Spin (Spin, #1)

by Robert Charles Wilson

People younger than me have asked me: Why didn’t you panic? Why didn’t anyone panic? Why was there no looting, no rioting? Why did your generation acquiesce, why did you all slide into the Spin without even a murmur of protest?

English-language media called it “the October Event” (it wasn’t “the Spin” until a few years later), and its first and most obvious effect was the wholesale destruction of the multibillion-dollar orbital satellite industry.

Losing satellites meant losing most relayed and all direct-broadcast satellite television; it rendered the long-distance telephone system unreliable and GPS locators useless; it gutted the World Wide Web, made obsolete much of the most sophisticated modern military technology, curtailed global surveillance and reconnaissance, and forced local weathermen to draw isobars on maps of the continental United States rather than glide through CGI images rendered from weather-sats.

“You know the three Russian cosmonauts? The ones who were in orbit last October?” Lost and presumed dead the night of the Event. I nodded. “One of them’s alive,” he said. “Alive and in Moscow. The Russians aren’t saying much. But the rumor is, he’s completely crazy.”

Time was passing differently outside the barrier. Or, to turn the equation around, time on Earth was passing more slowly than in the universe at large. “You understand what that means?” Jason demanded. “Before, it looked like we were in some kind of electromagnetic cage that was regulating the energy that reaches the surface of the Earth. And that’s true. But it’s really only a side effect, a small part of a much bigger picture.”

“People with a lot more experience than me are struggling with that question. But the idea of a time gradient has a certain explanatory power. If there’s a time differential between us and the universe, ambient radiation reaching the surface of the Earth at any given moment—sunlight, X rays, cosmic radiation—would be speeded up proportionally. And a year’s sunshine condensed into ten seconds would be instantly lethal. So the electromagnetic barrier around the Earth isn’t concealing us, it’s protecting us.

It’s screening out all that concentrated—and, I guess, blue-shifted—radiation.” “The fake sunlight,” Diane said, getting

“How much time, Jason?” “It’s been five years and a couple of months since the October Event. Outside the barrier, that translates into a little over five hundred million years.”

“I don’t know that either. It depends. We’re protected, to some degree, by the barrier, but how effective is that protection? But there are some unavoidable facts. The sun is mortal, like every other star. It burns hydrogen and it expands and gets hotter as it ages. The Earth exists in a sort of habitable zone in the solar system, and that zone is moving steadily outward. Like I said, we’re protected, we’re okay for the time being no matter what. But eventually the Earth will be inside the heliosphere of the sun. Swallowed up by it. Past a certain point there’s simply no going back.” “How long, Jase?” He gave her a pitying look. “Forty, maybe fifty years,” he said. “Give or take.”

So I was stuck with natural disasters and celebrity misbehavior. There was even talk of the Spin. We had begun calling it the Spin by then. Even though most of the world didn’t believe in it.

“We would begin with a series of synchronized launches containing payloads of engineered bacteria. Simple ion engines and a slow glide to Mars. Mostly controlled crashes, survivable for unicells, and a few larger payloads with bunker-buster warheads to deliver the same organisms below the surface of the planet where we suspect the presence of buried water. Hedge our bets with multiple launches and a whole spectrum of candidate organisms.

The idea is to get enough organic action going to loosen up the carbon locked into the crust and respirate it into the atmosphere. Give it a few million years—months, our time—then survey the planet again. If it’s a warmer place with a denser atmosphere and maybe a few ponds of semiliquid water we do the cycle again, this time with multicelled plants engineered for the environment. Which puts some oxygen into the air and maybe cranks up the atmospheric pressure another couple of millibars. Repeat as necessary. Add more millions of years and stir. In a reasonable time—the way our clocks measure time—you might be able to cook up a habitable planet.”

But the TV worked well enough to show us news channel views of crowds gathering in cities across Europe, where it was already dark—or as dark as it was going to get that night. No lethal radiation but plenty of incipient panic. Diane sat motionless on the edge of the bed, hands folded in her lap, clearly frightened. I sat beside her and said, “If any of this was going to kill us we’d be dead by now.” Outside, the sunset stuttered toward darkness. The diffuse glow resolved into several distinct setting suns, each ghostly pale, then a coil of sunlight like a luminous spring that arced across the whole sky and vanished just as suddenly. We sat hip to hip as the sky grew darker.

“The whole thing. The Spin. ‘No return.’ Reading the papers, it’s like…what? There’s something on the other side of the sky, and it’s not friendly. That’s all I really know.”

“It matters because Mars and Earth are both in elliptical orbits, circling the sun at different speeds. There’s no reliable way to precalculate the relative positions of the planets at the time the vehicle achieves orbit. Essentially, the machine has to find Mars in a crowded sky and plot its own trajectory.

“How could life survive a stellar catastrophe? But obviously it depends on what ‘life’ is. Are we talking about organic life, or any kind of generalized autocatalytic feedback loop? Are the Hypotheticals organic? Which is an interesting question in itself…”

The Spin had already done the heavy lifting for us. Every planet in the solar system—barring Earth—had been warmed significantly by the expanding sun.

The Spin, when it came, must have seemed like a monstrous vindication of Jason’s worldview—more so because of his obsession with it. Clearly, there was intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy; and, just as obviously, it was nothing like our own.

to open another clinic—” “But that was never my plan.”

“The Spin renders objections moot,” Wun said, “or nearly so. With luck the replicators will tell us something important about the Hypotheticals, or atleast the extent of their work in the galaxy. We might be able to discern the purpose of the Spin. Failing that, the replicators will serve as a sort of warning beacon to other intelligent species facing the same problem. Close analysis would suggest to a thoughtful observer the purpose for which the network was constructed. Other civilizations might choose to tap into it. The knowledge could help them protect themselves. To succeed where we failed.” “You think we’ll fail?” Wun shrugged. “Haven’t we failed already?

“People are starving. They’re starving because we can’t support seven billion people in North American–style prosperity without strip-mining the planet. The numbers are hard to argue with. Yes, it’s true. If the Spin doesn’t kill us, sooner or later we’ll be looking at a global human die-back.” “And that has something to do with the Spin itself?”

The Martians, Jason said, were not the simple, peaceful, pastoral people Wun had led (or allowed) us to believe they were. It was true that they weren’t especially warlike

“We assumed,” he said, “that when we launched the replicators we were introducing something new to the universe, a wholly new kind of artificial life. That assumption was naive. We—human beings, terrestrial or Martian—weren’t the first sentient species to evolve in our galaxy. Far from it. In fact there’s nothing particularly unusual about us. Virtually everything we’ve done in our brief history has been done before, somewhere, by someone else.”

Far beyond the Spin-sequestered Earth, far beyond the solar system—so deep in space that the sun itself is only one more star in a crowded sky—a replicator seed alights on a dusty fragment of ice and begins to reproduce. It initiates the same cycle of growth, specialization, observation, communication, and reproduction that has taken place countless times during its ancestors’ slow migrations. Maybe it reaches maturity; maybe it even begins to pump out microbursts of data; but this time, the cycle is interrupted. Something has sensed the replicator’s presence. Something hungry.

The predator (Jase explained) is another kind of semiorganic autocatalytic feedback system—another colony of self-reproducing cellular mechanisms, as much machine as biology—and the predator is plugged into its own network, this one older and vastly larger than anything the terrestrial replicators have had time to construct during their exodus from Earth. The predator is more highly evolved than its prey: its subroutines for nutrient-seeking and resource-utilization have been honed over billions of years. The terrestrial replicator colony, blind and incapable of fleeing, is promptly eaten.

“The Hypotheticals,” he said, “can manipulate time and space.