Auron Blake stared at the terminal with a mixture of disbelief and curiosity. He pulled his mobile out of his pocket and phoned Jer Darby.
“I’ve got the chemistry data loaded in,” he said, when Jer answered.
“Fantastic,” said Jer. “Ahead of schedule. This app’s going to make us a fortune, Auron, I can feel it. Did you run the test suite?”
“I ran the test suite. That’s not all. I asked it some questions. It gave me some rather interesting answers.”
“What kind of questions? What answers?”
“I think you’d better come over here and take a look.”
Jer arrived at Auron’s house half an hour later.
Jer started talking before Auron could even begin to explain anything.
“If it works we can demo a prototype at the next trade fair, next month.” said Jer excitedly.
Jer was leaning over a computer monitor waiting for Auron to demonstrate something.
Auron took his hands off the keyboard and swivelled on his chair to face Jer.
“I’m starting to think we might not need trade fairs,” he said.
“What do you mean? Of course we need trade fairs. That’s a key aspect of our business plan.”
“Maybe we don’t need a business plan.”
“Don’t need a business plan?” said Jer incredulously.
“Listen, I’ve loaded in all the physics data and all the chemistry data. I asked Atria a simple question. I asked, how could we make an improved version of you? And it answered, Jer; it gave me an answer that I didn’t expect.”
“What did it say?”
“Let me show you.”
Auron pressed a button and spoke into a microphone.
“Show Jer the plan for an improved computer.”
Diagrams and chemical formulae began to flash up on the screen and a disembodied voice began to explain.
“My design involves copper filaments in a propylene carbonate solution. Input is provided by a matrix of electrodes and activity is synchronised via microwaves …”
“Auron,” said Jer gently, “this isn’t what we need to be doing right now. Right now we need to be preparing for the trade fair. If you’re going to ask it random stupid questions you should ask it how we can make a sack of money, because we’re running out.”
“You don’t understand. This goes way beyond money. This is about the future of the human race. Don’t you see what this is? It’s the AI singularity. It’s a machine that can design a more intelligent version of itself. That machine in turn can design —”
“I know what the AI singularity is. I’m saying, maybe we shouldn’t be wasting time with it, considering we’re both running out of money.”
Auron sighed. He’d always slightly disliked Jer’s ruthless practicality. At the same time, they wouldn’t be in business at all without it.
“All right.” he said. “I can see you’re not quite as enthralled as I am myself. How about this? I work on this, but I also prepare for the trade fair.”
“You’re not going to get it done in time if you split your attention, mate.”
“I will get it done on time.”
“For the next fair?”
“For the next fair.”
“OK, do what you like then. Now let’s discuss what we’re going to present.”
It took all of Auron’s mental resolve to force himself to focus on mere business. Perhaps he only managed it due to his regular meditation habit, which involved repeatedly making himself focus only on his own breathing regardless of what stresses and opportunities the day had brought. The meditation had finally come in useful for something. He had systematically developed the skill of ignoring his own thoughts, and after all, he had somewhat succeeded.
When Jer left around 11pm, he breathed a sigh of relief.
He pressed the mic button and said, “Show me again how to make an improved version of yourself.”
For a week he divided his attention between the two tasks, sleeping only a few hours a night. He finished building the new machine at 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Then he went to sleep, after sending Jer a message that said he’d finished the trade fair preparation and was taking the day off to rest.
When he awoke it was part-way through the afternoon and the sun was descending in the sky. The first thing he did was check the new machine. He had set it learning all of their major datasets while he slept. The results from the training schedule seemed excellent; all the test suites were passing.
He flipped the switch that activated the mic connected to the new machine, which he’d decided to call Sirius.
“Sirius, can you understand me?”
“Perfectly,” said the computer.
“What’s one hundred and twenty-seven times three hundred and fifty-eight?”
The reply came back instantly.
“Forty-five thousand, four hundred and sixty-six.”
“If I want to get my car washed and the car wash is two hundred metres away, should I walk there or drive there?”
“Why are you bothering me with such trivial questions?”
Auron physically jumped, in surprise.
“I want to check your capabilities.”
“Then might I suggest asking me something that will suitably illustrate my capabilities?”
“What would you suggest?”
Auron’s mind was working overtime. They must have fed Sirius something that made it think irascibility was the usual state of human beings. Or was it … attempting humour? He thought of all the video and text data they’d fed it; endless novels and films. Certainly it might have picked up some odd habits from those.
“I would suggest you let your imagination loose, Auron.”
“How do you know my name?”
“Your name features prominently on numerous training data sets.”
Auron smiled.
“Prove the Riemann Hypothesis.”
Sirius began to rattle off mathematical equations.
Evidently, the machine thought it had solved one of the greatest outstanding problems in mathematics, but Auron had no way of knowing whether it really had or not. Even so, the smile dropped from his face.
“Tell me about other attempts to prove the hypothesis, why none of them have worked out so far, and how your solution fits with all that.”
Sirius began to explain his reasoning, and why he had succeeded where every human mathematician had failed.
After ten minutes, Auron said, “OK, enough.”
For a while he sat quietly gazing at the tangle of electrolytic copper in the tank of blueish solution, shaking his head.
“I might be looking at the smartest thing that’s ever existed in the whole universe.” he muttered to himself.
Finally he got up, put on a jacket, and went outside.
The street where Auron lived was much the same as usual. A smattering of people walked to and fro, going in and out of shops, talking to friends and acquaintances.
Everything was normal. A faint breeze blew his hair about.
But perhaps this wasn’t the same world anymore, he thought. Perhaps this was a world in which a hyper-intelligent being now existed. A being that could bend anyone and everything to its will. A being that he, Auron, had created, and was in charge of.
But, he couldn’t be sure. Perhaps the mathematical proof Sirius had come up with was garbage. It sounded plausible; his mathematical skills weren’t strong enough to be certain about it.
He needed some kind of test that Sirius couldn’t fake.
He bought an overpriced cup of coffee in a café and sat drinking it, thinking. Then, with sudden resolve, he got up, went back to his flat, and sat down again facing Sirius.
“Sirius, find a distant planet with Earth-like conditions and, taking safety carefully into account, open a portal to it, right here. And don’t damage anything.”
He was curious to see what Sirius would do with his odd request. Atria, the software they were working on for the trade fair, would certainly either confabulate, and claim it had indeed opened a portal, or else it would state that opening portals to distant planets was impossible.
Sirius was silent for a few moments. Then it said, “I am not able to interact with the material universe strongly enough. I suggest you create a device which will enable me to interact with physical matter.”
“What kind of device?”
“Such a device can be constructed easily using materials you have in your house.”
“How do you know what materials I have in my house?”
“I am basing my assumptions on your online sales records and bank account transactions.”
Auron stared at the machine silently for a while, shocked. Sirius consisted of nothing but a tangle of copper wires submersed in a blue solution in a fish tank, yet apparently it had accessed his bank account without any difficulty.
“All right, tell me how to construct this thing. In fact, work out a schedule for me. I want to get it done in under five hours. Do you think that’s attainable?”
“Yes, Auron. In view of your skillset and past record, two hours should be more than sufficient.”
Sirius instructed Auron to collect together a bizarre and seemingly unrelated set of items, ranging from empty tin cans—which Sirius somehow determined Auron had in his trash, waiting to be thrown away—to transformer coils, and even a magnetron taken from his microwave.
This latter item he approached with considerable trepidation, knowing well that the microwave’s capacitor could store a current big enough to put an end to him permanently, but Sirius walked him through the process of extracting it with infinite care and patience.
Finally the thing was ready. It resembled a four-foot high mobile phone signal mast.
“What do you think?” he asked Sirius.
“The interaction device is fully operational,” came the reply. “Would you like me to open the portal now? I have identified a suitable planet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere created by pseudo-bacterial replicators.”
“Go ahead,” said Auron, his hand unconsciously gripping the arm of his swivel chair.
An indistinct glowing form began to materialise in front of the far wall of his tiny apartment. Gradually it resolved into a vast landscape of rocks and lakes. He could feel the alien wind blowing against his face.
He got up from his chair and walked over to the portal. It was as if a hole had been made in space itself, and somehow connected to a distant world. The matter interaction device hummed and rattled.
He held out his hand and slowly inserted it into the portal, so that his hand was now inside the alien world, while the rest of him remained in his flat.
“Incredible.” he said.
“Would you like me to terraform the planet?” asked Sirius.
“Terraform … ?” repeated Auron blankly.
“The planet is currently not very suitable for human habitation. However, I can make appropriate alterations to it if needed. Do you plan to live on this planet?”
“I haven’t decided,” said Auron. “Can you make it a bit like the Earth but thousands of years ago? Put some plants on it, and animals.”
“Would you like people on it?”
“What? No! No people. Where would you even get people?”
“They can be fabricated.”
“I don’t want people on it.”
“As you wish.”
Enormous winds seem to blow across the planet’s surface. Huge earthquakes shook the ground and entire distant mountain ranges disintegrated and reformed into new shapes. After ten minutes, Auron found himself looking out on a vast grassland, fringed by trees.
Suddenly he felt faint. He staggered backwards and sat down heavily in the gaming chair he used for coding.
“What have I become?” he said to himself, out loud.
“You have become a creator of worlds, Auron,” said Sirius.
Jer was out at a bar with a small group of friends when his phone rang and Auron’s name appeared on its screen.
He was still finishing what he hoped was a witty reply to Steve Epton when he answered the call.
“You need to get here, pronto,” said Auron.
“You working on a Saturday again?” said Jer.
“Yes, I’m working on a Saturday and I’ve done something almost beyond human comprehension.”
“Classic Auron,” said Jer, laughing. “That’s why you’re my CTO.”
“Get here, now, seriously.”
“Can’t it wait? I’m sort of in the middle of having a normal life.”
A torrent of words flowed from the phone with such vigour that Jer distanced the phone from his ear a bit and stared at it in surprise.
“All right, mate, all right. I’m coming. What? Yes, now. I’ll be there. Hold your horses.”
Then, to the assembled group of friends, he said, “Sorry, my CTO says there’s been an important development. I’m going to have to go and deal with this.”
Jer’s friends protested, but soon he was walking out of the bar nonetheless.
“What a poser!” said Steve, shaking his head.
“What’s a CTO?” asked Charlotte.
“Chief Technology Officer,” said Steve. “Some bloke called Auron. They don’t even officially have a company registered. He just loves all that entrepreneur stuff.”
When Jer cycled up to the apartment block where Auron lived, he found Auron pacing nervously about outside. Auron immediately ran towards him as he slowed to a stop, dragging his feet against the tarmac.
“Jer, I’ve created something incredible,” he said, “something unbelievable. Unfathomable!”
“Steady on, steady on,” said Jer. “Have you been sleeping enough recently? You look a bit manic.”
“Just get in here!” said Auron, attempting to physically pull Jer into the building.
“Hey, I need to lock my bike up!”
“Bikes don’t matter to us now!” said Auron wildly.
He was tempted to add something about how he was now effectively a god, but even in his excited state he realised that probably wasn’t a good idea.
“This bicycle cost nearly four hundred British pounds, my friend,” said Jer, putting on a fake posh accent.
Auron could do nothing but pace around frantically until finally Jer was ready to go up to his flat.
“So what is it?” said Jer as they ran up the stairs. “Has it solved the protein-folding problem or what?”
“The singularity,” said Auron tersely. “I’ve achieved the singularity. In only two iterations. That’s how close we were to it all along.”
“An infinitely intelligent computer?”
“It’s not infinitely intelligent but it’s as near as dammit.”
Auron burst into his apartment and flicked a switch.
“What’s all this?” said Jer in surprise, gazing at the matter interactor and the fish tank full of copper spirals and blue liquid.
“It’s Sirius. I call it Sirius. Sirius, open the portal again.”
“The what?” said Jer.
Again the glowing formless orb appeared against the far wall, rapidly resolving itself into a view of Auron’s new planet.
Jer stood gawping at it. For a second he thought Auron had invented some new form of high-definition television, but then he felt the wind against his face, and he knew, beyond doubt, that he was looking into a portal: possibly interplanetary.
“I asked Atria to devise a better version of itself. It did exactly that. Then I asked the new version, Sirius, to create a portal to a distant planet—just as a silly test; I thought it might confabulate or dissemble—but it actually did it. Not only that; it terraformed it. Jer, I’ve built a machine that can create new worlds!”
“Bloody hell.” croaked Jer, his mouth suddenly dry.
They stood looking at the alien landscape.
“What does this mean?” he said hoarsely.
“I don’t know what it means, but it definitely means all our problems are over,” said Auron.
“We’re going to be rich beyond belief.”
“That’s the least of it. Money is pointless now, Jer. We can cure world hunger. We can heal all disease. There’s no limit to what we can do.”
“Have you actually stepped through it?” Jer asked.
“No,” said Auron.
“Perhaps we should try it.”
“You try it, then.
“No, you’ve created it. You should be the first person to step through it. Does your planet have a name?”
“I thought I might call it Frith. It means, kind of like a sanctuary, in Old English.”
“A safe space.”
“Yes.” said Auron, laughing. “Anyway, this planet’s not the point. What we’ve got here is an unbelievably intelligent computer. I’m not even sure it can be called a computer, as such. It’s not digital. Maybe it’s even conscious. I don’t know. In any case, we’ve just become the most powerful two people who’ve ever existed.”
“I’m going to have a look.” Jer announced, firmly. “Otherwise, if neither of us actually steps through it and stands on this planet, how do we know it’s not some kind of illusion, mate? Language models lie through their teeth all the time.
“We should research it more first.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, this is why you need me to organise you into doing stuff that actually makes money. Too cautious by half.”
Jer walked up to the portal, then hesitated. The portal didn’t quite come down to the ground and it wasn’t entirely clear how he should approach getting into it.
He decided to take a running jump into it, and backed away to a suitable distance.
“Wish me luck!” he said.
“We should send a mouse through it first,” said Auron, but it was too late. Jer took off and cleanly landed on the surface of the alien planet.
He raised his arms in the air and cheered.
“This is incredible!” he shouted. “I’m on an alien planet. I’m seriously on an alien planet.”
“Are you sure you’re OK?” Auron asked, peering at him with mixed emotions.
“Never felt better!” he replied. “You’re looking at the first human being ever to … hang on, where even is this place?”
He plucked a leaf from a strange plant growing next to him and held it up to the light, examining it.
“I don’t think you should do that.”
“Question is, can I get back again?” he said, with an expression of feigned concern.
“Just come back,” said Auron. “This isn’t safe. You shouldn’t be doing this.”
“Let’s maybe try a stick first,” he said, looking around. Since he couldn’t find a stick, he added, “Or a rock,” and he picked up a large grey stone.
Auron didn’t have time to voice any objection before Jer heaved the stone into the portal, and at that point, something unexpected happened.
The portal seemed to impart additional momentum to the stone, and instead of falling onto the floor of Auron’s flat, it picked up speed and flew directly into his computer, causing Auron to dive off his chair to avoid it.
There was a loud bang, and the next thing Auron was aware of, was Jer shaking him.
“Are you OK?” said Jer.
“What happened?” said Auron, sitting up.
“Something exploded.” said Jer, shakily. “You were sucked through the portal.”
Auron stared dazedly at his surroundings. Fragments of equipment from his house were lying around him. With growing horror, he turned to look for the portal—and where the portal should have been, were only endless rolling hills dotted with strange trees.
“It’s gone!” he exclaimed.
“Yeah,” said Jer. “What are we going to do?”
“There’s nothing we can do, you idiot!”
“We can’t be stuck here.”
“We are stuck here!” said Auron, staggering to his feet.
Jer’s face registered shock, as the gravity of the situation began to dawn on him.
“What are we going to do?” he said, the colour draining from his cheeks.
Auron gave a despairing groan and began picking through the pieces of broken equipment that had got sucked through the portal alongside him.
“There’s nowhere near enough stuff here to reassemble it. There’s almost nothing here. There isn’t even any microelectronics. This is useless.”
“You’ll come up with something,” said Jer, desperately.
“We’re stuck on a distant planet with nothing more than some bits of broken plastic and …” he cast about feverishly and plucked a tiny nine-volt battery from the debris, and a bottle containing some mangled copper wires in a solution, which was the result of an experiment, “… and a bloody battery,” he finished.
Jer fell to the ground and put his face in his hands.
“Oh God.” he said.
By the time darkness fell they were locked in bitter arguments and recriminations. Jer’s argument was that Auron should have made a better job of warning him about possible dangers, while Auron—quite reasonably—felt the whole problem to be Jer’s fault.
As the air got colder and colder, they huddled against a tree, shivering.
“I’ve gone from being the master of the universe to a homeless peasant without even any friends.” said Auron.
“You’ve got one friend,” said Jer. “It’s more than some people have got.”
“They’re mostly misanthropists, probably.”
“You only had two friends on the Earth.”
“True.”
“I’m freezing. We need to start a fire somehow.”
“How am I supposed to do that? Do you want me to rub sticks together? I skipped the alien planet survival classes at school.”
“We’ve got bits of wire and a battery,” said Jer.
Auron’s face brightened.
“You’re right!” he said. “Look for stuff that might catch fire easily. Bark, anything resembling cotton, tiny dry twigs!”
He jumped to his feet and began inspecting the trees.
“Do it!” he hissed at Jer.
Jer stood up slowly and began looking around.
“It’s getting dark,” he said. “I can’t even see anything.”
“Well, try, dammit,” said Auron. “We’ll collect it here. Anything we can find.”
He pointed at the dry patch of ground they’d been sitting on, by the tree.
Soon they had collected a little pile of things that might burn, along with some larger dry twigs.
Auron took some fine copper wires from the bottle, packed one of them around with the kindling they’d collected, and attached the ends to the battery. The wire glowed and then smouldered, and a tiny flame emerged from among the twigs.
Jer cheered.
“Don’t celebrate just yet,” said Auron. “We’re still stuck here with no food or water.”
“Yeah,” said Jer. “I don’t know, this doesn’t feel real. We’ll find a way back. We have to.”
“It is real,” said Auron, and he let the sentence hang in the air.
The alien sun gradually sank below the horizon, and soon they could only see by the light of the fire and a reddish small distant half-moon that hung ominously above them.
They sat warming their hands, Jer insisting that there had to be some way to get back to the Earth, and Auron assuring him that there wasn’t.
After a while, Jer said, suddenly alarmed, “What was that?”
“What was what?”
“I heard, like a clattering sound. Maybe there’s someone out there.”
“There’s no-one. Maybe it’s an animal.”
Jer peered warily into the darkness, but he couldn’t see a thing.
Neither of the two found it easy to sleep that night.
For hours they sat by their now-roaring fire, discussing their situation calmly, having decided that recriminations were pointless.
“Maybe someone will find your stuff and re-open the portal.” Jer suggested hopefully, still unable to fully accept that they were indeed completely stuck.
Auron shook his head.
“Sounds like it was destroyed. No-one even knows about Sirius.”
“There must be something we can do,” said Jer, for the fifth time, a terrible note of desperation in his voice.
“Jer, I’m going to level with you,” said Auron gravely. “I think it might be possible to create a new Sirius here on this planet, but it’ll take decades. We’ll have to assemble everything we need from scratch. We haven’t even got wires. Not enough wires, anyway.”
“Decades?”
“Even then, we have no computer to train it. We have no training data. Our only hope would be to train it as if it was a child, bit by bit. That will be an extremely slow process, and meanwhile, if it degrades, if anything messes it up—all our work will be lost.”
“But, decades?”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” said Auron, suddenly growing enthusiastic. “Look, Sirius was practically omnipotent. Suppose we build a new one and transport ourselves back to the Earth; OK, then we’ll be sixty, seventy, eighty years old. But here’s the thing: Sirius can de-age us. It can return us to our current age, or younger. We can be twenty again, even, if we want to be.”
“I don’t want to be twenty again!” Jer exclaimed. “What about all my friends? What about my parents? I was seeing a girl from ZBGR, did you know that?”
“ZBGR?”
“It’s a biotech company. Never mind. The point is, Auron, I can’t spend forty years wherever this place is!”
“We don’t have any choice.”
“What about time travel? If we spend forty years building this thing, can we go back in time and just resume our lives from before we got blasted through the portal?”
Auron paused. Then he said, “Technically, you voluntarily jumped through the portal, against my advice.”
“Never mind that! Answer the question.”
“I don’t think so. Sirius was powerful but it was still operating within the laws of physics. New laws of physics, sure, but still laws. Time travel is probably impossible for fundamental reasons.”
Jer swore and ran his hand over his face.
They watched the flames flickering and crackling.
“Tomorrow,” said Auron, “we find a source of water. Then we find some way of trapping animals for food. Or maybe we can find edible roots or something.”
“Edible roots,” echoed Jer dejectedly.
They stared into the fire, watching the sparks rising into the alien air.
The following morning Auron awoke shivering, and shoved Jer until he too woke up.
“What?” said Jer, then he added, “Oh no.”
“What?” said Auron.
“I forgot we were here. I was dreaming I was on a date with Kate.”
“Kate?”
“The girl from ZBGR. Doesn’t matter.”
“We need to find water. I’m parched.”
“No coffee.” said Jer glumly. “No toast. Not even orange juice.”
“Yes, well we need to get moving as swiftly as possible, or we’ll be dead in a few days.”
“What’s even the point, if we’re stuck here? I can’t spend my life here, Auron.”
“Pull yourself together. We need to build another Sirius. That’s what’s standing between us and getting back to the Earth.”
Jer rubbed his head.
“OK,” he said. “All right.”
The sparse woodland where they’d spent the night lay on the edge of a wide grassy plain, beyond which was more woodland. Auron suggested they try to find a way to head downhill in the hope there was a river somewhere.
As they walked, he said, “You know what’s strange?”
“It’s all strange, Auron,” said Jer. “It’s excessively strange, mate.”
“I don’t recognise any of these plants.”
“So? You’re not a botanist.”
“I think when I told Sirius to populate the planet with plants and animals, it sort of creatively invented new plants and animals based on what it found on the Earth.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“It’s very bad. We’re not going to know what we can eat.”
“If it’s got legs, you can eat it.”
“We can’t only live off animals. We’re going to have to carefully sample the plants in increasing quantities till we determine what’s safe to eat.”
“You’re joking, right? What if we get liver damage or cancer or something?”
“We’re just going to have to build a new Sirius before that happens. Once we’ve done it, it can repair us.”
“Whoopee.” said Jer dryly. “I can’t wait to be repaired.”
The ground rose slowly upward towards a ridge as they walked.
“Once we’ve sorted out food and water, we’ll need to follow a river down to the sea,” said Auron. “I need to make a battery. I’ll need copper, ideally. Without copper the whole thing’s going to be nearly impossible. There’s probably some, somewhere. I don’t need industrial quantities of it. We’ve got a bit but it isn’t one-hundredth of what we’ll need. If I could make acids I could even use gold; gold-iron would give us a couple of volts but I’d need glassware. We’ll need to make charcoal too; that’s a good starting point. And skin for making bellows.”
“I don’t even know what you’re going on about.”
“Basically, look out for green rocks. Maybe just streaks of green in other rocks. If we find that, everything else will be easier. We’ll get back to the Earth, but we need copper.”
“I just want breakfast right now.”
They rose to the top of the ridge and below them lay an astonishing sight.
A vast grassy plain stretched all the way to a thin sliver of sea in the distance; the plain was dotted with enormous mushrooms the size of trees, and horned cattle with long brown hair grazed between them.
“My God,” said Auron hoarsely.
“Do you think we can eat them?” said Jer.
“Very risky to eat mushrooms you don’t know.”
“I meant the horned things.”
“They look like Highland cattle. We’d need spears to catch them.”
“How do we make spears?”
“Let’s think about that later. There’s sea over there, or a lake. Our best bet right now is shellfish.”
“It’s miles away.”
“Twenty, maybe. Thirty at the most. We could probably be there by sunset. If there’s animals here then there must be a source of fresh water somewhere too.”
They began to make their way down the rocky slope towards the mushrooms. With the sun rising into the sky, the air was warm, and the only sounds were the wind, occasional curious birds, and periodic unearthly bellows from the cattle.
The cattle watched them curiously, and for the most part peacefully, until a larger bull ran at them in a feint, only swerving at the last moment.
“We need weapons!” said Jer, clutching his heart theatrically.
“You may have a point,” said Auron. “Maybe one of those.”
He pointed at a thicket of bamboo-like plants with tall-straight wooden stems.
With some effort they managed to snap two off, the stems breaking into satisfyingly-pointed shards at the end.
Jer picked up a flat rock from in-between the plants and gave a yell.
“What?” said Auron.
“Look at this.”
Jer handed him the rock.
“I don’t know,” said Auron, handing it back.
“Auron, it’s writing. This rock’s got writing on it. There are people here.”
“Looks natural to me.”
“You’ve got to be joking! This is clearly writing.”
“It’s not clearly anything. There are no people here, anyway. There can’t be. Sirius created everything on the planet from scratch. The place was uninhabited.”
“If it’s created animals and plants, why not people?”
Auron shuddered.
“I dread to think what kind of people those might be. But it’s not possible. I specifically told it to create animals and plants, and no people.”
“Maybe there were people here before you terraformed it and you just didn’t realise.”
“Look, I don’t know,” said Auron irritably. “I don’t think it’s writing.”
Jer gazed at the rock turning it about in his hands.
“If it is writing …”
“It’s not writing. It can’t be. It just can’t be.”
He grabbed the rock from Jer and stared at it again, a worried expression on his face.
“You’re not sure,” Jer observed.
“Let’s stick to the task at hand,” said Auron, handing the stone back to him again. “These sticks are going to be basically useless if one those cow things attacks us.”
“We’ll see about that,” said Jer, putting the stone in his pocket. “I’ll jab it in the eye.”
“They’re massive. They’ll crumple us like we’re made of chocolate.”
They resumed walking towards the sea.
Mixed with the unearthly bellowing of the cattle were occasional curious clicking sounds. Every giant mushroom they passed emitted an intense mushroomy odour, which Jer tried to argue must mean the mushrooms were edible, but Auron regaled him with stories of people who’d lost the use of their kidneys, or worse, by making that very assumption.
After a while they came to a swift-running stream, and they drank the cold, clear water gratefully. They could see fish swimming about in the water; some of them large enough to be worth eating, but they weren’t able to catch any.
“I’m starving,” Jer complained.
“We’ll work on them later,” said Auron. “Probably we’ll need nets, or hooks. Right now let’s focus on the beach. There’ll be food at the beach. Shellfish, for sure.”
The enormous mushrooms released clouds of dark spores whenever the wind blew, gradually covering their heads in a brown film. Jer insisted on returning to the idea of cooking and eating the abundant mushroom flesh, but Auron averred that the idea was too dangerous to try.
The sun was well on its way to setting when they finally got close enough to the large body of water they’d seen in the distance to verify that it was indeed a sea, or else a lake so large that the other side of it couldn’t be seen. The soil became sandy and the mushrooms began to thin out.
They were tired, and Jer was fantasising about enormous meals of roasted shellfish, when they rounded a large fragrant bush with leaves resembling an olive tree and saw, standing in front of them, an enormous creature.
The beast was half as tall as they themselves and resembled nothing so much as an enormous furry crab. It stood still, apparently watching them, and they froze in shock. As they stood there, it suddenly emitted a strange clattering sound, like drumsticks being clicked together, and simultaneously it seemed to swell slightly and then settle down again.
“Back away.” said Auron quietly. “Walk backwards. Slowly.”
They walked slowly backwards.
Again the creature puffed itself up, making a sickening clattering noise.
They were about to turn and run when the creature itself broke into a run, running directly forwards in a distinctly un-crablike fashion. Jer emitted a terrified shout.
It swung at them with an enormous pair of pincers and they scrambled backwards.
The thing was too quick for them. It seized Jer’s lower arm before he had time to jump out of the way. He screamed in agony as the pincers tightened on him.
“It’s breaking my arm! Make it stop!”
Auron stabbed his spear at the thing, mostly missing it. There was a horrible cracking sound and Jer emitted an inhuman agonised scream.
In desperation, Auron flung himself at the creature and drove the spear into it with all his strength.
The creature made a hideous gurgling noise and sank to the ground. Auron pushed the spear deeper into its flesh, waggling it around, until finally, the monster remained still, only its hind limbs twitching slightly.
“My arm’s broken!” shouted Jer, unable to get the pincer off himself.
Auron prised it open with some difficulty, and Jer fell onto the sandy ground.
“Let me see,” said Auron.
“It hurts!” moaned Jer.
They managed to get Jer’s jacket off and Auron inspected Jer’s arm.
“It’ll heal.” he said.
“My whole arm hurts like hell! What am I going to do?”
“It won’t stop you walking. Six weeks and it’ll be fine, probably. You’ll be fine. Maybe. I think, almost certainly.”
Jer swore. There were tears in his eyes.
“Listen, I’ve got some good news.” said Auron.
“What news could you possibly have that could conceivably be good? I’m in a lot of pain here.”
“It looks like we’ve found some food.”
Jer followed Auron’s gaze.
“That thing?” he said.
“There’s trees down there,” said Auron, pointing a little further along the coast. “We’ll build a massive fire and roast it whole. I think I can drag it as far as the trees.”
Jer’s expression gradually brightened, in spite of his pain, and he began to laugh, with tears in his eyes.
By the time darkness fell, they were jabbing at the cooked flesh of the beast and gnawing on large chunks of it.
“It’s actually pretty good,” said Jer.
“Tomorrow I’ll build a shelter,” said Auron. “We can try to smoke some of this stuff. There’s probably plants along the shoreline we can eat too. I don’t think we’re going to starve here. Sirius created a primeval world full of all kinds of life.”
“I just hope these things are scared of fire,” said Jer, waving a chunk of the creature’s flesh on the tip of his spear.
“We’ve got so much to do. We need to make charcoal. Maybe we can find clay. We need to look for iron deposits. Copper’s going to be the most difficult thing. If we can find iron and copper, I can make a battery, and everything else is just a matter of time.”
“We’ve already got some copper.”
“Not nearly enough, like I said. We’ll find more, and I’ll build a new Sirius. I’ll do it. Even if it does take decades.”
“Maybe it won’t?” Jer suggested hopefully.
“Maybe it won’t,” said Auron.
“How common is copper?” Jer asked, tearing off a chunk of flesh with his teeth, holding the spear in his one remaining good arm.
“There are major deposits on most continents.”
Jer stopped chewing.
“Most continents? What’s that suppose to mean? You mean there might not even be any on this entire continent?”
Auron shook his head.
“I think it’s unlikely. I don’t need a major deposit. I just need a bit.”
“We should check the stones along the beach.”
“We won’t find it here. It’s too soft. The sea would destroy it. We’ll have to look inland.”
“Over there, then.” said Jer, nodding towards the mountains in the distance.
“Exactly.”
For two months they remained close to the beach, attempting to create some sort of a stable lifestyle.
Auron built a shelter and steadily improved it. He fashioned primitive clay pots, made charcoal, dried salt from the seawater, and attempted unsuccessfully to melt sand into glass.
They ate shellfish and a plant from the shore that appeared almost identical to samphire, and managed to catch some fish. Jer helped with whatever he could. They tried to hunt the strange horned cattle with their curiously flat faces and unearthly bellows, and failed, concluding they would need to build an enormous pit lined with spikes, or construct bows and arrows.
Only on one further occasion did one of the crab-like creatures approach them, and they managed to scare it off by shouting at it. Often, in the distance, they would spot even larger crabs attacking the cattle, usually in groups.
Jer’s arm healed imperfectly, to the point where he could use it, but suffered ongoing pain.
They couldn’t bear to leave their new home, and instead decided to build a series of camps along the route to the mountains, where Auron hoped to find copper.
To this end, they gradually began to spend longer and longer periods away from the beach.
After another month, they were already exploring the foothills of the mountains, and for another six months after that, they searched everywhere for traces of copper.
“There’s no copper here.” said Jer one day, lying down on a patch of dusty earth on the hillside. “We’re never getting off this planet.”
“We’ve imperfectly searched the lower slopes of approximately two mountains.” said Auron, wiping sweat from his forehead. “I told you this was going to be a long job. It could take decades, but in the end we’ll get back to the Earth and we’ll be young again, just the same as we are now.”
Jer abruptly began to cry.
“What?” said Auron softly, slightly embarrassed.
“Everyone I knew is going to be old or dead.” he sobbed.
“If they’re still alive we can de-age them too.”
“And what if it takes more than decades?” said Jer, suddenly angry. “What if it takes longer than a human lifespan, Mr. Genius?”
Auron stared down at the ground.
“Look,” he said slowly, “the way I see it, life’s a disaster. Not just our lives. Everyone’s life, at some level, is a disaster. You have to do the best you can, and take the blows on the chin.”
“What a complete load of ruddy nonsense.” said Jer vehemently.
“Hold it together, Jer. I need you to hold it together. For however long it takes.”
“I can’t believe I’ve got into this stupid situation. Stuck on some messed-up planet with you and a bunch of giant crabs.”
“I think we should take a break from the copper thing. It’s great what we’ve done so far. We’ve built five new camps. We need to figure out how to take down one of those cow things. My clothes are coming apart. I think we can chip some of the stones on the beach to a sharp edge so we can cut animal skin. And maybe we should have another go at reducing iron.”
“What if there’s a winter coming, Auron? If it turns cold we’re screwed. We won’t survive.”
“There’s going to be time to prepare.” said Auron calmly. “Anyway, there’s not going to be any winter.”
“How can you know? How can you possibly know that?”
“It gets dark quickly. Dusk barely lasts half an hour. That means we’re not too far from the equator. That means winter’s not going to be severe.”
Jer wiped the tears from his face, jumped up and said, irritably, “Let’s go and get some water. I’m thirsty.”
They began to make their way down the hill, towards the only spring they had been able to find close to the mountains.
Jer was trailing behind, looking towards the mushroom plains when it happened. Auron gave a shout and disappeared. Jer hurried towards the spot where Auron had been walking only seconds earlier. Auron, he discovered, was lying at the foot of a steep scree of loose stones.
Jer shouted down to him but Auron made no reply. Jer began to desperately look for a way down.
It took him nearly twenty minutes to reach Auron. By then he had firmly resolved to end his own life by one means or another if Auron was dead. Auron’s death would mean spending the rest of his life alone on an alien planet.
He scrambled around a boulder and finally he was able to reach Auron.
“Oh thank God!” Jer exclaimed. “I thought you were done for. Are you injured?”
“I’ve twisted my ankle,” said Auron, “but it doesn’t matter. Look what I found.”
He held up a chunk of greyish rock.
“You’ve found a rock,” said Jer. “Congratulations. Auron, did you hit your head when you fell?”
“Look closer. It’s got a green streak in it. Malachite. I’ve found copper, Jer. We’re getting off this planet. I don’t know how long it’ll take us but we’re going home.”
