SPIN

"To what end, though, Jase?"

"Too soon to say. But I don't believe in the futility of knowledge."

"Even if we're dying?"

"Everyone dies."

"I mean, as a species."

"That remains to be seen. Whatever the Spin is, it has to be more than a sort of elaborate global euthanasia. The Hypotheticals must be acting with a purpose."

Maybe so. But this, I realized, was the faith that had deserted me. The faith in Big Salvation.

All the brands and flavors of Big Salvation. At the last minute we would devise a technological fix and save ourselves. Or: the Hypotheticals were benevolent beings who would turn the planet into a peaceable kingdom. Or: God would rescue us all, or at least the true believers among us. Or. Or. Or.

Big Salvation. It was a honeyed lie. A paper lifeboat, even if we were killing ourselves trying to cling to it. It wasn't the Spin that had mutilated my generation. It was the lure and price of Big Salvation.

* * * * *

The flicker came back the following winter, persisted for forty-four hours, then vanished again. Many of us began to think of it as a kind of celestial weather, unpredictable but generally harmless.

Pessimists pointed out that the intervals between episodes were growing shorter, the duration of the episodes growing longer.

In April there was a flicker that lasted three days and interfered with the transmission of aerostat signals. This one provoked another (smaller) wave of successful and attempted suicides—people driven to panic less by what they saw in the sky than by the failure of their telephones and TV sets.

I had stopped paying attention to the news, but certain events were impossible to ignore: the military setbacks in North Africa and eastern Europe, the cult coup in Zimbabwe, the mass suicides in Korea. Exponents of apocalyptic Islam scored big numbers in the Algerian and Egyptian elections that year. A Filipino cult that worshipped the memory of Wun Ngo Wen—whom they had reconceived as a pastoralist saint, an agrarian Gandhi—had successfully engineered a general strike in Manila.

And I got a few more calls from Jason. He mailed me a phone with some kind of built-in encryption pad, which he claimed would give us "pretty good protection against keyword hunters," whatever that meant.

"Sounds a little paranoid," I said.

"Usefully paranoid, I think."

Perhaps, if we wanted to discuss matters of national security. We didn't, though, at least not at first. Instead Jason asked me about my work, my life, the music I'd been listening to. I understood that he was trying to generate the kind of conversation we might have had twenty or thirty years ago— before Perihelion, if not before the Spin. He had been to see his mother, he told me. Carol was still counting out her days by clock and bottle. Nothing had changed. Carol had insisted on that. The house staff kept everything clean, everything in its place. The Big House was like a time capsule, he said, as if it had been hermetically sealed on the first night of the Spin. It was a little spooky that way.

I asked whether Diane ever called.

"Diane stopped talking to Carol back before Wun was killed. No, not a word from her."

Then I asked him about the replicator project. There hadn't been anything in the papers lately.

"Don't bother looking. JPL is sitting on the results."

I heard the unhappiness in his voice. "That bad?"

"It's not entirely bad news. At least not until recently. The replicators did everything Wun hoped they would. Amazing things, Tyler. I mean absolutely amazing. I wish I could show you the maps we generated. Big navigable software maps. Almost two hundred thousand stars, in a halo of space hundreds of light-years in diameter. We know more about stellar and planetary evolution now than an astronomer of E.D.'s generation could have imagined."

"But nothing about the Spin?"

"I didn't say that."

"So what did you learn?"

"For one thing, we're not alone. In that volume of space we've found three optically blank planets roughly the size of the Earth, in orbits that are habitable by terrestrial standards or would have been in the past. The nearest is circling the star Ursa Majoris 47. The farthest—"

"I don't need the details."

"If we look at the age of the stars involved and make some plausible assumptions, the Hypotheticals appear to emanate from somewhere in the direction of the galactic core. There are other indicators, too. The replicators found a couple of white dwarf stars—burned-out stars, essentially, but stars that would have looked like the sun a few billion years ago—with rocky planets in orbits that should never have outlasted the solar expansion."

"Spin survivors?"

"Maybe."

"Are these living planets, Jase?"

"We have no real way of knowing. But they don't have Spin membranes to protect them, and their current stellar environment is absolutely hostile by our standards."

"Meaning what?"

"I don't know. Nobody knows. We thought we'd be able to make more meaningful comparisons as the replicator network expanded. What we created with the replicators is really a neural network on an unimaginably large scale. They talk to themselves the way neurons talk to themselves, except they do it across centuries and light-years. It's absolutely, stu

"So what went wrong?"

He sounded as if it hurt him to say it. "Maybe age. Everything ages, even highly protected genetic codes. They might be evolving beyond our instructions. Or—"

"Yeah, but what happened, Jase?"

"The data are diminishing. We're getting fragmentary, contradictory information from the replicators that are farthest from Earth. That could mean a lot of things. If they're dying, it might reflect some emerging flaw in the design code. But some of the long-established relay nodes are starting to shut down, too."

"Something's targeting them?"

"That's too hasty an assumption. Here's another idea. When we launched these things into the Oort Cloud we created a simple interstellar ecology—ice, dust, and artificial life. But what if we weren't the first? What if the interstellar ecology isn't simple?"

"You mean there might be other kinds of replicators out there?"

"Could be. If so, they'd be competing for resources. Maybe even using each other for resources. We thought we were sending our devices into a sterile void. But there might be competitor species, there might even be predator species."

"Jason… you think something's eating them?"

"It's possible," he said.

* * * * *

The flicker came back in June and clocked nearly forty-eight hours before it dissipated.

In August, fifty-six hours of flicker plus intermittent telecom problems.

When it started again in late September no one was surprised. I spent most of the first evening with the blinds closed, ignoring the sky, watching a movie I'd downloaded a week before. An old movie, pre-Spin. Watching it not for the plot but for the faces, the faces of people the way they used to look, people who hadn't spent their lives afraid of the future. People who, every once in a while, talked about the moon and the stars without irony or nostalgia.

Then the phone rang.

Not my personal phone, and not the encrypting phone Jase had sent me. I recognized the three-tone ring instantly even though I hadn't heard it for years. It was audible but faint— faint because I'd left the phone in the pocket of a jacket that was hanging in the hallway closet.

It rang twice more before I fumbled it out and said, "Hello?"

Expecting a wrong number. Wanting Diane's voice. Wanting it and dreading it.

But it was a man's voice on the other end. Simon, I recognized belatedly.