Triploidy

Prologue

Shouting in the Jungle

May 24, 1999

…all the talk about alien invasion and

the danger of messaging extraterrestrial intelligence

I regard as idle and pseudoscientific.

—Aleksandr Leonidovich Zaitsev

Once upon a time, in a place not so very far, far away, there lived a man who was convinced he knew better than the whole of the human race what was good for it.

That wasn’t the problem. There have always been such men, at all times and in all places.

No, the problem was, at this particular once-upon-a-time-and-place, this particular man was in a position to act on that conviction.

His name was Aleksandr Leonidovich Zaitsev, and his position was that of head of the Yevpatoria RT-70 Planetary Radar in Crimea—a facility which boasted a parabolic dish antenna some seventy meters in diameter and ranked at the time of our telling as the third largest radio telescope in the world. More to the point, Yevpatoria was also the only installation of its size equipped to both receive signals from outer space and to send them as well.

And it was this that Zaitsev intended to do. On the evening of May 24th in the penultimate year of the second millennium, he pointed the Yevpatoria dish toward the heavens and transmitted the first of several so-called Cosmic Call messages.

Whatever their extraliterary historical significance, these messages were hardly paragons of style or substance: Basically a binary Rosetta Stone composed by Stephane Dumas and Yvan Dutil which proceeded from rudimentary arithmetic to higher order math and physics, supplemented with a smorgasbord of text, audio, and video from ordinary citizens around the world. If there was one worrisome feature of Dumas and Dutil’s contribution to Cosmic Call, it was that their primer included a representation of the nucleotides making up deoxyribonucleic acid, better known by its initialism: DNA.

Still, in the end it wasn’t the message’s form or content that mattered. Rather, it was the simple fact that, for the three hour and fifty-five minute duration of the transmission, the Yevpatoria signal increased the radio visibility of the Earth by four orders of magnitude. Briefly, in its limited frequency band and along its narrow line of sight, the Earth shone ten thousand times brighter than the sun.

It was, then, not without a certain cosmic irony that Zaitsev’s surname derived from "zayats—the Russian word for rabbit." Because he was indeed like some foolish little rabbit hopping down a dark and dangerous bunny trail, shouting at the top of his lungs and blithely advertising his presence to whatever predators might be lurking in the surrounding jungle.

And not just his own presence—all of Earth’s as well.

Zaitsev’s target on that lovely, late-spring evening was the yellow dwarf star 16 Cygni B, one hub of a triple-star system seventy light-years away in the northwest corner of that patch of sky named for the constellation Cygnus the Swan. Or more precisely, not the star itself, but rather its companion world. For three years prior, in 1996, 16 Cygni B had become one of the first stars to be confirmed as hosting an extrasolar planet. True, 16 Cygni Bb, as the exoplanet was designated, was a super-Jupiter. It weighed in at 2.4 Jovian masses and as such was an unpromising abode for the proverbial life as we know it. Still, where there was one planet, might there not be other, smaller, more hospitable worlds, as yet undetected, circling that same distant sun?

In any case, we wouldn’t have long—on cosmic timescales, at least—to wait before finding out: Zaitsev’s signal was scheduled to traverse the seventy light-years from Earth to 16 Cygni Bb and arrive there in November of 2069. Allow, say, a year for the putative inhabitants to mull a response, then another seven decades for the lightspeed return trip to Earth, and we might hope to receive a reply around the year 2140.

It was the possible form such a reply might take that rendered Zaitsev’s project deeply problematic, at least in some quarters. Even the doyens of the old Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) enterprise expressed reservations when contemplating the downside risk of this new Active-SETI endeavor—this initiative to dispense with decades of passive listening in favor of actually doing something.

Those downside risks were not inconsiderable. The Cosmic Call critics protested that we shouldn't call attention to ourselves when for all we knew our transmissions might be received by some real-world equivalents of H.G. Wells’s intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic. These beings might—out of paranoia or sheer malevolence—reply with relativistic impactors or cosmic computer viruses or interstellar laser beams that would set our sky aflame?

Zaitsev would have none of it. Dismissing the handwringing of the naysayers as idle and pseudoscientific, he vowed to carry on. And, given he had access to the requisite technology, how could anyone realistically hope to stop him?

In point of fact, Zaitsev was right: None of his detractors’ nightmare scenarios would come to pass.

What would come to pass instead was much, much swifter and much, much worse.

For in another, unimaginably further-removed time and place, a wise and ancient race had—after eons of godlike accomplishment—collectively resolved to depart the plane of material existence for their own unfathomable reasons.

But not before leaving behind, in their terrible benevolence, a parting gift.

That gift takes the form of a spherical wavefront, a globe of coherent light expanding ever outward from its point of origin. It is now irretrievably lost in time and space, but currently moving through one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy.

It is a wavefront with a difference, overlaid with cunningly crafted interference patterns that split a portion of its beams off from the prime vector and bend them back in a delay line. Of such elemental circuitry is fashioned the functional equivalents of XORs, NAND gates, and the rest of the low-level instructional menagerie that make up the firmware of a standard computer.

Save that this computer’s ware is decidedly not firm. Rather, it is a gossamer, its components forged of trimeric light. That is, light endowed with an infinitesimal smidgen of mass. Hence it is capable of interacting with itself by binding triplets of its constituent photons into the bosonic equivalent of molecules.

Save also that, inspirited by architectures of superhuman subtlety, all those simple intangible piece-parts are capable of self-assembling into something no mere earthbound computer can hope to match—a photonic intelligence.

An intelligence tasked with a single purpose: to bestow the blessings of its creators’ beneficence on any and all inhabited planets within its ever-expanding ken.

Admittedly, it is not much of an intelligence. Smeared out across the surface area of a sphere already some tens of thousands of light-years in radius and growing all the time, that which propagates outward in all directions from its long-lost source is by now a mere shadow of its original self. Merely a photonic entity that, after a seeming eternity of attenuating dilation, boasts all the smarts of your average amoeba.

It is, in fact, just smart enough to detect, at any given point on its enormous capture surface, one of a small number of trigger events.

The least significant of such triggers is the sort of transmission represented by the Cosmic Call, still only twelve years along on its seven-decade journey to 16 Cygni Bb at the moment when it intersects the wavefront entity. In and of itself, Zaitsev’s four-hour message burst might seem too transitory, too weak, and too primitive content-wise to warrant attention. But interstellar space is vast, and life-bearing bodies are few and far between. Even the least promising candidate for Transfiguration deserves, at a minimum, some consideration.

The entity marginally alters its incorporeal internal dynamics to bestow that minimum: Rippling outward from the point of intersection, the wavefront ceases to expand and begins to fold back in on itself. Refractive structures coalesce to focus light and logic on the bare-bones intellect which had first encountered the message from Earth. It's a shift that augments the entity's processing power, and with that power, its perspicacity, until at last the nascent photonic entity achieves a modicum of mindfulness.

And waits to see what would happen next.

 What would happen next was once upon this time.

Part 1

Arrival

Morning, Last Day of Autumn

0700 Hours: Into the Light

Jon, I’m pregnant.

Whatever effect Marianna Bonaventure might have anticipated this announcement having, it had not included the little convertible being braked hard enough to trigger the automatic seatbelt locks.

One moment, she and Jonathan Knox had been cruising up the stretch of El Camino Real that ran through the wilds of Big Sur, California. The next, they were sitting on the shoulder, engine ticking, clouds of road dust rising around them.

Jon was staring at her intently from the driver’s seat, silently studying her face.

Marianna’s heart sank. Oh, God. He thinks I’m trying to trap him!

No worries. She affected a nonchalance she didn’t really feel. I’ll be fine—

Jon leaned over and kissed her on the lips.

No, he said. "We’ll be fine."

Marianna Knox née Bonaventure smiled at the memory, then winced.

Soon now. Her night-long labor was entering its final throes as the first rays of dawn spilled across the birthing bed. Jon stood beside her in the delivery room, holding her hand. She could tell by his abstracted look that he was trying to recall the finer points of his Lamaze training. Typical male: he was having enough trouble remembering to breathe himself, much less urge her to do so.

To Marianna, the intervals between contractions felt like floating becalmed in the gentle swells of a tranquil sea. Then without warning a storm surge of agony would hoist her up, up into the sky, rip through her, and tumble her over and over. It crested and, as quickly as it had come, it was gone. Then she was sliding down the long, liquid slope into the trough, gasping for breath and bracing for the next wave.

Her uterus pulsed like a metronome—a metronome whose rhythm was accelerating, beats coming faster and faster—nature’s countdown.

But in between the beats came moments of introspection, thoughts about what it all meant. According to all the mother-to-be self-helps she’d read, she was about to embark upon the adventure of a lifetime.

Well, maybe so. But considering all the adventures in Marianna’s lifetime to date, there would be some stiff competition for that accolade.

She smiled again, then frowned, recalling a summer evening she and Jon had spent together two years back, cruising the North Atlantic onboard a corporate megayacht as big as a city block. All while, in the depths below them, a secret installation ensconced in the summit of an undersea mountain ticked down the final hours till Armageddon.

The memory whirled away into darkness as another contraction crashed into her, this one feeling for all the world as if a giant’s hand gripped her innards and squeezed them, trying to push them down, down, and out of her body cavity altogether.

Then it passed, leaving her drifting among reminiscences once again.

Reminiscences of a night in a futuristically palatial compound overlooking the Pacific, the scene of a technology launch gone horribly, earth-shatteringly awry, threatening to merge all the world’s intellects into a single, mindless meta-consciousness, and of a last-second intervention from an unexpected quarter.

Reminiscences segueing into that long walk up the aisle on the arm of her boss, Euripides Pete Aristos who stood in for her late father. She walked toward a beaming Jon, accompanied by his unlikely best man, Finley Mycroft Laurence, who seemed determined to make up for the groom’s evident lack of nervousness with a double helping of his usual agoraphobia.

And then the contractions were upon her again.

In the two and a half years they’d been together, Jonathan Knox had watched while Marianna poleaxed a hulking Gruzian hitman, had gazed through someone else’s eyes as she consigned an Iranian terrorist to a hell of his own devising, preventing gigadeaths in the process. Both times.

But this—this was far and away the bravest thing he had ever seen her do.

Yet, as proud as he was of his partner—his new wife, the soon-to-be mother of their child—Knox also felt … helpless, useless, superfluous. Not for the first time, he wondered what in the hell he was supposed to be doing here. Providing back rubs and foot massages? Timing contractions? Helping allay anxieties?

As far as that last part was concerned, he might as well forget about it. If anything, Knox was more anxious even than Marianna herself.

Jon? Marianna’s whisper intruded upon his self-indulgent funk. Could I have a sip of water, please?

Knox inserted a straw in the water bottle and brought it to her lips. Holding the bottle in position with one hand, he sponged Marianna’s forehead with the other.

"You’re doing fine, solnyshka. He used the Russian word for sunshine, the term of endearment not only evoking the brightening dawn, but also serving as a reminder of the assignment that had first brought them together. Just a little bit longer now."

Just a little bit longer now would also have been the thought entertained by the insubstantial instrumentalities currently traversing near-Earth space. Had they been capable of thought.

As matters stood, all that these rudimentary ripples of trimeric light could manage was to receive a feed from the Washington Square relay station and retransmit it to the wavefront’s central processing locus out past the orbit of Saturn. That feed, in turn, contained, suitably amplified, the feeble emanations from the monitors in the delivery room at Saint Bartholomew where Marianna Knox lay giving birth.

The photonic entity that was called the Emissary by its human servants received that feed. Only then it could fully formulate the thought:

Just a little bit longer now, and the Transfiguration can begin.

With a final, shuddering convulsion, Marianna delivered. It was a