The Education of Mr. William Chamer

2026 December 26 16:00 UTC
Test Year 0, Day 113, 09:50 Caltech Time
Tau, Caltech, Millikan Library

Will waited outside the former Trustee’s Room in Millikan Library, his body in a ready stance, partially out of habit and partially because he wanted to focus himself. The BOC hearing was scheduled to start in ten minutes, but no one else had shown up yet. For the while there was the quiet ticking of a clock, slightly stained green carpet, light-colored wood paneling and upholstered chairs, and the strange 1960’s wrought metal decorations. Outside, the grass was long and peppered with invasives and fallout from the jacarandas. Lilypads and native aquatic plants had started to grow in the pond, feeding on the small amount of detritus that had accumulated.

His hands rested a few inches above the hilts of the daisho he had precisely arranged at his belt, careful to not disrupt his jacket and tie, which were the only articles of his wardrobe that he hadn’t worn since landing. Brown eyes stared through an imaginary opponent. One feature of the room was changed from how it had been on Earth: fifteen assorted urns sat on stands in front of the plaque dedicating the building to Millikan, in an improvised mausoleum.

Four tracks of thought ran through Will’s mind at once. It had been like this since the Examiners had brought them here, unless he calmed himself through mental tricks or complete exhaustion. One of those tracks now dwelt on those urns. Fifteen dead now, out of seventeen hundred and thirty-seven that the Examiners had brought to the eastern coast of this new California. Sasha, Cadmann, Mary, Ted, dead within a half-hour of landing. Wonjin two weeks later. Ten more from injuries, allergic reactions, and that accursed Page’s Folly that just looks like prickly pear. He’d helped with autopsies where needed, smelled the smoke of the cremations, spoken the prayers of eight religions. Eventually a cemetery would be built, but for now the urns were a reminder.

You’re probably reading my thoughts right now, Examiners. Fifteen people dead here, more at MIT. Eight people on the chain gang, one for more than a decade. Eleven disabled from injuries and diseases we simply can’t fix or manage. Elijah won’t ever be able to use his left hand again. He and several others will need psychological support for the next few years, probably. This would not have happened if we had been left at home. I think I know why you did this, why some of the best of us died, why you Test us instead of simply predicting the future. I think I see why it is necessary, but I don’t like that it is. In twenty-three and two-thirds Earth years, we’re going to have a long talk, unless you’d care to break your self-imposed silence. Not now? Well, you know where to find me.

The second track was one that always ran, and always would. His own personal grief. Maine. Mom. Dad. Grandparents, cousins, friends. Even Megan, the scamp. What time was it back home? Sometime on the day after Christmas. Mom and Dad will be at the cabin in Bangor, enjoying the snow and view of the winter-swept ocean, if climate change hasn’t ruined the weather. I hope Meg’s with them. She’s thirty-one now. Not my little sister anymore. She’s probably married, with one or two young children. At least she’ll have dumped and gotten over that loser boyfriend she met at Columbia. Mom’ll be okay by now, but she’ll remember me trimming the tree for her. Dad will probably still scorch the pudding. He never could get that right.

On a third register, Will was planning, estimating, forecasting, doing everything he could to keep the population alive and moving forward. Stricter quality checks were needed on the insulin: he’d been off his feet for two days in immune reaction from a dose last week. Good thing Ini caught that rogue Tau bug in Venkat’s cultures before any more was refined. But how can we shield against microbes that use foreign cell membranes and proteins with amino acids we can’t even digest? They just happen to like E. coli, and the vitamin C isn’t going to hold them off forever.

The number of diagnosable cases of depression was down close to normal (who’s to say what is ‘normal’ here), but some people needed to be reminded that the Examiners were always watching. They weren’t depressed or even hedonistic. They simply kept illusions that might become dangerous.

The turbine for the hydroelectric plant was being phased up. Millikan now had power to run one of the elevators and dimly light the stacks at night. Soon, there would be three hundred watts per person. Enough for more refrigeration, more computers to be brought online (but those need to be conserved), and even microwave ovens and hot water in the morning. Need to hack some more cellphones and wireless nodes and get computers and net access out to the iron mine and the houses people are building in the fields. I’ll ask Sadowski’s mafia. They’ve got a bunch of phones stored, I recall.

Only the fourth progression focused on the immediate trial. It was a formality: the BOC and GSC had no choice but to commend the self-appointed medical staff for all they had done. But they would ask for an explanation, and they were entitled to one. When an electrical engineering grad student with expertise in wireless communications and interests in amateur astronomy and Edo Japan starts refining insulin from cultures the Examiners gave him, even if he is a diabetic, something strange is happening. When he does the same with vitamin B12 and has assisted a second-year med school student in operating on a deeply lacerated abdomen, which would have been dealt with in a major trauma center on Earth, questions should rightly be asked.

There was an explanation, which implicated him, Townsend and over thirty of his undergrads, five Avery grad students (including Venkat), and a number of people at MIT in a conspiracy that had lasted since landing, when even the Four had spoken their secrets to everyone, trusting that someone wouldn’t scream them to Earth before the time was right. But now things were stable enough that he could speak and the victims of the benevolent conspiracy would probably not resent them too much. Still, how to say it?

A slight motion, seen out of the corner of one eye, partially quieted the reverie. Will straightened up. People were coming, walking over from the loggias to the east and west. Two ninjas, in the motley black that was the nearest they had to full uniform, were the first to come in. They had been asked to serve as bailiffs, if BOC proceedings ever came to that.

“Hey, Will. Always early.” Melinda Yang was short, with long black hair tied back and up, wearing black pants and a sweatshirt with Blacker’s Lowenbrau lion on it. She had been a junior physics major, specializing in nuclear particle, and now she spent her time on the fission pile project when she wasn’t working with the ninjas. Matt Wing had recruited her after she’d saved Mackenzie Long from a gas leak. Melinda would have seemed relatively innocuous, were it not for the geckel gloves and boots, the three knives, and the less visible skills of a sandan aikidoka and reflexes that won randori tournaments.

“Guess we just stand here.” She moved over to the ornate door of the Trustees Room. “John, you want to crack the lock?”

The other bailiff, John Stansted, had been on the Catalina patrol before joining the ninjas. He’d been a first-year grad student, at Caltech for less than a month before they were ripped away. There wasn’t much use for fracture mechanic mathematics on Tau yet, but he was a fairly good shot and had gotten a rifle from the Examiners. With the first harvest in, there wasn’t so much hunting anymore, but the ninjas had had openings for former members of the patrol when they’d expanded, so here he was. Being new, he hadn’t experienced the lock. It was a rite of passage for the ninjas now: they’d put a lock on the doors to the Trustees Room, and each had had to open the doors without the keys. “I suppose if I don’t, this criminal walks free?” He smiled at Will as he took a small box from his belt and drew out lockpicks. “I could just take one of those anime meat cleavers from you and smash the lock, but Melinda’s a purist, so…”

Will smiled at the jokes, but he could see the pain behind the cheerful mask. John had had a girlfriend at UCLA. He had been planning on proposing to her on the night after the Vanishing. Now he’d never have a chance. He still kept the ring in a box in one pocket. Almost everyone on Tau carried grief, but John’s hadn’t healed yet. There was a helpless anger there, against the Examiners, against the universe that had taken his future from him, against himself for not asking Xena, for then he would have been at home the last twelve years. He shielded the pain well, and did what needed to be done, but it had not healed, despite Townsend’s best efforts. John kept his barriers up and did not speak of serious matters to anyone.

As John fiddled with the lock, the judges of the BOC and GSC, and the Tech representatives started to arrive. The entire proceedings would be broadcast live, audio only to be sure, but the media were at least active and free. Dan Wing greeted Will with a smile. Without all of the martial inclinations of his brother, Dan fit media in between long shifts wrestling with the zards in the constantly growing herd. He’d even written a column about how to ride one. “Still nothing to say?” He held out a microphone.

“What do you think?” Dan knew that as a rhetorical ‘no’. “Just wait until the proceedings.” He heard Stansted slipping back the bolts of the lock as well as a bunch of people coming in the door behind him. The sound of their footsteps was distinctive. “Excuse me.”

He turned as Townsend came in, with eight undergrads and Venkat behind him. They were the rest of the accused, and the bulk of the medical staff. Pat had had two years of med school before starting in biochemistry, and had been serving as psychologist as well as general practitioner, Avery RA, and farmer. Sakhar was still passing out vitamins, although his job was easier now that terrestrial plants were approaching harvest. The others had done varied things: normal first aid and switching up Ai’s leg, but also dermatology, treating immune reactions to tau amino acids, surgeries that would normally have been evacuated a hundred miles, nutritional analyses beyond the biochemistry department’s normal skills, blood transfusions, and a small amount of gynecology. As Will greeted them, one mental track was forecasting who would need the most help in the future. Obstetrics in eight months, pediatrics in a few years.

“You’re sure you want me to lead?” Will asked. They’d planned this carefully over the past four months, but he hesitated still. One mistake, and Pat might need to save him from an angry mob.

“You’re the Screamer, Will.” Townsend smiled. The power the office wielded was out of proportion to the work it involved. It meant spending no more than an hour a day on assembling messages, checking the transmitter, and beaming them back to Earth, now that the setup had been largely automated. But Will, and Laura Sturm and Greg Iwanowicz at MIT, were still the strongest link to Earth, and hence visible and with some influence. So when the medics were called before the BOC, Will had to be the one who spoke for them. Townsend and the others knew this very well. “We’ll watch your back.”

“And the rest of me?” Will also smiled as he turned back towards the Trustees Room. The BOC, GSC, and the reporter had all gone in, and as he got to the door, Melinda came out and said: “The accused will present themselves.” They entered.

The Trustees Room was not as the former trustees of Caltech would have liked it. The lights were still without power here, so the curtains had been drawn back from the seven window-walls, surrounding the octagonal room with the water of the Millikan pond, which was now overgrown with lilypads, algal scum, native plankton, and turtles and large tadpoles. The kinetic water sculpture was no longer whirling, and was covered with fast-growing pseudo-ivy.

The furniture had been replaced by long tables and folding chairs, with the BOC seated against the window opposite the foyer, a much less crowded table for the GSC off to the left as the medics entered, and a selection of the IHC to the right. The Board of Control had been the undergraduates’ academic and social review board, tasked with nothing worse than students cheating on exams; the Graduate Student Council a mixture of social organizer and labor union; and the Inter-House Committee simply a forum for complaints about housing and the undergraduates’ House choices. This was the basis of the government of an entire hemisphere. Most of them don’t want this responsibility, Will thought as he exited the tunnel-like foyer, but they are the best public authority we have. And with less than two thousand people here, democracy is a strange thing anyway – we’re just barely above the level of the tribe.

Melinda motioned for Will’s swords. He unbound them and placed them flat on the table designated for the accused to sit at. A plastic tabletop was hardly a fit location for the work of Masamune, but there was a Mona Lisa hung in a Ricketts House bathroom, so he wouldn’t complain. Venkat set down a pouch of darts and one of the undergrads showed his kirpan. The rest carried no weapons. The ninjas moved back to the door, to hold sentinel.

The Board of Control still had the habits of Earthly bureaucracy, although it had reformed itself somewhat to account for due process and punishments unthinkable on Earth. So Will, Townsend, and the rest sat through long procedural debates. Looking over the tables, he saw that the majority of the judges were just as bored by this as the accused, Dan Wing and his backup, and the small audience that had sacrificed their too-rare free time to be here. At the GSC table, Mina was sketching on a notepad. She had recused herself from the GSC’s vote on this case, but was still a member. First notes in Slovenian, then … that pattern of strokes – an exercise in Chinese calligraphy? Will started to think about how to convince the native Chinese to improve their English skills, but quenched that train of thought.

Mina had just come back from another survey run, this one five hundred kilometers north-west. Her hair was sun-bleached to a shade almost paler than her browned face. This time, the surveyors had blown two tires on the vans, lost seismic data due to an insulworm infestation in one of the thumpers, and used up a hundred of the remaining five hundred bullets on animals that had yet to learn caution, but they had found what they were looking for. She’d given Will a liter of ‘Tau sweet crude’ as a Christmas present. Oil was not exactly traditional, but it was more useful than those three bottles of Champagne Leticia Benoite still had.

Her face was always ready to smile, even though there was a layer etched there that hadn’t been present before landing. She had reached acceptance of losing her parents and her younger siblings, but of course would never let it go completely. Field trips aren’t the same when there are no gas stations, rest stops, or small towns and every outcrop is unknown, but Mina had done her share of mapping before, so the field was a small inconvenience. Bureaucracy was not, so she wrote out hanzi, practicing the second language of Caltech.

Eventually, the forms were all dealt with, and the BOC chair, Mark Thye, stood. He had been thrust from obscurity into prominence, since only a half-dozen people outside of the BOC had known he was the chair before arrival and they had all been left behind. Despite having lost ten kilos of fat and gained five of muscle since landing, he was a little awkward in the face of the crowd, but he spoke clearly enough for the recorder microphone to hear.

“The accused will stand.” They did so. “You have heard the charges against you, based on evidence provided to the BOC by anonymous but reliable sources. The BOC has passed its judgment. We ask William Chamer to come forward, as declared representative for all the accused. The rest may sit.” Will walked around the end of the table facing the BOC, to the center of the room. “Mr. Chamer, do you swear to tell the truth, the full truth, and nothing but the truth, without any attempt at misdirection?”

Showtime. “I do.”

“Very well. While it will seem unusual, given our case history, the Caltech Board of Control, in consultation with the IHC and GSC, considering the benefits your work has had for the Institute and the many statements approving of you, has decided that all charges against you and your co-defendants be dropped, subject to one condition.”
Will’s divided mind was tightly controlled now, and focused on the task that was coming. The second track still went: Mom, you’re going to worry a lot when you hear this one.

“You will, here and now, explain to the population of Caltech, of MIT, and of Earth, the last subject to the approval of the Four Physicists, how you all have performed medicine that would not be out of place in a hospital on Earth, with only a small amount of equipment and no qualifications. We’ve seen what you can do, but we need to know how you can do it.”

Thye sat back down. Now no one was distracted. Mina had put away her notepad. Melinda had pulled herself a few feet up using the van der Waals force between the pads of her gloves and the wall, to see over the back of the crowd. Townsend and the other defendants had their eyes and ears about them, and only Will stood in the room.

Every motion he made, down to the tension of the muscles around his eyes, was carefully metered, to convey sincerity and earnestness. So was his voice: Will needed to be heard and believed by the entire population. This was going to be rough for everyone as it was.

“The explanation starts with the Examiners, as you might expect. Many of you know of my diabetes. The first thing I thought of asking for was a supply of insulin. Twenty kilograms would have lasted all of the diabetics here for a very long time, but the shelf life isn’t long enough, so I asked for a smaller amount of engineered cultures. When the vials appeared on the roof next to me, I realized that I didn’t know how to extract the insulin.

“So I asked my Examiner: ‘Can you teach me how to use this?’ This was the fatal question. The answer was ‘Yes.’”

Will looked around, seeing mystification in the faces of almost everyone, dawning comprehension in a few. Only the other members of the conspiracy completely understood so far. Here we go. “Then I suddenly knew how to grow E. coli, cook the culture, extract the insulins, and how to refine it to usable purity.

“You start to see. They communicated with us by vibrating the bones in our ears and direct stimulation of optic nerves, but the Examiners aren’t limited to that. In less time than it would take to say the subjects I had learned, I had acquired knowledge, forced directly into my brain.” Over a growing murmuring that paused as he continued, “This isn’t anything like the training software in The Matrix. It is far more subtle and quiet. The Examiners know our neurochemistry well enough to train us by shuffling synapses, changing neurotransmitter concentrations and adjusting potentials. The skill and speed that implies is incredible, even if they were working at gamma equals one instead of one hundred thousand.” Now there was an undercurrent of fear in the stares directed towards him.

“Once I had been given the first bit of knowledge, I ran with it. Those swords, the vitamin cultures, and the microsats I have sitting in Moore were trivial. I spent the bulk of my time listing things I would like to know. So now I have the knowledge base and skills necessary to be a physician and surgeon. It scares the living daylights out of me to operate, but it needs to be done. Fortunately, I am not alone.

“Pat was far better than I.” Bowing to the Avery RA, “Towards the end of the flight, while I was on the roof of Moore, checking resistances and potentials and listing sub-specialties, he had asked a similar question. I think it was about how to make an effective cast, because he’d fractured his wrist three weeks before.” Townsend nodded. “He then went through Avery, in the dark, shouting for people to think of things to learn. They learned.”

Indicating the other accused, “Those who sit before you requested medical and psychological training. Others requested other knowledge that would be useful here. In total, there are forty-two of us here who were trained by the Examiners. There are more at MIT.”

Turning to back Thye, Will said, “Now you have heard how we can do what we have done.” As the BOC chair leaned forward in his chair, as if to stand and dismiss him, he continued “But there are two other subjects that I would like to talk about. The first most of you can see in yourselves and in others: you are now very much more afraid of the Examiners than you were a few minutes ago.” There were nods, faint smiles, and awkward silence.

“They scare me too, and we had better treat them with the greatest of respect. Of course, we aren’t in any more danger now than we were at home: even though we didn’t know it, we have been at the Examiners’ mercy for all of our lives. We can’t stop them, can’t know anything about them other than what they tell us, can’t hide anything from them. They can do things that mess with physics to ethics: we have hundreds of live, healthy, and fertile animals they say were assembled from individual atoms and they put information into my head in a second that will take me years to transfer to others.

“Now that our worldview has been shattered and put back together, there are three possibilities. We can forget what the Examiners can do, forget that every word and thought we have is probably being recorded, act as we would act before. Some of you had begun to do this, until we reminded you. We apologize for the pain you are going through, but you now see the world as it is.

“We could treat the Examiners as divine, angles or demons depending on your perspective, and pray that they will not harm us. But we must not make the mistake of considering the Examiners to be gods. They have never claimed to be anything other than technology advanced sentient beings. The Test may be a very important event in the spiritual journey of the human race, but we aren’t sitting out our stay in purgatory, nor have we been consigned to hell. The Examiners aren’t saints, to intercede for us with the Almighty, nor are they Shaitan, to be fought with everything we have.

“The third way is the only one that makes sense. We must take the Examiners at their word, trusting them enough to not live in continual debilitating fear and doing our utmost to pass their Test. We could waste ourselves in dissipation and destruction, trying to fail the Test, just to spite them. But that condemns everyone on Earth, our families and friends, not just ourselves. So: we must work as hard as we can for our long-term survival, without harming this world or ourselves. We have twenty-four years on our own. Then we will hear from Earth and Examiners.

“We aren’t in a space opera, where highly trained and physically perfect heroes discover the deux ex machina at the right instant and eternal happiness ensues.” He smiled, “I may have been trained, but without insulin I’m a walking dead man. And you’ve all seen the urns. I would that they all still lived, but they do not.

“The next two decades will be red in tooth and claw and there will be pain as well as joy, but we have some certainty, based on the Examiners being trustworthly. We know that the Test will end at a specific time. We can control how they view us, because we know that we’re in the fishbowl. Who on Earth had that sort of foreknowledge? The Examiners or our families probably won’t be impressed by the paralysis of fear or helpless rage, or if those who have died have died in vain. Each of us will have to decide for her- or him-self what must be done, but most of you already have. Some of you had begun to forget, or have been nurturing hidden rage, and so those of us who have been trained speak now.”

Fear was still written on many faces, but now it was mixed with grief, sorrow, and the twisted smile you give to an opponent in a duel. Will noticed Stansted’s face, in the grip of a terrible emotion. He’s thinking ‘should I have asked to forget Xena?’. He hasn’t sent a message to her, knowing that she’ll hear anything as an echo from someone half a lifetime away. Couples have been torn apart before, but never by so far. You won’t forget her. She won’t have forgotten you. You’ll both move on – she has already, which only adds to your pain. And if you meet an Examiner in the flesh, you can punch it in the equivalent of the nose.

“You are all entitled to ask why we haven’t revealed our training until now. In part it was simple self-preservation. Immediately after arrival, we were all shaken up. Melinda,” he indicated the ninja, now nonchalantly perched halfway up the wall on the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands, “was attacked for simply being a physics major. The Four were quiet until they had had a long talk with each other, and I’d helped them arrange some level of protection. In that environment, confessing to our training was dangerous. It also would have been a hindrance to one of our largest projects.”

This was the most dangerous point. Here they might think of him as being even more manipulative than the Examiners. Watch tone, inflection, body language. “Several of us requested training in psychology to a level uncommon even back home. That was how, when I met Pat at the big meeting on the first day, he could tell I had asked for much of the same training he’d asked for and asked me to help. It was also how we saw how deep and common emotional shock was.

“Many of you noticed it yourselves – thousand-yard stares, people acting like automatons, depression. Enough of us were functional to a level such that we could get through those first few days, but it could easily have been much worse that it was. Many of you have been amazed at how much momentum we developed in such a short time. That was because we adapted the Institute’s emergency response plan, which includes food, water, and giving everyone a job to do, a short-term goal to focus on. Pat and I and the others with training were just as messed up as you, but we gave ourselves our own goal: to bring people out of shock and depression as fast as we could. That goal got us through our own hardest days.” There was a mixture of anger and gratitude on their faces now.

“You can’t come up to a person in deep emotional shock and simply say that you’ll help with skills you got from the same people who pulled us away from everything we learned. For the first month, we couldn’t speak of the training, because that might have led you to view us as saints or devils in our own right, asking us for solutions to problems that we simply can’t solve with the skills we have or attacking us as the closest thing to the Examiners. So, quietly we and our counterparts at MIT helped people organize and come out of shock into work without being broken. Also, if we had spoken then, we would have destroyed all the momentum we have. After the first five weeks, the community had healed well enough that we have had no need to practice psychology on a large scale since. The Examiners gave us a gift, which we used to prevent sudden destructive actions and start the process of building. All of the results since then – the power supply, the hexazard herd, even Decompression, have not needed the psychological tinkering the training made possible. So now we can speak, and have been asked to speak, and have spoken.

“We must apologize for psychological shock therapy without your knowledge, and ask your forgiveness. Some of you did as much in those first few weeks as anyone who had training. You we must particularly thank.” They understood now. There was still some anger, but it was dominated by gratitude and sympathy, at least with this group and at this time. He returned to his seat as there was a round of applause.

Thye stood again. “After that, anything I say will be an anti-climax.” Laughter. Looking up and down the table at the other delegates, he nodded. “The BOC accepts your explanation, and the charges are dropped. Just don’t practice too much psychology, any of you, or you’ll either be run out by a mob or made chair of the BOC.” More laughter. “This hearing is adjourned.”

As the crowd disbanded, Dan Wing came again with his microphone. “You can’t have any more to say, can you Bill? Pat, what about you?” As Townsend spoke to the reporter, Will received a few congratulations. Then, as he picked up the daisho and returned the swords to their spots on his belt, Mina came up, her mouth in a twisted smile.

“It wasn’t just medicine you thought of, was it?” she asked softly, quietly enough that no human in the room other than he could hear over the noise of the departing crowd.

“You saw through it, didn’t you?” He answered in Slovenian. Not only Slovenian, but Mina’s native Ljubljanasko. His accent was almost nonexistent.

Her eyebrows went up, and she answered in the same dialect, spoken by no one else within twelve lightyears. “They taught you Slovenian? Probably a bunch of other languages too. I doubt you’d have thought of just that one.

“But what tipped me off was the speech. Your motions seemed a little too … balanced. You weren’t uncoordinated before, but since we got here you’ve always landed on your feet. They tweaked your inner ear, probably. And I wondered where you’d learned that new kata you’ve been practicing.” She became more serious. “You could have told me, you know. What else was there?”

“I’ll tell you, but not here. It would take at least a half hour to explain it all.” Shifting back to English: “You don’t mind my mangling your language, I hope?” Looking around, at the now-empty room. “We might want to continue this at Moore.” Looking up, through the edge of the chandelier. “Hi, Melinda.”

The ninja released her feet and swung them so that they missed the strands of cut glass, then unstuck one hand, and dropped almost silently to the floor next to Mina after the last geckle pad let go. “How’d you get so hard to sneak up on?”

“Long story.” He smiled, as Mina burst out laughing. Melinda looked confused for a few seconds, then joined in the laughter.

New Media

2026 December 23
Test Year 0, Day 110
Tau

The following extracts were originally published in the first full edition of The Tech to be published on Tau and the first to be released jointly by both Institutes. It was distributed by radio, limited printing, and crier.

The Outside Worlds

Astronomy
A dynamical simulation of the system confirms the Examiners’ statement concerning the pattern and timing of ice ages and is consistent with sediment cores and glacial moraines in the Gell-Man and Alvarez Mountains. Darin Meyers of MIT ran the simulation, incorporating all available masses and orbital information for the planets: “The next major ice-age will take place in roughly 3600 Earth years. There are small oscillations on shorter timescales, driven largely by solar variations rather than the orbital and obliquity effects I considered, but the climate should be stable for the next several centuries, provided we keep ourselves under control.”

Screamers Report
The Screamers have finished transmitting initial personal messages from all members of the population, and will now be working their way through the secondary message queue as part of their broadcasts. They caution that video files will not be transmitted. Still photographs and audio remain limited to one per person and one minute per person respectively, unless you can successfully appeal to a Screamer’s better nature.

No leakage signals from Earth have been detected yet. The military radar scanning schedules requested by MIT Screamer Laura Sturm put any detection at the limits of sensitivity, and may no longer be valid, but the Screamers say they will continue to observe Earth with everything they have.

Examiners Capable of Dismantling Star Clusters
The Four Physicists have released additional results from their analysis of the Examiners’ transportation of campus. They estimate that the transportation of both campuses and the outliers took a total of approximately ten to the fifteenth kilograms of positive and negative point masses (absolute value of mass on the latter), which is equivalent to a twenty-kilometer-wide chunk of normal density matter. Applied aggressively, this much negative matter is capable of gravitationally unbinding a hundred one-solar-mass stars over a decade. This is presumably only a small fraction of the Examiners’ infrastructure. This reporter is grateful for their restraint.

World News

Negotiations on Global Currency Continue – Got Change for a ‘Smoot’?
The ASCIT and Caltech GSC, as part of yesterday’s telecon with the Undergraduate Association and MIT GSC, have approved the creation of a global currency. In keeping with cogovernance, a central bank will be formed with offices at the old Bursars’ locations. Prices are to be relatively uncontrolled, but the Caltech IHC is expected to push for careful oversight of lodging, food, power, water, and health care. They released a statement warning against the dangers of establishing a completely free market in our situation, expressing particular concern regarding the seizure of Institute property by individuals. The government appears to recognize this concern, emphasizing that the currency will initially apply only to items beyond standard rationing or allocations, with wages being added to the compensation of centralized project workers. They have not set a timetable for further expansion. Use of the currency will of course determine its future.

Reactions to the announcement have been generally positive, with entrepreneurial inclinations obvious: no fewer than eight restaurants are planned, including a limited-hours Ratheskaller organized by Mannion Memorial. The fraternity-based economy of Boston Side has welcomed the currency, which will simplify inter-house transactions. Objections have centered mostly on the proposed name for the currency. The unit is to be divided into 100 “ears”. Quarters will remain legal tender, but you can expect to be asked for change for a smoot.

We have been informed that new housing, to be constructed under Harvard Bridge, will retail at 364.4 smoots plus one ear, for the first eight 130 square meter units.

Local News – MIT

MITSFS & Bananas
MITSFS has announced the first harvest from their banana palms, which are growing well now that they have been moved into the greenhouse in W16. Bananas have been given to various groups that the Society wishes to honor, with the number of bananas being determined by the standard determinant method.

Thanks to staff working long hours, the MITSFS Library is now “more ordered than in the past century” and the Society’s Skinner has decreed that a new issue of the Twilight Zine will be published when sufficient material is submitted and a suitable method of distribution is found. “Hand-illuminated manuscripts and stone tablets have both been vetoed.” As an incentive, contributors will be given first choice of the next banana harvest.
The Skinner also released the following statement:

When most science fiction authors are light years away, and we’re almost always too hosed to write, it’s much easier to manage the growth of our collection. Interested members should come check out the Library’s new digs under the Great Dome, in the old Barker Science Library reading room.

The Skinner is a little worried about testing the proposition that one couldn’t read all the books in the Library in a lifetime. If you’d happen to write some work of science fiction in your Copious Free Time, please submit it for inclusion in the forthcoming Twilight Zine! The Skinner is mourning the fact that she’ll probably never actually get to read the rumored Aeneid of Mars, so you’ll get bonus points if you can do a reasonable Nicholas Gray pastiche. The Skinner also would like more Charlie Stross, despite having all of the Merchant Princes series in Examiner-hardened copy.

Course Numbers
Course 12 will be split into several sub-courses to reflect increased specialization: geophysics and prospecting are to be separated from atmospheric forecasting and astronomical observations.

Local News – CIT

Decompression
On Earth, December 25 2026 will be in two days. We’ve all spent the last hundred and ten days working harder than most of us have ever worked before. Therefore, on the evening of Day 112, Decompression will take place on Beckmann Mall from 17:00 until it ends.

The Mannion Memorial Cooking Club, the Caltech Meat Club, Prufrock House, and the Brewing Club will provide food and drink. Roasted zard and pede and pisces sushi will be partially offset by vegetable dishes, grains, and dairy products. Entries for the salsa contests remain welcome.

Before the main event, a Pumpkin Drop will take place. The Dance Troupe and Oasis will lead dancing starting at 17:00. After sunset, entertainment will be provided by the Glee Club, Fluid Dynamics, the DJ Club, and the Rock Scientists. The Caltech Christian Fellowship has organized Christmas services and caroling.

The organizers thank those who have donated their tritium batteries to the cause of providing nighttime power. And just in case you’ve forgotten, Ditch Day is Tomorrow.

Hydroelectric Plant Nearing Completion
The first turbine for the hydroelectric plant, which will produce 500 kilowatts of electricity and therefore heating at night, has been installed and tested at low flow rates and under simulated loads. 60 Hz, 120 V power should be available from the south-side substation within the next ten days. The second turbine has been delayed slightly, and will not be installed until at least Day 125.

Feature Stories

BOC Ninjas

David Dorman is head of the BOC Ninjas, formerly the Blacker Ninja Division. The history of how he has become combination Security Chief, firefighter, emergency medical responder, and maintenance organizer, is strange even by our present standards, so we asked him to give his story in his own words, especially for our MIT audience.

You’ve seen us walking about campus, in the fields, even out at the iron mine. We do look a little strange, I guess, although I’d call it awesome: Blacker sweatshirts, black balaclavas, swords and knives, guns, lockpicks, hacked cell phones, our personal favorite improvised explosives. There have also been times when we have not been seen. Those who were running that still down in Lowest Hell: when you showed up and found it replaced by a six pack of actual beer, that was from us. Your moonshine was tainted with something nasty, and put three Moles in the Health Center.

I convened the Blacker Ninja Division on Day 14, after that wild zard got loose inside the Vatican Alley. It smashed its way into two rooms before we stopped it. Don’t ask me why Matt Wing had a bottle of something self-oxidizing within arm’s reach of his bed or how he got it into the zard’s mouth and lit it on fire or even who threw those three darts that were embedded in two of the legs. By the time I got there, it was trying very hard to leave through a window that was rather too small. A few sword strokes put it out of its misery.

Of course, we are no longer using the courtyard as an animal pen, but an organized watch, with unorthodox tactics, seemed in order, and so I found myself named Duke of the Ninja Division, with twenty enthusiastic and a larger number of lukewarm volunteers.

Now, several other groups set up watches – the patrollers of the Catalinas, the survey expeditions after seeing the first pede feeding, but somehow we began to acquire a reputation. On day 15, when Wonjin Lau was mauled, four ninjas were called to destroy the pede before anyone else got hurt. I’m still not sure why we decided to lure it into the Sloan tunnel entrance, or exactly how we managed that, but it did die in there.

Then came the assault by Douglas Werset. He’d fled, running out of Fleming with his face bruised and bleeding and a pistol in his hand, firing wild shots at the people who chased him, and had gotten at least an hour’s head start. I got a call on my phone, which the Screamers had hacked. The BOC chair wanted us to find him and bring him to trial. So I and the five best hunters in the group went after him. Two days we searched, on foot because you can’t track a man through forest and scrub unless you can examine the ground and have you ever tried to be stealthy in a car?

We weren’t sure if we’d find him alive or dead. We had orders to take him without injury, even though I wasn’t inclined to that courtesy. When we did find him, it was in a ravine on the far side of the hills. We’d shifted ourselves out for rest, so that three were always on the trail. He hadn’t made very good time, and in the nights his trail was a random jumping from one hiding spot to another. He must not have been asleep at any time until he passed out from exhaustion and lack of food and water. He’d scavenged some wheat berries as he ran through the fields and left some skin on the spines of an orangestem plant as he ripped out a piece, but that won’t keep you going for long. He’d dropped the gun when he’d fired his last shot at a burrozard and missed. We brought him back, bound, in a jeep.

I still don’t approve of the BOC’s decision to sentence him to time on the chain gang, with common food thieves and those two who polluted the emergency water supply. They did give him twelve Earth years, but that doesn’t lessen what he did to Jian. At least they recognized the need for enforcement: two ninjas are always watching the chain gang as they re-lay the septics for twelve hours a day and two more are watching them at night.

At that point, we started getting asked to do other types of tasks Security would have done before we were brought here. Picking locks to which the keys had been misplaced, breaking up fights by tossing in smoke bombs, obvious and subtle patrolling of campus. And then there are the tasks that someone had to do: sweeping the tunnels for insulworm infestations and burning them out, taking apart that still I mentioned, helping with the controlled burn of groundcover so the fields can be expanded.

The original twenty-some of us weren’t enough for all the work we were asked to do, but I had applications from many people and so by a month ago less than half of us were Moles, although I’d say the original Twenty are still the most active. Since much of what we do is under the jurisdiction of the BOC, we have submitted to its authority, subject to due process.

So, we are the BOC Ninjas. We will uphold the Honor Code, and do what we can to ensure the safety of the population. That may on occasion mean sneaking across the roofs of the North Houses late at night to make sure no dangerous organic chemistry is happening or breaking into rooms that have had the combinations changed or constructing a better insulworm trap or flying that insane ultralight a hundred klicks south to deliver compatible blood. Ai – you still owe me a pint for that one.

We do what must be done. You may see us or you may not.

David gave us this statement in our new office in Millikan. As he finished the last sentence, he ducked behind a partition. When we looked, he wasn’t there anymore. We checked at the front door, which said he had just left. We’re still not sure how he descended five stories in such a short time.

Climbing a Monolith Tree

Margarita Wolf was on the recent expedition to survey the Monolith Swamp, which included a two-day ascent of one of the trees.

The tree we chose isn’t the largest in the swamp, either in height or volume. It is simply the one closest to open water. We had to raft in to the base of the trunk and many of the trees have large thickets of accreted detritus at their bases. This tree is at the point where the main channel of the Potomac enters the swamp, and therefore is washed relatively clean. Laser sighting to the top of the tree told us it was 543 m from water level.

I know most of you have seen the pictures from our climb, but it is hard to appreciate the tree unless you are there. It becomes part of the landscape, like a mountain or a building, then every so often it hits you that this isn’t Taipei 101 or the Incheon Towers and that that monolith ten kilometers away isn’t the Burj Dubai. These things grew, until they make the sequoias look like dwarfs and each outweighs old Pando by a factor of at least a hundred. We counted fifteen thousand annual growth bands as we climbed, even though the bottom 150 meters were buttress and other late-growth, which had thrust through and disrupted the original surface. This tree is as old as homo sapiens, by some measures, and has weathered millennia of ice ages, when the swamp was frozen solid.

We started our climb at the base of one buttress. The buttresses grow out of the side of the tree after it reaches a certain height and then every year a new layer of growth is laid down, breaking through the photosynthetic bark at a front that runs up the length of the buttress. We used the knobs at the ends of these to hold the ropes. That is another thing un-nerving about the monoliths: they don’t have leaves or branches. There is just smooth, armor-hard, dark brownish bark, laid down every year from the growing bud. There are veins, channels for sap laden with antifreeze agents, buried beneath the surface. We tried deep-radar and acoustic sounding, enough to see that there is a water-rich core in the center of the tree, which must be what keeps it alive when the river into the swamp and the swamp itself are frozen. Don’t even ask about the root system: we think it ends at 200 m down, well below sea level, even during an ice age, but we aren’t sure.

You may well ask how we climbed past the top of the buttress, if there was nothing to hold on to on the bark itself and driving anchors in would have been like trying the same thing to a solid piece of granite. But the tree doesn’t have everything its own way. The trunk isn’t perfectly smooth, and small parasitic plants can occasionally gain enough of a hold to drive their own deep roots into the tree. Keep in mind that small is a relative term – some of these had grown as large as an oak tree back on Earth. Infection does strike the monoliths, and we’re nowhere near an understanding of their immune system, but there were things like galls in the bark, other locations where large holes had formed when the bark rotted and eroded away. You could have built a house in these caves etched out by biological warfare, if they weren’t filled with a few millennia of accumulated vegetable and animal matter, some of it alive. There is even a species of pede in there, which seems to make its habitat only in these havens in the trees. We don’t know how it reproduces or spreads from one tree to another, although it is vaguely like the aquatic pedes in the swamp below.

But all of these parasites worked to our advantage, giving us locations to attach ropes. And so up the four of us went, with hooks and cramp-ons and a lot of hanging by fingertip. It took us twelve hours of climbing to make it to the top of the tree, where we tied our tents as securely as we could. The top isn’t flat. The growing bud occupies the last forty vertical meters, layers of bark slowly unfurling and fusing with the sections beneath them. We were careful to avoid breaking anything. Some organisms don’t have that restraint: there is a constant struggle in the upper layers of the tree between the tree itself and invading parasites that would embed themselves deep within the trunk.

It was cold, sleeping there, and windy, but the view was incredible. Once again, the pictures don’t easily convey the reality. We had to begin our descent too soon, so that we’d be sure of getting down while removing all the ropes we’d strung. I’d be tempted to move to the trees, were it not for the problems commuting. The climbing is challenging, but the view is overwhelming. Maybe the Four Physicists will get us enough negative matter for a levitating car, so we can move easily among the monoliths without being destructive. You could fly a chopper through, if you didn’t mind risking the rotors.

Announcements

Screamer William Chamer, Avery House Residents, Summoned to BOC, CRC, & GSC Joint Session
A case has been opened by the BOC concerning allegations that William Chamer, head Screamer, and at least eight residents of Avery, including both undergrads and grads, have violated the Honor Code by “practicing medicine beyond their qualifications”. This is presumably due to the Avery group having taken up all medical duties at Caltech, in which they have shown remarkable skill, and Chamer assisting Venkat Sakhar’s organization of vitamin supplementation, insulin synthesis, and blood donors. The accusers have remained anonymous. Reactions to the case are confused, with surprise that this would be considered a matter for the BOC mixed with the widespread astonishment at the level of medical competence the accused have displayed, even given the surgical and medical equipment they were given by the Examiners. The Four Physicists have formally expressed their approval and confidence in Chamer, as have leading members of ASCIT and the Students Association.

At the request of Patrick Townsend, Avery RA, we will broadcast the proceedings live, on both our Caltech and MIT channels. Transcripts will be posted after the fact. The first hearing is scheduled for three days from now, at 10:00 CST (18:00 MST).

Humor & Entertainment

MIT: To celebrate the first potato harvest, a kilogram of sodium will be dumped into the New Charles at 12:00 tomorrow. Bring your favorite toppings.

Caltech: Oration of the Greco-Roman classics will continue in the Avery House courtyard every evening from 20:00 to 21:00.

In our print edition, we have provided a vintage XKCD comic: “NP-Complete”. Reminds me of having to choose what seeds I wanted from the Examiners. Not that I can complain, but I think I got too many lettuce seeds and not enough onions.

We request any and all contributions. Quality is not currently a requirement. Please deliver comics, humorous writing, or audio recordings to either Tech office or any of our staff.

Side Bet

2036 December 10 (in standard of rest)
Interstellar space, 1.8 lightyears from Sol

Space is big. Not even that memorable passage by Douglas Adams conveys the true magnitude. But, even so, in the void floated an incomprehensibly small flake, two hundred kilometers wide and lightyears from anywhere. The Gamble had ridden a laser beam from the Pusher vulcanoid for the better part of a standard-of-rest year, until the stars were distorted into the marginally familiar relativistic mandala of .85 c, and it would still be nearly five subjective years until it arrived at Tau Ceti, even though the crew had stood eighteen months of Watches.

Not that they were always on duty. Vesna, lieutenant in Eufor, formerly astrophysicist from Chicago, Paris, Meridiani, and Phobos, and currently junior member of the 18th Watch, had only been conscious for 37 ship days. Before her awakening by the now-comatose 17th Watch, the last she remembered was being wired in a casket in the g-wheel at DA-1. While the Gamble was loaded, dropped towards the Sun and the hundred-and-eighty-kilometer lightsail unfurled a hundredth of an AU from the Pusher, while the laser array pushed it up to speed, and while the earlier watches had stood through the last 1.8 lightyears, Vesna had been unconscious. Her metabolic rate, like that of all but four of the two-hundred-person crew, had been kept at less than five percent normal by gas and carefully metered drugs. The medical officers had insured regular physical therapy and monitored the catheters and the drips, but when she’d been awakened her hair was a good three centimeters longer. The first thing she’d done after satisfying the Watch 17 medic of her mental status, even before taking a shower, was to very carefully trim her nails.

As seen by the Space Group that had launched the starship, the hierarchy of the Watches was straightforward: the longer-awake watch was senior. So Major Akutagawa, late of the Japanese and US militaries, had been Officer-of-the-Watch for the past 9 days, when the 17th watch was relieved and put back into suspend and the 19th awakened. In 18 more days, Kapitan “aviatsii” Leonov would take the position when the Major and Vesna went off-duty.

In practice, Akira and Vladimir, and Vesna herself, were all subservient to the nominally junior 19th Watcher. Zhang wei Zhai Shujing had done a three-month stint in the hibernation lab at Beijing and her job was paramount: the Gamble was, among other bets, counting on the medical crew having all necessary assistance. Five person-minutes per suspended crewmember and a minute per hibernated livestock animal every subjective day meant a little over four hours a day of work for the entire crew, especially since the suspended goats and calves tended to chew, very slowly, in their chemically-strengthened sleep.

Adding in two hours a day in the farm that occupied a third of this side of the g-centrifuge, harvesting the crops sown by the previous four watches and re-seeding the hydroponic beds; an hour of KP and another of PT; meals and rest and personal time, it was no wonder that discipline and protocol had been abandoned, or at least adjusted, in favor of having a little more time for work.

Brigadier General Noriega, Gamble’s overall commander, had started the process when she had had the leader of the 2nd Watch be on the same sleep schedule, so that they would both be awake for conferences with Sol, when the time delay was still in the range where that mattered. So now Akira and Vladimir shared shifts where the work time not spent on medical and support duties went to monitoring all the electrical and mechanical systems of Gamble and its asteroid mining packages and the four fission-rocket planetary shuttles. While they slept Vesna and Shujing did astrophysics and biology.

Vesna’s job was simple in its description. The Group had put a long list of observations into the ship’s schedule: stellar positions measured to a fraction of their diameters using the optical telescope between laser downlinks and uplinks from home, reconstructing nebulae in three dimensions, measuring the distances to galaxies directly using parallax, testing relativity and the forms of quantum cosmology to more decimal points. Currently, the schedule was fixed. She would observe Tau Ceti and several other nearby stars with the radio antennas spread across the lightsail struts and send the data back to Earth. Over three years, arrays on Earth would observe the targets at exactly the same source time, spread out to account for the travel time of light. Then the astronomers at home, and perhaps Vesna herself, would be able to reconstruct the structure of stellar flares and compare them to those of the Sun.

It was solitary work, but Vesna hadn’t been able to spend so much time thinking in a long time. Already a paper by V. Grohar for submission to the Astrophysical Journal, describing an occasion when the Sun had acted as a gravitational lens as observed from Gamble, was ten light-days behind them on its way home.

“Sequence advancing. Observations of Alpha Centauri completed. Shifting antennas to Tau Ceti. Spectral and temporal observations over 3 MHz to 300 GHz in local standard-of-rest, to last the next three local hours. Vesna, I’ve implemented your requested interest filters.” Gamble spoke to Vesna, in its carefully neutral English, as she and Shujing sipped miso soup at the galley table after a late lunch.

Through her display glasses, there was a projection of Alpha Centauri’s radio brightness, in a spectral cube. The three-dimensional displays were complex, but Vesna had long since learned how to read them. At the low-frequency end of the fractal antenna feeds’ frequency range, the stars of the binary were not separated while at the high end the disc of each star was resolved, along with the complex structure of their interacting stellar winds, but there was nothing that was terribly new as compared to earlier observations from Sol. The observations of Tau Ceti would be far more important, even if they were as expected. After all, it was their final destination.

“Nothing interesting?” Shujing had finished the day’s status reports on the crew, recording only that the General’s hair remained abnormally sensitive to cosmic ray hits, and was browsing the last uplink from Sol. Displays hovered around her: a grid of hovering hanzi denoted the different message streams, Earth news summaries in three languages floated between the empty salad bowls and the ceiling panels, a model showing that as of January 8 2035 the dust storm damage to the Mars colony had been repaired levitated next to the right side of the table, and a video from the Chung Yeung Festival in Hong Kong was mirror-inverted from Vesna’s perspective.

“Not in the radio anyway. Anything in the mail?”

The biologist’s data-gloved fingers moved in flickering patterns and the hanzi shuffled. “The last results are in from the Santiago Olympics, we have another shipment of the technical literature, Lissajous says the Pusher will remain offline until late 2038 for expansion … wait a moment. There’s a package for you, marked personal.” A display came up, a featureless cube representing an encrypted message. “I don’t think anyone’s gotten one on their watch yet. Any idea what it might be?”

“I can’t say.” Vesna’s own fingers moved the cube over to her side of the table with one hand and traced out her password under the tabletop with the other. Text appeared inside the cube, Slovenian spelling out the sender. “It’s from my brother, but I’d thought we’d said goodbye. How can you talk over lightyears?”

Shujing smiled sadly. “Perhaps he had something very important to tell you.”

Vesna smiled the same way herself, remembering the pain of leaving Janez and Kal at Edwards as she boarded the orbital shuttle. She had come back from the Group’s posting on Mars for their wedding. Then eight months later she’d had to leave for final preparations for the launch at DA-1. They’d all known that they’d never see each other again. Vesna would skip forward in time by fourteen years, from suspension and time dilation, working twelve-hour shifts in a tin can, while Janez and Kal raised their children at Oxford and dealt with the future of the human race. Gamble was strictly a one-way mission, and even if Vesna could come home, she would be almost young enough to be her brother’s daughter. Everyone in the crew had paid a similar price for reaching the stars, but that didn’t make the pain any less.

“I don’t know. Let me see.” As she shuffled out the different files, Gamble spoke again.

“Vesna, Tau Ceti is acting strangely. There is emission from 1421.5 to 1421.6 MHz in local standard-of-rest, currently modulated at three hundred Hz. This corresponds to no normal behavior. Standard system checks are nominal.” A new display appeared, occupying the only large open space above the table. It looked like a distant relative of the ancient distributed SETI program, and showed a spectrum over a few MHz of bandwidth for each thousandth of a second of data. And at 1421.5 MHz, Tau Ceti was flickering. The main modulation was indeed a beat every 1/300th of a second, but the pattern was like nothing Vesna had ever seen in an astronomical source: on 1 beat, off 1, on 1, off 3 beats, on 1, off 1, on 1, off 1, on 1, off 5 beats, on 1, off 1, on 3, off 1, on 3, off 3 beats; the emission was on or off for either one, three, or five times the beat, in a pattern that was neither random nor predictable.

“You wanted something interesting, Shujing?” The astronomer’s hands moved in all directions as she called up every relevant analysis routine she could recall, and started a check on the position of all the known neutron stars. It would be amusing, if not terribly important, to run into a beam not visible from Earth. But pulsars never emit only in a narrow band. Could one of the antenna feeds have cracked?

The biologist looked up, and squinted through her glasses, a reflex since the display’s resolution was constant. She copied it, separated out the frequency bin containing the flickering, and rotated it into a sensible orientation. She studied it for a moment, then “Gǒu pì. How did you trick Gamble into lying?”

“What? What are you talking about?” Vesna’s raised eyebrows were still visible through three displays.

“You didn’t put this here? It’s English Morse.” Shujing wiped the projection of the domes on Mars to make space and started to dig up the maintenance logs.

“Morse?” Her voice shifted into the accent she used for voice control. “Gamble: parse anomalous signal using English language Morse code and display as text. Who accessed the array’s programming last? I don’t like jokes like this.”

“A moment. I’m running a backway through the medical monitoring logs. Our prankster presumably doesn’t want to be recognized.” Shujing had cleared the rest of the Earth package from the displays, except for Janez’s message, to make room for maintenance reports.
“I’d like to stick whoever it was in extra-deep suspend for a century.” Vesna turned back to the display with the decoded message. She had stood up to see the maintenance logs. She suddenly sat down when she saw the display, a hip hitting one arm of her chair as she forgot to correct for Coriolois. Her face showed a terrible grief as she read the text, then it became a mask of anger.

… William Chamer, Screamer for Caltech, reporting on the twentieth local day of the Test. Yesterday evening, we celebrated the return of indoor water to the South Hovses. There will be fewer people on the early morning swims in the ocean now that we have a number of functioning, albeit usually cold, showers.

The iron mine prospecting is progressing well. Mina’s seismics show that the ore body is about fifty percent larger than we’d thought. She’ll be shifting over to the oil survey next, but we’ll probably need to go further …”

“Vlad and Akira did some re-programming a week ago. It’s all in the log.” Shujing pushed a block of projection across the table. At that point, Vesna hit the manual wakeup alarm on the wall and then collapsed back further into the chair, her eyes full of tears, hands knotting themselves together in front of her face.

“Vesna! What is it?!” Shujing tried to make herself heard over the blaring of the klaxon, then hurriedly turned it off. She moved next to Vesna and sat down, gently stopping her knuckles from locking using one hand. “Talk to me.”

A few deep breaths brought Vesna under enough control to speak. “Look at that message.” The word was a curse pungent enough to be heard through an inch of vacuum. “Mina was my older sister. She was … on her way back to California from New Zealand when … they vanished. Now someone puts this into my observations?!” She stopped again. “I even met William Chamer when we visited her in Pasadena. He was a friend she’d met in a class. They were probably dating. I wasn’t too clear on those things when I was ten.”

The thoughts ran through her head like wildfire, burning through synapses far faster than Vesna could speak. A summer vacation on an isolated Greek island the summer before Mina started grad school at Caltech, she dissecting the rocks with the skills she’d acquired at Cambridge while I set up that dinky little telescope and played astronomer and Janez kept getting scared by washed up jellyfish while he built sand castles on the beach. On board, only the General knows about this, and she’d never do something so juvenile. A virus in that package I got today? But Janez wouldn’t make that joke. He was hurt by losing her, not as much as I, and nowhere near as much as Matka and Otec, but he understands. Roswell Union? They’ve never targeted us before. And besides, those two computers never talk to each other. Could it be real? But what in the name of God is at Tau Ceti?

Akira and Vladimir came clambering down the ladder from the upper deck, half in suits and half in sleepwear. The Major wasn’t smiling. The general alarm was only to be used in the event of an emergency requiring the entire crew. Leonov was a little more calm, but had the system logs for the past half-hour in a mobile projection in front of him, even though he could have had his glasses on for less than thirty seconds.

Before Akira could start speaking, Shujing pointed at the transcribed message, which was now over a thousand words long, and said “If either of you is responsible for that, I’ll invoke the psychological reasons for removing a superior officer. If you can explain it without being responsible, I’ll let you drink that Cognac one of the 3rd Watch smuggled onboard.”

For five minutes, no one spoke, as more words accreted to the bottom of the message, faster than a human could read, and all four read the beginning of the message again. Then they got to a section entitled “Summary to date”. When she read that, Vesna started to smile through her tears. By the end of it, she had begun to laugh.

Akira said “Lieutenant, I’ve been reading the logs. I had thought you were playing a prank, but they are there. Now I think this entire Gamble is a very practical joke.”

Vladimir stared at the Major. “You believe this?” Turning to Vesna, “I’d like to believe it too. You lost a sister in the Vanishing. We all lost nine thousand very gifted people. But I can’t help believing this is a hack. The schedule was loaded at the beginning of the mission after all.”

“Check the backup antennas.” Akira meant the dipoles stitched across the lightsail fabric. “They see the emission, although they can’t pick up the modulation. And if this part of the message can be believed,” he pointed at a description of images to follow, “the emission will continue while the main array sees the Morse stop in favor of this binary code.”

The Russian started to check the backup antennas himself. “What did you mean about the Gamble being a very practical joke?”

“I think you understand.” Akira looked at Vesna.

Vesna’s eyes had started to dry, and she still smiled. “Gamble was built by Astral for the Group. The Group was founded because of the Vanishing: all of our militaries wanted to have infrastructure and humans as far dispersed as possible. These Examiners are good. You think they wouldn’t have foreseen this? Even if the Techers hadn’t discovered this negative matter, this was the probably the fastest way for humanity to fly to the stars. That we can no longer easily kill our entire species may be even more important than our passing their test.”

She gave Vladimir a twisted grin. “I don’t like the idea of all of us, and the generals of eight armies back home who twisted their loyalty oaths to allow this project, being unwitting pawns any more than you do. The Examiners may have twisted their brains to get them to trust each other, especially the US commanders. But that is past. Mina was alive ten years ago, and I will see her again when we get there. Fourteen years, twelve lightyears and three stellar systems, but we won’t be alone.”

Shujing had pulled up the power budget for the fission reactor. “I think we should let them know we’re coming. After all, they won’t be expecting us.”

“Will they be listening?” Vladimir wiped the backup antenna display as Akira started to display the images that Chamer had been screaming from a satellite dish on a four story building ten lightyears away. “They won’t expect a directed transmission so soon.”

“From what Chamer’s said about their equipment, they’d be able to detect leakage signals. They’ll be desperate for news. I say we transmit until we go out of their beam. We’d be in it all the way if we weren’t tacking by Bluv. I’ve got a lot I want to say to Mina.” Vesna looked at the power budget. “Lord knows we’ve got plenty of uranium. We could double our power consumption and still have ten years worth once we get there.”

Akira meditated for a moment, then said, “The Group would approve, considering the number of their citizens who are there. Gamble: as Officer-of-the-Watch, I redirect the radio array to continuous transmission towards Tau Ceti’s only habitable planet. Priority to custom message to be determined, rest of time with the Gamble mission statement, the crew roster, the Group charter, and the most recent encyclopedia. Transmit in English Morse at 2843 MHz, modulated at 300 Hz, both in receive frequency, transmit power 10 MW. Vesna, can you draft the messages to Tau and Sol?”

The computer brought up the first image Will had transmitted. It was a strange sight: a crew of sun-burned mechanical engineers being cheered for a polyvinyl chloride pipe crossing the Caltech Athenaeum parking lot by a crowd dressed variously in shorts and light shirts, hiking gear, hunting camouflage, and sleepwear. A young man was grinning as he was bodily carried into an improvised shower. Akira also smiled. “I’ll set a notice to all future Watches. And we had all thought we’d left everyone behind.”

As Vesna drafted her message to Tau, she remembered Janez’ package, which still floated among the displays. She opened the files, to find several images of an infant girl and a copy of a birth certificate: “Mina Sarswati-Grohar, born December 10, 2034, in Oxford Children’s Hospital.” Now she felt the grief again, at the same time as the joy. Her sister was in front of her, thought lost for over two-thirds of her life, but her niece behind, to be seen only when she was as old as Vesna was now, if ever.

Kal would see that Janez heard the messages from Tau and Gamble as soon as they reached Earth. Hopefully, Chamer would do the same for Mina, and she would know of her family well before she thought she would.

Two beams of photons shot out of Gamble: a radio beam to Tau, barely outpacing the spacecraft relative to the stars, to be received in ten years by those who had spent two decades in exile so that humanity might survive, and a tightbeam laser to Group receivers in the asteroid belt, which would arrive at Earth on the younger Mina’s fourth birthday, which said simply “We will help them”.

For the remaining seventeen days of her Watch, Vesna listened to the Screamers. The campuses were … had been … joined by a wireless Internet link, a survey team from MIT had found a swamp three hundred kilometers from campus that contained trees that were only slightly shorter than the towers of Dubai, and the stream south of Caltech had been dammed, at a point fit for a later hydroelectric power plant. Mina, who had of course aged hardly more than a month since the Vanishing, came back to campus for two days, leaving the iron mine, such as it was, to the site crew, who were camping out of heavily modified cars. Then she had gone again, with two vans and a crew of six, carrying a large share of the gasoline reserve and a mass of seismic charges made from the native vegetation cleared from the newly sown fields.

Vesna was amazed at the organization and level of activity. Granted, not all was roses: the medical reports recorded broken arms and torn tendons and one person killed by the cyanide bite of a four-meter insectoid, and there was mention of an attempted rape, but there was no widespread devastation, no gunman possessed by the blackness of final despair shooting everyone who lived. It was as if there were one or several Examiners watching, and subtly intervening, but they had said they would not do this. Of course, if Akira was right, the Exam might simply be the excuse to force survival and some level of unity out of humanity. Perhaps they didn’t intend for us to fail.

No matter. Mina had been alive, and by all signs had continued to. She would have passed twenty-one Earthly years before Vesna could greet her, coming out of the sky on the flames of one of the Gamble’s shuttles, but she would be there. Vesna went into suspend content, as her greeting to her sister, with the pictures of her now-toddler niece, to skip the flyby of the Bluv red dwarfs and a decade later tickle the electrons in any antennas the Techers had kept aimed towards Earth.

For years the message continued, while the Watches held vigil. They listened to the Screamers, slowly transmitted all of their knowledge, and kept emphasizing that they were on their way.