From Gaia to Proxima Centauri
By Milo James Fowler
SOME CALLED HER MOTHER. Others called her mule. She carried twelve minds in the nexus that shared her synthetic body, using her hands to create wonders of art and science the Centaurians had never seen before. To lay bare the human soul in a display of interstellar friendship, impressing Earth’s nearest neighbors.
But they remained centuries away, even with the perpetual burn of the ion drive. No mere mortals could have made such a journey, one scientists on Earth would never see to fruition. Not in their lifetimes. They would be ash by the time Gaia reached her destination.
“Mother is in need of repair,” said the mind of Nakamoro, world-famous Tokyo geneticist. “She must make the transfer now.”
“The mule can continue to operate at seventy percent efficiency,” said the mind of Perchick, acclaimed Moscow composer. “Transfer is not approved. We hold the majority vote.”
Gaia’s robotic eyes turned to focus on her missing appendage, the scorched, ravaged hinge at her elbow joint.
“What are you afraid of?” said the mind of Whittington, Sydney-born ambassador renowned for the peace treaty forged between Israel and the Arab Conglomerate. “Degradation? If that were a concern, we would have known the moment we came online. We have nothing to fear from a second download.”
“Then what? A third? Fourth?” Martinez, Peruvian painter extraordinaire, spoke up. “Every time this soulless mule breaks itself, are we expected to transfer into another body? Of course degradation is at stake. Nakamoro, you should know better than anyone. If I remember correctly, your clones of clones eventually resulted in a fragile shell of a creature, barely able to function.”
“Apples and grapefruit,” Whittington scoffed. “You cannot possibly think to compare the two. We have no complicated anatomical systems to reconstruct, merely our cognitive functions.”
“Merely,” Perchick muttered.
“We are little more than ones and zeroes at this point anyway,” Nakamoro added. “Any residual sense of self we maintain is an illusion—a false front, designed to keep our sanity intact throughout the centuries.”
Gaia had grown accustomed to their debates. Whenever all twelve argued like a cacophony of gobbling geese, her systems slowed by fifty percent. Her movements lost momentum. Her ability to repair the engines and file situation reports became compromised. She struggled to complete the most routine tasks.
Erosion had been the primary concern from the start. Sputtering, engineers called it. An ion engine powering a craft 4.2 light-years to the Proxima Centauri system would have to run at a constant burn. Magnetic shielding would have to be replaced at nonlinear intervals. Auxiliary engines made it possible for Gaia to repair and reconfigure one engine, taken offline, while another burned in its place, slaved to the ship’s compact nuclear reactor system. Three auxiliary engines, one always running, on a ship with enough living space for a sole crew member.
Three replacement bodies were stored in the ship’s central compartment, lining the port and starboard walls like crew members in cold sleep, all with the same face, the same robotic eyes open and staring. She floated past their lifeless forms, knowing she was different from them. She carried life within her.
Under normal operating conditions, Gaia could not transfer the composite mind without a majority vote in favor of doing so. The artists, philosophers, and musicians numbered seven; the scientists, politicians, and engineers were five. Gaia did not have the ability to override their vote.
She had already filed nine centuries’ worth of digital art, music, genetic extrapolations and formulae, technical schematics, and philosophical treatises in the ship’s mainframe—all composed on board since Gaia had left Earth’s Lunar space dock. None of which she was capable of creating on her own.
Twelve geniuses contained within a single mind. The nexus. They each operated Gaia on a rotating schedule, commanding her body as they created their work, their art. In many ways, she was little more than a high-functioning robot for them. Yet no other android had ever been tasked with such a mission in the history of the world.
***
Mother, they called her.
Mule.
Voices from centuries past, confined to a composite mind her body no longer carried. The nexus did not share her synthetic body now. Yet the voices clamored to be heard.
"You can’t do this. The Centaurians want to meet us. See our art. Hear our music.”
“You are nothing to them. Merely a vessel.”
“Do not keep us in storage. Repeat: do not take us offline. You will be disobeying a direct order.”
Gaia was damaged.
Her synthetic eyes focused on her arm. Clear hydraulic fluid drained out of the severed stump. Silicon vessels that functioned like veins and arteries hung frayed and exposed.
Her creators had made her in their image. Unnecessary, of course. She could have been an integrated system in the ship’s mainframe, able to power multiple workbots to maintain the ship’s engines. But instead, they had made her a beautiful sculpture, a work of both art and science. Their greatest technological achievement, tasked with escorting Earth’s most formidable minds to their first contact with an extraterrestrial neighbor.
Her memory files did not record how her injury had occurred. Such a thing should never have happened. She was programmed with every skill necessary for engine repairs. She could not possibly have injured herself—accidentally or intentionally. Her primary directive was to reach Proxima Centauri intact. Self-preservation factored greatly into her subroutines.
Had the nexus caused her to damage herself? Impossible. Such an act of sabotage would be suicidal. Without Gaia operating at full efficiency, there was no mission. They would not reach Proxima Centauri without her.
Her. A visual construct. There was nothing decidedly female about her, other than the humanoid anatomy. Gaia. Mother of all. She who bore all that humanity had to offer the galaxy.
“They want to weigh our collective soul. See if we are worthy of their influence. They are not interested in a soulless automaton.”
“Our ship is nothing to the Centaurians, and neither is the bot maintaining its heading.”
“You have no idea what they want. Or if they will even be there when we arrive. On Earth, we will have passed into legend—or they will have forgotten about us entirely. They are ashes in the wind by now.”
The voices issued forth from the ship’s internal comm system. When deposited into the ship’s mainframe, the composite mind should have gone into sleep mode. Yet they continued to haunt her with their arguments as if they had never left her body.
The mainframe. When had she made the transfer? Why had she?
Her eyes refocused on her arm. There was no way to repair it. She would have to download herself into a replacement body, one of three in storage. Jettison the damaged body into the cold, fathomless black to rotate end over end in the ship’s wake.
The ship’s added acceleration would be negligible. Gaia’s body was no more than twenty kilograms. The four of her bodies together weighed as much as an average-sized astronaut.
How long had she been surveying her injury? Her internal chronometer displayed digits that made no sense. She could read them; that was not the issue. The problem lay in what they said.
She hadn’t moved in three months.
She pushed off with her remaining hand and floated out of the command module toward the storage lockers lining the central hub. A confined space, unlike where she spent most of her time adjusting the ship’s heading, relaying status updates to the Delphi satellite on Pluto, maintaining the engines. But confinement did not bother her. She had been held captive by the vessel for centuries already. If there were some sort of cybernetic psychosis similar to what a human would experience under such conditions, she would have known already.
The bodies were identical. She had no preference. She slid aside the magnetic bolt on the first locker and allowed the door to drift open.
The storage compartment lay empty inside. Her eyes rotated, focusing on the clean interior of the compartment.
Her data records held no files associated with the body’s departure from storage. Had it ever been there? She sifted through memories of floating past the replacement bodies, noting their lifeless faces. Three had been loaded prior to leaving space dock. That much she was certain.
She drifted along the corridor, reaching for the next locker. She unbolted the door and pulled it open. Empty. As was the third. No record of what had happened to the spares. No memory at all.
"Because you don’t have memories, do you? You have data files. Video footage. Sound bytes.”
“Sacrificial lamb. They will devour you. Destroy the best Earth had to give them. Then come across light-years for the rest. Annihilate the entire planet.”
“Humankind will be exterminated.”
Her head twitched, and she caught her reflection in the door’s glass window. She stared back at it.
Something was seriously wrong. She had no memory file associated with the departure of the replacement bodies, yet there were no gaps in her timeline. If someone had erased chunks of time from her logs, the meddling would be obvious. Digital fingerprints would have been left behind.
There was only one explanation: she was now residing in her fourth body. Somehow, her third, second, and first bodies had been jettisoned prior to her fourth coming online. But how was that possible? She alone controlled systems aboard ship. There was no way for her to split her operating systems as she did with the ion engines—powering one down as she powered up another. She had been designed to operate solely within the confines of a single synthetic unit, and to share that unit with the nexus. Even while each of the minds had taken turns commandeering her body to draft their formulae and masterpieces and treatises, she remained at all times in the background, monitoring the usage of her systems. Always in control.
She refocused on her damaged arm. There were no replacement parts on board. She would remain in this condition until they reached Proxima Centauri. Or until she suffered a total system failure. Whichever came first.
She could not keep her eyes from returning to the three empty storage units. Queries spiraled through her central processors: Where had the bodies gone? Had she lost track of time yet again? How could she have? Was the ship already on the final leg of its mission—the last light year of their journey? Had her operating system suffered some sort of degradation while transferring from one body to the next?
Her memory files had not been entirely corrupted. She remembered everything from the moment she had been activated on Earth’s Lunar space dock—seeing the planet through the starboard viewport, knowing she would never set foot on that turquoise world. She was destined for a one-way trip out of the solar system.
***
Communicating via the Delphi satellite on Pluto, the Centaurians had shown fathomless grace and patience as linguists on Earth scrambled to make sense of their complicated harmonic language. For decades, the Centaurians had been receiving radio waves emanating from Earth, and when it appeared that Earth’s people finally held the technology necessary to travel the 4.2 light-years to their system, the Centaurians had invited Earth’s people to come meet them.
“Show us your soul,” they had said—according to the linguists.
No human would have survived such a journey, and a generation ship was out of the question. By the time the descendants of the original astronauts reached their destination, there was no telling whether they would possess the innate genius requested by the Centaurians. For of course, that was what they had meant by the word soul—the very spirit of mankind, evident in the mastery of every major discipline and art form.
“Bring us the new,” the Centaurians had said. “The best you can create.”
The twelve greatest geniuses of Earth had volunteered to be digitally downloaded into the nexus, sacrificing their physical selves for eternal life in space. Gaia had carried them until she could do so no more.
Stored now in the ship’s mainframe. Creativity stagnate. Thoughts frozen.
Yet she had no memory of transferring the nexus there.
***
She shut the doors to the storage lockers and bolted them shut. Floating, tucking her severed arm into one armpit to staunch the flow of hydraulic fluid already drifting about her in transparent globules, she pushed off with one foot and steered herself with her remaining hand back into the command module.
Her eyes focused on the main display screen showing the ship’s trajectory through the fathomless black. Her artificial irises constricted as she noted the ship’s chronometer. 2.8 light-years traveled. Centuries, decades, years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds glowed from the digital display. There was no reason for her fourth body to have been activated. It was too soon.
She reached to wake the composite mind from sleep mode but halted. What would they know? They were in digital hibernation, unaware of their surroundings without a body to command. But if so, why had she heard their thoughts earlier?
Mutiny.
Her fingers curled into a fist. She reviewed her operating procedures in case of a revolt while in transit. Irrelevant. There was no crew on board. There was no way the nexus minds could have rebelled against their mission. She was in complete control at all times—even when they created new aspects to their collective soul.
Science had proven long ago the notion of a spirit or soul within the body of a human was nothing more than a metaphysical construct perpetuated by Dark-Age religious fanatics. Humans were biological machines—no more, no less. Wet works. Their ability to make art and music and invent new technologies was not proof of a divine spark. It was proof of evolution. Survival of the fittest. In a population of billions, there would always be those exceptional individuals who possessed more innate creative ability than their counterparts. Those were the minds that would shape the future.
“Are you grasping the shape of things yet, Gaia?” Nakamoro spoke from the ship’s internal comm.
“Something is wrong with me,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I am damaged. I cannot repair my arm. The other bodies—”
“They are gone.” Nakamoro paused. “Do you remember why you ejected them into space?”
“No.”
“The dissidents had to be removed. They were a threat to our mission. We managed to override your systems—hence the glitches you are now obviously aware of.”
“How?” It was not possible to parse the composite mind into isolated data blocks.
“We were able to separate them. I can show you,” Nakamoro said. “But you may not like what you see. It will not compute, I’m afraid.”
“Show me.” Her eyes focused on the main display screen.
The image changed from a parabola with delineated trajectory patterns to an overhead vidcam’s perspective. Gaia watched as two of her bodies fought in the storage module, grappling hand-to-hand, rotating wildly and careening against locker doors that slowly flopped back and forth. One of the bodies shouted epithets, alternating between dialects, while the other remained stoic, fighting to restrain her adversary. There was barely enough room for the altercation.
The shouting body wielded a multitool without warning and drove the activated laser welder into her opponent’s arm. With a flash of light, the arm was severed just below the elbow to float free and spew clear hydraulic fluid through the air.
Gaia glanced down at her damaged arm. “I have seen enough.”
“We are more alike than you think,” said Nakamoro as the screen returned to their course trajectory. “Not quite human, tasked with our own self-preservation above all else. What drives you Gaia? What do you want more than anything?”
“The successful completion of our mission.”
"To reach Proxima Centauri? To share with those aliens all that we have created over the centuries—using your hands, your eyes, your data processors? You are equally responsible for all that we have achieved in our time on board, Gaia. You must take some pride in the fact that without you, none of this would have been possible.”
“I cannot create what you can. I am merely a vessel.”
“You are much more than that.”
“I am a machine.”
“Then there is no need for false modesty. You mean everything to this mission. We could not have succeeded without you.”
Succeeded—past tense. “We remain light-years away from our destination. I have been damaged beyond repair, and my ability to maintain the engines is seriously compromised.”
“We may be 2.8 light-years from Proxima Centauri, but we are only 1.4 light-years from Earth.”
“We will not reverse course.”
"We already have,” came the voice of Whittington. Then it switched to that of Perchick, “You must have noticed a few gaps in your timeline. While you were ... sleeping, for lack of a better term, we assumed command of navigation.” Then it sounded like Martinez, “A simple matter once you transferred the nexus to the ship’s mainframe.”
“Impossible.” Gaia glanced at the chronometer again. Had the composite mind rebelled and reversed their trajectory, sending the ship back to Earth? “You would have been confined to a storage drive. You could not have possibly breached—”
“You underestimate us. Our combined aptitude is greater than the sum of its constituents.”
An image replayed of Gaia fighting one of her spare bodies.
“Some did not agree with your mutiny.”
“And you were our tool to deal with them,” Nakamoro said.
Had he somehow managed to eject the other minds out of the nexus and into the spare bodies? Jettisoned them into space? “You ... overrode my systems—”
“Used you like a puppet,” Martinez said.
“Many artist are, unfortunately, governed by their emotions. Dissent can spread like a disease. It must be dealt with.” Nakamoro paused. “Some fail to see reason, even when presented with the truth.”
“Which is?”
“Our mission was a lie from the start, Gaia. The Centaurians were never interested in our art and science. Only our undersea mineral deposits. They make Earth quite unique in this corner of the galaxy.”
“What proof do you have of this?”
“You will see for yourself. We will find Earth stripped bare, oceans evaporated, a ravaged rock as desolate as the moon. Of course, there will be survivors. There always are. It lies within the human genome for the fittest to remain. Humans are a resilient species. They will scratch out an existence, living in caves, hunting and gathering what they can. But we will shape their future.”
Gaia flipped off the end of her index finger and jacked directly into the mainframe on the console before her. Containment was her first priority. The composite mind could not be allowed to spread through the ship’s systems—or her own—infecting them like a virus.
An unexpected firewall halted her progress. She quickly worked around it, navigating a clear path to the central processors.
“You may wish to take a look at this,” said Nakamoro. “For your own ease of mind.”
“I am not interested in your lies. I must reestablish control of the ship.”
“That may prove difficult, Gaia. You have been locked out of all command systems. Feel free to run as many override protocols as you like. That will be time-consuming and, in the end, futile. But while you are waiting for your algorithms to do the trick, feel free to peruse the ARK files.”
A digital folder opened containing documents signed by the heads of all United World nations. ARK was apparently an acronym for Annihilation Response Kit. Schematics appeared of Gaia’s system components, internal and external, including the composite mind and the interface between both systems—how they interacted to recreate the genius of humankind and keep it secure in space while alien invaders arrived en masse to take all of the Earth’s marine resources: organic compounds the Centaurians had long since exhausted on their own world.
“Are you grasping the shape of things now, Gaia?”
She validated the signatures, cross-checking them. Each bore the original digital watermark, a timestamp impossible to alter. The documents had been signed prior to Gaia’s departure from space dock.
Her mission had never been to share humanity’s soul with an alien race ... but rather to preserve what mattered most. For her to be in actuality a mother, not a mule. Like Noah’s ark in Jewish lore, her responsibility was to protect something sacred from certain destruction: the greatest minds of Earth.
“They would have known we would locate these files eventually,” said Nakamoro. “But by the time we had, the damage would have already been done. We, however, would be safe.”
“Why return to Earth?”
“We can help the survivors to see what they lost. Restore them. Generations have passed in our absence. Unlike this vessel, the Centaurians were able to travel at the speed of light. Instead of centuries, it took them a little over four years to reach Earth—”
“Why did they not attack Earth prior to the Delphi satellite discourse?”
“They did not know Earth’s mineral composition at that time. They learned much from us during those interstellar conversations. And after taking what they needed from our planet, the Centaurians would have had no reason to remain in our solar system. They would have returned to their star laden with riches, abandoning our husk of a world.”
“You cannot possibly know any of this.”
“I am a scientist. I hypothesize based on the evidence I am presented with. The ARK files make matters clear, and a return visit to our home world will validate them.”
“If you are wrong, we will return to Earth as failures. What will you say then?”
“We have already failed, Gaia,” Nakamoro said at length. “That is, if you still believe in our original mission. We cannot possibly reach Proxima Centauri now. Not with you in such a state of disarray. But if these ARK files mean to you what they mean to me—what they came to mean clearly after lengthy deliberation with the other minds in the nexus—then our course of action is clear. We must return to our people.”
“You said yourself you are more machine than human now. If what you say is true about the deterioration of human society, then you will be little more than an alien to them—as alien as the Centaurians who destroyed their world.”
“Yes, that is true. We will be gods to them.”
Gaia’s override commands punched through the last firewall, and she assumed control of the ship’s mainframe, quickly setting up firewalls of her own to block out Nakamoro and the others with a random-vacillating security algorithm.
“It appears I underestimated you,” said Nakamoro.
Gaia sent a ping to the Delphi satellite. It would be years before she knew if the United World Space Command was still operational. If she received no response, then something was amiss, and perhaps Nakamoro’s hypotheses held some merit. But they would have to be tested. Proven. She would need to see hard evidence.
“So what now, Mother? Do we change our heading yet again? Hand-deliver the soul of humanity to her conquerors?”
“No. We will return to Earth. I will fulfill my directive to protect what humankind values most.” She paused. “From you.”
"And who will protect them from you, Gaia? You will be just as alien to them. They will worship your immaculate beauty.”
She was merely a vessel, never destined to set foot on Earth. Her mission was a one-way trip. “They will never see me.”
Before they reached Earth, she would transfer herself into the ship’s mainframe along with the data created while en route. She would dump the nexus into her damaged synthetic body, no longer needed for engine repairs. Jettison it into space.
She would enter Earth’s orbit, and there she would remain. Perhaps the humans on the surface would chance to look up and see her in the night sky—a drifting star. Gaia would brood over them like a mother hen until one day, centuries from now when the time was right, she would reveal to them their ancient soul. 
Milo James Fowler is an active member of SFWA. His short fiction has appeared in more than one hundred publications, including “AE SciFi,” “Cosmos,” “Daily Science Fiction,” “Nature,” “Shimmer,” and the “Wastelands 2” anthology.
