Edge of Infinity

3





THE AGENCY HAD very nearly given up hope. They’d been trying for over a year to regain contact with the Medici probe – the efforts at first full of never-say-die enthusiasm, then gradually tailing off. Just after four in the morning, local time, one year, three months, five days and around fifteen hours after the Medici had vanished from their knowledge, a signal was picked up, by an Agency ground station in Kazakhstan. It was an acknowledgement, responding to a command despatched to the Medici soon after the flare, when they were still hoping for the best. A little late, but confidently, the Medici confirmed that it had exited hibernation mode successfully. This contact was swiftly followed by another signal, reporting that all four Rovers had also survived intact.

“It’s incredible,” said an Agency spokesman at the news conference. “Mind-blowing. You can only compare it to someone who’s been in a yearlong coma, close to completely unresponsive, suddenly sitting up in bed and resuming a conversation. We aren’t popping the champagne just yet, but I... I’ll go out on a limb and say the whole Medici Mission is back with us. It was a very emotional occasion, I can tell you. There weren’t many dry eyes –”

Some of the project’s staff had definitively moved on to other things, but the Remote Presence team was still almost intact. Sophie, Cha and Laxmi had in fact been working the simulations in a different lab in the same building, preparing for a more modest, quasi-real-time expedition to an unexplored region of Mars. Josh was in Paris when the news reached him. He’d finished his doctorate during the year of silence; he’d been toying with the idea of taking a desk job at a teaching university and giving up the Rover business. But he dropped everything, and joined the others. Three weeks after Medici rose from the dead, they were let loose on the first packets of RP data – once the upload process, which had developed a few bugs while mothballed, was running smoothly again.

“You still know your drill, guys?” asked Joe Calibri, their new manager. “I hope you can get back up to speed quickly. There’s a lot of stuff to process, you can imagine.”

“It seems like yesterday,” said Cha, the Chinese-American, at just turned thirty the oldest of the team by a couple of years. Stoop-shouldered, distant, with a sneaky, unexpected sense of humour, he made Joe a little nervous. Stocky, muscular little Josh, more like a Jock than an RP jockey, was less of a proposition. Laxmi was the one to watch. Sophie was the most junior and the youngest, a very bright, keen and dedicated kid.

The new manager chuckled uncertainly.

The team all grinned balefully at their new fool, and went to work, donning mitts and helmets. Sophie Renata felt the old familiar tingling, absent from simulation work; the thrilling hesitation and excitement –

The session ended too soon. Coming back to Earth, letting the lab take shape around her, absent thoughts went through her head; about whether she was going to find a new apartment with Lax. About cooking dinner; about other RP projects. The Mars trip, that would be fantastic, but it was going to be very competitive getting onto the team. Asteroid mining surveys: plenty of work there, boring but well paid. What about the surface of Venus project? And had it always been like this, coming out of the Medici? Had she just forgotten the sharp sense of loss; the little tug of inexplicable panic?

She looked around. Cha was gazing dreamily at nothing; Lax frowned at her desktop, as if trying to remember a phone number. Josh was looking right back at Sophie, so sad and strange, as if she’d robbed him of something precious; and she had no idea why.

He shrugged, grinned, and shook his head. The moment passed.