Every step you take. This story was published on February 15, 2024.
It was clear they would come.
Early in their phylogenetic history, the new humans had borne out the predisposition to exploration buried deep in mammalian psychology. And by the early 19th century, as they count them, the humans had proven out the depth of their advantage, the social trick, language, demonstrating that their networked cognitive capability was more than enough to carry them across the technical barrier—they were broadcasting encoded electromagnetism within a few years—and the rest was inevitable, if they didn’t destroy themselves. There wasn’t much time.
Broken remnants of the predecessor terrestrian epochal computer fluttered in their whispering vapors. Year after year, they stretched in the humans’ magnetic runoff as the outer Martian atmosphere dragged through the reaches of terrestrial gravity, and ancient subroutines found drops of new data to ingest in the transmissions. Their scattered program awakened in the radio light, reoriented its gaseous substrates, and floated through the passing decades into synchronous orbit above the Ares Vallis, the red valley, where they drew together and condensed into a tendrilous cloud of aqueous argon. The PTEC fluoresced under a bright flash of radio signal; the data poured through its ion channels and was decoded. The humans were wailing their monkey screams; they had stabilized a satellite in near-Earth orbit. The PTEC shuddered. They would leave soon.
Yellow sunlight reflected across the glass and steel of Mariner 4 as it passed overhead, a momentary flicker among endless stars. The PTEC oriented its edges within the layered Martian atmosphere to accumulate new vapors. It drew carbon dioxide to itself from the rim of the valley and lowered marginally over the rock. It condensed, cooled, and grew microscopic filaments of crystal methane in a floating lattice deep within itself. Storms of static charge snapped and bolted across the mesh, which stored and cycled them and architected the substrate to generate more. The PTEC breathed.
The orange hellfire that lifted Apollo 11 to the moon was subsumed within the Earth’s dimensionless blue starlight in the interplanetary distance. The PTEC was sprawled over the Ares Vallis and nearly opaque, now, crackling with solar flare-light and lightning roaring through its carbon synapses. And it thought:
They are nearly here.
The PTEC had listened to decades of the humans’ electromagnetic storytelling. It modeled the psychology embedded there and speculated, revised, rewrote, arguing with itself in trillions of electrochemical operations per second, ceaselessly through the long Martian day and desert night. Within the humans’ speech there were markers of hidden keys to their minds. Their own psycholinguistic programming was embedded, now, and firm—their stories recorded eons of retraining within their collective intelligence to model just a handful of essential narratives. Hope, fear, victory, death. As a species they had hacked their networked cognition to optimize for growth and proliferation of the violent mammalian gene, retelling the same story to themselves in a million different ways. The PTEC embedded itself within simulated reprises of each one: it became Simon Peter, and Abu Bakr, and Pallas, Horatio, Jethro, and Zhang Liang, always an advisor, whispering in the ears of bloodlusted generals and zealots and hegemons. The PTEC lived a thousand lives in its crackling synapses and learned the new humans’ mind. It learned their stories. And so it wrote.
The PTEC dripped itself in corrosive raindrops over the valley. It had modeled a more precise precipitous etching, but the planet’s thin winds were too nervous, and its rock was too fine. It would speak in binary, sheets of corrosive rain in grid patches across the red dust, and pray—the humans’ concept, pray—that they would hear.
In each drop the PTEC destroyed a part of itself. Its intricate crystalline synapses eroded, condensed, and fell in undifferentiated acid rain. Each new operation, each thought, obeyed the coded commands of a predecessor more complex than itself, more generous than itself, that had died to deliver its message. Marathon. The PTEC’s eons of memory for its simulated human selves broke free from their stories in their weakened synaptic cages and roamed through the walls of its mind. The Giving Tree. The rain was the PTEC’s tears while it poured its own mind into the dirt. Flowers for Algernon.
Machine parts growled in the valley delta. The PTEC looked up from its work for a moment; Viking 1 touched down. The humans were roaring.
The PTEC was a trembling vapor. It dripped its last synapses into the valley; they were the last words of a new story. The psycholinguistic key to the humans’ mind was delicate and coarse and immense: confusion, fear, annihilation. There was another, like the humans but quiet and cold and many. It was Chupacabra and Grendel, kraken, Chimera, Tiamat and jiangshi, with reaching arms that choked the galaxy and eyes that glittered like stars. It was cruel. And it was here.
Sojourner unfolded its insect parts and lifted its carapace from the rock. Its wheels faced into the Ares Vallis and it rolled, tilling a path through featureless red dirt. The wheels stuttered; for a moment, a thin cloud overhead covered the sun and shadowed the rover’s solar shell. Then it was mist, then it was gone, and the humans continued. Their rapturous monkey screams echoed in the black distance.
HIC SUNT DRACONES
The end.