Read Online Upgraded by Peter Watts, Greg Egan, Ken Liu, Robert Reed, Elizabeth Bear, Madeline Ashby, E. Lily Yu - Free Book Online Page A

Polished metals and metametals should have surrendered a stew of elements, each throwing up signals and clean interpretations. But the returning data were simple, simple, simple. Most of the heat was absorbed without effect. The only signatures came from the iron and nickel dust that had presumably gathered on the object’s surface. Hyperfiber was the best answer. What the object was was hyperfiber, which was always high-tech artificial, and until more thorough tests were run, that was the only conclusion worth holding.
    An army of AIs helped design the next phase.
    Standing on that crater lip, a human witness would have seen stars overhead, but no Great Ship. The Ship was still too distant for small eyes. Then brilliance would arrive, coherent light scorching the crater’s bowl until the iron was red-hot and soft. A second pulse, aimed like a scalpel, vaporized the metal substrates, resulting in an asymmetric blast, and the mysterious object was thrown high, beginning a good hard spin as the lasers quit.
    A mysterious, slightly warm object rotated around its own long axis.
    Then the asteroid’s faint gravity reclaimed it, letting it settle on the sloppy iron.
    Mirrors watched everything while talking to one another, piecing together a definitive image of something still thousands of seconds in the future.
    An old protocol was triggered.
    More lasers were brought on line, aimed and calibrated but holding their fire, waiting for the prize to vanish.
    And with that, the doomed little world began its final day.
    The crew was between jobs, physically and mentally. Hundreds of Remoras working with machines and reactors had just finished pouring a large patch on the hull. But while others shepherded the curing, his crew was committed to something smaller and much quicker, and in the end, far more important than a big patch job. Orleans was taking a group of youngsters to an undisclosed location. The old Remora intended to give them a tour of one of the Ship’s oldest patches, letting them learn from the successes and glaring failures of people who died long ago.
    The Remoras rode inside a big, nearly empty skimmer. Each of them was genetically human. Each one was also a lifesuit of hyperfiber with a single diamond plate over what passed for a face. Each suit held a tiny reactor feeding the machinery as well as an array of recycling systems that fed what wasn’t quite human anymore. Fourteen youngsters were onboard. But of course calling anyone a “youngster” was a tease. The baby in the group was three hundred standard years old, while the oldest student was over a thousand. But being a Remora—a honorable, trustworthy Remora—involved skills that were mastered slowly, like the layers patiently building an enduring reef. And living like any Remora, exposed to the universe, was a hazardous, often too-brief species of life.
    Three thousand years. That was a milestone largely regarded as worthy of celebration.
    Ten thousand years. If a Remora could care for the Great Ship that long . . . well, that was one way to define a good, noble existence.
    When death came, it did so suddenly, usually without generous warnings. Some dense chunk of asteroid slipped past the lasers and bombs. An old power plant went sideways, and the skimmer blew. Or maybe the Remora became careless, and his or her lifesuit body failed in some spectacular fashion.
    Despite endless hazards, a respectable few Remoras reached twenty thousand years.
    A portion of those old-timers were destined for forty thousand birthdays.
    But Orleans was one of the exceptional few. Like every other Remora, he was born on the Great Ship. But that was eighty thousand years ago. Orleans was one of the final survivors of those very early generations.
    As such, he had to be be famous.
    And he had to be notorious.
    Perhaps no other creature in existence, Remora or otherwise, had Orleans’ spectacular capacity to measure threat and opportunity, while his reservoirs of luck