He was visibly anxious for a different reason. Generations had lived and died in the expectation that Vox would one day meet and merge with the Hypotheticals, but it was Oscar’s generation that was confronting the fulfillment of that prophecy. By joining this expedition he had put himself at the cutting edge of the encounter. That was a spectacular piece of luck, from Oscar’s point of view—whether good or bad remained to be seen.

*   *   *

Wind and squalls persisted all the way to our landing point.

Maps from my day would have been a poor guide to Antarctica as it existed now. The great ice sheets had disappeared centuries ago, and the Ross Sea and the Weddel Sea had joined to separate East Antarctica from the huge islands off its western coast. Oscar said the place where we landed was in what geological surveys had once called the Wilkes Basin, roughly seventy degrees south latitude. It was a flat, pebbly wasteland.

We suited up as soon as the aircraft touched ground. We wore thick, insulated outer garments to keep us warm and tight-fitting masks that fed us canned air. The ship’s airlock opened onto a landscape that was bleak but not actually ugly. All of Antarctica was a desert, but deserts are often beautiful: I thought of the Equatorian outback, or the deserts of Utah and Arizona, or the old pictures of Mars before it was terraformed, pre-Spin. The terrain here was nearly Martian in its stony lifelessness. The climate was cold, Oscar said, but not cold enough to sustain a permanent icecap, and relatively dry. A late-summer snowfall like this would likely melt off before the day passed. The snow came down in intermittent flurries, drifting into hollows and blurring the outlines of the low, parallel ridges that stretched into the distance.

The sun was a dim incandescence behind the clouds, close to the horizon. We could expect another few hours of daylight but we were fully equipped to operate in darkness. The soldiers loaded portable high-intensity lights and a host of other gear onto self-powered carts with big, articulated wheels. Then they fell into formation and advanced, the civilians following behind.

We navigated by compass. The Hypothetical machines were still invisibly distant. We had landed well outside the perimeter that had been defined by the loss of the drone vehicles. How the attempt to cross that perimeter would affect us and our gear was an open question. “Of course we trust the Hypotheticals,” Oscar said. “But they have autonomic functions just like any other living thing. Events can happen without conscious volition, especially given the hugely different scales of time and space on which they operate.” But none of that seemed as real or substantial as the tug of the wind, the monotonous crunch of gravel under our feet, or the faint stink of hydrogen sulfide that infiltrated our masks.

*   *   *