It took the technicians about one minute to find out how much worse it was even than that. The last signal from New New was an active intelligent sabotage program. It slammed into our information systems and, before it could be contained, randomized most of our stored information, and backups, in discrete chunks. All of Hamlet, for instance, is lost. All of The Tempest and the Henry plays: Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet. But Twelfth Night is intact. Troilus and Cressida. It’s perverse.

Ninety percent of history and art and philosophy are gone. But what may kill us is the missing science, mathematics, and engineering. If something goes wrong with the antimatter containment, for instance, we’ll just have to roll up our sleeves and try to figure it out from scratch before it quietly blows everyone to Kingdom Come.

We don’t even know whether New New still exists. There’s nothing wrong with our antennas; we can still monitor the radio telescope on the Moon, the useless navigation beacons in Earth’s oceans. But not so much as a carrier wave from New New. Our telescopes aren’t quite powerful enough to see it. Seeing it wouldn’t mean there was anybody alive inside, anyhow.

I think I know now, a little, how Harry felt the day the doctor told him he was going to die. Not today, probably not tomorrow, but soon enough.

OPTIONS

They had two months in which to make the big decision. Up to fourteen months out, they still had the option of turning around, decelerating for another fourteen months, and then slowly returning to Earth and New New. After 25 November, their bridges would be burned: Epsilon, or slow death, or swift.

Room 4004 felt too small for the whole thirty-six-person Cabinet—normally Engineering and Policy met in camera separately, only getting together for largely ceremonial public sessions—but they did manage to find enough chairs and places to put them. O’Hara and John Ogelby were the last ones in. The security door sighed shut behind them, and the murmur of conversation ebbed to claustrophobic silence.

Eliot Smith clicked a metal finger twice on the table in front of him. “I doubt that we’ll arrive at a consensus today. Let’s just make sure everyone has the same information to work with.

“Start at the beginning. Dan, Len? What do we know about that final transmission from New New?”

Len wood Zylius gestured for Dan to speak. “Matty Lang tells me it was what they call a ‘Borgia program.’ The Borgias sometimes murdered their guests with co-adjuvant poisons—two chemicals that were harmless by themselves, but deadly together. So it was safe to drink the wine, for instance, as long as you stayed away from the cherry pie.