Godlike Machines by Jonathan Strahan [Editor]

together again. Same story: notes, chords, melody, and counterpoint. Music. That’s when I started accepting the reality of it. Whatever we were dealing with—whatever had come to find us—wasn’t what we had assumed. This wasn’t just some dumb invention, some alien equivalent of the probes we had been sending out. The Matryoshka was a different order of machine. Something clever and complex enough to sing to itself. Or, just possibly, to us.” Nesha hesitates and looks at me with an unwavering gaze. “And it was singing our music. Russian music.”
    “I know,” I say. “It’s been in my head since I came back.”

    No one had ever gone this deep before.
    The Progress had travelled fifty kilometers into the Machine-through two layers of orbiting obstruction, each of which was ten kilometers in depth, and through two open volumes fifteen kilometers thick. Beneath lay the most difficult part of its journey so far. Though the existence of Shell 3 had been known since the second apparition, no hard data existed on conditions beneath it.
    The barrier was actually a pair of tightly nested spheres, one slightly smaller than the other. The shell’s material was as dark as anything already encountered, but—fortuitously for us—the spheres had holes in them, several dozen circular perforations ranging in width from one to three kilometers, spotted around the spheres in what appeared to be an entirely random arrangement. The pattern of holes was the same in both spheres, but because they were rotating at different speeds, on different, slowly precessing axes, the holes only lined up occasionally. During those windows, glimpses opened up into the heart of the Matryoshka. A blue-green glow shone through the winking gaps in Shell 3, hinting at luminous depths.
    Shortly we’d know.
    “How’s he doing?” Galenka asked, from the pilot’s position. I had just returned from the orbiter, where I had been checking on Yakov. I had fixed a medical cuff to his wrist, so that Baikonur could analyze his blood chemistry.
    “Not much change since last time. He just looks at me. Doesn’t say or do anything.”
    “We should up the medication.” She tapped keys, adjusting one of the Progress’s camera angles. She was holding station, hovering a few kilometers over Shell 3. Talking out of the side of her mouth she said, “Put him into a coma until we really need him.”
    “I talked to Baikonur. They recommend holding him at the current dosage until they’ve run some tests.”
    “Easy for them to say, half a solar system away.”
    “They’re the experts, not us.”
    “If you say so.”
    “I think we should let them handle this one. It’s not like we don’t have other things to occupy our minds, is it?”
    “You have a point there, comrade.”
    “Are you happy about taking her in? You’ve been in the chair for a long time now.”
    “It’s what we came to do. Progress systems are dropping like flies, anyway—I give this ship about six hours before it dies on us. I think it’s now or never.”
    I could only bow to her superior wisdom in this matter.
    In the years since the last apparition, the complex motion of the spheres had been subjected to enormous scrutiny. It had been a triumph to map the holes in the interior sphere. Despite this, no watertight algorithm had ever been invented to predict the window events with any precision. The spheres slowed down and sped up unpredictably, making a nonsense of long-range forecasts. Unless a window was in view, the movement of the inner sphere could not be measured. Radar bounced off its flawless surface as if the thing was motionless.
    All Galenka could do was wait until a window event began, then make a run for it—hoping that the aperture remained open long enough for the Progress to pass through. Analysis of all available data showed that window events occurred, on average, once in every 72-minute interval. But that was just an average. Two window events could fall within