Godlike Machines by Jonathan Strahan [Editor]

deathly slowness. Galenka stepped back, the two of us standing side by side. When the star had widened to ten or twelve meters across, the floor stopped moving. Smoothly, silently, something rose from the darkness. It was a plinth, and there was a figure on the plinth, lying down with his face to the domed ceiling. Beneath the plinth, icy with frost, was a thick tangle of pipes and coiling, intestinal machinery. We stood and watched it in silence, neither of us ready to make the first move. There was a tingle in my head that was not quite a headache just now, but which promised to become one.
    The floor began to slide back into place, the jagged blades locking beneath the plinth. There was now an uninterrupted surface between the resting figure and us. Galenka and I glanced at each other through our visors then began a slow, measured walk. The slope-sided plinth rose two meters from the floor, putting the reclining figure just above our heads. It hadn’t moved, or shown the least sign of life, since emerging through the floor.
    We reached the plinth. There was a kind of ledge or step in the side, allowing us to bring our heads level with the figure. We stood looking at it, saying nothing, the silence only punctuated by the labored, bellows-like sound of our air circulators.
    That it was human had been obvious from the moment the plinth rose. The shape of the head, the ribbed chest, the placement and articulation of the limbs-it was all too familiar to be alien. Anyway, I knew that something descended from us-something essentially human-had sent back the Matryoshka. My bright new memories told me now that I was seeing the pilot, the navigator that had steered the artifact through the vicious barbs of the booby-trapped time machine, and then up through time, skipping through a cascade of wormholes, to our present era. The pilot was ghostly pale, wraithe-thin and naked, lying on a white metallic couch or rack that at first glance appeared to be an apparatus of torture or savage restraint. But then I decided that the apparatus was merely the control and life-support interface for the pilot. It was what had kept him alive, and what had given him the reins of the vast, layered machine it was his duty to steer and safeguard.
    I sensed that the journey had not been a short one. In the Matryoshka’s reference frame, it had consumed centuries of subjective time. The pilot, bio-modified for longevity and uninterrupted consciousness, had experienced every howling second of his voyage. That had always been the intention.
    But something had gone wrong. A miscalculation, a problem with the injection into the time machine. Or the emergence, or the wormhole skip. Something I couldn’t grasp, except in the nature of its outcome. The journey wasn’t supposed to have taken this long.
    “The pilot went mad.”
    “You know this for a fact,” Galenka said.
    “You’d think this was a punishment—to be put inside the Matryoshka, alone, hurled back in time. But in fact it was the highest honor imaginable. They glorified him. He was entrusted with a mission of unimaginable importance.”
    “To change their past?”
    “No. They were stuck with what they already had. You can change someone else’s past, but not your own. That’s how time travel works. We have a different future now-one that won’t necessarily include the people who built the Matryoshka. But they did it for us, not themselves. To redeem one possible history, even if they couldn’t mend their own. And he paid for that with his sanity.”
    Galenka was silent for long moments. I surveyed the figure, taking in more of the details. Had he been standing, he would have towered over both of us. His arms were by his sides—his hands were small and boyish, out of proportion to the rest of him. His fists were clenched. The emaciated form was partly machine. The couch extended parts of itself into his body. Glowing blue lines slipped into orifices and punctured his flesh at a dozen