This distinctively Canadian hard-SF story has been published in
ANALOG SF & Facts, vol XCIII, 5-6 (May-June 2023)

Kuiper Pancake

by Michèle Laframboise

The thick smell of maple syrup welled up in my olfactive memory when I rolled into the kilometer-wide depression under a bowl of clear, unblinking stars.

A long time ago when I still had legs under my body, I had tasted my grandmother’s warm pancakes, flat wheat flour disks covered with bubble cavities, looking like the face of the Moon. We didn’t get real, grown wheat flour often, maybe it had been contraband from northern Alberta, but wow! did it taste awesome with the reconstituted maple syrup! I called to mind the homey scents of the kitchen and the rumor of the city behind gran’s windows, the basil and spice and coffee (not for me, that), to help me face reality.

My gran’s kitchen was hundreds of millions klicks away now. Her smile had evaporated decades ago, the price every Scout or Explorer paid for getting an extended life span.

Here in the Kuiper belt, I didn’t possess any sense of smell, except in a very practical, this-could-save-your-life row of chemical gas samplers, apt at identifying the spicy sting of toxic compounds that could eat my hull and nibble at the precious wetware inside. Mechanical vibrations were similarly filtered and transcribed into sounds, along with the IA voice of the Explorer talking to me.

My current body had grounded to a stop, a six-wheel tank spiked with sensors and samplers, its huge swiveling head crowned with an array of cams and antennas and teacup radio-receptors.

Presently, that huge swiveling head was stuck in the throes of indecision, like a teenager.

Should I call or not?

***

Most objects in the Kuiper belt were logged in the database and easily tracked, but this odd ball did not figure in the records compiled by generations of spacescopes. It was one of those rare outside visitors to our system, and it had come to our Explorer ship’s attention by its odd form, like a cracked marble.

Accretion toward a marble-shaped planet needed a sufficient mass. Most spherical planetoids exceeded four hundred kilometers in diameter. Not that one, a mere two hundred fifteen kilometers. Not enough of a size to keep it from distorting and warping under the faintest gravity tide.

The rock surface surrounding me had been abraded by millions of collisions, micrometeorites and some not so small, hard-and-fast encounters shock-full of kinetic energy. The odd asteroid had been round at a point, but now a squiggly fault divided it in false hemispheres, hence the cracked eggshell look.

Before my launch, the Explorer ship had concluded that this Oddball was a residue from the birth of a distant solar system, violently ejected while it was still in the process of planetary formation (it designing both the system and the small planet wannabe).

I had been following this fault line when, under my wheels, the uneven ground changed into a smooth, vitrified surface, the signature trace of a violent meteoric impact. It must have melted the fault line. Or maybe the impact itself had created it.

The reflectance spectroscopy and X-ray fluorescence readings of the crater had woken up the Explorer ship. Raman spectroscopy and agnostic scans for CHONPS elements and silica-based organic matter were conducted while I was still under wraps. Traces of ATP turned up, suggesting the presence of carbon-based protein, mayyyybe a new vacuum-resistant bacteria that the Explorer guild could claim for itself (and for the billions of people benefitting from its research). After all, Earth had received huge loads of water and organic compounds from errant space rocks like this one.

So, I had been revived, my neural net unrolled from its gel bath, dipped into more proteins than I needed to last two years in a vacuum, poured into my current body as wetware, all senses blinking on, testing each limb (Ooh, new wheels! Why, you shouldn’t have!) and launched from orbit.

When I transitioned to become a Scout, my reptilian ‘fight or flight’ brain stem that had helped primitive humanity to survive, was smoothed out. From my original cortex, I kept the neurons that contained my human memories and sense of self, the muscular control linked to senses and mechanic limbs, with a pinch of hormones (all with names ending in -mine) to add some emotional roller coaster to my long life. All neurons rearranged in a convenient roll.

By sentimental reflex, my cams followed the majestic Explorer ship as it drew away, its forward umbrella shield capturing stray particles, its aft solar sails pushed by the thin flow of photons from the distant Sun. The tail had a prop drive, but using that one consumed too much energy. That ship was as frugal as my grandmother had been, so long ago.

The Explorer was, consequently, a slow ship, but not broadcasting a heat signature was a good thing. The forward umbrella shield also blurred our outline into a smudge.

The Plutos wouldn’t track us.

***

As soon as my new wheels made contact with the Oddball’s surface, I set to work. The middle part of my body took micro samples of the mineral environment and analyzed the composition. Those tasks unfolded almost without my noticing unless too much energy was expended. You didn’t waste a micro-Joule in the depths of the Kuiper, where only a billionth of the solar energy bathing the Earth would reach you.

The mineral samplers’ display returned the usual suspects: silica rock, copper, antimony, iron … plus some passerby, like carbon in diamond form and silvery nuggets of platinum. The rarer elements were always welcome, even if life detection was a Scout’s first goal. If I didn’t find any living cell here, the Explorer League could always claim the Oddball and rent the concession to the Plutos.

***

What had made me think of my grandmother’s pancakes lay a short distance from my front wheels, at the geometrical center of the depression.

A thick disk, its surface a creamy yellow, covered the dark vitrified ground. It was a big one: eight point forty-seven meters in its larger diameter and, according to my camera’s computations, not perfectly circular. One rounded edge was farther from the center (marked in my display by a red cross).

Its color was smeared with darker spots, some coalesced in golden-orange smudges that suggested the texture of maple syrup.

It was fortunate I didn’t have an acid-churning stomach nor a buccal orifice anymore, because I would have salivated at the sight.

Even as a ghost devoid of hormones or hemoglobin, nostalgia could creep on me without warning. My old family, the four-generation communal house, the good, simple life my grandparents had managed to hold on in the face of incommensurable odds.

That nostalgia was mixed with a diffuse anger at the unfairness of it all: billions of hard-working people sacrificing their comfort and endeavoring to reverse climate change, a never-before-seen collaboration effort. And none of those heroic efforts had counted against a fistful of plutocrats hogging the intact lands, buying all patents in view, and polluting all communications… So more heroic efforts were called for, like the ultimate sacrifice I made after my second stillborn child.

The pancake’s edge was thinner than its center. By focusing my telescopic view, I could make a furry-like consistence, like the big round carpet in Grandma’s living room.

Maybe crystal growths, but how they would have sprouted in this energy desert was beyond my (and probably the Explorer ship’s) comprehension. Crystal grew in a liquid medium, lava or water; sometimes gas solidified in concentric layers. But growing in a complete vacuum at the outer edge of the solar system?

I debated with myself, but decided to wait before activating the come and get me signal. The thrift habits of our forebears were kept alive in scouts. Detouring the big umbrella now would cost energy. I needed to know more and get samples from the pancake-shaped rock formation.

Also, needless communications in space were monitored by the plutocrats’ listening stations scattered in the Neptune orbit. They already got the deeds on the first asteroid belt. No need to give them new intel to accrue their wealth, especially with another potential mini-worker.

Bacteria and microbes were the backbone of the low-energy plastic reconversions and soil reclamation, The Plutos’ legal division grabbed rights on any new one found in the Solar system. So the billions of ordinary people had to make do with a fistful of “free” worker microbes (or counterfeited ones).

After much hesitation (because: no back-up), I rolled at a snail pace to stop three meters from the appetizing pancake. At this distance, I could see the edge that looked blurry was composed of a mix of gossamer spikes, none more than two centimeters long, with fine duvet-like at their base. I didn’t dare take a sample, in a self-preservation reflex.

I set out to record a period of twenty-five standard hours and went to sleep.

***

A nutrient discharge from my reserves, the equivalent of a strong coffee cup cleared my foggy mind of any dreams I could have experienced. (This was an undesirable point of my condition, I knew I dreamed in my inactive state, but no trace was kept on record, in a spirit of economy.)

When I accessed the records, a current of excitement spread in my wetware.

The furry spikes had been moving.

No, not moving in the way of those cheap SF flicks that had my moms laughing as they (and me) were watching them. Neither was it a wavelike undulation of prairie grass under the wind; the moves I detected had occurred at a microscopic level.

A two-micrometer growth of crystal had happened in the section of the pancake closer to me.

I checked the records on the whole disk’s circumference: the furry spikes had not grown in the other quadrants. The creamy disk had been responding specifically to my presence. To the faint heat seeping from pieces brushing against each other in my joints.

Maybe even was still reacting so, present tense.

A reaction.

A sign of life.

I sent the call.

***

Landing on the Oddball, I had expected to find some alien vacuum-resisting microbes. Instead, I got a multicellular life form, carbon-based with an invitation extended to some silicates and proteins. This pancake had adapted to its extreme micro-energetic environment by adopting a circular pattern.

No cyclic glucose detected, alas.

Despite its impressive size, there was no clue about its degree of intelligence. The organism’s flatness was clearly a way to spread and collect incoming particles, or cosmic rays. I envisioned it as a thin layer covering the whole asteroid like the gift-wrapping of my last present to Grandma. (Of course she went before me!)

In my excitation, I scanned the ground formation under the disk. The results showed me the presence of more protein in the form of a funnel going from the pancake’s center, tapering off like a tree root. The pancake could be feeding from the kinetic energy stored in the asteroid, except there had been no event in the recent eras that had impacted it. The Oddball’s core was not active enough to produce a magnetic field.

The pancake’s growth was checked by a balance between availability of radiation and organic integrity. Not all rays carried the same wavelength, making for a wide-ranging diet.

Living organisms on Earth shared key characteristics: an ordered structure with specialized organs (or organelles in the case of single cells); regulation and homeostasis to preserve this ordered body’s stability and temperature; reactivity to its environment; then the obvious needs like growth, reproduction and energy processing.

That last point was not a given. The pancake was clearly subsisting by converting the cosmic radiation into energy, but there were few of those in the Kuiper belt, and much less in the vast gulf separating the solar systems. Unless a nearby sun exploded in a supernova of high-energy particles, it would not feast every day.

Or every century.

I sent the pre-recorded first contact protocol packet, the mathematical equivalent of we come in peace: an array of prime numbers and uneven rhythms, fast and slow, followed by my lone IA-generated voice reciting the greeting in the four dominant languages of the system (Binary, English, Chinese, COBOL).

My sensors did not detect any responding heat emission from the pancake. It was not going anywhere, no more than a patch of lichen could. My enthusiasm waned. Living and reacting did not equate intelligence. Coral reefs were an impressive macrostructure, but a construct of many smaller organisms.

The prospect of conversing with a new species dwindled lower in my mind.

You expect too much of life, my grandmother and my mothers had told me, the mantra of our simple, low energy living.

***

While waiting for the Explorer ship to make an economical turn on its sails and come back, I set out to explore the lonely ball.

More telemetry from the stars’ positions told of its current path: a parabola that would loop around Neptune and bounce back to the emptiness beyond the Kuiper belt. No visiting the inner system riddled with eager mining ships.

Time passed with only the slow spin of the Oddball to rhythm my work. It spun because it had been ejected from its original system, an exciting premise that promised, if not meaningful conversation, a bunch of rare metals of alien origin.

I dropped a weight from my torso, and measured the impact waves, getting a gravitational snapshot of the Oddball’s inner structure. Its mass made it very dense. Maybe the asteroid had been part of a planet’s core. That would explain the spherical accretion.

It didn’t explain the fracture, though.

I compiled a map of the geological features, igneous rock with fragments of past collisions. The asteroid’s core where the pancake’s root plunged would be in a solid state, and very dense. There were no other traces of the familiar C-H-O-N organic molecules in the ground samples.

After much computations and language algorithms and simulations (translation: hesitations), I rolled back to the depression.

My upscaled senses left me no doubt. While I was dropping and lifting weights, the pancake had grown, outward and upward, by a fair centimeter.

Its color had changed to a milky white, the spots a delicate orange. I opened every receptor of my body, but no we come in peace sprouted, no message in infrared traced the fine down covering it. Nevertheless, the being was growing, and reacting to my presence.

Still no meaningful conversation, though.

***

I summoned my courage to take a sample from the pancake. By sample, again, I mean, a microscopic fragment from the edge.

Under my swiveling head, I had delicate snake-like arms with steel claws and sensory pads at the end, to get an idea of the being’s texture. I extended this arm to touch the edge. The consistency of its skin was hard like rock. I tapped on it with a steel claw. Harder.

But using my scalpel, I managed to scratch some dust off. The pancake did not react.

My analyzers worked out one general answer, confirming the extract was multicellular, before sealing it in a bag for subsequent work on the Explorer. Maybe they would discover a useful bacteria.

Then, as I had lowered my eyes almost to the ground, I noticed the orange growths were not flat smudges, but jutting in convex domes.

Getting a sample from the orange spots would pose no problem for my extensible arms. Bag in one claw, claws and scalpel in the other, I scraped the top of one mound…

This I really, really, shouldn’t have.

The whole disk flipped its edges up, except for the central root that glowed a dark red. The edges undulated in waves, like those gossamer medusae in the sea documentaries. As it had been incredibly rock-solid a second earlier, it seemed rubbery now. I picked no sound in the airless space, but my wheels picked vibrations in the ground.

I rolled back to get out of reach.

The pancake flopped down, the residual energy of the move visible in the circular edge, where a sinusoidal wave continued for a few seconds, each revolution getting slower and slower.

It was so like turning a pancake in slow motion that I giggled inwardly. Of course, I faithfully recorded its reaction.

No need of translators to get the drift: don’t touch.

***

The micro fragments I had inadvertently brushed confirmed a multicellular structure, so I guessed there were specialized cells carrying functions inside the pancake.

The orange spots had coalesced in a new pattern several hours later. I couldn’t tell the level of intelligence except for a protection instinct. At first view, a creature feeding off rays and the occasional kinetic energy of quakes did not need higher brain functions.

Like a sunflower orienting its corolla to the sun. You didn’t need advanced mathematics to gobble your soup.

I was at this stage of my reflections, and polishing a geological map of the Oddball, when a signal pinged my radar. Only too happy to greet my Explorer, I oriented the teacup of my receptor. Telemetry filled my banks, almost setting me on fire.

It was not her.

The signal source was a large ship, its accelerating speed telling me of powerful thrusters. Its broadcast signature was—you guessed—the Pluto concession.

One Plutos’ claim ship, coming right at me and the pancake.

***

There was this old saying about in space, nobody could hear you scream. Nobody could hear you get fleeced neither.

If the Plutos found the pancake, they would eat it up with interests, pull it out, dissect it, use it any way which they could, all with the benediction of a wall of lawyers. The asteroid would be marked as their territory, and mined so fast only a Swiss-cheese husk would drift off the Solar system, minus the uprooted pancake. And there was nothing the Explorer guild could do about it once the plutocrats staked the Oddball.

The Explorer guild’s directive was exploring and surveying. The patents and claims benefitted the people at home. I racked my brain to find a way to protect this form of life. Finding none.

I had no human face nor could I shed tears in my body. Nor could I convene my sorrow to an alien life that had nothing in common except wanting to survive.

So I did the sole thing I could do: shutting down all active functions except basic life support and passive functions (like the teacup receptor). All my lights winked out, and my external circuits. My antennas and samplers retracted in my body, whose hull blurred chameleon-like in the vitrified depression.

Meanwhile, the inquisitive Pluto ship swept the space, searching in a fan pattern. I decoded periodic warnings in four languages stating that legal action would be exacted against anyone who trespassed on their property. (They couldn’t say yet which property, since the Oddball had been in the system for a few years only, but detecting its position would be a cinch. The Oddball was not invisible or immaterial.)

The disk’s fibrous surface rippled in a concentric pattern, probably reacting to the sudden drop of my energy emissions.

I guessed the pancake was eating up the repeat signal from the incoming ship, food being food, whether nutritious or junk.

I raised the resolution of my cams to spy the swelled orange spots. They were moving, converging toward each other. The process was very slow, stretched over days, new spots appearing and expanding. Eventually, the spots formed a new pattern, no more akin to single cities, but a conurbation.

Plutos’ ships were faster than Explorers, but they had a longer trajectory to cover before getting in the vicinity. Anguish coalesced in my mind, like the spots. The Plutos’ ships carried the best weapons in the system. My Explorer should have been here long before.

What had happened to it?

***

The Plutos’ ship advanced, preceded by its sweeping signal. Contrary to the elegant umbrella-shaped Explorer, the claim ship looked like a hammer in search of a nail to pound down. A hammer with a hexagonal head hiding the rest of its handle and bulbous drive. Powered by all the fuel pulled from the first Belt mining asteroids, it had no need of sails nor fancy aerodynamics.

To make a story short: of course the Plutos’ ship spotted me, despite my low reflective hull! And, of course, besides my rectangle of metal and wetware, they noticed a disk of organic matter.

I raised my energy levels to normal to better analyze the ship. Not that it helped me much. Neither me, nor the Explorer, was built to wage battles. I wanted to ask about the Explorer, but it would give off too much intel. And they had more than enough. (Besides, if the Explorer were around, its response would draw more attention.)

Dire and direr warnings pinged my wetware. I ignored them.

I would not leave. Could not leave. If they had already destroyed my dear Explorer ship, there was nothing I could do, nowhere to go for the next two years until my systems failed.

The hexagonal face of the hammer grew wider in the sky.

Then the warnings stopped. Dark eyes popped open in the hexagon. The weapon ports, charging. This was it. The parsimonious pancake would die under such an onslaught; the Plutos did not need an alien alive to harvest DNA traces. Even if they were targeting me, the proximity would not help. I would die, too, but gouging my thick hull would take their laser more time.

About four milliseconds more. Whatever. That being was worth protecting, even if it didn’t understand the threat currently unfolding. It hadn’t responded to my first contact protocol emissions. I powered on to sit over it, and what I had called its spot cities, to offer my meager protection.

Before my front wheels could gain purchase on the pancake, its border flipped up. Like the first time, but instead of flopping down, it rose higher, and spread.

An instinctive no! flowered through me. That being had survived eons sipping the sparse photons and stray particles, carefully managing its resources, not spending it lavishly like we humans had.

Such a fast move must have pulled all its painstakingly accumulated reserves. Like those new rims and tires that my Explorer had splurged on.

Now, deprived of its resources, it was about to be obliterated.

The sky and the approaching ship disappeared under an intricate web of fibrous veins. The pancake had morphed into a beach parasol that covered me. It was supposed to be the other way around. Now, my vision was impaired, but I did not need it to know the moment the ship fired: a burst of static filled my teacup receptor.

Instants from annihilation, I observed everything around me, my senses magnified, time slowing down.

The beam colored the parasol a bright red, through which I could see the outline of the coalesced spots. I expected them to wink out of existence after a millisecond, but they didn’t. Instead, they glowed, a chemical reaction so bright my cams had to compensate.

Then luminescence pumped up and down the root, kind of like a thunder flash conducting the electricity to the ground. The ground shook as the pancake, that had been so thrifty for millions of years, absorbed all the overload in one instant.

And released it back at its sender.

***

The sole thought that came to me was: they shouldn’t have fired that beam.

When the “spot cities” fired back, I registered a millions joule discharge. Then the parasol flopped down, covering my big swiveling head with fibrous strands.

I rolled back from under it, trailing some filaments. When I looked at the sky, the hexagonal hammer was nowhere to be seen. In its place, a glittering cloud of debris swirled around the Oddball.

“Wow,” I said, in my IA first-contact voice.

The pancake was busy returning to its flat configuration, the stem disappearing from my vision. I was certain it was going very far down the asteroid, that so very dense asteroid that had puzzled me… What if the pancake had harvested from the forming system before its ejection, and deposited its treasure at the center?

Suddenly, I guessed the pancake had not even been aware of a threat. Simply, it had responded in kind to what it had perceived as a strong communication attempt.

I sent the F.C. protocol again, using my coherent beams, set wide. This time, a response came, not from the whole surface, but from a spot city. The bulged, and detached itself, rolling down the curve of the pancake, to attach itself to my pincers.

***

The Pluto network was still groping its net of cloned minds for the sudden loss of a claim ship, when the familiar umbrella outline of my Explorer ship hid the pinpoint of the Sun.

I was about to stammer, “what took you so long?” when I felt a tremor: the impact of a self-burying forty-meter long stake, properly identified as property belonging to the Explorers’ Guild. That explained the delay in coming back. The stake had been inserted far enough from the depression and the pancake that had returned to its previous flatness.

Retrieving my wheels inside my bulk, I executed the launch procedure, the sample safe in my hold.

As the twin jets propelled me upward, the light gravity of the visitor being no match for it, I kept one cam focused on the pancake that I would never see again. The pale spotted disk dwindled, smaller and smaller … and flatter, as the rotation of the asteroid was bringing it over the horizon.

Before it disappeared from sight, a sudden flash impressed my receptors. I read highly compressed levels of electronic activity, then nothing. When I looked down at the surface, I expected the pancake to have vanished like in the good stories, but no, it was still there, a thin creamy oval on the scarred surface of the asteroid, its crater outline cresting the ragged horizon.

“What was that?” I asked, using the tight beam to prevent eavesdroppers.

The Explorer ship, its mind much older and wiser than I was, sent the equivalent of an amused chuckle. It refrained from commenting, with the Plutos listening stations hanging by, even billions of kilometers away.

The ship’s flank swelled and gobbled me up, like an amoeba. Once I was safely inside and the tiny, tiny pancake city transferred into a lab chamber, the Explorer’s familiar voice pinged me.

“I would say your discovery has just sent a message to its friends.”

It was a very tight beam, so the Explorer pinpoint the destination. Somewhere in the vicinity of the galactic center.

“But there’s no one out there, » I said. « That message will take millennia to reach its origin system!”

If it reached the right place. The Galaxy was like a bowl of bean soup, the contents moving around the black hole at various speeds.

There was a silence. The Explorer could do a ton of computations and carry hundreds of conversations with its scouts, so that silence meant its own wetware was thinking.

“But what if, for them, a life span was longer, in geological terms?”

“Like when I took the train to visit Montréal, and then I called my Moms at home after I arrived?”

I could see it now, how this scarred globe had drifted millions of years, the pancake flat and cold, until the first ray of the distant Sun made it swell again. What geological-scale conversations did the pancakes have?

***

Once all was said and done and compiled, and the spot city safe and sound, the time came for me to retire for another long, long night as the Explorer cut the fine mess of particles that filled the Kelvin-cold space. It was a routine akin to putting a child to bed, except more complex, but one I never tired of. Because here, I could keep my dreams.

“Did you clean up your wheels before pouring your wetware off your hardware?” the Explorer asked, in this oh-so-familiar voice, a reflection from the human it had been, so long ago.

And I, a blend of machine, electrons and brain cells, found a smile lurking inside me as I responded, again a sign of life.

“Yes, Grandma.”

The End

Kuiper Pancake

First published in ANALOG SF & Facts, vol XCIII, 5-6 (May-June 2023)

Picture of Charon : NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

This text is eligible for the 2024 Aurora Awards – go here for the nomination page.

The text also eligible for the Hugo Awards

Please contact the author for reprint permission.