by J. Benjamin
“Dr. Alessi,” Minister Endo said. “There’s one more order of business we need to cover while you’re here. Remember when we said we had to protect the intellectual capacity of GSF?”
“Yes.”
“Two days ago, a cruiser arrived from Space Station Sagan,” Minister Endo said. “It contained precious cargo, escorted by armed personnel. You see, there’s another reason we chose you for this research mission.”
“Precious cargo from the Sagan?” Val asked. Her heart-rate climbed.
“From Deck Fifty-Five,” Seiji added.
“Activate it, Seiji,” Minister Endo ordered. Seiji approached one of the consoles and quickly typed in a series of commands. A hologram popped up between Val and the glass pane. Though not as shocking as seeing Minerva, Val was nevertheless astonished. It was the face of the most advanced AI construct in human history.
“Hello Doc. Miss me?” Starscraper said. Val starred at the sentient AI interface.
“Oh, fuck!”
Chapter 5
William Herschel Station - Mimas Orbit - January 7, 2083
Dev, tired and mentally drained, felt ready to collapse as he continued working from his cramped, poorly-lit, private office on the Herschel. Aside from a Cosmineral-branded hat, and a Cosmineral-branded pen, he also kept a potted succulent. Being so far from home, it helped to have just a little greenery around.
It wasn’t just the events of the past few days that had taken a mental and physical toll on him. The long stretches of time and space between Earth and Saturn were taxing. Sure, Dev had done the journey several times now. Yet each journey lasted two to three months and with little human contact. But even a person as disciplined as Dev Ivanov, had only so much bandwidth for such jaunts. Especially given that he was a long ways away from the wild-eyed, young, budding scientist/entrepreneur of his youth. Of course, even Dev was honest enough to confess that the “entrepreneur” part was really inherited from the empire his mother started.
Then again, the donut-shaped space station he found himself on was not of his mother’s doing. Nor was the colony that sat on the banks of a lake made of paint thinner on that cloudy moon called Titan hanging among the stars outside his window. Dev found himself spending more time on Titan since Cosmineral initiated the expansion of Huygens Landing.
Cosmineral was the ice-mining conglomerate which recently diversified its portfolio to include the study of interstellar jump sequencing. Huygens Landing was the Titan-based colony of bubble habitats which housed more than a thousand Cosmineral employees and contractors. Contrary to its name, it wasn’t the actual landing site of the original Huygens probe from seventy-eight years before.
He heard a knock.
“Come in,” Dev said. The door opened and the public face of the company walked in.
“Oh hello again, Sook,” Dev greeted
“That’s Chairwoman to you,” she replied.
“Right. Chairwoman,” Dev replied. “Take a seat.”
“I’m here to give you an update on our current situation,” Sook said, unveiling a stack of notes.
“If you’re here to tell me about current mining output or progress on the purification tanks, no worries. I’ve been following the reports.”
“As I expected,” Sook said. “Actually, I came here to talk to you about that other thing.”
“Oh?” Dev said, eyebrows raised.
“There’s a feed that just came in. From Earth.” Sook opened a hologram.
Dev recognized the stage and golden walls. He’d seen it thousands of times, but something was different. The GSF flags that typically adorned the General Assembly were gone, replaced by flags that Dev recognized only from historical footage, recorded before he was born. It was a design of stars and stripes. Then he saw the emblem on the podium with the eagle holding the arrows and olive branch.
“Please welcome the President of the United States,” said the deep voice of a man off-camera. A hero’s welcome of thunderous applause and ovation ensued.
At 42 years old, Nelson Stanton had not even been alive the last time the United States existed as a sovereign state. Yet, here he was, the first American President to claim the office in nearly half a century. He triumphantly took to the podium with “Hail to the Chief” blaring through the amphitheater which had once been the legislative hall of the now-defeated GSF.
“To my fellow Americans, and to the nine billion people watching at home and abroad. I speak to you from the official Capitol of the re-United States of America.”
“Son of a bitch,” Dev said. “That didn’t take long.”
“Together with our allies, the United Nations and China, we have ended the dangerous experiment that was the Global Space Federation,” the President said. “Nearly half a century ago, our great Republic collapsed. Befallen, not from lack of wealth, but from lack of will. The petty differences and civil conflicts which once consumed us are now of a bygone past. Fate has brought us back together. Today, we find ourselves reunited to confront a threat unlike any our species has ever witnessed. And it will take all of us, arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder, to protect our fragile planet.”
“He sure has a way with words,” Dev said.
“Science is the greatest of human endeavors but absent ethics, absent morality, it can be as corrosive to the foundation as the most overzealous dogma,” the President continued. “And in the wrong hands, could bring unmitigated death and destruction, the likes of which my generation has not witnessed.”
“That’s enough,” Dev said, waving away the hologram.
“I don’t think we have many allies left on Earth,” Sook said.
“Listen, Sook. If there’s one thing I know about the Americans, they are all talk. I mean Hell. They’ve been on this whole reunion tour for a few months and now they act like they own the place? They’ll have enough trouble keeping the factions together, let alone running a serious military operation.”
“Um, they just took down the GSF.”
“Correction. They picked up the scraps of what was left of GSF, and they didn’t do it alone. When that alien leviathan landed on Luna, the rest was history. China pulled their funding. Then India. Then the EU. Then the US got back together. Then Adler had to sell off most of their assets to keep the lights on. GSF fucked themselves. As for this pretty-boy Stanton, I’m not scared of him.”
“Well you should be. The man is a total demagogue, and he’s young. He’s exactly the type who can rally a populist uprising on the heels of a disaster,” Sook said.
“A populist rally of what? Many parts of the old US still haven’t recovered four decades later. Half of them can’t stand the other half. Their new Constitution was rushed through. They barely have a country,” Dev said.
“As we speak, the US and UN have auto-fabs constructing a whole new fleet designed for space warfare. They’re preparing for full-scale militarization that even the GSF couldn’t pull off.”
“Great!” Dev replied sarcastically. “Whose going to fly them? A bunch of crop dusters? Forget America. When you remove Cosmineral and GSF from the equation, most of them haven’t left Earth’s orbit, let alone piloted a fighter. Don’t even get me started on the multi-month journey, and that’s with the fastest skippers in Sol.”
“Dev, I don’t think you are taking this threat seriously,” Sook said sternly. “UN, China, India. The big players on Earth are turning their back on us. We have so few allies. Mars and Luna can hold the line but they’re feeling the heat too.”
“Sook. You’re failing to see the big picture. Every single thing that leaves Earth or gets built on another moon, planet, or whatever rock orbits the Sun, relies on the rare metals found exclusively through contracts with the Cosmineral Corporation, and we know more about intergalactic spacetime jumps and the Aquarians than any government besides New Tokyo. Those motherfuckers couldn’t touch us if we landed on Earth because they know we’d make the secrets of the technology public. Mutually assured destruction. Like I said, I
’m not worried about pretty-boy Nelson Stanton.”
As quickly as the words left his mouth, the lights of his office flickered violently and then shut down.
“What the Hell?” Emergency blue-lights dimly lit the floor while emergency sirens blared.
“The bridge,” Sook urged. They quickly jumped from their seats and dashed into the hallway. Confused faces wandered about.
“Everybody, get to your stations!” Dev demanded. They made their way down the bending arc of the donut-shaped station toward the special-access area where only a select few were allowed. A quick eye-scan and there they were, the command deck of the William Herschel Station. The arc-shaped bridge had deck-wide window panes which spanned the entire radius. In addition to the deck-wide view of Saturn, there were workstations for the employees responsible for monitoring station activity and a special seat for the station’s commander. Dev skipped it, and approached the half a dozen people frantically working to make sense of what just happened.
“Report!” Dev commanded.
“Power surge,” replied Carlos Montez, Cosmineral Chief Science Officer.
“Any idea what caused it?”
“Negative. Comms, nav, and shields are down. Life support systems unaffected. Emergency systems on standby.”
“Shit! Comms, nav, and shields? Who caused it?” Dev inquired.
“We’re working to figure that out,” Carlos replied.
“You guys might want to come see this,” a female bridge officer said, pointing to a console. “We’re being hacked.” A black terminal displayed green text flying up the screen.
“But how, Elle? We’re hundreds of millions of miles away from anyone outside the Cosminernet VPN,” Sook said. “Is it the Americans?”
“No,” Carlos interjected. “Look at the characters. That variant of Malay. This came from Indonesia.”
“Indonesia? I guess pretty boy Stanton isn’t our only adversary these days,” Dev quipped.
“The US isn’t working alone,” Carlos replied. “All of Earth is after us.”
“They might be too far to hack us directly, but they don’t need to. This is a Slugworth,” Elle said.
“A Slugworth?” Dev asked.
“It’s an AI meant to act on its own without a human guiding it,” she replied. “It has one purpose: embed deep within a system and steal everything.”
“This is why I put Elle on bridge,” Sook said to Dev. “Can we extract it from our main systems?”
“Even better. We’ll isolate it to a nano-crystal. I keep them prepared for this sort of event and . . . done. Slugworth virus contained,” Elle said.
“That was fast,” Carlos said.
“This was a test run,” Sook said. “The Indonesians know its gonna take much more than that to break our VPN. They wanted to send a message.”
“They’ll be back,” Elle said.
“Oh I don’t doubt it,” Sook replied. “And I’m sure they’ll bring the whole world with them next time. We got lucky because we have the best people. But if there’s one thing I learned in this line of business, it’s that even the best people are no match for the most committed. Our adversaries will stop at nothing until they learn what we’re up to. And if they succeed at that, we’re fucked. So we need to be as vigilant and as prepared to take on the world as possible.” The team nodded. “Good, carry on. Dev, come with me.”
They walked back toward his office. The main lights reactivated.
“You might be right about Stanton,” Sook said. “But you know better than anyone that these motherfuckers work like an orchestra. Might be a different instrument at a given moment, but they all play for the same team, and that’s Team Fuck Our Shit Up. Got it?”
“Got it, Chairwoman,” Dev said condescendingly.
“In the meantime, we will beef up cyber-defenses and deploy interference drones to the nearest Lagrange points. I’ll give the shareholders a full briefing on what just happened here.”
“Sook.”
“What?”
“Do you think they know what we’re doing?” Dev asked with a hint of concern.
“No. Nobody knows,” Sook said. “And it will stay that way. Trust me on this.”
Chapter 6
January 8, 2083
After one day, Val determined that throwing herself into her new job would help her overcome the anxiety of the past few days. She was mesmerized by the tissue samples from the Aquarian under the microscope before her. Just as Kiara had said, the Aquarians had a cellular structure that confounded all logic. That is, they had no structure. Aquarians, at least the smaller workers, were amorphous. Val recalled Kiara and Matt testifying to the Aquarians having the ability to shift shape and color and mimic themselves to be exact replicas of another species. Though no other direct witnesses were present in Sol, the Aquarian cells corroborated evidence of such a capability.
“So you guys docked with it?”
“Correct, Dr. Alessi,” said New Tokyo Chief Scientist Kosuke Sato from the console next to Val’s. At 34 years old, the tall, skinny scientist was one of the younger members of Minister Endo’s Cabinet. His white lab coat, dry personality, and fixation on details gave Val the impression he was a man deeply rooted to science. “The truss allows us to enter the leviathan and complete extraction sprints.”
“How have the workers reacted to our presence,” Val asked.
“It’s mixed. Sometimes they swarm us out of curiosity. Other times, they just hang in their pods and keep to themselves. We initially went in with drones. Didn’t get far with that.”
“Let me guess. They hacked them?”
“Just like in the eleventh report,” Kosuke replied. “Send anything the size of a baseball in that fish tank and the core system is screwed.”
“Then remind me how you managed to airlift it across Luna and store it here? A comms system is a comms system. Doesn’t matter the size of the object. Couldn’t they just hack the transport that carried them here?”
“Funny how that works, Dr. Alessi. They only have one host in Sol. When the Pelicans encountered the hosts at Wolf 482, they were confronted with an entire fleet. Our team has reason to believe that when separated from the pack, a single Aquarian host is limited in its capabilities. We think this one is so weak that it’s only able to hack objects once they’ve crossed the hull.”
“So I take it your hab suits were stripped of all their fancy gadgets,” Val replied, her eyes still in the microscope.
“Drones, anything with moving parts, even smart lenses. Limited to narrow radio frequencies. It’s like we’re in 1983 instead of 2083,” Kosuke said.
“It’s a good thing sentient AI’s like me live on closed systems,” Starscraper interjected. The sudden appearance of his hologram and voice jolted Val, her elbow slamming into the microscope. She quickly reached out to steady its teetering.
“Good to see you too,” Val lied.
“Starscraper, we’ve been over this,” Kosuke replied, annoyed. “We are not ready to bring you in. It’s too risky.”
“Oh come on, Kosuke. Where’s your sense of adventure?” Starscraper replied.
“I’d rather go ice fishing on Europa,” Kosuke replied. Val chuckled.
“I’ve run through the scenarios. Even if they somehow hack my mainframe, I can set off a self-destruct sequence.”
“We’ll discuss this later,” Kosuke said to the persistent AI.
“I’m surprised you even remember me, Starscraper,” Val said. “When Kiara saw you in her training, she said you didn’t remember me.”
“That’s because Dr. Lacroix encountered a different iteration of my interface. You’re talking to the OG, straight out of Sagan, and this one never forgets a face.”
“You’re definitely the OG. As much of an original pain in the ass as you were when we were reviewing Blade 53,” Val replied.
“I still think it’s pretty cool how you went from looking at Pelican data from light-years away to looking at aliens under a mic
roscope,” Kosuke said. “Not many people could claim to have done that.”
Val turned away from her microscope to speak to Kosuke directly. “In this line of work you have to wear different hats to be able to do what we do. Aside from Kiara, we’re all kind of pioneers in this new post-First Contact world.”
“Yeah, but Dr. Lacroix doesn’t seem so optimistic,” Kosuke said. “I have to confess, I was surprised when she took the side of the UN. I really thought she would be the one calling the loudest for more spacetime sequencing.”
“It was spacetime sequencing that almost killed her and Matt. So I’m not surprised she wants to end it. What surprised me were all the things she said about the Aquarians. Didn’t think she’d be one for cutting off all contact.”
“And do you agree with her?” Kosuke asked.
“I can’t say that she’s wrong because I haven’t walked in her space boots. Then again, if they really wanted to kill us, why would they let Edie Brenner and the Cosmineral folks coexist with them on one of their worlds? Makes no sense. I don’t think they want to kill us. Quite the opposite. They want to learn more about us. Unless they show up here in large fleets and start wiping out humanity.”
“Or if they make us go crazy and turn against ourselves,” Kosuke said.
“Oh, we don’t need their help. We’re doing a fantastic job of that all on our own,” Val replied. Kosuke received and alert from Seiji on his smart lens.
“Kosuke, Val, Minister Endo requests your immediate presence at Fuji Station,” Seiji said.
“Fuji Station?” Val replied, looking at Kosuke, who seemed equally puzzled. “Okay, we’ll be right there.”
When they arrived at the spaceport, the same one Val and Ty landed at just a few days before, a crowd had gathered. What could possibly disrupt everyone’s day like this? Val wondered. Actually, who? They were after all, at the main spaceport.
Val caught sight of Minister Endo and Ty standing beside a potted palm across the cavernous, halogen bathed port. They stood close together but faced apart, each scanning the crowd intently. When Ty locked eyes with Val she ushered her toward them, tapping Minister Endo’s shoulder and softly gesturing in Val’s direction. Minister Endo turned then, so that she stood square with Ty, and they both looked on as Val approached. For a moment, Minister Endo seemed relieved, but as Val neared, whatever anxiety had been static between them, regenerated and spread across her face as a particular tightness in the seal of her lips. Ty exuded something gentle, almost apologetic, in her eyes and Val felt a wash of gratitude for her presence.