Providence

by Max Barry

“—but the communication between the two.”

  She jabbed a finger toward the screen. “Were you watching? Did you see the computers let that hive breeze up to our front door?”

  “It was correctly categorized as an unknown object. The fact that no officer ordered a closer investigation—”

  “Not one alarm. Not so much as a red light.”

  “—is attributable to inadequate shared understanding between the human and artificial components of command.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said.

  “Our conclusion,” said Bogart carefully, “which I believe is shared by Service, was that Providence-class battleships should be commanded by machine intelligence, free from human input.”

  There was silence. “Well,” she said. “That’s a terrible idea.”

  “It’s not an idea,” Nettle said. “It’s happening.”

  “If you’d like to review our simulations,” Bogart said, “you’ll see that software outperforms human decision-making in practically all areas by orders of magnitude. It’s not even close.”

  “Simulations,” she said. “Computers grading themselves.”

  “Your reservations are understandable,” Nettle said. “You have more reason than anyone to be cynical about AI running command of a Providence. That’s why we’d like you to captain one.”

  A laugh popped out of her. Just a short bark, but inexcusable, given the company. She searched for composure, but the absurdity of the question was so great that she couldn’t figure out how to address it directly. “If software runs the ship, what do you need a captain for?”

  “The real war,” Nettle said.

  She felt air leaving her body in a slow, tired way. Of course. Of course.

  “You’ve done a bang-up job speaking around the country,” Nettle said. “People admire you. They trust you. The message it would send if you captained a Providence . . .”

  “No,” she said. “Please.”

  “It would be a tremendous vote of confidence. Not just in this program, but the entire direction of the war. It would tell people that the sacrifices they’re making to fund the fleet are worth it.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  “The AI is sound,” said Bogart. His tone was apologetic, but she couldn’t look at him. “It’s advanced a great deal in the three years since you shipped out to Fornina Sirius. And this isn’t just a Surplex innovation. There’s machine intelligence driving decision-making at all levels in most major corporations these days, with incredibly positive results. The political parties are using it to drive candidate selection and platform generation. I don’t want to sound glib, but by the time you come home, it may be running the country.”

  She stared at him.

  “It can fly your ship,” Bogart said. “It can do that better than you can.”

  She kept her mouth shut. Nothing that would come out now would do her any good.

  “You know what?” Nettle said. He seemed unperturbed by her reaction. “Let it roll around in your mind. We don’t require a decision today. Take a week. A month.”

  A year. A lifetime. There was nothing that could put her in one of those ships.

  “You may change your mind when you meet the crew,” Nettle said.

  * * *

  —

  It was a bundle of hangars and habitats forty miles north of Anchorage, where they could shoot birds over the pole without blowing out anyone’s windows. There were nine hundred candidates, drawn from every branch of Service and corporate fast-tracks, vying for twenty-four crew slots. As the shuttle dipped toward the snowfields, the polite young flight lieutenant who was accompanying her leaned across and pointed out landmarks. There weren’t many. She spotted a squad in the snow, struggling through drifts.

  “Including officers and support staff, the permanent base population is about five hundred,” he said. “Not counting visitors.”

  “Why is it named Camp Zero?” she said.

  “Because this is where it starts. Where we win the war.” She looked at him, but he was completely serious.

  * * *

  —

  She spent a week lurking at the rear of classes and watching field training through binocs. On her second day, she was called to deliver a speech on an actual stage in a hangar. She gazed out at a sea of bright young faces and did what she’d done ever since she’d returned from Fornina Sirius: spoke of the nobility of Service, the depravity of the enemy, and the confidence she possessed that the awesomeness of the human spirit plus a Providence-class battleship would give birth to victory so splendid, it would inspire a thousand songs.

  Nettle called her on the flight home. “Well?” he said.

  “They’re children.” The flight lieutenant was sitting across from her, his expression neutral, his eyes on the wall. “Do they even know that a Providence doesn’t need a crew?”

  “We don’t emphasize it.”

  “They think this is for the best. That’s why they’re here. Not because they want to fight. To further their careers.”

  “And?”

  “I saw a round table on what they wanted to get out of the mission,” she said. “What they wanted.”

  “It’s the younger generation. They’re less motivated by patriotism and duty. It doesn’t make them bad soldiers.”

  “It doesn’t make them good ones.”

  “I’m not letting this go, Jolene,” Nettle said. “I’ll ask you to visit again, in time.”

  She shook her head. She was more convinced than ever that the Providence program was a colossal mistake. It made her wonder whether they could win.

  “But not for a while,” Nettle said. “Say hello to David.”

  * * *

  —

  She caught a shuttle from Arlington to New York, arriving late. David was asleep, so she extracted herself from her uniform and crawled beneath the sheets and snaked her arms around him. He was the world’s heaviest sleeper, but she knew he would get there. Finally his eyes cracked open. “Hey.”

  “Hi.”

  “How were they?”

  “Young.”

  “Mmm,” he said. “We were, once.”

  “Not like that.”

  He was silent awhile. “So you’re not going out?”

  “No,” she said. “Of course not.”

  “Good.” He kissed her hair.

  * * *

  —

  David was very patient, which she hoped one day to deserve. She felt like she had tricked him. Pulled a bait-and-switch. They would be strolling together, or eating dinner, and she would drift into a universe of shredded polymer, where salamanders unpeeled from nowhere and everyone began to die, and she wouldn’t even realize until she saw his face. It had been six years and she was still clawing her way through therapy and Service-approved medication toward the person she used to be, the young, happy, ambitious bride David had married, before Fornina Sirius crawled into her head and turned her into this.

  Nettle sent her back to Camp Zero three months later. Then three months after that. Then six months later again. By then, the first Providence, Fire of Montana, was almost complete, a bright star in the early evening sky. It had a named crew. She watched their interviews and felt not the tiniest mote of regret.

  “Who’s picking these people?” she asked Nettle on their next call. She had been surprised by at least two of the selections, whom she knew from Camp Zero.

  “AI.”

  She had suspected. “So now you’re letting software choose the crew on your new ships that will be run by software?”

  “Yes,” said Nettle.

  “Boy,” she said.

  She heard the shrug in his voice. “Welcome to the future. It works.”

  “But you don’t know how it works.” She didn’t even want to learn about t
he AI; it only made her more angry. But she couldn’t stop herself from picking at it like a scab. “It’s made from computers writing software no one can understand.”

  “But it works.”

  “Boy,” she said again.

  * * *

  —

  The candidates did grow on her. She became somewhat inured to their ignorance, their self-centeredness, their wildly optimistic worldviews. There was even something charming about their irrepressibility, how they would run three miles through snow with a ninety-pound pack and no hesitation. She watched a class of Intel candidates perform a Task To Completion Under Stress, where NCOs roamed around screaming at candidates attempting math puzzles. “You ugly piece of dog shit!” one yelled at a girl in the front row. “I hope you’re smart, because your face makes me want to puke!” Most candidates exhibited defensive reactions of one kind or another, revealing the extent of their distraction, but there was a young man at the back who seemed genuinely oblivious and only registered the torrent of abuse with a small jump in his eyebrows when he’d finished the task, like he’d forgotten that was going on.

  “Isiah Gilligan,” an NCO told her when she inquired. “Surplex civvy. He’s provisionally scheduled for Providence launch five.”

  She told David about her experience in a New York diner, slurping noodles, thinking he’d find it amusing. Instead, he grimaced. “Ugh. That sounds horrible.”

  “What does?”

  “The test. It’s cruel.”

  She said nothing.

  “Did I say something wrong?”

  “We shouldn’t hurt their feelings?” she said. “Before we send them to war? Is that what you think?”

  He eyed her. “All right.”

  She dumped her fork and walked out. She was choked with a ridiculous seething rage and didn’t even know where it was directed. What David had said—that complacency and ignorance was everywhere. Sometimes even in her: She would watch a report about Fire of Montana sweeping away salamanders and just for a moment it would feel like an interesting show, a series she could tune in to and then forget, that was happening far away, to other people. She walked down Third Avenue with her hands stuffed into her pockets against the cold, passing bright stores and bubbles of conversation, and salamanders were pouring down from the sky, falling like a plague of stars that no one else could see. She felt disassociated from the human race. She felt like she’d never left Fornina Sirius, a trillion miles away. Like the most important part of her was still out there, with her fallen brothers and sisters, who’d seen the enemy and learned its horror. She felt like she might never make it home.

  * * *

  —

  Out of curiosity, she looked up the rest of the crew of Providence Five. The Weapons candidate, Paul Anders, she didn’t know. The Life candidate, though, was Talia Beanfield, whom she’d seen struggle toward the finish of a grueling pack run, then return to help those behind. Afterward, Beanfield had sat with a cadet who’d recorded a disqualifying time, genuine grief written across her features. She would make a good Life officer, Jolene thought. For a few days, she began to feel that Nettle’s suggestion might not be completely preposterous; maybe there was a set of circumstances in which she would consider going back out. The idea was curiously exhilarating. David picked up on her good mood and, on the spur of the moment, suggested they go away. They rented a cabin in western Massachusetts where they woke to bird calls and explored red gums and pulled wicker chairs together on a porch to watch the sunset and talk about small things that didn’t matter. In the mornings, he made eggs. It was the closest she’d felt to him since she left. She hadn’t given herself the choice, she realized. She had felt, on some level, compelled to stay and heal and become a good wife, but she couldn’t do that unless it was truly voluntary. Only by walking to the edge of leaving her life with David could she discover that she didn’t want to.

  “You’re happy,” he said, on the return trip.

  “Yes,” she said. “I made a decision.”

  “A good one?”

  She nodded, and he smiled and didn’t press, as always. She would like to have a baby with this man, she thought. It had been one of their plans and then she had gone away and they’d not discussed it since. She would like to discuss it.

  She had to leave for Camp Zero the next day, and daydreamed as the aircraft skipped over snow and ice. She’d never felt a part of this place but was now an outright fraud, returning empty salutes, mouthing meaningless ranks. She passed three days in reviews and meetings, her mind already on the shuttle home. And then in line at the mess hall there was shouting and flying trays and two men throwing punches. The shorter of the two gained ascendancy and drove the taller man to the floor, then fell on him to continue the assault before being dragged away by others.

  “Who is that?” she asked a neat, clipped Life candidate in line behind her. Because that was not cool, carrying on the fight after he’d already won. That was no way for a candidate to behave.

  The girl’s pencil-thin eyebrows rose. “That’s Paul Anders, sir.” Her tone implied surprise that Jolene didn’t already know. As it happened, she recognized the name: Anders was the Providence Five Weapons Officer. That night, out of curiosity, she pulled the tape from his postincident interview, the vision following her around her quarters as she brushed her teeth. An unimpressed NCO asked Anders to explain why, exactly, he’d felt the need to assault a fellow candidate, and why he shouldn’t be discharged on the spot. Anders’s answers were spectacularly unimpressive, and Jolene wondered again about the AI that selected these crews. How bizarre did its choices need to be before people stopped ascribing them to advanced intelligence and realized it was simply broken? she wondered.

  “Your brothers gave their lives at Fornina Sirius,” said the NCO, and she stopped, because she hadn’t known that. “How do you think they’d feel about your conduct today?”

  “I reckon they’d understand,” Anders said. His demeanor was cocky, as if he didn’t realize how much trouble he was in, or didn’t care.

  “I disagree,” said the NCO.

  “Well, let me tell you something about my brothers,” Anders said, and leaned across the table. “They taught me that when you get hurt, the only way to make it stop is to go find whoever gave it to you and give it back.”

  She stared at him in dismay. His words were a knife in her heart. Just like that, she knew. She was going back out. And she was taking Paul Anders with her.

  11

  [Anders]

  THE SURFACE

  He coughed. Around him, the jetpod was battered and deformed and on fire. Someone had him by the shoulders. He jerked and twisted but it was only the harness.

  Beanfield lolled beside him, half-naked and caked with soot. She looked dead. He turned away. Flames crackled. His sense of direction was wrong. He was looking into the nose of the jet, which was filling with thick curls of winding black smoke, but it felt like up, not forward. Down was behind and a metric fuckton of gravity was trying to usher him in that direction. They had ditched, then. He hoped he hadn’t killed Beanfield. He looked at her. “Beanfield,” he said. She didn’t respond.

  He wrestled free of his harness to look for Jackson. Below was a blanket of smoke and crackling fire. Beneath that was a sound: gloop, gloop. He didn’t know what that meant. But it wasn’t good. He considered moving Beanfield, but it was probably safest to stay above the smoke. That was a strange thing about the smoke: It wasn’t rising. It was low smoke. He eyed it. Jackson had gone to the rear, to that exact area. He hadn’t seen her since they’d sideswiped a hive and tumbled through atmosphere. That had opened up a lot of holes in the jet. There was a good chance Jackson had exited mid-descent.

  He felt Beanfield’s neck for a pulse. He squeezed her chin and shook her head back and forth until she groaned. Her eyelids fluttered. So she wasn’t dead. That was good.

  Th
e smoke was closer. It was rising, eating away at the room he had. The back end of the jet was badly breached, he figured; possibly the whole fucking thing was gone altogether. They were holed and sinking. That was the gloop, gloop sound: liquid coming in.

  He felt for the lightning gun but couldn’t find it. He didn’t know why he might need a gun, but he wanted it badly and groped around near where he’d stowed it. When his fingers closed on its grip, everything immediately felt better. He hauled it out and slung its strap over his shoulder. He began to extract Beanfield from the harness, but she weighed a ton and he struggled for leverage. Smoke blurred his eyes. The gun on his back clunked against something: his survival core. He’d long lived in fear of that fucking thing deploying with no warning, springing wet plastic around him, trapping his face, but he would need it now, if he was going to jump into that mess of flame and liquid and survive. Then he looked at Beanfield. She didn’t have a survival core. He’d left hers in Medical, on the ship.

  “Beanfield?” he said. “We’ve got a problem.”

  He was unstrapping his own core when the smoke below heaved and something came out of it. It was Jackson, her head bulbous, her body glistening. She was encased in a thin suit with a boxy little helmet: Her core had deployed.

  She pulled herself toward him one rung at a time, fighting the gravity. “What are you doing?” she said. “Put your core back on.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  She yanked open a locker and pulled an EV suit from it. Anders had forgotten that the jet contained stuff. Jackson had been scavenging: She already had a matter converter strapped to her back and supply belts at her waist. When she reached him, she flopped the EV suit onto a harness. “We’re sinking fast. Can you take Beanfield?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll be right behind you. But the liquid’s dense. If we get separated, find each other on ping.”

  He began to feed Beanfield into the EV suit, dressing her for the second time that day. By the time he’d finished, water was lapping at the harness’s lower straps. Or not water: a thick black liquid that smelled like death. He fixed the EV helmet onto Beanfield’s head and peered at her face. He was a little jealous of her right now. Not only did she get the good suit, the one with the bigger helmet, but she got to do this unconscious. He heaved her out of the harness. He eyed the roiling blackness below. Dense liquid, Jackson had said. It was going to squeeze him like a bitch.