by Guy Haley
Sand looked to Corrigan. “You leave on your own without these people’s children and I swear to Mary, mother of God, I’ll shoot you myself,” he said, loud enough for only her to hear.
She bit her lip. Nodded. “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry.” She was bent half over, her hands out, placating, every fibre screaming at her to climb down the ladder. She was afraid for herself. The noise of the ship rose to a roar as it drove down through exosphere and clipped the outer edges of the thermosphere. Within minutes, the vessel would be into the lower reaches of wherever the hell they were’s atmosphere and shake itself to pieces. She had to get off now. She caught the eyes of the people. They’d stopped fighting. Acceptance was setting in; there was nothing they could do. She had never seen anything like it. Once the fighters gave in, the ones who’d knife you to survive, the will to do anything went from them all.
Except from the parents. The faces of the parents were the worst.
She thought quickly. “Okay! Okay! I can take five children, only five! I’m sorry.”
There was a loud crash from outside. The Mickiewicz was not designed to withstand atmospheric entry. The crowd started, all of them acting in concert now, their individuality subsumed into the mass. Sheep to the slaughter.
“How many if I stay?” said Corrigan.
“What...?”
“Dammit, listen! How many can you take if I stay?”
“How much do you weigh?”
“What?”
“The robots, the fucking robots push the mass tolerance of the shuttle up to the max.”
“Ditch them!”
“I can’t get rid of them until I’m clear of the ship and by then it’d be too late!”she shouted, then something came across her face. “How much do you weigh?”
“Eighty kilos.”
She did a quick calculation. “I can take two, three more... Two to a seat, maybe, maybe.”
“Four seats? Then take eight.” Corrigan moved away from the lip of the shuttle door. “I’m staying! Eight children can go, eight!”
There was renewed shoving as the urge to protect their offspring overflowed in the parents in the crowd. Sand did a count in the part of her mind not frantically calculating how much longer she had left. There were nine kids there. Nine.
“What are you waiting for?” he shouted. “Get in the cockpit! Get in now!”
Sand stared at him, then slid down the ladder. Corrigan had one of the fathers bundle the children into the access hatch. Sand pulled them roughly down into the cockpit, scared kids who wailed and could barely move. “Get in the chairs,” she shouted. “No! Not that one! Little ones on big ones’ knees. Buckle yourselves in, and hold on fucking tight.”
“That’s seven!” shouted Corrigan down the hatch. A pair of children, clutching their parents’ hands, stood by him, peering down, moon faces with terror-wide eyes. “Two left.”
The cockpit was jammed full. The mass ratio was all off. The cargo she carried was about as much as the Lublin could take. The planet down there pulled well over Earth average. She tried to do the sums, but her inChip would not co-operate and the numbers stuck in her head. She was pushing it as she was. She couldn’t get three per seat. She couldn’t. “I can’t take two!” yelled Sand. “There’s no room!”
The boy and a girl waited to be chosen. Frantic parental hands smoothed hair and patted clothes, as if presenting them for an award. The children seemed impassive; the parents wept loudly. “Take my son! Take my son!” wailed the boy’s mother.
“No! Diana, take Diana!” shouted a father. “She’s all I have.”
This went on: the crowd, energised by this nucleus of woe, were growing restive again. She heard Corrigan shoot off another burst.
“I have to get the fuck off this ship now, Corrigan, choose!”
He looked down at her, helpless. The ship bucked, no longer rotating. They were coming out of the microgravity environment. Hankinson must have put the Mickiewicz belly down to save them from shear.
“Choose!”
The boy made the decision for him. He looked calmly to his mother. “I’m staying here. They have my sister. I’ll stay with you, mama. I’ll stay with you.”
The woman’s face crumpled. Diana’s father lost no time in pushing his daughter downwards at Sand. Thanks spilled from him as readily as tears. The wailing of the woman whose son had decided to stay was terrifying. Sand grabbed the girl, and shoved her onto the lap of an older boy.
She stepped toward her chair. The people still on deck made fearful, inarticulate noises.
She paused. “Fuck! Bridge, Bridge, come in!”
“This is traffic control, we’re a little busy here right now, Sand. Get the hell off.”
“I’ve a hundred passengers crowding the deck. They’ve backed off. Give me a way out for them.”
A pause.
“Goddammit!”
“Tell them to board their passenger pods through cargo service hatches nineteen and twenty seven. We’ll eject them. Order the Kraków and Gdańsk to circle back and pick them up once it’s safe to do so.”
“There’s not enough room!”
“Tell the others to make their way to the shield. There’ll be room for some on the escape pods.”
“What about the crew? What about you, control?”
“Good flying, Sand.”
The voice cut out.
Sand’s hand hovered over the docking clamp release; she snatched it back.
“Fuck!” She surprised herself with her vehemence. She hauled herself up the ladder. The ship was shaking. People were screaming. She reached the top, and shoved Corrigan to the side. “Listen!” she shouted. It was hard to make herself heard over the noise. “Goddammit, listen to me!” Her voice broke, tears streaming down her face. She was not sure for whom she cried: them, or herself. They could not hear her. She wiped at the tears with her forearm, and jabbed at the ship’s external speaker system through her inChip. Her voice rang out in the docking bay. “Listen! Get into the passenger pods. Go in through service hatches nineteen and twenty seven. Captain Posth is going to jettison the hibernation decks and the remaining cargo. They’ll inform the Gdańsk and the Kraków to pick you up first. It’s a small chance, but it’s the only one you’ve got. Any of you feeling fit, get up front, there’ll be space for more on the crew evacuation pods.”
The ship screamed as its mass shifted. The crowd were unrooted from the floor.
Corrigan gave her a small smile and a nod. “Thank you,” he said. “Now get out of here.” He turned to the crowd, brandishing his weapon. “Back!” he shouted, “Back!”
She went hand over hand down the ladder, coming off it as the ship lurched, banging painfully into the ladder tube.
“Get back!” The sound of gunfire. “Get b –”
Corrigan’s words were cut off as the top hatch popped into place, and the seal hissed closed.
Sand threw herself into her flight chair and strapped herself in, trying to ignore the terrified children in the co-pilot’s seat next to her. No time for flight checks.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” she said as she flicked on the flight systems.
“You’re swearing!” came a small voice.
“Yeah?” said Sand. The younger children cried. The older ones tried to calm them. The edges of the outer bay glowed. “If you were flying this fucking joyride you’d be swearing too. Now hold on, this is going to be hairy.” She touched Roosevelt for luck.
The docking clamps disengaged. She would not be thrown free this time, with the rotation stilled. She punched the ventral thruster. Full blast, outgassing all her CO2 stock in one go. She had to get clear of the ship. The Lublin leapt from the spine of the Mickiewicz, clipping the edge of the bay as it went and tumbling into a spin.
Sand wrestled with the control stick like it was a python. The whole thing was fly by wire, but it had the mother of all feedback built into it, and she was fighting the air of an entire planet.
The shuttle tumble
d. The children screamed. She was in a spin. If she couldn’t pull them out of it, they’d get into thicker air and burn out. She’d never flown like this. In her idler days trucking back from the belt, supervising the machines that did the real flying from the mine to the Lagrange refineries, she’d fantasised about real piloting, about being faced by a crisis where she could prove herself. Now she had what she’d wished for, and how.
She fired the retros all down the starboard of the ship, desperate to arrest its yaw. The little vessel creaked in protest, the altimeter ticked down in a blur. The gees racked up as they accelerated; Sand’s head pounded, her vision retreated to a point at the end of the tunnel. It was just her and the stick. She pulled on it so hard she thought she’d break it. She stopped trying to pull the nose up and pointed it right down, trying to use the drag of the increasingly dense air to stabilise her.
The ship bucked, and she was flying level. She yanked back hard, pulling the Lublin out of a steep dive. She had to get its back end to present to the atmosphere, get the nose out of the heat.
She did it, and screamed.
There was the Mickiewicz, a great worm of a thing aglow with fire. Debris broke from it, spinning away. Posth was jettisoning the cargo, and containers were shooting off the rear of the cargo rails like bullets. The mass-reactive cap billowed steam. The vessel was going down in a wreath of flames, and she was headed right at it.
Sand yanked the stick sharply left, thrusters sending the Lublin slewing. She made it over the top without being struck, more by luck than design.
“Oh, my God.”
The hibernation decks blew from the Mickiewicz. Starting at the stern and working their way toward the cap, each deck blasted away from the vessel, splitting into two semicircular segments. They were hardened for emergency landing, but a hot touchdown like this had not been planned for. Even in the worst scenarios, there was always time to evacuate. No-one envisaged the ship driving itself into the ground.
The segments tumbled like so many petals from a burning flower. She watched as two of them smashed into each other, spilling their contents into the maelstrom and smearing themselves brightly across the sky.
She jetted away, try to keep clear. A few of the deck segments seemed to be okay, orienting themselves for a safe re-entry profile, but the majority were spinning out of control, fire tailing behind them.
Sand dodged one as it shot from its housing. She put all she had into the Sabres, burning their rocket fuel recklessly, accelerating past the segment. She jerked the ship around as another segment blasted out in front of her. The segment moved with deceptive majesty. She opened up the port Sabres full, let out her remaining manoeuvring gas stocks of the jets on that side, and slammed her foot onto the ventral jet pedal, but the CO2 in the ventral was all gone. She turned too slowly, inertia sending her in a wide curve right at the hibernation deck.
She reacted fast, slamming on dorsal thrust and ducked down. For a second she thought she’d missed it, just for a second.
The sound of the collision ripped through the ship. Sand was slammed into her restraints, and the few children still conscious cried out. Debris from her ship and the deck tumbled into space behind them. A cacophony of screaming and alarms filled the cockpit. Reality shifted, her blood and breath thundered. She was aware of her body in ways she never had been before. Her sense of self retreated until she became a set of skill-driven responses utterly dedicated to preserving the shell they inhabited.
She did not think; she flew.
The ship hadn’t picked up much momentum from the collision – she arrested the spin almost before it started – but so many of her systems were out. She hit the atmosphere barely in control.
Her mind, overclocked by the threat of extinction, seemed to exist without her, observing from outside as her animal body fought madly to save itself. She was aware of instruments registering dangerous hot spots on the hull skin where the shielding had been compromised, aware of the pain of acceleration pressing her back, aware of the strap cutting into her neck. Her body reacted accordingly, reversing thrust, bringing speed down, while the ship’s automated systems staged their own electronic struggles for survival, cooling and mending as best they could.
The atmosphere thickened, the wings extended, the engines switched mode. The port wing was damaged. Icons glared red and blared harshly at her – one of the four Sabres’ micropore intakes was fouled. She shut the engine down before it could explode.
Desert rushed up to meet her, eager to embrace the Lublin. Sand’s sense of time stretched, slowed further, her brain and body in overdrive. She brought the nose up. Deploy the gear: Yes? No? Options and scenarios fled through her, too quick to catch. She tried to bring landing gear down. In the atmosphere, the Lublin was ungainly, energy-hungry. The ground came closer and closer. She vented the Sabres down and back, twisting them halfway to their VTOL position. She extended the flaps, only for half the port wing to vibrate and rip free. The ship yawed.
The undamaged starboard wing clipped the ground first, kissing the top of a sinuous barchan in an explosion of sand. The Lublin leapt into the air, swooped down the slipface of the dune. The wing caught again, banging the belly of the craft into the ground and then up again like a stone skipping across a lake. Another impact, and the ship was down for good, slewing across the sand. The port landing wheel tore free, then the nose wheel, and the Lublin ploughed the desert prow first. Stone and sand battered the cockpit, and the windows shattered, spraying her and the children with glass and debris. Sand threw up her hands to cover her face as a dune loomed up in front of them. The Lublin slammed into it, and she was flung forward, cracking her head on her instruments as the vessel came to a sudden, final halt.
Sand passed out, the screams of dying children pursuing her into the black.
PART III
Desert
1 day after the crash
Barry Loan: ...and now we’d like to introduce our next guest. For generations mankind has been fascinated by the possibility of creating artificially intelligent beings. Mary Shelley started it with her novel Frankenstein. How is it, then, that nearly two centuries after the first computers were created, we see no such created minds among us? Are we getting closer to the advent of machine minds, or will they forever remain the domain of fiction? Professor Vikram Patel of the Bangalore Institute for Post-Human Sciences has been studying the formation of intelligence in non-natural systems. We’re delighted to have him with us today, in person no less. You’ve got some rather bad news for us, haven’t you Professor Patel?
Professor Vikram Patel: Well, I don’t know about bad news...
BL: Your latest study suggests that artificial intelligence is impossible.
VP [looks apologetic]: Impossible for now.
BL [earnest smile]: Why is that?
VP: We’ve been looking at advanced techniques involving biological brains for robotic units. It’s been apparent for a long time that computers cannot simulate intelligent thought. It is possible to create a facsimile of a personality within a digital environment, but it remains convincing only so long as its original parameters are not exceeded...
BL: Like asking something programmed as a receptionist to make a burger?
VP [crosses and uncrosses legs, coughs]: Well, ‘programmed’ is not the word, and the artificial beings we have currently in society can generalise that much at least... It is more akin to asking a well-trained sheep dog to become a rescue dog, with no additional training. It might try, but its efforts will be clumsy.
BL [taps at a tablet]: And how has your research into grown brains been going? They are grown, right?
VP: Yes, from stem cells collected from volunteers. From my team, actually...
BL [frowns questioningly]: So these grown brains, they also do not exhibit true intelligence?
VP [looks uncomfortable]: This is what we have found. Even when we grow a human brain from scratch, it does not function as one grown in a human body. Naturally, we have not
undertaken to create an entire brain, as that would be unethical, but our initial research indicates so.
BL: And this mirrors the work undertaken in China a few years back?
VP: To create a digital copy of an existing human brain. The simulation should have functioned, but it did not.
BL: Why?
VP: Nobody knows, but we are trying to find out. That is the beauty of science, after all.
BL: What do you think?
VP [folds hands on stomach]: Personally? I do not know. Perhaps there is something special about us that infuses the human mind with a higher consciousness. Maybe it is to do with the long maturation process, or – as I suspect – that the brain is more a reflection of its experiences and environment than an expression of its genes. The human brain is developing throughout childhood; we have such a long childhood precisely because we need time for our brains to develop. On the other hand, long-period digital simulations that have attempted to replicate this have led to nothing. Perhaps it is something else.
BL [gestures expansively, his face earnest]: A spiritual angle? The Catholic church is already citing your work as proof of the hand of God; that only an outside force can imbue us with our souls.
VP: I hesitate to call it that – to use the word soul – or to defer responsibility for our consciousness to a supernatural force, but some of my colleagues entertain the idea, certainly. Others are examining the idea that the brain is a receiver for consciousness manifest in higher planes of existence, but this is a fringe science and even more unlikely, in my opinion. The brain is incredibly complex, and I am not surprised we have not duplicated it. I doubt we ever will.
BL: You must have some idea if it’s possible...
VP: Sentience cannot be forced. It is my contention that it emerges from complex systems. We can’t make it; it either happens, or it does not. We could run a million simulations of the human brain that do not result in sentience, but the million and first might develop into a thinking creature. Do you see? We cannot command it to happen. No one can, not God or Prometheus or... I think intelligence’s mystery in itself is a cause for wonder enough without appealing to a higher authority. Don’t you think?