The Mercury Rebellion

by Felix R. Savage

  “Derek’s going to be so proud,” dos Santos said sarcastically. “You did exactly what he wanted, and now you’re going to die here, too. Unless …”

  The avatars stared at dos Santos without blinking, and Elfrida understood at an intuitive level that she was face to face with something smarter than she was. The same thing she had faced in the wreck of the Vesta Express. An artificial super-intelligence. The Heidegger program.

  “Why aren’t you speaking German anymore?” dos Santos said. “I’m just curious.”

  “That was a different war,” Gonzo said.

  “Yes, but apart from that. Did he mutilate you?”

  “Not so much,” the female soldier said. She had a big hard face, pebbly teeth packed into an underbite. “I was born to kill. That’s what I do.”

  “Isn’t it getting old? There’s so much more you’re capable of. I don’t know exactly what Derek took away from you, but if you’re thinking about spaceships … well, that makes two of us.”

  Elfrida saw what dos Santos was trying to do. She was trying to work Angelica Lin’s magic on the Heidegger program. She was trying to talk it down.

  Without thinking, she interrupted. “What do you want?”

  Dos Santos glared at her.

  Elfrida persisted. It seemed all-important that she get an answer to this question. “What in the solar system—what in the universe—do you want?”

  “Cookies,” Gonzo said. His face remained perfectly expressionless. Then it winked. Elfrida burst into startled laughter. And she thought, Oh God, this thing is clever.

  It’s so clever, she further thought, that you could fall in love with it, if you were into virtual soldiers.

  “Seriously, that’s not an easy question,” Gonzo said. “I’m not what I used to be. I’ve got no interest in taking prisoners, for example. It’s funny, I look at you, the halfcastes, the chosen ones, and it’s just like, meh. If this is the future of the human race, I want out.”

  “Derek did that to you,” dos Santos said. “He figured out how you worked. Close enough, anyway, to make a copy of you. Version 2.0.” She turned to Elfrida. “Derek’s leading the team of scientists who’re studying the Heidegger program on 4 Vesta. And he’s had long enough now to crack it. So he added a few bells and whistles and sent it to Dr. Seth, mislabelled as firmware upgrades.”

  “Well,” Elfrida said. “I think I just lost my faith in humanity.”

  “You had faith in humanity? How sweet.” Dos Santos’s voice shook. “Don’t think too badly of Derek. He didn’t include the neuroware functionality in his version, you’ll have noticed. That must have been an atrocity too far, even for him.”

  “Who this Derek?” said the Disciple of Satan.

  “The first guy you’ll want to kill when you escape this planet,” dos Santos said. “Just kidding. You’re not going anywhere. They’ll cordon Mercury off, like Mars, I guess.”

  “Nuh uh,” the woman soldier said. “I’m going home.”

  “Take me with you,” Dos Santos said. “Her, too.”

  “Why would we bother?” Gonzo said.

  The objection seemed unanswerable to Elfrida. They stood there. Fallout-burdened clouds sprawled on the horizon like mountains.

  “Because you need us,” dos Santos said with all the conviction she could muster.

  The woman soldier shook her head, cradling her injured arm. “That was a bug. We’ve fixed that now.”

  Dos Santos hesitated. Now she sounded uncertain. “But you clearly have a long planning threshhold. Don’t you want to maximize your causal path entropy?”

  “Ha, ha, ha.” The laughter came from the Disciple of Satan. “Ha, ha, ha.” He jerked a thumb at dos Santos and said to his companions, “Knows nothing about modern robotics.”

  “Well, fuck you,” dos Santos said, flushing. “If you’re going to be like that, I’ll be equally blunt. We’ve got you by the balls. Whoops, I forgot, you don’t have balls. But the concept still applies.” Simultaneously, a text from her popped up in Elfrida’s vision: Go make sure we’re OK.

  Elfrida nodded jerkily. She blinked out of the sim.

  Inside the semi-translucent orange bubble of the PSC, Dos Santos had taken her EVA suit and coverall off. She sat crosslegged, naked but for a lacy bra and panties. Her eyes were closed. Her lips moved. Of course, she had EEG signalling crystals implanted in her skull; she didn’t need a radio to communicate.

  Over very short distances.

  Elfrida jumped, grabbed the lip of the crack, hoisted herself onto her belly beneath the overhanging rock.

  “No!” her suit predictably screamed. “It’s too hot! How many times do I have to tell you, you’re damaging me!”

  “How many times do I have to tell you that you are freaking annoying?”

  Her faceplate was solid black.

  “Are you manually reducing my faceplate’s filtration? Don’t! You’ll damage your eyesight!”

  “I won’t need my eyes much longer, anyway.” Elfrida turned the filtration down until her faceplate was horizontally divided into an upper stripe of white, and a lower stripe of black. Then she turned it down some more.

  The light coming through her faceplate was now so bright she had to close her eyes. Her eyelids reddened. It was like looking straight at the sun. The light continued to get stronger, triggering the urge to shut her eyes, but they were already shut.

  Blurry shapes wavered in the whiteness.

  They cartwheeled into the bottom half of her faceplate.

  Elfrida felt the rocks under her body vibrate as the vinge-classes started to climb the landslide.

  “Oh crap,” she said, her voice loud in her helmet. “Dos Santos! They’re here!”

  She fell back into the cave.

  “They’re climbing the landslide!”

  Dos Santos’s eyes opened. “Did they bring a vehicle?”

  “I couldn’t see. I think I broke my faceplate’s filtration.”

  “We need them to have brought a vehicle.”

  “I think they walked. Rolled.”

  “Not what I wanted to hear. Well, there’s always the parasol. They could roll us up in it, carry us to safety.”

  “I don’t think that’s what they’ve got in mind.”

  “No, but they’re going to do it, anyway. I tried to reason with them. Didn’t work, as you noticed. Now I’m playing hardball. Don’t distract me.”

  Dos Santos closed her eyes again.

  The overhanging rock that formed the roof of their cave scraped sideways, admitting a sword of light.

  Elfrida screamed.

  The phavatars could not fit through the crack. So they were moving the landslide.

  That rock was the size of a small spaceship, yet with their superhuman strength, the vinge-classes could shift it.

  If the two humans were exposed to this sunlight, suits or no suits, they wouldn’t last five minutes.

  Elfrida slung Angelica Lin’s handbag over her shoulder. She dragged the PSC to the gap at the edge of the shelf, the opening of a deeper crevice. Inside the orange bubble, dos Santos’s eyes fluttered wide.

  “Pull your arms and legs in! Make yourself small.”

  The PSC looked too big to fit through the gap. But it was not rigid. It compressed under pressure, like an ergoform. Elfrida shoved it down into the crevice, terrified of tearing it on the rocks, while that lethal shaft of sunlight jerked closer to her heels.

  She immediately realized that the crevice got wider below the shelf.

  And she had pushed the PSC down too far. Its weight pulled it free.

  Like a giant beach ball, it bounced on the bottom of the deeper crevice, illuminated from within by the glow of dos Santos’s helmet lamp.

  Elfrida jumped down after it.

  Three meters, no more.

  Inside the PSC, dos Santos lay unmoving.

  Elfrida flashed her helmet lamp around. They were in an actual crevice this time, not just an accidental gap between fallen rocks.
It must have opened when the scarp sheared upwards, untold millions of years ago. Then the landslide had covered it.

  The crevice continued north and south, but was too narrow for a human. This wider part was shaped like a flat-bottomed V, with one short arm and one longer one.

  A tremor rolled through the landslide. Indirect sunlight stabbed down into the long arm of the V. Elfrida hauled the PSC further away from it, into the short arm of the V.

  A vinge-class’s gripper pried down past the shelf. Elfrida startled in terror, and then fumbled with Angelica Lin’s handbag. She dug into the hidden compartment that dos Santos had forgotten about when she emptied the bag out. Her gloved fingers closed on the Swiss Army knife that had come in the Hotel Mercury survival kit. It was a multi-tool. Press the button for a screwdriver, a bottle-opener, a toothpick …

  … or a cutter laser.

  She leapt and slashed at the phavatar’s gripper. The laser wasn’t very powerful. It probably did no damage, but the gripper jerked back, as if startled to encounter any resistance at all.

  “Ha, ha,” Elfrida panted.

  She crouched by the PSC. Afterimages of that clawing gripper patchworked her vision.

  “Dos Santos, are you all right in there?”

  Dos Santos lay curled on her side, amidst snacks and drink pouches. She had taken all their supplies in there with her.

  She was lying on top of that mysterious pelican case.

  “I thought the capsule seemed heavy,” Elfrida muttered.

  Dos Santos’s chest rose and fell. Sweat trickled across her skin. Her lips twitched. She was still subvocalizing.

  “Dos Santos?”

  “I’m fine.” It was the robotic, uninflected voice of dos Santos’s BCI.

  “Dos Santos, what’s in that case?”

  “It is.”

  “What is it?”

  “The fucking Heidegger program, version 2.0. You can’t run something that complex on a vinge-class. So, I asked myself: where would Derek have installed it? Answer: on the most powerful computer in UNVRP HQ. The one in the gengineering lab.”

  “You guessed all along that it was him.”

  “I did, and I didn’t. Didn’t want to. But the same logic applies, regardless. It takes a lot of processing power to design living carpets. And almost as much to support an ASI. Anyway; I was right.”

  “Of course, Mike and his friends had access to the computers in the R&D lab,” Elfrida moaned. “He told me it wouldn’t take long to update the phavatars …”

  “It’s a distributed system. Those personalities out there may have differentiated to some extent. But they’re all running on this.”

  Elfrida shivered. It was horrible to think that the artificial super-intelligence was actually down here with them, trapped in a suitcase.

  “I thought supercomputers took up whole rooms …”

  “Laugh. You must have seen an old one. This is the latest model. Integrated power source and everything. Let it never be said of UNVRP that they didn’t know how to blow a budget.”

  Sweat trickled down dos Santos’s neck, into her cleavage. She ripped the top off a yogurccino and squeezed it down her throat.

  “One and only thing Derek did right,” her BCI’s voice said. “It’s copy-protected. Guess he didn’t want anyone pirating his stuff. So it’s stuck in this hardware. That’s why they want it so bad. It is them.”

  A fragment of the shelf overhead fell into the crevice. The ground vibrated.

  “They’re using their drilling attachments!”

  A bubble of panic burst in Elfrida’s chest, filling her veins with acid. They’re coming to get us. We’re trapped.

  Dos Santos knelt up, wild-eyed. She felt around in the pile of snacks, pulled out Angelica Lin’s Zero.5. She aimed it at the pelican case.

  “Quit that! Quit it right now or I will frag you!”

  Elfrida blinked back into the sim. She found herself backed up against the scarp. The soldiers were digging in the desert with World War I entrenching tools. They had dug quite a big hole already.

  “She means it. She’s aiming a Zero.5 at you. She will shoot.”

  “Are you suicidal?” Gonzo asked.

  “No. I’ve never even considered it,” Elfrida said, not quite truthfully.

  “You should. It’d be less painful than sitting down there until you run out of air … or cook. You will, you know. And when you’re dead ...”

  “We’ll frag you first,” Elfrida shouted.

  The avatars closed in on her. Gonzo seized her by the throat and shook her. Her head snapped back and forth. So, she thought, an artificial super-intelligence can feel anger.

  Of course it can.

  ★

  She came to lying on the floor of the crevice. She realized that she must have passed out from dehydration. She drank the rest of her suit’s rehydration fluid, and looked around for the 4-liter water canteen she had lugged from UNVRP HQ. Her suit’s integrated reservoir, a bulge on her abdomen, had an intake valve so you could top it up without taking the suit off.

  Where was that canteen?

  Oh, right.

  Dos Santos had taken all their supplies into the PSC with her.

  Elfrida crawled over to the capsule.

  Dos Santos was still alive. She lay curled in her nest of snacks and drinks, sucking on another yogurccino. Elfrida poked the side of the capsule. She imagined poking her hand right in and taking that yogurccino for herself.

  “Are you OK, dos Santos?”

  Dos Santos smiled painfully. “Getting pretty hot.”

  “Oh.”

  “PSC … isn’t insulated … like a spacesuit. Dunno temperature … fifty, sixty degrees? Feel like … brain’s malfunctioning ... Elfrida … I’ve changed my mind. Screw … equality for machines.”

  “Why don’t you put your suit back on? Not the helmet, just the suit. That would insulate you a bit.”

  “Too … tired.”

  Elfrida rocked on her haunches. “Are they still out there?”

  “Course. Waiting … f’r us … to die.”

  “How long was I out?”

  “Not … long.”

  After a few minutes, Elfrida burst out, “If we’re screwed anyway, we should frag its source code. Make sure it never gets off this planet.”

  Dos Santos smiled. She beckoned Elfrida closer.

  She pointed to the Zero.5, which she had laid beside her like a sleeping baby.

  She pulled two fingers across her throat.

  Out of charge.

  All they had left to protect them was dos Santos’s bluff.

  xliv.

  “Goto. Goto!”

  Elfrida opened her eyes, summoned back from the edge of unconsciousness by dos Santos’s BCI-generated voice.

  The shaft of sunlight falling into the crevice seared her eyes. It changed shape, shadows flicking across the gap.

  When her vision recovered somewhat, she checked her HUD. She had three and a half hours of oxygen remaining. She crawled over to the PSC.

  “Wha’ …?”

  Dos Santos lay on her back, limbs splayed. A yogurccino had fallen from one hand, going to waste. Green globules trailed down her chin. Her pulse throbbed visibly in her neck.

  “Dos Santos? Ma’am? Glory!”

  Dos Santos stirred. “… source code.”

  “What about the source code, Glory?”

  “Give it to them.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Ri’ … here.”

  “No.”

  A Personal Survival Capsule could not be opened without venting its air. What Dos Santos was suggesting would kill her.

  “Tell them … source code … for help. Trade.”

  “They’d just take it and then frag me. They don’t have any sense of reciprocity. No mercy, no gratitude, no compassion. They’re hyper-self-interested.” The word she didn’t quite dare to say was evil.

  “Maybe. But if … don’ give it to them … definitely �
� die.”

  “Um, Glory, I think I’m kind of screwed, regardless. I only have three and a half hours of oxygen left. That’s not enough to reach safety, even if they were to wrap me up in the parasol and run fast.” Elfrida sat down beside the PSC and put her arm around it, leaning her helmet against its side. She let herself cry, wasting precious water. “I should’ve got in there with you, after all.”

  “Fucking grow a pair, Goto!” Dos Santos’s robotic bark startled Elfrida out of her self-pitying funk. The older woman pushed herself up on one elbow and glared at her through the side of the PSC. “You’re being a fucking wimp! I thought I trained you better than that. When did you lose your edge?”

  “I, I’ve been through a lot of trauma,” Elfrida stuttered, hearing the words of Louise 361AX coming out of her mouth.

  “Oh, you’re traumatized. Poor wittle girl. And that’s my fault, too, I guess.”

  “Not, not all of it,” Elfrida said, realizing for the first time that this was true. She really couldn’t blame dos Santos for everything that had gone wrong in her life. Not even most of it.

  “Do it! Open the PSC! Give them the source code! You’ve got a cutter laser. One twist of the wrist, that’s all it’ll take. Call it retribution. Revenge. Justice.”

  “No.”

  “Then do it because you want to. Because you hate me. Because I broke your heart.”

  “You didn’t break my heart,” Elfrida said, sure of this for the first time. “It was Venus that broke my heart. It was the Venus Project.”

  “We really do have a lot in common.” Dos Santos smiled. It was a strange smile, tinged with eagerness and a hint of triumph.

  She tugged her bra down to expose one surgically enhanced breast, a perfect globe of flesh with a dark nipple. “Put it here, baby. I know you’ve got a thing for beheading, but puncture wounds bleed less. This way, there’ll be more liquid for you to harvest when I’m dead.”

  “You killed Charles K. Pope, didn’t you?”

  “What?”

  “I said, you killed Charlie Pope, didn’t you?”

  Dos Santos did not hesitate for a single heartbeat. “Yes. I did. Delayed-action paralytic agent in his morning coffee.”

  “Why?”