The shuttle was falling into its pre-planned descent, Rani keeping a close eye in case she needed to intervene. Lortisse had a presence in the shuttle performance system, but it was more out of habit than genuine worry. Lante appeared to be dozing, even as they came into contact with the upper atmosphere. Baltiel himself was staring at the images—views of Nod from the module, from the shuttle: a world of brown, black and red, far from the green-blue jewel of a terraformed New Earth.
A transmission came in from the Aegean and he looked at it, despite everything. What now? But it was gibberish, just strings of alphanumeric characters chopped up to look like language but devoid of meaning.
A practical joke? Because that was something on Senkovi’s file, one of his ways of impressing on lesser people just how clever he was, although this didn’t seem up to his usual standard. He sent a query back.
They were going for a shallow descent to save wear and tear on the shuttle as much as possible, but also so Baltiel could use the ventral cameras to get a new fly-by view of his domain. Below them was the obsidian expanse of the ocean. The wine-dark sea. Too high right now to see anything more, but they would get a good skim over the waves before they crossed past the coast.
“Hey, boss, no, all fine.” 8jsgjg r jg81 ufwytmv-i9r f “All under control here. All fine. How’s the flight?” kksn hu9 d i99t k.
“Disra, what the hell?” Abruptly there was a very uneasy feeling in the pit of Baltiel’s stomach because he was getting a lot of ghosting nonsense from the Aegean around Senkovi’s signal, multiple separate transmissions from the ship that manifested as sudden intrusions of nonsense audio shutting out the man’s voice channel.
“It’s… Look, boss, don’t panic. I’m going to have to turn it off and on again.”
I made the wrong call. He was in the Nod orbital’s only shuttle and it was committed to the approach now. There was no way he could go and help Senkovi. Although even if we were still sitting back up there in orbit, it’d take the best part of a year with the positions the planets are in right now. “Explain,” he demanded curtly.
“I’m having some system infiltration issues,” came Senkovi’s voice, trying and failing to be casual about it. “I…” hhs i4 gk; gg 8lubj2 “I need to restart the ship’s systems from scratch, boss. I’m really sorry. It’s a bit” n83.ljsg.n hgikkkd “screwed up.”
Baltiel’s insides were screwing themselves up, partly in worry, partly furious that somehow Senkovi had managed to piss on his moment of glory. “Explain,” he repeated, and then, looking at an initial analysis of the nonsense transmissions, “Are you being hacked?”
“No. No, no. Yes.” Senkovi’s delayed response sounded as though it was somehow funny, whilst simultaneously being horribly serious. “Look, I’m sending the others off on the shuttle, just in case things,” 9wks rj i934mmgpppphhhhheeelllohellohellowhatwhat “uh, just in case things go really badly, which they won’t, but it’s all a bit,” whatwhat95mg; hooqueryquery “you know, kind of… I’ve said that if things go really badly they should skip over to Nod and throw themselves on your mercy. Not their fault. All mine, okay?”
“Disra, just tell me what the hell!” Baltiel had already shouted over the man’s babble. The increasingly organized nature of the other signals was prickling the hairs on his neck. Has he kickstarted the ship into full AI or something?
“Victim of my own success,” came Senkovi into a sudden silence as the other transmissions cut off. “I’ve clamped down on bandwidth but I can’t keep them bottled up. I’m taking it all offline. All you need to know. Normal service will resume shortly.”
“That is not all I need to know!” Baltiel was trying to interrogate the Aegean but, between Senkovi trying to cover himself and whatever chaos was actually going on over there, he wasn’t getting a coherent picture. On the screens in front of him, the Nodan seascape was lost in the shuttle’s rushing progress, and now there was red desert below. According to his diagnostics there were half a dozen net presences in the Aegean’s system, weird undirected processes lurching around trying to access ship systems.
He’d thought his demand must have come too late, but Senkovi obviously caught it before flipping the switch. “All right, boss, here’s the lowdown,” came the reply. “I may have failed to contain my experimental subjects properly.”
“Explain.”
“I’ve been training them up, teaching them basic communications so they could interact with the equipment on Damascus. They’ll be useful. We’ll need them. Only they’re curious, right? It’s inbuilt with them, and I’ve been using the Rus-Califi viral catalyst to select for that, only I didn’t realize how quickly they’d catch on.”
In the midst of all the man’s justifications, Baltiel suddenly understood what Senkovi meant. “Disra, are you talking about your damned octopodes?”
“Boss, I am.” He sounded partly embarrassed, but also impressed with himself, too, or at least with his pets. “I taught them to access the system, play games, basic teaching stuff, and now they’re past my security and just, you know, poking around. Curious, like I said, only I can’t stop them and they’re screwing everything up. It’s all innocent, but… I made a bit of a monster, boss. Look, I’m suited up and everyone else is getting the fuck out on the shuttle. I’ll fix this.”
“Why aren’t you on the shuttle, Disra?”
“Boss, it’s my bad. I can sort it better from in here. There’s always something you have to go do by hand.”
“Use a remote. Disra, do you hear me?” Baltiel’s own shuttle was beginning its landing approach now. They were over the black and grey mottling of the salt marsh and a flash of white in the distance was the habitat.
“I’m suited up. I have independent power. All set, boss. Got to go.” Senkovi’s voice cracked at the end and Baltiel suddenly understood. His pets. Shutting the ship down was a death sentence for his precious octopodes and he wanted to be there for them, or maybe even save some of them. And probably he’d get killed, and Han and the rest would have to finish the terraforming without either Senkovi’s brilliance or his goddamn molluscs.
With that, Baltiel forced himself to let go. Senkovi had finally found a way to get out from Overall Command, and now neither Baltiel nor any other human agency could help him. It isn’t my problem, he decided. Not for want of trying, but he’s going to have to get out of it himself. He imagined the Aegean as if the ship was literally crawling with Senkovi’s rebellious progeny, monstrous cephalopods blobbering through the compartments waving angry tentacles. Of course, they would be in tanks somewhere, their intrusion purely virtual, and yet irresistible, circumventing everything Senkovi could throw up to keep them out. But then, when you’re designing an interface to let molluscs play computer games you probably don’t build in that much security.
Baltiel had a moment to consider how that was a sequence of words he’d never expected to be relevant in his life, and then they were landing, Rani hovering over the controls like a hawk in case the shuttle’s onboard got it wrong, and Baltiel already had a hand up to release his straps because, goddamn it, he was going to be first on the ground.
Amazing.
How quiet.
Almost worth it just for this.
But Senkovi didn’t really believe that. He couldn’t know about Baltiel’s inner child thoughts, but he himself was making a very similar comparison. Only, for him, his inner child had done a very bad thing indeed and, unlike all the other times, hadn’t been able to cover the evidence before being found out. Baltiel is going to have my hide as soon as he’s done playing Lewis and Clark.
Also like a child, some part of him was desperately casting about for some superior authority to blame. Someone should have told me not to. Except that he had worked very hard to abstract himself from any kind of oversight, even the distant watch that Baltiel could have kept over him. Senkovi had been absolutely convinced of the rightness of his own actions, and it had all been wholly amusing until it had become utterly fucked up. It
struck him, in a moment of wry self-reflection, that he was the whole terraforming programme in miniature, Kern and Baltiel and all of them. We get them to throw money and resources at us so we can go and be gods somewhere else, because when you were thirty light years from Earth, who was going to tell you to stop?
And now he was standing in a vast silent tomb of a ship, wearing a cumbersome space suit and knowing he had a remarkably long time before the computer system cleansed itself and bootstrapped itself back into being. Han, Poullister and Maylem were kicking back in the shuttle, anxiously waiting to hear from him. If he had been playing it by the book—insofar as this particular book existed—he should have been with them, doing everything remotely. By hand was better, though, especially as Salome had somehow accessed the remote channels and begun to use the machines as bonus limbs in her spirited attempts to dismantle the Aegean to find out what it was and whether she could eat it. Paul had always been Senkovi’s favourite student, meaning he had entirely missed how destructively smart Salome was. And that was not to mention Saul, Ruth, Methuselah (renamed from Peter after he got to ten years without showing signs of ageing), Jezebel and… well, Senkovi had worked quite hard to ensure that casual scrutiny from a distracted Baltiel did not pick up that he now had forty-three octopi on the staff register, all of them of Biblical nomenclature because of the original Paul, and because once he had Damascus and Nod past the censors he might as well stick with a theme. And because it would have annoyed some of the irritating fundamentalists back home had they ever heard about it, and Senkovi loved nothing more than amusing himself.
Forty-three octopodes as Baltiel would say, but Senkovi preferred the feel of the even more incorrect “octopi” on the tongue, and he was used to pleasing himself first and foremost.
And now he was learning just precisely why he had been considered a good second but only when careful Baltiel was there to hold his leash, because he had royally screwed up.
He had known from long before, from his pets back home, that octopi responded very badly to rigid Pavlovian training. They weren’t like rats or pigeons or dogs, who would do the same thing over and over until they had more food than they could eat. Instead, they were curious in a way even dogs weren’t, because evolution had gifted them with a profoundly complex toolkit for taking the world apart to see if there was a crab hiding under it. As I am bloody well now having cause to regret.
Senkovi had charged up every portable battery he could find, and now had a trolley of devices to get to the centre of the Aegean. The centre was where the gravity wasn’t, of course, and he had set up his labs there because the octopi got used to not caring much about up and down quickly enough. The Pacific striped octopus had always been his preferred test subject, just as it was his preferred pet. Unlike most of their relatives they were passably social and long-lived, the two major deficiencies that, in Senkovi’s opinion, octopus-kind had been cursed with. They were intellectually agile, too, but that was true across the octopus board. Senkovi’s personal theory was that the pressure of being in the middle of the food chain was an essential prerequisite for complex intelligence. Like humans (and like Portiid spiders, had he only known), octopuses had developed in a world where they were both hunter and hunted. Top predators, in Senkovi’s assessment, were an intellectual dead end.
He had bred several generations, each one further mediated by limited intervention by the Rus-Califi virus. That had been hard, but mostly because he had needed to be ruthless, and Senkovi was soft at heart, especially when it came to the objects of his obsession. The later generations had been markedly better at interacting with abstract devices and operating machinery, and then his lax experimental procedures had borne unexpected fruit. Most of the previous generation had still been around and in contact with his new enfants terrible, and they had started picking up the same behaviours, less directed, but still determinedly exploring the virtual space he gave them access to. The major challenge had been developing cephalopod-friendly interface devices, and Senkovi was aware that his own imagination had been the primary constraint with that. For creatures that were a boneless, infinitely mutable hand with independently sensing and thinking fingers, his pitiful controls were wasting most of their potential. One day they’ll design their own. But that was taking things too far. Or rather, it was stable door after bolting horse because things had already gone too far.
One of his pets had almost opened one of the airlocks before he had jumped in to stop it. Paul had been fighting him for control of the communications suite. Salome had flown wobbling drones through the compartments of the Aegean, opening and closing doors and attacking walls with the cutting torches. All just harmless fun, he assured himself, and yet they had reacted swiftly to his attempts to cut them off. He closed one virtual opening and they squeezed through another, multi-tasking in a way that he—and, eventually, the entire human crew—couldn’t match. In order for them to do the jobs he would need them for, he had been trying to get them to understand the idea of a virtual environment, somewhere that would be workspace, communications suite and interface if they could only perceive it as they did the physical space around them. He had watched generations simply fail, reacting to light and touch and changes of temperature, but stubbornly refusing to make the leap to that abstract level. And then, without him doing anything in particular, without any obvious prompt or warning, Salome was in the system, and the rest all followed, tank after tank of them teaching each other somehow. Abruptly they could all do the virtual exercises, but they weren’t content with that. They expanded their virtual presence as they would their physical one, reaching out to see where the space went, and there they encountered the ship’s systems. And the ship’s systems, of course, connected to the rest of the ship, the air-filled bit that he and the other humans lived in. He hadn’t considered that the bulk of the Aegean would be just a further extension of their online playground.
Senkovi and the others had worked for hours at damage control, finding that the invertebrate test subjects had grasped certain principles of the computer system with sufficient force that they could not be pried loose. A running battle between mammal and mollusc had raged, but the Aegean was a vast and complex beast and there were no convenient bottlenecks to stave off the invaders from inner space. The octopi had the same untethered access as the human crew, and they were playfully pulling everything apart.
He lowered his crate of toys towards the ship’s centre-line until it was just drifting, then he followed after it. The readouts from his HUD told him that the temperature here was dropping, but he had evacuated the space around the tanks so that their heat would take longer to diffuse outwards. This, of course, was the main reason he had stayed behind, out of contact with the human race. He was going to try and save his pets, and he didn’t want Han and the others to laugh at him, to recast him from eccentric to pathetic. But, just like the dog lover who goes back into the burning building to save little Floofums, he was going to try and keep some of his experimental subjects alive until the ship came back online.
Baltiel will want them all dead, he knew, but he could handle Baltiel. He would go against Baltiel if he had to, a full-on war in heaven of angry messages cast across the void.
The nearest tank had shattered, as had the next two. The denizens had, like Senkovi, been too clever for their own good and found some physical egress, and now he’d killed them by evacuating the chamber. He hardened his heart and pushed on until he found one that was intact. His suit lamps shone in, and he saw motion inside, not fleeing the light but approaching it, because the octopi had learned to associate light with entertainment, and the sudden dark and quiet must be profoundly disconcerting for them.
“Hi, Salome.” His voice was loud in his own ears. An alien eye stared at him from within the tank, the skin around it ruffled into angry spikes, awash with red and black pigment as Salome told him precisely what she felt about being denied net access. Senkovi manhandled a heating unit out of the crate and attached it to
the tank side. With luck it would keep the water viable until the system was back up. Then he went to the water pump and fumblingly installed a battery unit to keep circulation going, independent of the ship’s own mechanisms. Again, it was a stopgap measure. He went on to the next tank.
He wished he could talk to Han, but he’d cut himself off entirely from their shuttle. He hadn’t wanted to be bothered by their constant enquiries after his safety. He was Disra Senkovi, the man who was an island. Right now he felt his shores eroding. He wanted them to ask, so that he could be aloof and not answer. Floating in the dark in the bowels of a dead ship, surrounded by the living and the dead of his mollusc pets, it was a terrible time for self-knowledge to kick in. There was nobody but the octopi, though, and he felt they were judging him. He was their higher power, after all, who should have ensured they didn’t steal so much fire from heaven that they ended up burning everything to the ground.
He went from tank to tank, restoring warmth and circulation wherever he found live contents. At least a third were already non-viable, either because of the fatal ingenuity of the occupants or because he was too slow. He had thought of the ship as a tomb before, and now it was.
And still the ship was restoring its system, the naive curiosity of the octopi purged from it, and he had hours yet before he could even get a progress report. His own suit was still toasty, but eventually the ship’s warmth would start to leach away and he would learn if he had enough batteries to overcome his own hubris. He settled down beside Paul’s tank, anchored himself there and turned off his lamps to conserve power.
Children of Ruin Page 5