They ate at a bistro with napkins folded into flowers on the tables. Horse carriages clip-clopped along the street. Elfrida had lost track of the seasons, and the warmth of October heightened her disorientation. She kept looking up at the sun, her gaze drawn irresistibly to its radiant orb. She was eating a salad, in obedience to protocol. It tasted of toilet paper, and would later emerge from her phavatar’s disposal hatch in the form of shrink-wrapped pellets for easy recycling.
“I’m about sixty percent persuaded by Kate’s arguments,” Lorna said, smiling at the woman from MIT. “In the light of our shared research goals, I know I shouldn’t say this, but it looks like a blessing in disguise. Our very own mini-PLAN to poke and prod! Know your enemy, as they say.”
“Thank you, Derek,” said Kate from MIT, forking up crème brulée. “As to the prudential concerns, those can easily be addressed by full-spectrum signal jamming.”
Elfrida could see which way the meeting was going. She broke off from the group on their way back to the hotel where the out-of-towners were staying. She had never been to Toronto before. Turning at random through unfamiliar streets, she came to a church and went in. Her sense of utter helplessness led her to a pew, where she lowered her phavatar onto its knees.
“Help me,” she whispered. “Help me.”
She presently became aware of someone kneeling beside her. She didn’t want to raise her forehead from her fists in case it was a regular parishioner who would be startled to find out that they’d sat down next to a phavatar. But the presence broke her mood, made her tense up. She tensed up again when she heard a hoarse male whisper: “Don’t look up. Nod twice if you copy.”
Astonished, Elfrida nodded several times.
Nothing happened for fifteen minutes after that, which meant the man beside her was physically there, kneeling in the last pew of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Toronto. Elfrida eyed his legs. They were clad in perfectly pressed summer-weight trousers. His shoes looked like real alligator.
“Ja. Now listen up. What’s your problem? You’ve been sitting there all morning like a fucking lawn ornament.”
The man paused as a priest walked past them. Then he resumed.
“This ridiculous ad-hoc committee of Lorna’s is going to factor heavily into the President’s decision-making process. Why, because none of us know what we’re dealing with. In my view, the very fact that we don’t know what we’re dealing with is reason enough to scour 4 Vesta down to the mantle. But that option is off the table. We’re already perceived as high-and-mighty authoritarians in the Belt; we don’t want to aggravate that perception. 4 Vesta isn’t just any asteroid, after all. It’s a protoplanet, a model colony, a World Heritage Site of outstanding universal value, yadda, yadda, yadda. Visuals of Star Force using it for target practice? An early Christmas present to critics of the UN’s expansion policy. Do not want.
“On the other hand: this concept of quarantining the so-called Heidegger program to study it. Are you out of your fucking minds? We already made that mistake once, so let’s make it again! Because the public sector is so much better than the private sector at information security! The arrogance of scientists never fails to amaze me. They aren’t giving a thought to the communities they’d be endangering, up to and including the entire human race. Noooo, no. It’s all about the research funding.”
“I agree two hundred percent, sir,” Elfrida said softly, knowing that her words wouldn’t reach him for fifteen minutes.
“As a rule of thumb, whatever Derek Lorna wants, do the opposite. He’s an idiot. But he’s not stupid, if you can appreciate the difference. Which is to say, he’s open to compromise. And this is the compromise you are going to propose to him in the afternoon session.”
He explained it to her. Elfrida felt hope dawning, mixed with quibbles. While he was talking, however, he heard her saying, “I agree two hundred percent, sir,” so that was that.
“Ja.” He rose and brushed off the perfect creases of his pants. “I apologize for this absurd spy caper. It’s undignified, and personally risky for me. But the fact is, I can’t be seen talking to you, and this is the only way I could get to you without going through the IS-fucking-A. Telepresence encryption will keep this conversation away from their eyes … and I hope you’re not storing your data dump in the hub of the Imagine Dragons. Take it with you, or they’ll be into it faster than you can say ‘breach of privacy.’ Got that?” He stepped past her, out of the pew.
Now, at last, Elfrida dared to look up. But it took fifteen minutes for her instruction to reach Earth. By the time her phavatar swivelled its head, Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter, director of the Space Corps and member of the President’s Advisory Council, had long since vanished into the afternoon. The bright rectangle of the doorway silhouetted an elderly couple, supported by his ‘n’ hers helper bots, arriving early for Mass.
★
When she got back to the hotel, the afternoon session was in progress. Raised voices carried into the hall. The discussion had turned acrimonious.
“I’m telling you the thing was a plant!”
Had Elfrida been there in the flesh, she would’ve paused outside the conference room to eavesdrop. Her phavatar, however, lacked canniness. It walked straight in. Faces turned briefly to her and then back to the speaker—another phavatar that had hardly said a word during the morning session. This one belonged to Dr. James of the University of Vesta.
“We’re playing into the PLAN’s hands. They wanted the fragment to be found. They wanted us to succumb to the temptation to study it!”
“Maybe so,” said Kate from MIT. “But at this point, what difference does it make? People are dead, and we have a responsibility to learn about what killed them, so we can prevent this from happening again.”
Dr. James continued speaking over her, since his remarks had actually been made thirty minutes ago. This was the biggest drawback of multi-locational meetings: they disintegrated easily into non-sequitur.
“Dr. Lorna mentioned this morning that we need to know our enemy. But I submit that he was begging the question. Do we need to know our enemy? Why? Where would that get us? This is a mea culpa. I jumped at the opportunity to study the thing in the first place. I hoped it would help us to crack the PLAN’s stealth technology, among other things. That didn’t happen, obviously. But even if Błaszczykowski-Lee’s team had succeeded in mastering the Heidegger program? Nothing we can learn from the PLAN would outweigh the risks of learning from the PLAN.”
The man from the University of Lagos, feet on the table, said, “Yes, but let’s be realistic. What are the risks, exactly? Everyone in this room knows this isn’t the first time the PLAN has attacked us with malware. It’s been spamming us for the last eighty years. Hell, that’s how we lost the internet in the first place.”
Elfrida hadn’t known that.
“Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, the ISA and related agencies scour the servers of the solar system for the PLAN’s garbage. I’ve heard the figure of fifty trillion items deleted daily. Nevertheless, some of it gets through. So we have the so-called epidemic of BCI crashes, cubicle death, etcetera. Fortunately for humanity, the PLAN isn’t very good at cyberwarfare. It doesn’t understand us well enough to devise effective spam campaigns. But some people will click on anything. In my opinion, the PLAN is doing us a favor by removing them from the gene pool.”
Laughter.
“What are we dealing with on 4 Vesta? More of the same.”
And now Elfrida understood why Jimmy Liu and Wang Gulong had not flinched at the prospect that the Heidegger program might get loose on the internet. It was already there.
“But,” she started.
Derek Lorna voiced the same objection she’d been going to offer. “With all due respect, Uchendu, this isn’t ‘more of the same.’ This version of the neuroware can run on human brains, if they have the right wiring. I agree with Dr. James that this represents an evolution of the PLAN’s strategy. I’d even postulate th
at the Heidegger program is an evolution of the PLAN itself.”
“Agree,” said the man from Oxford.
Lorna went on, “In terms of what we know about massively self-organizing systems, it’s possible that the PLAN couldn’t evolve unless it produced ‘offspring’ that would achieve AGI status in a isolated environment. We helpfully provided just such an environment. So yes, Dr. James, I concur that the thing was a plant. Moses in his basket, floating on a river of stars. The entity ‘Little Sister’ is not a soldier of the PLAN. She is its firstborn child.”
Elfrida shivered. Dr. Hasselblatter was right: Derek Lorna was the smartest person in this room. That reminded her that she had to propose the compromise Dr. Hasselblatter had outlined. She’d been waiting for an opening, but she was never going to get one, because she couldn’t know where the discussion would be in fifteen minutes. She started talking.
Meanwhile, Dr. James had thought of something else to say. He spoke into an argument between Lorna and the Nigerian professor of cyberwarfare.
“There’s a moral dimension to this. When I said that knowledge of the PLAN would hurt rather than help us, it may have seemed a wayward statement. But I’m thinking in the context of the oldest set of moral guidelines we possess: the Book of Genesis. Do we really want to eat this apple? Think of those people, professors and scientists just like us, murdering their pureblooded colleagues with any weapon that came to hand.”
Dr. James flashed a vid montage up on the whiteboard in the conference room. Everyone quieted, not yet desensitized to the horrifying images from the Bellicia ecohood.
“Suppose we were to discover why the PLAN targets purebloods. And suppose, further, that it turns out to make sense. Are we confident that we would not adopt the same strategy ourselves—oh, our methods would be more humane—simply because it is wrong?”
Kate from MIT drew a shuddering, audible breath. “Scare tactics,” she snapped. “Beneath you, Dr. James. And I’d ask you as a fellow professional to keep your religion out of it.”
Her riposte touched off a shouting match. One camp consisted of most of the Earth-based experts. The other comprised the phavatar delegates from the Belt, plus the AI expert from Oxford, who’d taken it on himself to speak for them. Derek Lorna was noncommittal, tossing in the odd comment.
Elfrida spoke—not the words she would have chosen to say at this point, but the ones she’d already said.
“Um, as you know, I’m Elfrida Goto from the Space Corps, and I’m here in a dual role, um, because I witnessed a lot of what happened on 4 Vesta. But I’m also here to represent the Space Corps. I agree with Dr. James, for what that’s worth. But I’d actually like to propose something different from just letting Star Force use 4 Vesta for target practice.”
After a few seconds, the sheer novelty of hearing her voice prompted everyone to quiet down and look at her phavatar.
“Um, the Space Corps is an independent agency with representation at the PAC level, but we work very closely with UNVRP. In that capacity, I have recommended 4 Vesta for purchase by the Venus Remediation Project.”
Every human face radiated astonishment.
“It meets all our criteria. It’s big. It has a hole in the crust, known as the Big Dig, which will make a suitable cavity for the gengineered microbes that we place on captured asteroids as part of our Phase 2 atmospheric reduction program. 4 Vesta also, at this time, has no human population.”
Her voice trembled a bit on the last words, but the phavatar smoothed it out for her.
“The only potential stumbling block would be the cost of moving this 2.67 x 1020 kilogram object from its present orbit onto a trajectory intersecting the orbit of Venus. But as it happens, a solution to that problem is already in place. 4 Vesta is equipped with the solar system’s second-biggest rail launcher. The track was recently damaged, but all it needs is a bit of splart. Once fixed, it could be repurposed for propulsion. Use the existing launch cradle in combination with a cheap electrical engine: Put rocks in, fling ‘em out, repeat. Small, targeted collisions could also be employed to provide initial boost and trajectory corrections. That would get us to Venus in roughly eighteen years, while consuming less than one percent of Vesta’s mass in the form of propellant.
“Now, I’m going to take the liberty of anticipating another objection. Who’s going to fix the rail launcher? And who’s going to operate it? Who is going to do that with the Heidegger program active on the surface? Remotely operated bots would be vulnerable to hijacking by the Heidegger program, a risk we cannot countenance.”
The whiteboard flashed up a vid Dr. Hasselblatter had sourced for her: a PR clip from a construction machinery trade fair in Dalian, China. Advertisement-festooned diggers, crawlers, rubble-haulers, drills, and cranes revolved on immense turntables beneath disco lights. Girl-styled robots draped themselves over the machines.
“That’s a sampling of what we’ve got on Vesta,” Elfrida said. “Uh, minus the flashing lights and the sexy robot shills.” She’d paused there in hopes of getting a laugh. Her quip fell into a stunned silence. “The machines on Vesta are from Empirical Solutions and Huawei Galactic, and they’ve indicated that they are willing to lease them to UNVRP for a reasonable price. Obviously, this solves the problem of repairing and operating the rail launcher. These machines run on Chinese protocols. We can’t communicate with them … and neither can the PLAN.”
For the first time, someone interrupted her. “She’s right,” said the mousy woman from CalTech. “The Chinese don’t have a spam problem. Some think there’s a reason for that, but anyway.”
The rabbit hole of conspiracy theories about the Chinese yawned. Elfrida spoke on, and it was left behind.
“UNVRP and the Space Corps are presenting this proposal as a compromise between what I might call Moar Science! and Slag All The Things.” She got a laugh for that. “4 Vesta’s eighteen-year journey through the asteroid belt and inferior space will give you a chance to study the Heidegger program, in a potentially fruitful collaboration with the Chinese. At the end of that time, it will impact Venus, and believe me, it will get slagged. You might even be able to see it from Earth.”
“And not incidentally,” said Derek Lorna, “it’d be a huge get for your nutzoid terraforming project. 4 Vesta contains five percent of the mass in the entire asteroid belt.”
“This concludes my presentation,” Elfrida said. “Questions? I do want to stress that the PR angle hasn’t been much considered here, but I think the visuals will be great on this. It’s turning lemons into lemonade, which will make people feel like we’re winning, rather than, uh, the opposite. Plus, there’ll be a super-dee-duper explosion to look forward to.”
“PR is not a concern of this committee,” Lorna said. But his former comment had been teasing, rather than hostile, and he continued in the same tone. “Leave it to UNVRP, the slickest propaganda machine on Earth, to come up with a solution that has something for everybody.” He rocked back, spreading his hands. “Would I be correct in assuming that this isn’t so much a proposal for our consideration, as a heads-up? As in, you’re going to do this regardless of what we say?”
“Well, UNVRP has already purchased 4 Vesta from Virgin Atomic,” Elfrida admitted. “Got it for a song. But we do need your backing. President Hsiao wants a scientific consensus in support of her decision.“
These words reached the conference room in Toronto fifteen minutes later, by which time the experts were arguing over who would get first dibs on the Heidegger program, and where you could buy non-buggy Chinese translator software.
When he heard Elfrida’s words, Derek Lorna’s phavatar smiled. “Consensus? Never. We’re scientists, honey. Support? Hell, yeah.”
Dr. James’s phavatar lay with its head on the table. The professor had checked out.
xxxx.
A few tens of meters from the telepresence cubicle where Elfrida lay, Colonel Oleg Threadley was conducting Shoshanna Doyle’s funeral in hard vacuum. Even the ISA felt th
e need to mark death with more than a moment of silence in front of the recycling unit. Holographic wreaths decked the auxiliary deck of the Imagine Dragons. Kiyoshi stood at the back of the crowd, head and shoulders above the Earth-born officers, half-watching the speeches recorded by ISA colleagues of Shoshanna’s who had known and, apparently, loved her.
In the distance he could see the Unicorn, a dot above the irregular curvature of 4 Vesta. The ISA had come up with one reason after another not to let him return to his ship. He wasn’t exactly under arrest, but it could go either way. The ISA trafficked in ambiguity; it was one of their weapons.
Whereas this would previously have driven him nuts, he now felt weirdly calm. There was nothing they could do to him that he couldn’t handle. If they tried to do something to Jun, then they’d have a problem. But it hadn’t reached that point yet. As far as he knew, they were not even aware of Jun’s existence.
The funny thing, the miraculous thing, was that he hadn’t had a dose since that gulp of morale juice before he boarded the Vesta Express. And yet he felt OK. He wondered how long this could last.
The funeral proceeded with martial formality. Suddenly the strains of A Mighty Fortress Is Our God swelled over the public channel. A shock of recognition made Kiyoshi smile—until he heard the words the ISA officers were singing:
A bleeping ordeal is our job,
Protecting all the nations.
The solar system is FUBAR
So’s the United Nations.
Yet unthanked we toil on
Crime and pre-crime exposing;
They don’t know they owe their lives
To our eyes never closing.
Someone tapped Kiyoshi’s elbow. He automatically stepped out of the way. A midget on skis pushed past him. It was the crippled astrophysicist, Dr. James, in a custom EVA suit. There was a little yellow circle stuck on top of his helmet like a price tag.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 59