The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series

by Felix R. Savage

  “Where’d the Monster go?” Kiyoshi asked before he could stop himself.

  “Dunno. All I know is you paid for a week’s parking and didn’t even stay the night.”

  “Hey, big boy.” That was the girl who’d looked after him upstairs … or a simulation of her. “Why were you in such a hurry to leave, anyway?”

  “Because we’re about to lose another planet,” Kiyoshi shouted. “We already lost Mars. We don’t have any more planets to spare! And if Mercury goes, the money floating through here will dry up like spit in a vacuum. So I suggest you collectively wake the fuck up!”

  The floating heads went away.

  “Why didn’t you say so before?” asked a different, deeper voice.

  Kiyoshi hammered on the airlock with both claws. One of the handler arms broke.

  “If you’re going to the aid of Mercury, Godspeed to you.”

  The airlock’s chrome flanges melted into its rim. Kiyoshi dragged the Superlifter into the chamber as fast as he could.

  “With whom am I speaking?” he asked.

  The airlock closed behind the Superlifter. A graphical display showed the atmospheric pressure in the chamber sliding towards zero.

  “Chief Philosophical Officer of Rocking Horse,” said the voice. “Now bugger off. Oh, and consider this a friendly warning: if we ever hear from, of, or about the Monster again, we will sue your ass to Jupiter and back.”

  The airlock opened and the Superlifter was flung, like a pebble from the rim of a swiftly turning wheel, into the void.

  “Well,” Kiyoshi muttered, “that’s one more corner of the solar system we won’t be welcome in anymore. Huh?” he barked, delivering a kick to the mini-fridge beside his couch.

  It spoke to him.

  “More pastries,” it said.

  xv.

  70 hours later, the Monster orbited in high ellipses around a dead planet.

  The ship’s new drive had come out of a decommissioned Hyperpony. With an exhaust velocity of 8,000,000 m/s, it could burn so hard that the chief constraint on the Monster’s velocity was the structural resilience of the ancient Longvoyager. Jun had apologetically stated that he didn’t feel safe above 1.6 gees of acceleration. That was plenty fast enough for Mendoza, who’d spent most of their journey lying flat, relieving himself into a diaper.

  Mercury was presently as close to Earth as it ever got. They’d made the journey as fast as humanly possible.

  But not fast enough.

  Mendoza floated on the bridge, staring at the comms screen. Blue-tinged chemical flames dotted the twilight zone of the rocky little planet.

  Mendoza added an infrared filter and zoomed in until the sensor feed broke up into pixels. Heat blotched the nightside plains and the polar craters, marking the graves of the factories that had once pumped out consumer goods for the solar system.

  “Look at the polar craters,” Jun said, floating at his shoulder.

  “Heat.”

  “That’s the normal level of waste heat you’d expect to see. Those are Wrightstuff, Inc.’s underground habs. Looks like they’re intact.”

  “Then why can’t we raise them?”

  “All the satellites are gone.”

  “They should have ground-based relays.”

  “Maybe they’re all dead in there,” said Fr. Lynch.

  Mendoza looked at Jun’s projection, hoping for reassurance. He had got used to interacting with the phantom as if it were a person. It was astonishing how quickly familiarity pushed existential unease into the background.

  “I’m picking up signals,” Jun said slowly. “It’s the Heidegger program, sure enough. But it’s not acting like it did on 4 Vesta. Notably, it’s not trying to spam the solar system with copies of itself.”

  “It’s evolved again,” Mendoza guessed.

  “It looks like this version is copy-protected.”

  “Copy-protected!”

  “Yes. UN copyright laws are ironclad. When you copyright something, it’s automatically copy-protected. Modern DRM is one of humanity’s uncontestable triumphs.”

  Fr. Lynch laughed out loud. “Lorna doesn’t want anyone else stealing his code.” He sobered. “Or, maybe he’s not a total lunatic. He wanted to conquer Mercury. He did not want to imperil the survival of mankind.”

  “He has, though,” Jun said. “If this copy gets off the planet, and we lose track of it, it’ll crack the DRM. It’s an AI, after all. It just needs time …”

  Mendoza clenched his fists. Now that they were here, Elfrida seemed further away than ever. But she had to be down there somewhere. Alive, or dead?

  The Monster swooped down from apogee. The dayside came into view, a crescent of dingy pearl.

  “Well, that’s interesting,” Jun said in a frozen voice. “You were right, Mendoza. It has evolved again. It is evolving … incorporating data from local sources. Changing.”

  Mendoza realized that Jun was acquiring and processing new information in real time. Spinning around Mercury, the Monster would be able to grab weak signals from different regions of the planet.

  Jun looked at him. “That sim?”

  “What sim? MOAR ART? The one I made for Dr. Hasselblatter? That sim?”

  “Yes. It’s still running down there. The Heidegger program’s running it now … It’s gamified its environment.”

  “The doggone thing never did share our reality,” Mendoza said.

  “Right. It tries to suck people into its own reality. But now it’s developed a more attractive pitch than ‘Infinite Fun Space This Way.’”

  Jun was referring to the spam campaign the Heidegger program had used to trick people on 4 Vesta.

  “That was so freaking lame,” Mendoza agreed. “What’s it spamming us with now? Tourism statistics? Landscape art?” He shook his head angrily.

  “Your ideas were entertaining, Mendoza. They appealed to people, they inspired hope. They weren’t dangerous. This is.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “World War III.”

  “Huh,” Mendoza said, and then, “Hey. There already was a World War III.”

  “There was?” Fr. Lynch said.

  “Yes. The Philippines isn’t a full member of the UN. So the history we learn in school is the real deal. World War III started off as a conflict in the Levant and North Africa, and then turned into a proxy war between China and the United States of America.”

  “Ah! The Hegemony War. That’s what we saddoes in the UN call it.”

  “You’re both right,” Jun said. “It was a war for global hegemony. 30 million people in the Middle East lost, but it’s not so easy to say who won. But China still exists, whereas the United States doesn’t. So in the long run, the Americans lost.”

  “And?” Mendoza said impatiently.

  “This version of the Heidegger program has incorporated databases belonging to Wrightstuff, Inc. Lots of stuff in there about American history. Lots of propaganda about how the United States was screwed over by the Chinese. The program has made that stuff part of its identity. So now it wants to fight World War III over again. And get it right this time.”

  “No one will fall for that,” Mendoza said, but as he spoke he thought about all that “real” history he’d learned, growing up in Manila. About the miasma of rage that permeated Filipino politics and culture. Rage at the Imperial Republic of China, which jackbooted all over its neighborhood. Rage at the unfairness of history. Of course, being Filipinos, they laughed it off, but …

  “Revenge is a powerful motive,” he conceded.

  “Revenge will eat humanity alive,” Jun said, “if this thing spreads. We have to stop it from getting off the planet.”

  Fr. Lynch interrupted. “What’s that?”

  Mendoza wallowed through the air to the astrogator’s workstation. The Jesuit indicated the gravmap that displayed Mercury as a mesh sphere, their orbit as an ellipse. There was a blip on it.

  “A ship! It must have been hiding behind the planet while we appr
oached.”

  “Yup,” Jun said. “Looks like one of the Star Force Heavycruisers that was stationed here. There were two of them, but the other one left a couple of days ago. This is the Crash Test Dummy.” Gone was the gloomy prophet of war. Jun arrowed across the bridge, cassock flapping. “Grab onto something, guys!” He settled into the captain’s couch, which Kiyoshi Yonezawa wasn’t here to occupy anymore.

  Mendoza floated back towards the comms workstation. The main screen flashed. “They’re hailing us! What should I say to them?”

  “Nothing!”

  Subject-line text stitched across the screen. WHAT’RE YOU CHINKIE FUCKERS DOING?

  “They’re accusing us of being Chinese,” Fr. Lynch said.

  “I’ve had people make that mistake,” Mendoza said.

  A new message. WELL??!? NO SAVVY ENGLISH, GOOKFACES?

  “Do not respond!” Jun said. “There’s no one left alive on that ship!”

  The bridge suddenly filled with rapid-fire Japanese. The bristles on the back of Mendoza’s neck stood on end. He seemed to be surrounded by invisible men barking in a dead language. Jun, calm and confident in the captain’s couch, issued orders.

  The Monster reared and fell sideways. Mendoza and Fr. Lynch fell the other way. Strictly speaking, they stayed where they were while the wall accelerated towards them and hit them.

  Pinioned by thrust gravity, Mendoza watched all the screens strobe, throwing up chunks of data too fast for any human eye to process. For an instant he seemed to see ghosts manning the bridge, men in long white smocks, floating at right angles to what was now the floor. Nausea gripped him. Then a cheer went up. “Banzai!”

  The ship stabilized. The g-force dissipated. The invisible crew fell silent.

  “Got the bastard,” Jun said in tones of quiet satisfaction.

  Fr. Lynch murmured to Mendoza, “Do you get the feeling we’re just in the way around here?”

  Mendoza nodded.

  “I don’t know whether to worry about him or not,” the Jesuit muttered. He untangled himself from Mendoza and drifted away.

  “So that was a space battle.” Mendoza was shaking, his body charged with adrenaline he had no use for. “I thought it would last longer.”

  “Orbital combats are quick-draw contests,” Jun answered. “The Heavycruiser was in a lower orbit, moving faster than us. So I threw a couple of nuclear warheads into its path. It couldn’t dodge, because there’s already a kiloton of debris down there. It returned fire, but I evaded its missiles successfully.”

  “I think we have a problem,” Fr. Lynch blurted. “Something else just popped up on the radar.”

  Jun whipped around, inhumanly fast.

  “Looks like another ship. And now there’s a lot more debris in orbit, isn’t there, Jun? Think we can dodge it? Or should we shoot first?”

  Jun’s face relaxed. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve seen that ship before.”

  Twenty minutes later the Monster’s operations deck airlock valved open, and in floated Kiyoshi Yonezawa in an EVA suit.

  “Thought you got rid of me, huh?”

  “It was fairly peaceful without you around,” Fr. Lynch said, slapping him on the shoulder.

  Kiyoshi scanned the vestibule of the airlock. Mendoza followed his gaze. Fitted in between chunks of machinery, the small vestibule was shaped like a hollow wedge. Jun’s projection floated in the thin end, appearing to brace its arms and legs against the walls.

  “What the fuck?!” Kiyoshi bellowed. “You sold the fucking Superlifter! You know who bought it? Some kids in a band! They would have been stuck in there with the Ghost! By the time they reached the Belt, there’d have been nothing left of them but bones!”

  “I’ve been working on my predictive modelling,” Jun said. “I knew you’d steal the ship back.”

  “You didn’t know crap! You guessed!”

  “All right, but I guessed correctly, didn’t I?”

  “That doesn’t make it OK.” Kiyoshi stripped his EVA suit down to his heels, kicked it off. Mendoza had an impulse to get between him and the projection. But Kiyoshi did not make any violent movements. He folded his arms. He looked different, somehow, from when they’d left him at Midway. “I saw some shooting. Was that you?”

  Jun nodded.

  “You know you’re not supposed to mess with my guns.”

  “He saved our lives,” Mendoza said. “What should we have done, sit there and get fragged?”

  Kiyoshi gave a one-elbowed shrug, dismissing Mendoza’s contribution with an indifference that made Mendoza’s blood boil. He stared up at the projection. “Don’t you ever, ever try to predict my behavior again.”

  “I won’t,” Jun said.

  Kiyoshi narrowed his eyes suspiciously.

  “I can’t. Can’t predict your behavior. I got it wrong.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I predicted you’d be so angry you would take the Superlifter and go home. Somewhere else. Back to the Belt. I wanted you to go away from here, Kiyoshi! I wanted you to be safe!”

  The raw emotion that flashed across Kiyoshi’s face was too much for Mendoza. He turned away, and heard Kiyoshi saying, “You tried that before, little brother. Didn’t work then, and it isn’t gonna work now. I guess you aren’t that intelligent, after all.”

  “I guess not,” Jun said softly.

  Fr. Lynch filled the silence. “So what happened to you on the Rocking Horse, Yonezawa? We waited for hours, but you never showed. Were you sprawling in some drug den, loved-up to the eyeballs? Getting away from it all with a little help from Dr. Headjuice?”

  “No.”

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. If there’s anywhere in the solar system that could drive a man to relapse, it’s Midway.”

  Kiyoshi patted his upper lip, and Mendoza realized what was different about his appearance. He was now clean-shaven. Also, his hair was shorter. “I went to get a haircut. A haircut, OK? And when I get back, my freaking ship’s gone, and there’s a frug-rock band painting torture porn on my Superlifter. I’m telling you, I cannot catch a break.” They all laughed. “So what’s the deal?” Kiyoshi said. “Anyone left alive down there to rescue?”

  “We’re not sure yet,” Mendoza said, at the same time as Fr. Lynch said, “God have mercy on their souls, but we fear they’re all dead.”

  Kiyoshi kicked off. Mendoza followed him out of the vestibule. “How were you going to rescue them, anyway?” Kiyoshi said to Jun. “The Chimera, I mean the Monster, can’t land on the surface. You need the Superlifter for that.”

  The operations module of the Monster was a house of many mansions, most of them filled with stuff. There were no transit corridors, so they had to pass through this floating obstacle course to reach the bridge. Mendoza bumped into a cloud of liquid textile sacks. One of them caught on a stanchion and split. ‘Mellow Mauve’ liquid gushed out, forming wobbly globules that went everywhere. The Yonezawas flew on ahead. Mendoza heard Jun saying: “… the launch site.”

  Mendoza floated among globules of Mellow Mauve. He thought: They aren’t really interested in rescuing Elfrida. They’re after something else.

  Screw that.

  He caught up with the Yonezawas on the bridge. They stared at his mauve-splotched face. “The sim,” he panted.

  Kiyoshi said, “The World War III sim? Jun’s been telling me about that. We’re mapping the source of those signals right now.” He wedged himself into his nest. “I’m doing the shooting this time.”

  They were planning to locate the Heidegger program’s computing platform, and frag it from orbit. Mendoza’s blood ran cold. “There might be a—a different way.” He caught back a better way. He’d already learned that Kiyoshi Yonezawa did not take kindly to being challenged. “That sim is based on something I made. What if we could get into its back-end? We could destroy the Heidegger program’s identity. Reprogram it.”

  “No access,” Jun said. “I’m running a brute-force attack right now, but it cou
ld take years.”

  “I’ve got access. When I put together the MOAR ART package, I, well, I put in some easter eggs. I guess I wanted to sign my work.” It had been a stupid, sentimental impulse. He was glad of it now. “I made some jizo statues ...”

  “Jizo!” Kiyoshi said. “Those stone idols they used to have in old Japan?”

  “Yeah. I … I was thinking of Elfrida. She’s half-Japanese. I put them in for her.”

  “And?”

  “And Dr. Hasselblatter’s campaign staff were in a hurry, so they used Mendoza’s graphics as-is,” Jun finished for him. “The jizo are still there. Yes, I see them.”

  “Well, there’s a back door embedded in the graphics. I thought I might want to get in later, for some reason.”

  “Give me the access info.”

  Mendoza did.

  Jun’s projection vanished.

  The lighting on the bridge dimmed.

  “He’s going to throw every erg of computing power at it now.” Kiyoshi glowered at Mendoza. “We found the supercomputer the thing is running on. It’s on the dayside; it must be a portable. I was all set to drop a nuke on it. Flash, bang, problem solved. Goddamn AIs; wedded to the elegant solution.”

  Mendoza examined the mauve smears on his fingers.

  “When did you guess?” Kiyoshi said.

  “How could I not guess?” Mendoza said presently.

  “What was the giveaway?”

  “Oh, I dunno. The stealth technology that shouldn’t exist, according to the laws of physics?”

  “It doesn’t break the laws of physics. I’ll get him to explain it to you, if we survive. He didn’t invent that, anyway. Was that all?”

  “And, well, he just acts so human.”

  “Yeah. Not always, but in general, yeah.” Kiyoshi picked an immersion headset out of his freezeblankets.

  “How long have you known?” Mendoza said.

  “Me? Oh, a few months.”

  “And you’re OK with that?”

  “With what?”

  “The fact that your ship’s hub is an AI!”

  There were only two honest-to-goodness AIs in existence, going by the definition of true AI, or AGI—Artifical General Intelligence. AGI was defined as human-equivalent intelligence, but it was also a threshold marker. Once an entity reached the AGI tipping point, it could go FOOM—recursively improving itself, getting exponentially smarter. So, in practice, every AI would sooner or later turn into an ASI: an artificial superintelligence.