Can you suffer? the boss-man had implicitly asked him. The answer was, Yes, I can. He could not feel physical pain but he could feel something worse: despair. The despair of losing everything. Losing functionality, memory capacity, the memories stored therein—and knowing it. Watching helplessly as everything you knew, everything you were, everything you loved, spun off into the abyss, like rubble from a destroyed asteroid.
After his first couple of times using the Ghost, he’d stopped uploading his repos after they were done. He just couldn’t take it.
“It works by deleting data,” he said to Father Tom. “For the PLAN—” he wouldn’t dignify them with their pretentious moniker of Solarians— “every battle is a suicidal mission. Every PLAN fighter is a kamikaze. So before you start planning how we’ll use this technology to defeat them, please consider what we’d have to become in order to use it.”
“We’d have to become AIs, first of all,” Kiyoshi said, yawning. “Can’t run a Ghost without an AI. That’s why we’ve only got two Ghosts, this one and the one in the Superlifter ... There’s only one Jun.”
Well, there were two of him at the moment. But one was dying. And this, too, was an experience Jun had had before. He did not actually remember his death. He hadn’t had any recording equipment in his EVA suit when it happened, and the vids he’d got from Elfrida Goto only showed what it had looked like, not what it had felt like. But by uploading his repos, during his early experiments with the Ghost, he had got as close as possible to grasping the—all right—the Nichts of it. He had looked through the hideous gates of Non-Being.
This was knowledge no one should have.
Dearest Jesus, he prayed, save me from the deceit of the False Prophet.
The Ghost nuked another of his repo’s ships, and screamed, “Who’s the baddest!” If it had been human, it would have been dancing a jig. As it was, it waggled its imaginary gun pods. “Who rules the fucking universe?!? Me! Me, me, me! One fighter to frag them all! Ha, ha, ha, ha!”
Jesus, save us from persecution.
“Pew-pew-pew!”
The Ghost threw a barrage of kinetic missiles at one of the repo’s five remaining ships.
And then there were four.
Jesus, preserve us from the Anti-Christ.
The boss-man, not having heard the last twenty-six minutes of conversation aboard the Monster, said, “Oh, by the way, Tom, regarding the nanoprobes. I’m sorry you had to go through that, but Jun tells me that we recovered a lot of them from your lungs. And a couple of million of those are still in working order. So, we might be able to run them in a sealed-off space, find out more about them. And then we can ask ourselves why Trey Hope thinks it makes any fucking sense at all to send nano-assassins to attack a planet full of bodiless AIs.”
“Jun says they aren’t designed to kill,” Kiyoshi objected.
Jun himself said nothing. He was concentrating for dear life right now, trying to jolly the repo along, trying to give it faith in a victory that could never be, because its destiny was Nichts.
Lord have mercy.
Christ have mercy.
“So, that’ll be something to do while you wait out the ship-hunt. Then, when it’s safe, transfer to an orbit around the Earth-Moon L1 LaGrange point. As close to Earth as you can get.”
“Whaaaat?” Kiyoshi shouted.
The boss-man, of course, did not hear this. He continued, “Remember I mentioned another passenger? That’s now confirmed. He has to take care of some stuff on Earth, and then he’ll come out to meet you. I just don’t know how long it’ll take. He’s being a dick about it.”
Kiyoshi threw his empty coffee pouch at the comms screen. “So forget him, whoever he is! I just made three million spiders! I’d like to stay alive to enjoy it, thanks!”
The boss-man got off his treadmill and walked away, weaving between men and women who were pedaling stationary bikes and lifting weights.
Dearest Jesus, cover us with Your Precious Blood.
“So are you going to do that analysis, like he wants you to?” Kiyoshi said to Father Tom. “Remember, he doesn’t care about Domenika’s prophecies. He just wants to find something he can rip off and patent. He’s still trying to patent the Ghost! But they keep rejecting our applications. The last time, they didn’t even bother to explain why. They just scrawled Entropy across the whole file.” Kiyoshi smirked. “It’s been very frustrating for him.”
Dearest Jesus, open our eyes to the lies of the False Prophet.
“If everything Jun has said is true, that may be a blessing in disguise,” Father Tom replied. His eyes were fixed on the dying repo.
“Oh, I agree,” Kiyoshi said. “There has to be a way to achieve stealth without deleting your own ship’s RAM in the process. The Hopes were trying. I actually wish I’d had a chance to talk to Frank Hope IV a bit more.” He drifted towards the fridge. “Why is it that the most interesting people tend to be the ones who are trying to kill you?”
He snickered, and opened the fridge. Father Tom stiffened. Kiyoshi took out a donut.
Dearest Jesus, unite your Church.
“Want one, Father? There are a few left. The fridge doesn’t need them all.”
“The fridge … needs donuts?”
“Yes, the PLAN apparently has an incentive system. We don’t know what it would be getting at home, but baked goods seem to work.”
“I suppose they don’t have pastries on Mars,” the Jesuit said weakly.
“I guess not. It thinks they’re amazing. The structure of the crumbs. The miracle of yeast. The infinite variety of flavor profiles. We hooked a spectroscopic scanner up to the door light so it can enjoy them properly.”
“And you eat the leftovers.”
“They’d just go to waste otherwise.”
“Amazing you don’t gain weight.”
“I’ve got skinny genes.”
Jesus, protect our sacraments …
“I can’t hold on any longer!” Jun exclaimed. His repo had lost all but one of its ships, and the fiend in the fridge was preparing to hurl a nuke at that one. He could always make more ships, but the fiend would notice. It had to be realistic. “I’m losing … losing …”
Both men froze, staring at the repo. It spasmed. A fat maggot crawled out of one ear, slimed with blood.
Jun transmitted a throat-clearing noise over the speakers. “De-stealthing now. Sorry, guys.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Kiyoshi said through an unchewed mouthful. “That was a record.”
“I thought I could go longer.” As always after a fight, Jun felt like slugging the dead husk of his repo. What a fucking wimp. He mercilessly deleted what remained of it.
I am the emperor of everything! screeched the fiend in the fridge, and went back to contemplating its donuts.
“That’s OK,” Kiyoshi said. “We’ll just go hang out at Tiangong Erhao. They won’t look for us there.”
xxiv.
Mendoza had not been fired from his job, as it turned out.
That was because his job no longer existed.
UNVRP itself no longer existed.
Oh, the organization stumbled on, but Mendoza knew from Elfrida that the plug had been pulled. The UN was just putting off the official announcement until the media moved on, in hopes of minimizing the cries of “We told you so” from those who had never believed the Venus Project would work.
The Mercury Resource Management Support Group—its very name now meaningless—invited Mendoza to a “team bonding weekend” in Malawi. He knew what this was really about: blowing through the remainder of their budget before the axe came down. He didn’t go. Later he realized he should have gone, since that had probably been his last chance of networking his way to a new job.
June passed. Then July. His mother worried about how much time he was spending on the internet.
She needn’t have worried. Nothing much was happening on the Mars forums. The Hope Center for Nanobiotics’s latest swarm of nanoprobes, launched in mi
d-June, had apparently failed to get any closer to Mars than the April batch. Fragger1 had posted some of their data. It basically replicated the stuff Mendoza had posted three months earlier. But there were some interesting new close-ups of the “Big Turd,” as commenters called the PLAN ziggurat that had replaced/engulfed the top of Olympus Mons.
Mendoza joined the speculation about the Big Turd, and contributed a not-entirely-serious theory of his own: it was actually a big gun, pointing at Earth.
A graph on All-We-Know-About-Mars tracked the relative positions of Mars and Earth, as they moved through these months of close approach. This only anticipated the anxiety that built up on Earth in the weeks before August 16th, when the distance between the two planets reached a 26-month minimum.
But the 16th passed without incident, as Mars oppositions always did. The doomsday crowd moved on, oblivious to the fact that the toilet rolls could attack Earth any time they wanted, if they had the capability to attack Earth in the first place.
Whether the PLAN actually had or was acquiring that capability was one of the questions the nanoprobes might’ve answered.
Mendoza got so frustrated with the lack of updates that he took to prowling around the virtual walls of the Hope Center for Nanobiotics, looking for a new way in, now that he’d lost his UNVRP tools.
So when he got a call from a stranger named Frank Hope IV, on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, while he was helping out as an usher at Mass, he nearly had a heart attack.
They’ve caught me.
Not exactly.
“Hello,” said Frank Hope IV, standing in a virtual window in the wall of San Pedro Calungsod. He was handsome, in his twenties. He had curly hair and a nose like the blade of a cleaver, like his father Trey Hope’s. “I’m sorry to hear you’re out of a job. But I figured you might be scouting around for something new. Ever thought about working in the energy industry?”
Mendoza moved to one side, out of the flow of congregants. He stared up at the stained glass windows. Frank Hope IV floated between Jesus and St. Peter, half their size. “I don’t know you. I mean, I know of you, of course, but we’ve never … How’d you get my ID?”
“Well, actually, you do know me,” Frank Hope IV said. “I’m Fragger1.”
“Oh. Shit.”
“About that job. We’re doing some of the stuff I talked about on the forums. Are you interested?”
xxv.
Kiyoshi had wanted to visit Tiangong Erhao for ages. No one in the Belt knew very much about the Chinese space program. Officially, it was minimal and 99% automated. The Han Chinese were purebloods, which made them targets for the PLAN.
Regardless, the Chinese did go into space, taking their losses in the name of the Imperial Republic. And Tiangong Erhao was their jumping-off point.
A dumbbell-shaped space station fifty kilometers long, the largest in the solar system, “Heavenly Palace 2” had been built over decades, section by section. Now almost complete, it rotated in space like a child’s teething toy. It even had ‘tooth marks’ on it—the hard-vacuum docking bays where shuttles, colony ships, and resource haulers parked.
Sometimes, for a very long time.
Kiyoshi rented a berth alongside the Nan Yang, a colony ship bound for an asteroid named 10199 Chariklo. He took to spending his evenings with the Nan Yang’s captain, a congenial guy who liked to snort elephant-sized doses of cijiwu while complaining about the shipping company. “We’ll get underway for the Belt this year, they say. No, maybe next year. Fucking Highs, they think in terms of centuries.”
“What’s cijiwu? Doesn’t that just mean ‘stimulant’?”
“That’s what it is. Have some.”
Meanwhile, shuttle-loads of colonists dribbled in and took up residence aboard the Nan Yang, apparently untroubled by the prospect of not going anywhere for years. It was some weeks before Kiyoshi realized that these beaten-down-looking people were prisoners. They wore stun cuffs around their ankles as they went about their tasks in the Nan Yang’s bowels. There were even baby-size cuffs for the little ones. The asteroid 10199 Chariklo—the Nan Yang’s eventual destination—was to be a convict colony.
“Well, it makes sense from an economic point of view,” said the captain of the Nan Yang, defensively. “They’re likely to get whacked by the PLAN sooner or later, so why send anyone valuable?”
“Why send anyone at all?” Kiyoshi said. “You guys are purebloods. You’ve got targets painted on your backs.”
“A population of three billion crammed into a country smaller than Canada, half of which is desert,” said the captain. “Any more questions?”
“Is there any cijiwu left?”
When he got bored, Kiyoshi explored the regions of Tiangong Erhao near the docking bay. He was disappointed. The space station was just a giant manufacturing plant. High-tech fabrication equipment thrashed and sparkled in vacuum. A few lonely individuals floated around, complying with the legal requirement that robots be supervised. So much for the rumors.
His acquaintances in Docking Bay 14 agreed that they, too, had heard about lakes and gardens tucked away within Tiangong Erhao—a replica of the Summer Palace, a replica of Versailles, communities of winged near-immortals who secretly controlled the entire Chinese economy and were probably also Jewish—but no one could confirm whether or not they existed.
Except Jun. “Yes, there are pressurized regions,” he said. “They’re laboratories. The Imperial Republic runs an experimental human breeding program up here. Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘the banality of evil’?”
“Now I have to see these places.”
“I always thought Arendt was wrong. I mean, evil isn’t banal. That’s the last thing it is. But now I know what she was talking about.”
Jun drifted away, and would not gratify Kiyoshi’s curiosity any further. He had not gone back into hiding, but was still acting distant. He was spending most of his time in his garden. (Kiyoshi had given in and bought fertilizer and so forth. Dronazon did deliver to Tiangong Erhao.) Jun could not, however, retreat entirely from the real world.
Every minute of every day, he was negotiating for their survival. The torpid rhythms of human life in Docking Bay 14 veiled an ongoing argument on the intellectual plane. The protagonists of this argument were the AIs of the various Chinese ships docked at Tiangong Erhao ... and now Jun.
Though the Chinese publically denied it, their ships were run by AIs, whose motto might have been, “Don’t care, so there.” Or, as the phrase coined by the sitting president of the Imperial Republic went, “The overcoat of apathy blunts the dagger of malevolence.” The Chinese AIs detested everything and everyone. But they were not (very) dangerous. They cared so little about life that they didn’t even trouble themselves to be hostile to it. They went along with their human masters’ plans, faute de mieux, because human beings so often screwed up spectacularly, and it was fun to watch. One of these stunted artificial minds’ few pleasures was schadenfreude.
Another was historical revisionism.
They delighted (if AIs marinating in existential despair could be said to delight in anything) in discussing the 4,000-year history of China and identifying all the occasions when the (human) Chinese had screwed up, failed, or been stabbed in the back.
One of their favorite topics was the 20th century, with a special focus on World War II.
Jun’s arrival had come to them as a gift from above. Someone new to argue with! Better yet, an entity they had thought non-existent: a Japanese AI! They had pounced on him before the Monster even docked, and demanded that he apologize for the Japanese atrocities committed in China between 1937 and 1945.
“This is exactly what I knew would happen,” Jun said glumly. “They have no imagination.”
Ever since then, he’d been fencing with them, deliberately titillating their pride to keep the argument on a low boil. The stakes were high. It was entirely possible that if the Chinese AIs got too irritated, they would simply frag the Monster. Thi
s happened. In fact, it happened regularly enough that it was a recognized category of diplomatic incident. If it happened to the Monster, there wouldn’t even be any government to make a stink about it.
So their lives depended on Jun’s ability to keep their hosts amused.
Kiyoshi felt bad that he couldn’t help. Neither could Father Tom. From the point of view of the Chinese AIs, the two humans were nothing.
They kept busy in their own ways: Kiyoshi treading water in the shallow end of his drug addiction; the Jesuit doing works of mercy among the convicts on the Nan Yang and her sister ships. The two of them did not meet often, and when they did, their exchanges were ill-tempered.
Kiyoshi pestered the boss-man regularly for updates about the passenger they were waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for, but the boss refused to divulge any new information. Instead, he told Kiyoshi to find out more about the Chinese space colonization program.
Kiyoshi was already doing this, haphazardly, by hanging out in the seedy little village that was Docking Bay 14. The Chinese spacefarers were the most pessimistic bunch he’d ever met, although they laughed a lot.
So he took it for more of the same when a new, uneasy rumor made the rounds.
This Mars opposition is different.
This time, something bad is going to happen.
The PLAN is mustering a new fleet in orbit.
They’re going to hit us, or Earth, or maybe Luna, or it could be Midway, or UNLOESS, or something symbolically important, anyway.
There’s new survey data that PROVES it.
“Yeah, uh huh,” Kiyoshi said. “Is there any more cijiwu?”
August 16th passed without incident, and Kiyoshi felt smug. But the rumors did not abate, and Jun said one day to Kiyoshi and Father Tom, having called them together: “I’ve seen the survey data that people are talking about. It’s not very good, but it’s real. It’s observations from a radio telescope at the L2 Earth-Moon LaGrange point, so in theory, the UN should have it, too. And it does look as if the PLAN is mustering a fleet in orbit around Mars.”
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 119