Intrinsic Immortality: A Military Scifi Thriller (Sol Arbiter Book 2)

by J. N. Chaney

  Byron went over and examined the condition of the body, then he looked around at everything else. “Yeah, three. Look, we need to assess for a minute.”

  I agreed. If Byron was right, then Huxley could not have been responsible for 2/77. Not unless the conspiracy went back further than I thought. “What do you make of it?”

  “Well, let’s review what we know from the briefing. Huxley Industries is one of the biggest defense contractors in the solar system.”

  “Right.”

  “And they have ongoing business relationships with all the major players, including the North Atlantic States and the Sol Federation. That’s not illegal, not yet, but it means selling weapons to both sides of what will probably be the next major war.”

  I didn’t want to believe that. A war on Earth, using all the technologies now available, would be beyond horrific. Still, Byron was right. The Sol Federation aimed to rule the solar system, and its authority was at least minimally acknowledged on every world and colony. The North Atlantic States were wealthy and powerful, enough so to stand a fighting chance against that claim. Would they really go down without a fight?

  Byron continued. “So, we’re probably talking about a divided loyalties situation.”

  “I think it goes beyond probably. Especially considering that they’ve been selling some of their cutting-edge androids and other weapons on the black market. August Marcenn being the prime example.”

  “Maybe. We don’t know that there isn’t a worse example. But anyway, none of this is helped by the fact that their founder and Chief Executive, this corpse here, was a recluse. Everyone assumed that he was behind it all, but this… this find suggests he had nothing to do with it.”

  “And that raises another question…” I pointed out. “If he had nothing to do with it, then why is he dead and how did he get that way?”

  Byron nodded. “Sure. Murder, suicide, or something else?”

  It didn’t look like murder, at least not in any obvious way. “He’s lying in bed, and nothing has been knocked over or ransacked.”

  Just as I said that, I brushed against a vase on Huxley’s bedroom desk and knocked it tumbling end over end. It’s hard not to do that sort of thing when you’re wearing a dropsuit. Before it could land with a crash and shatter on the floor, a nearby android stepped forward and caught it, then placed it carefully back where it had originally been.

  I stared at the android for a moment.

  “Something wrong?”

  I shook my head. “If there was any kind of fight, the androids would just have cleaned up all the evidence.”

  Byron’s eyes moved from the bed to the vase, then back to the body. “We can’t rule it out one hundred percent, I’ll grant you, but I’m not seeing it. He’s just lying here, and there’s no wounds or blood stains on him.”

  “That doesn’t explain everything,” I said. I was trying not to move, knowing how likely it was that I would knock over something else if I so much as shifted my weight, but without even thinking, I gestured with my left hand when I said the word everything and knocked what looked like an ancient Chinese sculpture over.

  I was glad about the androids, or that jade horse would have seen the last of its days. A moment later, the horse was back where it had originally been. The android looked at me, standing there in my massive dropsuit, then moved the sculpture a few inches back from the edge. The little bastard didn’t trust me.

  “What doesn’t it explain?” asked Byron, oblivious to my clumsy destructiveness.

  “The fact that no one seems to know he’s dead. I mean, they didn’t announce it, they didn’t even send anyone over to pick up the body. They just left it here to mummify. How could something like that even happen in the first place?”

  “Let’s go back to the living room. And try not to knock over anything else. You might not get lucky next time.” So maybe he wasn’t so oblivious.

  We lumbered back to the living room, and Byron pointed to the rows of monitors. “See those screens? That’s how he runs his business. He doesn’t run it. Everything’s automated, same as it is here.”

  I thought about Young, the expert hacker I met back on Venus. He would have loved the idea of Huxley’s place, but I doubt he would have considered it “automated.” Someone with a highly developed intelligence had set all this up, and if it seemed automatic now it was only because he put everything in place beforehand. This whole house didn’t strike me as the creation of someone who wanted everything done for him. It struck me as the creation of someone who wanted total control, even over things he couldn’t be there for in person.

  “He probably wrote those scripts himself…”

  “Exactly,” said Byron. “He could have programmed them to use the same strategies and issue the same types of orders as he would have.”

  “So, what are you saying? That nobody knows at all? I find that hard to believe.”

  “If somebody knew, wouldn’t they have done something about the body in the bedroom?” he asked.

  “I guess they would have had to, but then the secret would have gotten out. If they’d sent in a cleanup crew, there’s no way they could have kept it secret after that. The story is just too juicy.”

  “So, if somebody did know, and they also knew that most of what he did for the company was automated anyway, they’d be better off not moving it. Just leave it here, let the androids and the A.I. system keep doing what they do, and no one’s the wiser. They can reveal it later in their own time. If ever.”

  It was a ghoulish scenario, but it could have happened that way. “Okay, let’s follow that thought for a minute. I’m a corporate executive, maybe someone he had out here occasionally for meetings or strategy sessions. I stumble across Huxley’s body, realize he’s dead, and wonder what the hell to do about it. I think of calling someone to come and deal with the corpse, but I decide not to. Why?”

  “The oldest motive. Money.”

  “If there’s any way I could profit off that, sure. But I don’t see how there would be. I can’t vote on his behalf; he already has the A.I. to do that for him. I can’t just rip the company off either. The A.I. is watching and it knows everything Huxley knew. He was clearly a genius, so could anyone who worked for him just go in and reprogram what he created?”

  “So, what are you saying here, Barrett?”

  “Either no one knows, or whoever does know hasn’t changed a thing. Their motive is not to rip off the company, or to give themselves a big promotion. Their goal is to keep everything exactly the same, to keep everything going without interference.”

  “Maybe. I think you’re giving them all a little too much credit. If somebody knows about this, there has to be a way for them to benefit personally. If we can figure out how, we’ll figure out who.”

  “This has to have something to do with what happened on Venus.”

  Byron didn’t reply. He probably just thought of it as empty speculation, but to be fair his whole idea about a conspiracy to keep Huxley’s death a secret was just as speculative. You see stories in the news, like an old lady who dies alone and doesn’t get found until the neighbors complain about the bad smell. Isolated out here among the trees and guarded by his proxy army, there was no one to even notice the smell.

  Huxley’s tech obsession had ensured that he could die without anyone noticing. His need for control had led to a lonely and pointless death, and there was no reason to see a conspiracy in that. When it came right down to it, we had no reason to think anyone even knew. Huxley’s systems had fooled the world.

  It reminded me of something from the Academy. “You know, this is kind of like a Turing Test.”

  “A what?”

  “Turing Test. It’s something they talked about at the Academy.”

  “Dr. Richter, Fundamentals of A.I.?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. People used to think that a computer should be considered sentient if you couldn’t tell its conversation apart from a human’s.”

  “
That’s just stupid,” said Byron. “Computers aren’t sentient, not even if they can fake it.”

  “Some of them are pretty good at faking it,” I said.

  He shrugged. “So what? It’s all just programming. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  That was certainly the conventional wisdom at this point, but Dr. Richter hadn’t been so sure. He used to say that people believed whatever they wanted to believe, whatever was most convenient for them to believe. We use A.I. for so many things, the idea that it might have a will of its own is going to make us uncomfortable. No one talks about the Turing Test anymore, but is that really because the idea wasn’t valid? Some of what I had seen on Venus made me question our assumptions.

  “Computers might not be sentient, but Julian Huxley has been running Huxley Industries from beyond the grave for years now and the vast majority of people have no idea. The decisions he’s making, the things he’s saying… they’re plausible enough to fool just about everyone.”

  “So, it’s almost like he’s still alive. Huh. You have an interesting way of thinking, Barrett. Even if it’s wrong.”

  That might be the only compliment I ever got from Byron Harewood.

  4

  Once we got back to Command, there were several long hours of debriefing from multiple levels of officers who wanted to know what we had found, how we had come to find it, and why we had done this instead of that. Director Park sent out a cleanup crew to remove Huxley’s body and had to decide what if anything to do about the fact that he was dead. We had nothing to do with any of that, so Commander Urich gave us each a day off while leadership considered their next move.

  As I often did after Venus, I decided to use my free time to visit Sophie Anderson. Gabe and I were friends, but he kept his family life sealed off from his work. I never even met Sophie until she was Gabriel’s widow and they sent me to bring her his badge and a folded flag. Now I went over and spent time with her every few weeks or so. We would have coffee and just talk in the way only people with a shared loss could.

  The first few times we mostly talked about Gabe. How the two of them had met. How he had recruited me for the Arbiter Force. How hard it had been for her when he was away all the time. How he had become my assigned partner when I got out of the Academy. How good he was at storytelling, making you feel like you were there with him when it happened.

  Over time, we ended up having more in common than just our memories of her fallen husband. We started talking about our own lives, our childhoods, and our hopes for the future. Sometimes we hardly even mentioned Gabe at all.

  When I got to Sophie’s house, I parked on the street and looked around at the trees that ran along both sides of the quiet lane and the comfortable little house with its white fence. They were starting to become familiar to me, and I was starting to associate them with my friend and his life even though I had never seen them before he died. I walked up to the door holding a bottle of red wine. A nice, fat bottle—enough to get both of us good and tipsy.

  When I rang the button, it took Sophie a few minutes to answer. I started to wonder if she wasn’t home, or if she was home but deliberately not answering—which would have been weird. She opened the door and smiled like she did whenever she saw me. Then she saw the bottle.

  “You brought wine? Thank you, Tycho.”

  “Well, you know, it’s healthier than coffee.”

  She laughed a little, then we went into the living room and sat on the couch. The easy chair was empty, but I knew from the first time I’d come over that she didn’t want anyone to sit in it. It was his.

  I heard the clink of glasses from the kitchen, and the quiet pop as she pulled out the cork. When she came back into the room, she handed me my glass and sat down across from me in a wooden rocking chair.

  It wasn’t all that delicious, really. I had picked something Danish, but it turns out the Danes can make bad wine too when they put their minds to it. It had a metallic aftertaste, and I could see her trying hard not to grimace when she sipped it. I must have looked like a cheapskate, but Arbiters don’t get paid as much as you might think.

  She brushed her blonde hair back from her face. Her eyes were sad, just like they had been the first time I met her.

  “Is Gabe on your mind a lot today?”

  She smiled and nodded. “Always. But you’ve been such a good friend, and such a big support to me. Not like everyone else—the people who just sent a money or maybe a casserole before they forgot all about me. I truly appreciate it.”

  I took a large sip of my wine, and now it was my turn to grimace. “Sorry about the wine. This stuff is awful.”

  She laughed quietly. “At least it’s not retsina. That’s what Gabe would always insist we drink. When he told my father he liked the stuff, Dad actually walked out.”

  “Oh, your Dad is a bit of a wine snob?”

  “No. Just a reasonably civilized human being.”

  I laughed, and then had to wipe a mouthful of wine from my chin with the back of my hand.

  “So how are you doing, Soph?”

  She smiled. “Soph. I like that. Like we’re a couple of kids, and that’s your little nickname for me. I’m okay, but I do have something I want to ask you.”

  “Sure, what is it?”

  “It’s like I said. You’ve done more for me than anyone else. You’ve been a friend to me, a real friend. I like our talks; they help me process everything I’ve been through. But I’m worried about you. Why is it I never hear about a woman in your life? You deserve to be happy, have a family. But you never talk about it.”

  I set down my glass of wine and took a deep breath. This wasn’t something I wanted to talk about. “Well, Sophie, that’s just something I can never do again.”

  She set her glass down and leaned forward with her hands folded in front of her. “Come on, Tycho. What do you mean by that?”

  All right, cards on the table.

  “I need to tell you a story, something I’ve never told anyone. Not even Gabriel.”

  “Go ahead, Tycho.”

  “Well, I was married once.”

  “You were?”

  “It’s not something I talk about.”

  She reached a hand out across the gap between us and placed it gently on my arm. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  “No, it’s fine. I’ll tell you.”

  She pulled her hand back again. “Okay. I’m honored that you would share something so personal with me.”

  I took a breath.

  “I haven’t always been an Arbiter. Any one of us could say the same; we all come into the Force from something else. For some it’s the military, for some it’s law enforcement, but not for me. In fact, my life used to be about as different from what it is now as it could possibly have been.”

  “Don’t tell me you were an insurance adjuster.”

  “No.” I laughed. “An engineer. That’s what I always wanted to do, what I always imagined myself doing. I met Daphne when I was still in school. Both of us expected to spend our lives together. We dated all through college, got engaged as soon as we graduated. You know how it goes.”

  She watched me intently. “Yes. I do. What was she like?”

  The question caught me. “It’s hard to remember. That’s the toughest part of it all, that I can’t really remember her. I remember her being angry, I remember her being kind, I remember her being sleepy… it’s all bits and pieces. It doesn’t add up to a whole person. I’m always missing her, but what I’m missing are just… moments.”

  “I’m sorry, Tycho.”

  “Thank you.” I thumbed the glass in my hand as I continued. “So, I finished school and was headhunted almost immediately. Mechanical engineering for a luxury sports vehicle manufacturer. My big break, to get recruited by a company like that when I was still so young.”

  “Was Daphne happy?”

  “I don’t think she cared. She never had any interest in careers or promotions. She just wante
d to be married, to start a family together. And I wanted that too. I worked my way up through the company, always moving toward bigger projects. Bigger responsibilities. It took me away from her, and things got hard between us. Distant and tense, like there was always an invisible wall between us.”

  “That sounds like what happened with Gabe and me,” she said. “We talked about it.”

  “Yes. But then Daphne got pregnant, and I thought maybe that would bring us back together.”

  “Did it?” Her eyes were sympathetic.

  “I guess it did. I proposed to her, and she accepted. Everything was pretty wonderful, for a little while.” My voice faded out a little on those last few words.

  “You don’t have to tell me, Tycho. You really don’t.”

  “Just give me a sec.”

  I had some more of the wine and then leaned back. Her eyes were getting to me. Something about how sad she was for me. It was hard to look at.

  “So, we were engaged. I gave her a present, a cutting-edge car I’d designed myself. The perfect vehicle, designed to my own specs. Every last detail.” I saw that Sophie was holding her breath. She must have seen what was coming.

  “She loved it, of course. She drove it everywhere, showed it off to everyone. It was built for safety. That was my gift to her, to know that she and the baby could go anywhere they wanted, and they would never have to worry about anything. But I still had to follow the codes.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Professional ethics, code of conduct. I’ll get back to that in a minute. So anyway, she got really into organizing the wedding. It kept her busy, so the fact that we weren’t spending a lot of time together stopped being a problem for about two months or so. And as for me, I stayed focused on work. I can’t even imagine it now, because I hated that job. I used to joke around with Gabe about it, how I wasn’t cut out for that life. But I didn’t know that back then. I thought that was the only kind of life there was. I even had an office and some stupid motivational poster hanging on the wall…”