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

by J. N. Chaney

  “You mean like that one?”

  She was pointing toward her study, where there was a poster showing the Milky Way beneath the one word: DREAM.

  I shook my head and laughed. “Yeah. Sophie, you should have heard me ranting about those posters when we were on Venus. You’d kick me out right now. I don’t know why, but the sight of them just fills me with a crazy rage. Maybe because they remind me.”

  “I shouldn’t have interrupted you,” she said. “Keep going.”

  “So, there we are. Our wedding day comes, we have a quick little honeymoon, then back to work. She’s getting big now, we’re past the point where there should have been much of a risk. But then one night, I get home from work late and she’s on the floor. There’s a puddle of blood underneath her.”

  “Tycho! Oh, I’m so sorry!”

  “Daphne was okay, but she had just had a miscarriage. The baby was gone, and the baby was the whole reason we got married in the first place. We’d been drifting apart for a good long while. We had nothing left at that point, and we were both too young and dumb to work it out. ‘We might as well admit it,’ she told me the morning after she got back from the hospital. ‘This whole thing was a mistake.’”

  “This just gets worse and worse…”

  “I moved out of our place and got a lease on a little studio. I kept trying to see her, but she never backed off from what she was saying. The whole marriage was a mistake, a bad decision, it was doomed all along. We should get out now, before anything else happened. I got the impression that she saw the miscarriage as a punishment, like we’d done something we shouldn’t have and we had to pay the price for it.”

  “That’s irrational,” said Sophie.

  “Yeah. But does it matter?”

  “It does. It’s important for you to know that. Losing your baby was random chance; no one was trying to punish you.”

  I didn’t know what to say, because I hadn’t even gotten to the worst part yet. “She filed for divorce, and the day of the hearing was set. She still had that car, and even though I wished she would sell it I didn’t plan to insist on it. She needed a vehicle after all, and I wouldn’t have to see her riding around in it. When that hearing was done, we could walk away from each other as if nothing had happened. Like we had never even met.”

  Sophie’s voice was soft. “It’s okay to be sad, Tycho. You don’t have to be strong.”

  I didn’t know why she kept saying things like that. It’s not like I was melting down or anything, but maybe she could see something in my face I didn’t know was there.

  “On the way to the hearing, Daphne got caught up in a major accident. A monorail had malfunctioned, and it wasn’t stopping for oncoming traffic. The car couldn’t stop; there wasn’t enough time. All it could do was redirect, driving her straight off the road and into the river. I designed it to be the safest car she could possibly drive. I worked in lots of little features, anything I could think of that would make her safer. But I still had to follow the Code of Conduct.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “There’s an A.I. in every car, and it has to make life or death decisions if the situation comes up. Like whether to plow straight into the maglev train, which would quite possibly have killed dozens of people but would have been survivable for the driver. Those cars have a lot of impact-resistant plating on them, and the prototype model Sophie was driving had even more. She might have lived.”

  “Are you saying the A.I. decided to kill your wife?”

  “That’s exactly what happened. It calculated the likely loss of life and drove her off into the river rather than letting her just hit that train. She probably drowned, but I don’t really know the details. To oversimplify, it decided that the minimal loss of life from an impending collision would come at her expense. So yeah, it killed her.”

  “Oh my god, Tycho! That is so horrible!”

  “It isn’t great. I needed to understand it, maybe because I half-suspected that what had happened was my fault. I used my company access to upload everything that was in the car's black box and examined the telemetry. I ran countless simulations, countless scenarios, and they all ended the same way. If a collision had happened, there was a 50% chance the car would have just derailed the maglev but not plowed right through it. Daphne would have been hurt, and the injuries might have been life changing, but she would probably not have died.”

  Sophie furrowed her brows. “So why isn’t that what happened?”

  “Because I had changed the design of the vehicle. Those extra plates along the front of the car? They altered the outcome from 75% survivability for the maglev passengers and 50% for the driver, to 15% for the passengers and 75% for the driver. The plates had turned the car into a high-speed missile and guaranteed that any major crash would result in mass casualties. To keep that from happening, the AI ran her off the side of the river embankment instead.”

  “Tycho,” she said as she reached out to touch my arm again. “You have to know this isn’t your—”

  “—I don’t have to know anything. I do know this. The changes I made to the car are what killed my wife.”

  “Tycho, no…”

  “Just a few minor design differences would have been enough to alter the outcome of that day in almost every way. She would have made it to the hearing, she would have started a new life. She would have lived. I killed Daphne, and the fact that I didn’t do it intentionally doesn’t make any difference at all if you ask me.”

  She didn’t ask me. Instead she just stood and put her arms around me in a long, warm hug.

  “Tell me something, Tycho.”

  I nodded. I was suddenly too exhausted to object even if I had wanted to.

  “Is that why? Did you become an Arbiter as an act of contrition? Sacrificing your life to… to pay her back, maybe?”

  I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to think about it anymore. I just let her hold me.

  5

  So much for my day off. The visit to Sophie’s house was just as exhausting as any workday, but I did feel like we were suddenly much closer because of it. I left her house in a daze.

  When I got in my car, I was ready to be done with this whole “day off” concept and get back to work. The drive back to my place was going to take a little while, so I decided to bring up the dossiers on the three men we had arrested on Luna. Maybe I would see something that would move the whole case forward somehow, or maybe I would just improve my background knowledge. Either way, it was better than thinking about Gabriel’s widow and a hell of a lot better than thinking about Daphne.

  I brought the files up from my dataspike. Combatives A.I. Division Chair Anton Slotin, Ballistics Development Chair Stefan Graves, and Generative AI Division Chair Lucien Klein.

  I don’t know what I was expecting. Overt links to organized crime, some sign of unsustainable debt, anything that might make sense of their actions. From what I saw in their files, these three just weren’t that interesting.

  Slotin had a military background before he went into private industry, but he seemed to have spent most of his service moving from one cozy little desk job to another. Graves had a long family history of weapons manufacturing, going back to the now-defunct Graves-Wormbach Manufacturing company. When Huxley Industries absorbed GWM, Graves moved into Huxley’s top echelons as part of the deal. Klein’s background was in A.I., but he wasn’t so much an A.I. genius as a money man with some knowledge of artificial intelligence. His primary job would be better described as mediation, keeping an eye on the geniuses for Board and keeping an eye on the Board for the geniuses. Neither side would like or trust him, but both sides would need him if they wanted to avoid dealing with each other directly.

  There was nothing obvious here, and if not for how disoriented I was feeling after that conversation with Sophie, I would probably just have dropped it. The case would be closed soon, and we’d get another one, most likely on some remote colony.

  I didn’t need to do any
thing here. Whatever the truth was, the three executives were no longer my responsibility. They had already been transferred to Federation detention, and, as far as Command was concerned, all outstanding matters related to the Tower 7 arbitration were now resolved. Their main concern at the moment was what to do with the knowledge that Julian Huxley was dead. No one back at headquarters was tossing and turning over what had motivated these three men to commit such serious crimes.

  I closed the dossiers, laughing at myself for my own immaturity. I was playing detective, trying to get all worked up about something that no longer had anything to do with me.

  But there was something odd about the whole situation at Huxley. This wasn’t a case of some disgruntled janitor selling access to confidential material, or some blackmailed executive handing over a prototype blueprint to a rival company.

  All three of the suspects had been linked to the weapons transfers by a paper trail that wasn’t even that hard to crack. All three were involved in the projects that developed the heavy androids Marcenn bought, the nanosuits his Eleven had used in the final battle at the top of Tower 7, and so on. How could three executive-level positions be involved without direct orders from the boss himself?

  But the boss was dead, and if Byron was right that someone knew about it, then it was probably these three men. The question was why.

  All three were top-level executives at Huxley Industries, and all three were paid as well as you would expect for men in that position. Why would any of the three have risked everything they had by selling weapons to a private party on an inner colony? They must have worked closely together to commit the crime, a situation of tremendous risk.

  Were they planning to short the company after the news finally broke? Were they all working for someone else, the real mastermind who called the shots? If that was Huxley, why had they gone so far to cover up his death? Why had they continued to work together to fulfill his agenda, whatever that really was?

  Now that my mind was moving, I connected to the Arbiter Force internal network and reviewed Huxley Industries' investor report. Everything about this case suggested a larger conspiracy, but I was no closer to really understanding it than I had been when I first discussed the issue with Gabriel on our way up Tower 7. If everything went back to Huxley Industries, then there had to be something here. Some little thread I could unravel.

  I scanned through the document, but all I could see at first was the same meaningless pablum you would normally expect to see in an investor report. Here’s everything that’s going fairly well for us, here’s a list of excuses about the things that aren’t going so well along with some tortured explanations for why it’s all just fine, and here are some wildly optimistic projections for the next few quarters. I don’t even know why the investors read these things, unless they’re either just that gullible or that much better at reading between the lines.

  Our forensic financial investigators had already turned up a list of keywords and phrases that referred to the black-market arms dealing. When I glanced through the transaction records, I found these keywords easily. The evidence was there. Even though the transactions themselves had involved serious crimes, the company had still logged them just like they would have logged anything else, relying on an almost childish code system to disguise the true nature of the most sensitive transactions.

  If that was their method, then it stood to reason they’d use the same method with other clients. If Slotin, Graves, and Klein had their own little arms ring going, I expected to find the same semi-amateurish misdirection in reference to other deals. But I couldn’t find anything, not even when I had my dataspike perform a series of semantic filter searches through the Huxley Industries financial records. My filters did turn up a number of transactions, but they were all the transactions we already knew about.

  If these three were criminals, they were criminals with exactly one client: August Marcenn.

  When we’d confronted the last eleven members of the Tower 7 Nightwatch under the control of Marcenn’s broken mind, they’d spoken a lot of gibberish. Or so I thought at the time, but now I was starting to wonder if there was more to it than I realized at the time.

  What was it they said? I closed my eyes and thought, picturing them perched up on the top of a building and speaking in that eerie, coordinated way of theirs.

  “The great work of the human race is in terrible danger. We acted to protect the glory. We would do so again. Do not prevent the work.”

  New working hypothesis, for what it was worth: August Marcenn wasn’t alone. His murderous fanaticism wasn’t just a personal savior complex, but an ideology shared by other powerful and well-connected people. The slaughter on Venus was not a simple case of megalomania, but a deadly ideology with other followers, other true believers.

  It was starting to look like we’d been right the first time, when we guessed that a death cult was behind the incident on Venus. But what exactly did the cult believe? The Eleven had rambled about a threat to “the glory,” by which they seem to have meant the glories of human civilization. And who was responsible for this threat?

  “Insidious powers, old and dispassionate.”

  An epic battle between good and evil, not an atypical ideology when it came to death cults. Unsurprisingly, the self-proclaimed good guys in this scenario were the ones committing mass murder.

  So, that was one way to look at it. A conspiracy, driven by some bizarre ideology. But it was kind of far-fetched, which had always been the weakness of the cult hypothesis. If you were starting a death cult with plans to kill vast numbers of people, how would you go about recruiting the wealthy and powerful to your cause?

  It didn’t feel right somehow, and there was another possibility. The three men had been set up, fall guys for someone else with a more easily understandable agenda such as an extremely large sum of money. The paper trail had been too obvious, the code they’d been using too easy to crack. The arrogance of the corporate elite, or evidence of a frame-up?

  I wanted to know, and that didn’t have as much to do with being an Arbiter as with simple curiosity. Never mind the old saying about that.

  Something hit the car with a jarring impact, shocking me out of my wandering thoughts. The hit was a hard one; I could feel it in the base of my spine. I was stunned at first. Car accidents are rare. Daphne’s death in one was a freak event. I had never even met anyone else who had lost someone in a car accident. What was going on? My car’s AI should have seen any trouble, made the necessary corrections, and avoided the impact.

  The car sped up, and I was thrown violently against the door and then just as violently the other way. With a mounting sense of dread, I realized that the car’s AI was taking evasive actions. Someone was chasing us.

  My voice was shaky as I spoke to the onboard computer. “Street view and sitrep.”

  The screen lit up, and I saw the street outside. We weren’t alone on the road. There were people on the sidewalks and other cars racing by, all of which were trying to get as far away from us as possible.

  The A.I. spoke, a soothing female voice with a British accent. “Sitrep as follows: we are pursued by an armored vehicle, and it is attempting to force us off the road. If we continue at this speed, we will impact an approaching monorail. To prevent this outcome, we may be forced to accept impact with the armored vehicle. Survivability is dependent on the angle of impact but is no greater than 25%.”

  My car was weaving back and forth, speeding up on every straight and slowing down on every curve. Beside the road, I saw the winding, snakelike shape of a nearby waterway. Up ahead, I saw a bridge across the river and a maglev monorail track with the lights of an approaching train.

  That was when I panicked. It couldn’t possibly be real, but there I was in a grotesquely familiar scene. It felt like some kind of cheesy ghost story, where you suffer in the most ironic way possible to punish you for your past sins. My peripheral vision disappeared, washed away by a red darkness. The sound of my ragg
ed breathing filled the car.

  The maglev crossed in front of me, a rattling wall of metal and plastic. My car’s A.I., programmed to kill its own driver if necessary to save as many lives as possible, gave up on escaping our pursuers and braked with a jolt, throwing me forward against my seat belt. It must have decided in that moment that the survivability was optimal for everyone concerned, which did not imply we would all survive. Whoever was chasing me hit hard, an impact that slammed my teeth together and cut my tongue. My mouth flooded with thick, hot blood.

  I felt something like freefall and realized in a vague but terrifying way that the car was flipping end over end. We hit a person on the street, and I saw their head explode in a burst of blood and brains against the car before the screen went dark. We hit something else, something big enough to jostle my whole body. It held us in place for just a moment, then fell away, like someone had opened a trapdoor beneath my feet.

  I had lost any sense of up or down, but I felt a sickening lurch in the pit of my stomach as the car cleared the edge of the embankment, then a sudden jolt as it plunged into the cold, muddy water below.

  6

  I wasn’t knocked unconscious, but I did lose where I was and what was going on for several seconds. I heard a pleasant sound of gurgling water and felt like I was floating free. Perhaps in outer space? No. There isn’t any water in outer space, and I wondered why I had thought such a silly thing. Was I at a campground, waking up in my tent by a stream? I could get up and go fishing, or take a boat out on the lake nearby…

  I opened my eyes and saw the water slowly filling the car. The roof of my vehicle was now below my head, and I was hanging suspended by my own seatbelt. The disorientation cleared and I realized I must be underwater.