Grand Central Arena

by Ryk E. Spoor

  DuQuesne frowned. ‘‘We haven’t even finished the overall ship design. Dr. Franceschetti had only begun on those when I left.’’

  ‘‘True,’’ the disembodied voice agreed, ‘‘but with a minor amount of analysis I could come up with a general design projection that I believe matches the likely final design to within a few percent.’’

  Showing off, but with a purpose. He wants us to know that he’s the right man for the job. DuQuesne passed through another door, and stopped, studying what he saw carefully.

  Dr. Thomas Cussler’s eyes were closed, slightly graying eyebrows contrasting with skin so dark brown as to be nearly black, his square face seemingly chiseled out of polished wood by a master sculptor. Shimmers of light danced near him in the air, and actual physical leads—treated superconductor—were attached to him at several points. DuQuesne, now looking at him with a data-transfer overlay map, could see a torrent of data—sensor feeds, augmentation data, analysis enhancement, and others—streaming back and forth and through the man.

  Yeah, he’s definitely a Transcender; believes in the ultimate destiny of mankind to unify with the machines we created. Doesn’t do the full Upload thing because it’d qualify him as an AI under current rules.

  This wasn’t the kind of direction DuQuesne ever intended to go, but for a nanomaintenance man it was ideal. Tom Cussler was obviously aware of the operation of much of the station the way a man is aware of the operation of his body. ‘‘You sure you want to come along?’’

  Cussler suddenly sat up and opened his eyes, which glinted with humor and awareness. ‘‘Oh, most definitely,’’ he answered, in a deep, warm voice. ‘‘Your ship may be far smaller than my usual systems, but I am fascinated by the possibilities. I’ve just finished making a backup copy of myself, in case of disaster, so the risk is minimal.’’

  One way we really think differently, DuQuesne thought. There’s no way in hell I’d make a ‘‘backup’’; it wouldn’t be me, just someone who thought he was me, and what if it got activated by accident when I was still alive? Aloud, he snorted and shook his head. ‘‘So I didn’t even have to come here?’’

  ‘‘Perhaps not,’’ admitted Cussler, extending his hand and shaking DuQuesne’s, ‘‘but I appreciate the effort, and the personal touch. While I am perfectly comfortable making all my arrangements by virtupresence, many others are not—I note that our pilot, in particular, will want to meet me in person before we actually begin, so I have already made the arrangements. I’m leaving Maxine in charge for the time in question.’’ DuQuesne got a fleeting impression of a pretty young woman in overalls, wearing a baseball cap and holding an oversized wrench, giving him a wave and a wink. ‘‘She can run things here almost as well as I can, certainly for a few weeks.’’

  ‘‘Good enough,’’ DuQuesne said. ‘‘Well, since I’m here, you want to get up and show me around the place?’’

  Cussler laughed. ‘‘Wondering if I actually move far from the center of my web, Doctor? Why not? My connections travel with me. Yet . . . it’s rather odd, Dr. DuQuesne. I have a vague impression that this is not your first visit here. And I do not normally have ‘vague’ impressions at all.’’

  He’s damn good to have any at all. I’ll have to upgrade Davison’s security again, and especially the data-feed remote editing. If he can get even a vague impression . . . someone else might get more. And that would be real, real bad. ‘‘It’s possible,’’ he said, answering Cussler’s implied question, ‘‘but if so it was a long time ago; probably before you really settled in here.’’

  Cussler relaxed. ‘‘Yes, that would make sense.’’ He rose and gestured to another door. ‘‘Shall we? This will take us to some of the better areas of the station most quickly.’’

  ‘‘Lead on,’’ DuQuesne said with a smile.

  Chapter 5

  Simon leaned back in his chair, massaging his temples. ‘‘So we are nearly ready to go?’’

  The diminuitive blonde woman opposite him nodded, answering in a soft Southern accent. ‘‘Speaking just for myself, I’m ready. Tom and the others have done themselves proud on giving me the best medical facilities we can fit in the space available. Of course, I’m hoping I’m just excess baggage.’’

  ‘‘Gabrielle,’’ Simon assured her, ‘‘a medical officer is never excess baggage. Obviously we hope you have nothing but an entertaining ride to look forward to, of course.’’

  ‘‘Thank you kindly,’’ Dr. Gabrielle Wolfe said, flashing a brilliant smile of appreciation at him. ‘‘Me and you both, I assure you. And you too, Arrie.’’

  Ariane Austin smiled fondly back at her friend. ‘‘No doubt about it, Gabrielle. We just want to sit back and enjoy the show.’’

  Simon could tell that Ariane wasn’t being entirely truthful; she was a pilot, and at heart she wanted to be the one flying the ship into history. But she wasn’t going to complain about that in public; she was going to pull her friends together as part of the team.

  In an odd way, the fact that they held these face to face meetings as a courtesy to her preferences was helping bring them all together. Virtupresense was ubiquitous . . . yet somehow personal meetings still had an undefinable power that most virtual encounters lacked. You made the right choice in taking her, Simon, Mio said.

  Thank DuQuesne for that, he answered honestly. I wouldn’t even have thought of taking a pilot. Now I’ve got a crew that starts out unified, mostly. He glanced over at the third of Ariane’s friends, Dr. Stephen Franceschetti, nearly as small as Gabrielle Wolfe, one of the top concept engineers in the System and the main designer of the experimental vessel—which now had a name, courtesy of Ariane Austin.

  The pilot had insisted on it. ‘‘No ship I’ve ever flown has been just a string of numbers, and even if the only time I actually fly her is in simulation, I’m not going to change that now.’’

  And her suggestion of a name had been so apropos that there hadn’t even been any competing candidates. In honor of what they sought—the proof of the practicality of faster-than-light travel, something dreamed of but never realized over the centuries—the test vessel was to be named Holy Grail.

  He smiled again at the thought. ‘‘Dr. Franceschetti, how long until we’re ready for launch?’’

  Steve ran a hand through short-cropped curly hair. ‘‘A week? The E-dollar support we’ve been getting has pretty much maxed out the construction and testing speed. Tom,’’ he glanced to Dr. Cussler, who grinned back, ‘‘has already got the nanomaintenance working internally, which is helping a lot. Carl’s got the controls installed, except for Ariane’s pure physical actuator backups, which we’re having to do a lot of modeling on to make sure we’re not making any unrecognized assumptions.’’

  ‘‘What do you mean by that?’’

  ‘‘What he means,’’ Ariane said, catching his gaze, ‘‘is that our technology’s so ubiquitous that we have lots of areas where we tend to forget about it entirely. Like the fact that we were installing physical control systems, and backup sensors that could’ve been manufactured three centuries ago, but the display interfaces were still assuming I could get a 3–D holographic input that’s run by a T-0.5 display server.’’

  ‘‘Oh dear. Yes, that would not do at all.’’ Simon had the momentary, very unpleasant image of being inside a vessel whose pilot—human pilot—couldn’t see where she was going or what might be in her way.

  ‘‘That’s been the main pain in the ass for this ship design all along,’’ Carl put in. ‘‘Having to parallel every damn operation of the ship, one cutting-edge, the other something that dates back to, what, the twentieth century, maybe the twenty-first? I’ve had to work with Tom, Steve, and Marc,’’ he nodded at DuQuesne, ‘‘to reconstruct models of those kinds of devices. Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to crossbreed a rocket ship with a Spanish galleon.’’

  Simon chuckled. ‘‘Come now, it’s not that bad. But it is an interesting challenge we are facing, I admit. Dr. DuQuesne?’’<
br />
  ‘‘Interesting, yes. I’m coming from the other direction—with all the advances we’ve made since that time, I was able to actually come up with a reasonably efficient design for a fusion reactor that doesn’t require AI controls. Might actually be worth a paper or two at the next Energy Review Conference.’’ The huge, black-haired engineer leaned back in his chair. ‘‘So main fusion reactor’s a go. I’ve put in a good chunk of backup batteries, plus the absolutely enormous bank of superconductor batteries to hold the transition pulse for your ‘Sandrisson coils.’ Power runs to all main and backup systems are designed and almost completed. We’ve got all the drive systems installed, primary to final backup, except, of course, for the test drive; those coils are still being built up and you’ll have to resonance test them day after tomorrow.’’

  ‘‘Supplies?’’

  Tom Cussler answered. ‘‘That’s my department. We have—courtesy of Commander Maginot—an AIWish unit, rating ten, with the limiting programming interlocks disabled, so I can use it for manufacturing just about anything. We’ll have plenty of raw materials, so food should not be a problem . . . unless you’re planning on spending a long time in this ‘transition’ of yours.’’

  ‘‘Well,’’ Simon said, ‘‘That depends on what you mean by ‘long.’ Because of the energy demands of the drive, we will have to spend some time—I calculate about five or six days—to recharge the coils, but no more than that.’’

  Ariane glanced up, puzzled. ‘‘But . . . your probes jumped out and came back pretty much right away. Why can’t we just do that?’’

  ‘‘Because we simply don’t have room for two banks of surge superconductor batteries capable of carrying that much power.’’ Sandrisson answered. ‘‘The one we have already takes up more than a quarter of the ship volume. Add another bank and we’ll have room for about one person. Maybe.’’

  ‘‘Your prior tests only lasted for a few seconds,Simon,’’ DuQuesne pointed out. ‘‘If we stay in this . . . transition space for days, how far away will we have gone?’’

  ‘‘A question that’s not quite as simple to answer as it sounds. Remember that the probes seemed to emerge at almost random locations. There was some correlation between how fast they were going and how far they had gone when they emerged, but it was not nearly so clear as I would have liked.

  ‘‘Based on the maximum speed we have seen . . . perhaps a third of a light-year.’’

  The others were silent, staring at him for a moment. A slow grin spread across Ariane’s face. ‘‘Going where no one has gone before,’’ she said.

  ‘‘Aside from unmanned probes, yes. Of course, that’s part of the risk. For the current approach, we don’t have room to add a full backup set of batteries—the power requirements of the drive would scale up again—and so, if for some reason we end up unable to come back . . . ’’

  The others looked momentarily troubled, but Ariane waved that away as though it was of no more concern than a smudge on the Holy Grail’s paint job. ‘‘Don’t try to scare me out of this. You can stay home if you like. I could always fly her on my own.’’

  Simon shook his head. ‘‘And I do believe you would. No, I don’t think any of us are backing out. Certainly not me—I have a great deal to prove here. Anyone else?’’

  DuQuesne snorted, an eloquent, if nonverbal, response. The others all indicated they weren’t backing out either.

  ‘‘Then I do believe that our next meeting—this time, next week—will be our final meeting in preparation for launch.’’ Simon smiled. ‘‘One way or another, we’ll be done with this in a couple of weeks.’’

  ‘‘With luck,’’ Ariane said, as she and the others stood to leave, ‘‘it will just be the beginning of something bigger.’’

  ‘‘We can only hope,’’ he agreed.

  Chapter 6

  As usual, DuQuesne noticed, Simon lingered a bit longer than everyone else; generally he seemed to be giving people a chance to meet with him privately in case they had questions or concerns they didn’t want to talk about in the general meeting. Since he didn’t have any additional points to hash out with Simon, DuQuesne continued out.

  But after he’d only gone a couple of corridors down, he slowed. There’d been something on the scientist’s face, a shift in expression, that bothered him. DuQuesne shrugged and returned to the conference room.

  Simon Sandrisson was still there, eyes closed but not resting; his face, now that DuQuesne was looking for it, seemed definitely troubled. ‘‘You okay, Simon?’’

  The green eyes snapped open in startlement. ‘‘Marc? I thought everyone had left.’’

  ‘‘I had. Came back, though, because I thought you looked like something was eating at you. From what I saw when I came in, I was right. Want to talk about it?’’

  Sandrisson sat up, one hand reflexively smoothing his hair back so it framed, rather than fell across, his face. ‘‘Is it really that obvious?’’

  ‘‘No,’’ DuQuesne answered, giving the scientist a very small smile. ‘‘I doubt anyone else would have noticed anything at all. But your question tells me you do have a problem, so spit it out.’’

  ‘‘I suppose I should. Marc, is it really worth endangering all of you just to prove my own point? Am I conducting an experiment that I shouldn’t?’’

  ‘‘Didn’t you already have this discussion with Saul Maginot and me? The Schilling potential of this jaunt seems minimal.’’ DuQuesne used the usual shorthand to refer to the risk of true lethal disaster, derived from the runaway nanotech or ‘‘gray goo’’ incident that had consumed the laboratory and persons of Dr. Michael Schilling, the unrelated Dr. John Schilling, and their forty associates in Lunar Lab 2—necessitating a thermonuclear strike to eliminate the danger. ‘‘And there’s some good reason to go forward with this. You convinced Saul, obviously.’’

  The scientist sighed, then took off the ornamental glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘‘I played to his general concerns, partly because Mio was able to glean his hot-button topics from his public speeches and interviews. But privacy, self-determination, all these things are virtually at an all-time high. I’m afraid I may have convinced him, but not myself. What is the danger and urgency here that justifies risking people?’’

  DuQuesne gave a derisive snort. ‘‘Sandrisson, let me tell you something. I’ve known Commander Maginot for . . . well, a damn long time, and if all you did was try to play up to his fears, he’d have laughed you out of the conference room and denied you this chance, right off the bat.’’ He shook his head. ‘‘Look, Simon, it’s hard to see all the parts of this picture. Some of it goes all the way back to Harriman Delosius and the Anonymity War, which damn near wrecked civilization but ended up giving us what we’ve got now—a society that’s bloody close to the ideal of everyone able to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as they don’t hurt anyone else, and without anyone starving, freezing, or otherwise suffering because they can’t even get the basic necessities of life. We still have different countries, but compared to what they used to be, they’re practically volunteer clubs.

  ‘‘But you know there’s always that nagging set of voices out there worried that someone is doing something bad with that freedom—and of course the problem is, sometimes they’re right.’’

  Simon nodded. ‘‘Hyperion.’’

  DuQuesne grimaced. ‘‘Yeah. Hyperion. That mess forced Saul to create the Combined Space Forces and the Space Security Council all at once. There are some things too monstrous to allow, even in the name of freedom. The problem is that it’s easy to let that kind of change accumulate. People don’t mind poking into other people’s business . . . they just don’t want other people poking into theirs. Governments exist to run society . . . and they do that best by having more and more information and control. Sure, the governments we have now don’t have much of that at all any more—when AIWish nanoreplicators can give everyone pretty much anything, there’s just not all that much left to do.’’ />
  ‘‘Yes, yes,’’ Simon said tiredly, ‘‘I know that part of the argument; I made it to the Commander. Do you really think there’s a clear and present danger of this society turning into one that’s really so much more controlled?’’

  ‘‘Oh, yes indeedy.’’ DuQuesne gave his most unsettling grin. ‘‘There’ve been bills debated already on the floor of the SSC which would introduce requirements to insert override codes—only for use in the most extreme circumstances, of course—allowing the SSC or its active arm, the CSF, to directly interrogate your personal net, including your AISage, without consent. They’ve been defeated so far, but the problem is that we’ve come way too far with our technology; if such a thing were ever enacted, it would be a very, very, very short step from that to universal monitoring and control. And that is ignoring the joker in the pack of the AISages—imagine your favorite friend and confidant being secretly programmed to monitor you. It wouldn’t be hard to manage.’’

  Simon shuddered. ‘‘Mio says you have a horrible imagination and she’s going to have nightmares about that.’’

  ‘‘Sorry,’’ DuQuesne said sincerely. He opened up his link so he could see the little Asian avatar glaring at him. ‘‘Really, I am sorry. That wasn’t meant to imply anything about you.’’

  She narrowed her eyes. ‘‘I certainly hope not.’’

  ‘‘So, Marc,’’ Simon said, ‘‘Do you really see FTL as helping this situation?’’

  ‘‘Indirectly, yes. Oh, it’s not really going to be a solution for the Solar System itself if someone manages to trigger a totalitarian revolution, but what it would do is make it possible for there to be places not controlled by such a regime. The Solar System’s got fifty-five billion people in it now, and it’s actually starting to get a little difficult to find some area to set up shop where you’re not going to be a little close to someone else. For, of course, varying values of ‘a little close.’ And if you do set up shop far enough away that other people aren’t sure what you’re up to, it’s already true that they start nosing around to make sure that you aren’t the next Hyperion Station.’’