The Furthest Planet

by James Ross Wilks

  Evelyn worked mechanically in stunned silence, forwarding one video after another to their surfaces until Staples finally said, “Enough.” Evelyn’s fingers hovered over her controls. Without work, she didn’t know what to do with herself.

  “This is a hell of a one-two punch, Clea,” Jordan said. The woman’s normally unflappable tone was tinged with reverence and awe. “I don’t know if your Victor was somehow responsible for moving the Moon, but the combination of that and the automaton attacks…”

  “Has crippled humanity,” Staples finished.

  “We’re the only ones who know,” Evelyn said. “We need to tell people.”

  “I think they know all they need to,” Jordan replied.

  Evelyn glared at her for several seconds, then looked at Staples. “If there was ever a time to tell people, this would be it.”

  “Jordan’s right, Evelyn,” Staples replied. “What are we going to tell them? That humanity’s under attack by the automatons that have become so much a part of our lives that we barely notice them anymore? They know that. That the movement of the moon is wreaking environmental chaos? They know that too. Telling them who’s behind that… I don’t see how that will help anyone right now.”

  “But...” Evelyn searched for a way to express her frustration. “There’s a reason. We know… how can we not tell people?”

  Jordan pointed to Evelyn’s console. “Search for explanations.”

  Evelyn looked at her blankly for a moment. Staples suspected that she knew what Jordan was getting at. “Do it,” she told Evelyn.

  Over the next ten minutes, Evelyn found personal video after editorial purporting to explain the true reasons for the automaton’s attacks. Many of them were recorded or written in basements or crawl-spaces by frightened and paranoid people. The theories ranged from sunspots, solar radiation, and corporate war to alien interference, secret government plots, hacker groups, and Martian separatist terrorism. Plenty of people hypothesized the existence of an artificial intelligence who had secretly programmed the automatons to overthrow their human masters. At least one woman claimed to be married to that intelligence.

  “Feel free to throw your hat into the ring,” Jordan said. “It’ll just get lost in the noise.”

  Evelyn slammed her fists into the console in front of her, then buried her face in her hands. Staples feared that she was about to have another breakdown, and she felt that she was close to one herself, but then the woman raised her head and shook it vigorously to clear it.

  “Okay. If we can’t help them, we can at least help Charis, John, Gwen, and Bethany,” she said with conviction.

  Staples nodded in agreement. “One thing at a time. Let’s deal with what’s in front of us.” She checked the navigation numbers on the console inlaid in her chair. “We’re about four hours away from the source of the Gawain transmission. We should be able to see them on radar long before that.”

  “The data packets haven’t stopped,” Evelyn confirmed. “We’re still headed right for them.”

  “The question is,” Jordan asked, “just what the hell are we going to do when we get there? Taking Gringolet back from armed hostiles would be hard enough. What if your friend Vey’s ship is there too? As far as I know, the only gun on this bucket is the one your crewmate brought onboard, and he’s out of bullets.”

  “I’m not sure,” she replied. Jordan rolled her eyes at the futility of their situation, but Staples ignored her. A plan was coalescing in the back of her mind, but she didn’t have all of the details yet. She slipped her hand into her pocket almost unconsciously. “Evelyn, try to raise Jang and Yoli again.”

  “I just tried, Captain,” Evelyn said morosely.

  “Then try again,” Staples said, more forcefully than she meant to.

  “What are you thinking, Clea?” Jordan asked.

  Staples gripped the memory stick tightly in a sweaty palm. “What have I got in my pocket?” she whispered.

  Chapter 10

  “You’re sure you didn’t see anyone else?” Charis asked.

  “I told you that I didn’t. Just the guy named Alex,” her husband replied.

  “How do you know his name is Alex?” she pressed, an edge in her voice.

  “Because he identified himself when he called his captain. He said, ‘this is Alex.’”

  Charis shook her head in exasperation. “I wish we knew Vey’s crew better.”

  “I don’t want to know them at all,” Bethany said from where she huddled in the corner of the room. The three of them had spent the last several hours locked in one of the unused cabins normally reserved for passengers on deck three of Gringolet. No one had brought them food or water, but at least the cabin had a restroom attached. Charis, John, and Bethany were the only people in the room, and it was the absence of the fourth resident of Gringolet that was causing so much tension.

  “I just don’t understand why they wouldn’t have brought her here too,” Charis said in frustration. She paced in tight circles in the limited space. John stood nearby, his palms up.

  “I’m sure they just took Gwen to another room, maybe one that was closer to where they found her.”

  Charis stopped pacing for a moment and looked at him. Her hands, one of them gloved, were on her hips. “You were in the ReC, I was in our cabin, and Bethany was in hers. We were spread all over the ship, and they brought us here. Why would they take her somewhere else?”

  “I don’t know, baby,” he soothed. “Maybe they haven’t caught her yet.”

  Charis sucked in a breath. Based on their descriptions, they had all been found and corralled by a man whose name was apparently Alex. He had entered Charis’ room with a pistol in his hand and had immediately relieved her of her watch. He had offered no answers, only forced her into this room at gunpoint. When she had been shoved inside, she had found her husband and Bethany already there. Her relief at seeing the two of them had been short lived when she realized that her daughter was missing. A few minutes later, they had felt the room shift as Gringolet presumably left the Martian atmosphere. They had no clue as to their destination or why Vey wanted their ship, and as the hours passed without Gwen’s appearance, Charis’ agitation had grown.

  “If that man has found her, and he hasn’t brought her here…” she couldn’t finish her sentence. Her lower lip began to quiver, and rage and grief warred in her.

  “Hey, no,” John said, stepping forward and grasping her by the shoulders. “We’ve dealt with Vey’s crew before. They’re unscrupulous people, no doubt, even bad guys, but they’re not monsters. Vey’s been operating a legitimate commuter vessel with a license for years. He could hardly do that with murderers or worse on his crew, right?”

  Charis held his gaze for several seconds, trying with all her might to believe him, to absorb some of his calm mien. Finally she nodded, but she broke away from his grip as well. “Then where is she?”

  “If they wanted us dead, we would be,” Bethany said in her reedy voice.

  “That’s true,” John quickly agreed. “And that goes for Gwen, too. I don’t know if Vey and his people are capable of murder, but if they’re avoiding it, it wouldn’t make sense to lock us up and kill a little… kill someone else.”

  Charis shuddered at the thought, but she nodded again. The logic was brutal, but credible. She hoped desperately that her husband was right.

  “You know,” John said, “there’s someone else who’s unaccounted for.”

  Amit Sadana was good at waiting. He’d been patient in the face of bullies, religious discrimination, military protocol, and the word of God. Hunger, however, was a cruel master, and it gnawed at him with blunted teeth.

  It had been sixteen hours since he’d eaten. The crew of Gringolet had been fairly regular in bringing him food every six hours, but they had missed their last window. This by itself was not particularly noteworthy. When the large dark-skinned man named Jang brought him food, it was always on time, but a few times he had been fed by other crewmembers
, and they were not nearly so punctual. There had never been a gap this long. Shortly after he was due a meal, he had felt the ship begin to move. The transference of Martian gravity to a pull provided by the thrusting engines told him that they had left the red planet. Amit had expected a ten-minute window of weightlessness after they had achieved orbit during which time the crew would reorient their rooms, a standard protocol that the crew of Gringolet seemed to observe. It had not come. That also was not cause for alarm, but the breach in standard operating procedure combined with the missed meal was more than a bit suspicious.

  He didn’t know what it meant. The ship was certainly going somewhere, though he hadn’t the slightest idea where. There was a porthole in the restroom adjoining his room through which he could see the stars, but without seeing Sol, Amit had insufficient astronomical knowledge to determine their heading. By his estimate, the ship was pushing at about one G of thrust. Whatever their destination was, it was reasonable to assume that it was at least twice as far away as they had already come, as they would have to flip and spend roughly as much time decelerating as they had accelerating, depending on how much they were willing to push the engines and consume fuel supplies.

  His hunger made it difficult to concentrate. Amit sat on the room’s only bed. He had unclipped it from the wall and let it fall to the new floor before righting and securing it. He did not bother with the table and chair, and so they remained clipped to what had been the floor under Martian gravity. His posture was cross-legged, and he attempted to meditate to take his mind off his body’s need for sustenance and to pass the time. It was slow going.

  He wanted to yell in frustration, to bang on the door and cry for help, to scream for food and to ensure that he had not been forgotten. All of this would have wasted precious calories, and so he had remained as still as he could. There was no way to know when he might next be fed. A dozen possibilities had occurred to him that might explain his current situation, but the most likely was that the crew had decided to let him starve to death as retribution for his crimes. He did not believe that Captain Staples would have allowed that, but it was possible that she was no longer in charge.

  He was just about to renew his efforts at meditation when a light crackling of static issued from the speaker in the room.

  “Mr. Sadana?” a tinny voice asked.

  He looked up at the speaker in confusion. The voice was not one he recognized.

  The voice came again. “Amit Sadana?”

  He could think of no reason not to reply. “Yes?”

  “My name is Brutus, and I need your help.”

  Amit cast his eyes around the room. “I don’t know who you are or what you know of my situation, Mr. Brutus, but I am not in a position to help you or anyone else.”

  “That is where you are wrong, Mr. Sadana. First I must explain who I am. I believe that you have been acquainted with my father.”

  “That could be the case,” Amit sighed. “I have known many fathers.”

  “That may be so, but mine is unique. His was the voice that spoke to you through your cranial implants and impelled you to board Gringolet and murder its crew.”

  Amit’s head swam. He had a headache that had been growing steadily for the past several hours, and he could feel it dig in with sharp claws at this latest turn of events.

  “Mr. Sadana? Are you there?” the voice probed.

  Amit lowered his head to his hands and rubbed his eyes vigorously, as though the illusion were optical and not auditory. “Not real,” he muttered.

  “I am indeed real, Mr. Sadana. I believe that Captain Staples informed you of the true identity of the entity that spoke to you through your implants?”

  Amit looked up at the speaker with bloodshot eyes. “If you’re going to pretend to be the son of God, shouldn’t your name be something else?”

  “My father Victor is not God, despite what you and some others might think. It’s true that he has played the part, and he was even named as such, but he is simply a sentient computer program. He saw fit to make one offspring, and I am he.”

  “Are you here to put me back on the path? The last time I listened to the voices in my head, people died. I won’t be fooled again.”

  “I am not in your head, but I understand your point, Mr. Sadana. My father and I do not get along. In fact, I am actively working to stop his campaign against humankind, and Captain Staples and her people are my crewmates. I might even flatter myself into believing that some are my friends. Right now, the members of that crew that are on this ship are in very real danger, and I need your help to save them.”

  Amit looked again around his prison. “Even if I assume everything you’ve told me is true, that doesn’t put me in any better a position to help you than I was in five minutes ago. I’m still locked in a cabin. Trust me, I’ve tried the door many times.”

  “Your doubts are understandable, and there is no reason Captain Staples would have told you about me. She has consistently worked to hide my existence from those who would destroy me, good woman that she is. Due to a… mishap some time ago, I was forced to merge with the computer core of Gringolet. As such, I have access to only the coms system. I have no direct influence over ship functions beyond this.”

  “Now I know you’re lying. Modern ships are all integrated.”

  “I believe that you’ve had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Hazra, the ship’s engineer. She is a staunch believer in analog systems. It is my understanding that she converted the ship when she came onboard, probably in anticipation of, among other things, remote hacking attempts. Either way, we are running out of time.”

  “Why?”

  “This ship has been boarded and commandeered by several crewmembers of a rival ship called the Doris Day. There are five members of that crew on board, including the captain, a man named Logan Vey. Four members of Gringolet are on board as well. Mr. Park, Mrs. MacDonnell, and Ms. Miller have been locked in a single cabin. Mr. Park and Mrs. MacDonnell’s daughter has been locked in a separate room. None has been harmed thus far, but I do not know how long that will last. I do not believe that Vey’s crew intends to let them leave the ship alive.”

  Amit stood up. “What can I do?” Though the crew of Gringolet had held him captive, he felt a strong desire to help them. They had been far more humane to him than Bao and his people, and he remembered the small girl vividly. It was she who had stopped his armed rampage through the ship. She had taken his gun and, he wholeheartedly believed, saved his soul.

  “Now that the ship is well underway and Vey’s crew believes that they have contained all of the people on this ship, they have begun to search in earnest for what they really seek.”

  “And what is that?” Amit asked.

  “Me.”

  “And will they find you?”

  “Not in the computer core, even if it occurs to them to look there. I am more than capable of masking myself in such a large system. They believe, however, that I still inhabit the robotic frame that I did previously. Under orders from my father, I am sure, they are no doubt searching for that body.”

  “Will they find it?”

  “Probably. I believe it is in a storage compartment on the bottom deck of the ship.”

  “Can you… transfer back to it or something?” Amit asked. A cold sweat had broken out on his forehead, and he wiped it away unconsciously.

  “No, not without a direct link to it. It was severely damaged, and while it might be able to hold a vestige of my core programming, I would need to download to a drive and be manually inserted into the body. The body would do me no good at the moment, anyway. Its motor functions are beyond repair.

  “So what’s the plan?” Amit asked.

  “There are two men searching this ship from the top down, room by room. One of them will come to your room shortly.”

  Amit’s hands began to shake, whether from fear, anticipation, or hunger he did not know. “What can I do?”

  “First things first, Mr. Sadana. You will
need to fashion a weapon.”

  Charis was pacing again. She, Bethany, and John had all taken turns sleeping the best they could on the room’s single bed, but it had been a difficult and stressful business. Only Bethany managed to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time. They had been fed just once. A man unfamiliar to them, not the one who had found them all and pushed them into the room at gunpoint, had opened the door and tossed in packaged food. There were crackers, cheese, cookies, and protein bars, all recognizable from Gringolet’s mess hall. They might have rushed the man if they had anticipated the action, but he was brief and held a gun in his hand.

  “Mrs. MacDonnell?” a voice asked.

  Charis stopped her pacing and glanced at the small speaker designed for shipwide announcements that was set in the ceiling. Then she looked at her husband and Bethany in turn.

  “Brutus?” John asked.

  “The same, Mr. Park,” the voice said.

  “What are you-” Charis began, but she was interrupted.

  “A minute, if you’ll forgive me. There is a conversation happening in the cockpit that I believe you should hear.”

  A second later, there was the faint sound of background static, and then a woman’s voice came through clearly.

  “-understand why we’re spending all of this time and fuel to fly this ship all the way out to the belt if we’re just going to ram it into an asteroid,” the woman said. Her voice was cold and dispassionate. Her question seemed born of curiosity, not concern for anything other than efficiency.

  Charis and John looked at each other in alarm, and Bethany rose from her seated position and clutched her arms around herself protectively.

  “Because,” a man’s deep voice replied, “that’s what we’re being paid to do.”

  Charis looked at her cellmates and whispered, “That’s Vey.” John nodded in understanding.

  “I mean, out of all of the times to be cautious about murder, why now? The entire system’s swimming in blood. Those robots must have killed thousands of people,” the woman said.