The Furthest Planet

by James Ross Wilks

  She summoned up some false cheeriness. “Admiral Bao. Sorry we left Mars without talking to you. We figured you were busy. Frankly, we were too.”

  “Little early to joke about the deaths of over twenty-three thousand people, don’t you think?” Bao’s voice, normally humorless, was deadly serious.

  The number itself was shocking, but after recent events, Staples found that she took it in stride. “You deal with loss in your way, I’ll deal with it in mine. If you’re coming for Sadana, you’re going to be disappointed. He’s dead. We didn’t kill-”

  “Save it, Captain. You can keep him. I’m here for the AI.”

  Chapter 14

  A surge of adrenaline fluttered Staples’ stomach, but when she spoke, the steadiness of her voice surprised her. “What AI?”

  “Don’t be coy. We knew that someone was talking to Sadana through his implants, but we couldn’t figure out who. The carrier signal was unusual, something our tech had never seen before. It was enough to make me consider AI, but of course, that sounds like conspiracy theory. Anyone who really knows the field knows that artificial intelligence has been possible for a little while, but the law has ensured that no one has committed the resources necessary to pull it off.”

  “So what makes you think that someone has now?” Staples realized that she was staring at her watch as she conversed with Bao. There was a barely detectable delay in communication due to the distances between their two ships, but that distance was shrinking rapidly as they moved towards each other.

  “That would be the robot uprising. My techies tell me that no hacker could ever reprogram that many automatons and keep it secret. Asimov’s laws of robotics are built deep in their architecture. They think only an AI could pull that off.”

  “They think…” Staples said, futilely hoping to sow doubt.

  “That’s more than enough, but if it wasn’t, there’s the fact that the automatons started to attack just as the story about Teletrans broke.”

  “Teletrans, what’s that?” Staples asked innocently.

  “The company that designs operating systems for the military. The company that designed the OSes that were used on the Nightshade vessels. You might remember them. Three of them tried to destroy your ship a month ago before the Martian Navy saved your asses.”

  Staples wondered why Bao was bothering to walk her through the chain of logic that had led him to her, but then it clicked. Every minute she spent sparring with him was a minute they weren’t doing anything about the Pride of Ares bearing down on them.

  “Sounds like conspiracy theory to me,” Staples retorted. “And I don’t see why, even if you’re right, this has anything to do with us.”

  “You must be joking. A religious zealot manipulated by an AI makes not one, not two, but three assassination attempts on your crew? You obviously know something, or more likely, have something that it wants. Do you really think that I left Sadana in the hands of the four most inept guards on Mars by accident?”

  Despite her previous attempts at subterfuge, Staples couldn’t help but say, “You wanted to see who would come to get him.”

  “I thought it would be you, and you didn’t disappoint. Actually, I think there are two AIs. I think they’re at war, and I think you’ve got one of them on that ship of yours. I don’t know why you’re helping it, and I don’t know what’s in it for you. Setting aside the repairs and rearmament of your ship on Cronos Station that were paid for by a shell corporation that all but disappeared less than a month later, that is. And let’s not also forget that you were right there when Cronos Station was destroyed. Once I had a theory and knew to take a closer look at you, everything fell into place. You’ve been at the center of this thing from the start, and I will find out why. I’m coming for the AI, and you can’t stop me.”

  Staples thought that despite what Bao had put together, he was probably bluffing to at least a small degree. He didn’t really know what Brutus was or that he was on Gringolet, but that wouldn’t stop him from tearing her ship apart looking for him. Knowing that someone was bluffing didn’t help when your hand was the worst one at the table.

  She thought furiously. She had seen the Pride of Ares up close, and she knew there was no way Gringolet could stand up to it. Her ship had pulled them through more dangerous situations than she had a right to expect, and she had perhaps one of the best pilots and tactical officers in the system, but the inescapable fact was that she was hopelessly outgunned. Bao could give them the first five minutes of engagement free and they’d still end up as a field of debris.

  Nor could they run. Even if they weren’t at half fuel reserves, Bao’s ship had a bigger reactor and more powerful engines. They didn’t have anywhere to run to anyway. There wasn’t a port in the system that would cross the Martian Navy to save their hides. Handing Brutus over to Bao made her feel even more queasy than the idea of giving up Sadana. She thought back to the conversation she had had with Overton about how she might have to sacrifice her principles to serve her crew, and she thought perhaps that the day had come.

  “All right, Bao. You win. His name is Brutus, and he’s,” she almost said harmless, but the pirate attack flashed into her mind. “Benign. We’ll give him over when you get here.”

  “Cut thrust,” Bao ordered. “It’ll make it easier for us to match your speed.”

  “What the hell is this?” Bao asked, staring at the crushed form of the Brutus automaton. He and a dozen of his soldiers stood in the shuttle bay of Gringolet. The soldiers wore black uniforms trimmed with red epaulets and cuffs, and black berets adorned their heads. Each of them had a rifle, and while they weren’t pointed at Staples and her crew, they weren’t slung on their backs either. Staples let her eyes drift down the line and counted only three of them with actual fingers on their triggers. Behind them swelled their state of the art boarding craft for which Staples had opened her front door.

  Behind the captain of Gringolet stood Carl Overton and Dinah Hazra in her customary parade-rest bearing. Despite Dinah’s objections, neither of them was armed. Staples wanted to make it clear to Bao that she knew just how overmatched she was.

  Once the Pride of Ares had matched their velocity towards Mars, a process that had taken several hours, Gringolet had been ordered to resume thrust at .2 Gs. Searching a ship was far easier when objects that were tossed aside did not bounce off walls and hit one in the face.

  “This is Brutus, or what’s left of him. Our computer scientist thinks there are parts of his programming left intact, but it’s not her specialty, and frankly, I’ve had her busy with other things.”

  “What happened to it?” Bao asked. His voice carried a timbre of disgust. Staples assumed it was at the prospect of claiming his prize and not regret at the loss of sentient life.

  “Crushed in corridor 3A during that battle with the Nightshades you mentioned earlier. The one where you saved our asses,” Staples replied. “I’d be happy to show you the hallway. It’s been repaired, but you can still see where it was welded back together.”

  “We’ve got a copy of your repairs on board the Ares,” Bao replied without looking up at her. “But I’ll want to see it anyway. I’ll want to see every corner of this ship.”

  “Why? What you want is right here,” Staples said. The question didn’t really need an answer, and she didn’t get one. Bao didn’t trust her.

  “Why didn’t you tell me it was damaged before we arrived?” Bao asked instead, finally affixing her with a piercing look.

  “Would you have believed me? Turned around and left us alone?” Staples asked rhetorically.

  “Obviously not, but you might have prepared us.”

  Staples smiled sympathetically. “I’m sorry if I got your hopes up, but it’s not my job to protect your feelings, especially once you made it clear you were planning on boarding my ship at gunpoint if I didn’t let you in.”

  “Out of curiosity, why did you keep him on your ship?” Bao asked.

  “I can’t stop you f
rom going through my panty-drawer, but I think I’ll keep my motivations to myself.” Staples knew that she was pushing a potentially untenable situation, but she also knew that Bao saw himself as a hero, and she was counting on that. The man had no problem torturing Amit Sadana for information, but to Bao, he was the enemy. Staples and her crew were legal citizens who had broken no laws, at least no Martian ones.

  Bao snorted once. “You said his name is Brutus, not his name was Brutus.”

  “I told you, we think he’s still in there. Why do you want him?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Bao asked, genuine wonder on his face. “We want to study it and make more. AI could be the answer to an independent Mars. Look at what’s been possible. The Nightshade vessels are amazing. Ships that can accelerate without concern for harming a human crew, battle computers that can react in a microsecond and do so with sound judgment. They’re just the beginning. An AI could increase farming production, help build cities, and better Martian society in leaps and bounds.”

  “And give you an edge if Earth tries to stop you from breaking away. In case there’s a war,” Overton said.

  “That won’t happen,” Bao snapped. “They’ve got bigger problems now.”

  “Using the displacement of the moon and resulting environmental problems as a leverage point to push your political agenda is pretty low,” Staples said.

  “We’re doing nothing of the kind,” Bao replied evenly. “These plans have been in motion for years. Whatever happened to Luna is unfortunate, but we’re certainly not going to stop the natural evolution of Martian society because of it. In fact, given what seems to be proof of alien life, it’s more important than ever that Mars have a strong and independent navy. Earth has it’s Nightshades; we’ll have ours.”

  “Those ships aren’t controlled by Earth,” Staples said, suddenly realizing the depth of Bao’s misunderstanding of the situation. “Victor, the other AI, isn’t a tool of the US or Earth. I realize it might look that way-”

  “That’s exactly how it looks,” Bao said, interrupting her. “I’ll invoke Occam’s Razor here.”

  “Typical jarhead,” Overton said. “This is one situation where the simplest explanation is not the best.”

  “I’ll remind you that you were a jarhead too, Mr. Overton,” Bao said, glancing at him with disdain. He turned back to Staples.

  “You are not in some AI arms race with Earth, Bao. Victor is an independent entity and a threat to all of humanity, Earth and Mars. You’ve got to believe me,” Staples said, though she could see that he didn’t. She decided to try another tactic. “You know those movies, the ones where the military wants to use the dangerously unstable technology because they’re so arrogant that they think they can control it? You know what happens. It always breaks free. It always comes back to bite them, and they always realize – too late – that they should have listened and not let their hubris get in the way. That’s this situation. Right now.”

  Bao shook his head. “You’ve got it all wrong. You’re right in that this conversation has played out before, but you’re not the doomsayers who get to say ‘I told you so’. You’re the ones who stand in the way of progress and shout things like, ‘the Earth is flat,’ ‘the atomic bomb will incinerate the atmosphere,’ and ‘you cannot operate on the human heart.’ Technology has made our lives better, Captain Staples. You live in a piece of technology. The advance of technology is not only inevitable, it is a good thing. People live longer and better today than they ever have. They are better educated and safer than they’ve ever been. Of course some technology is dangerous,” Bao said as if speaking to a student, “but when cooler heads prevail, humanity leaps forward.”

  Staples opened her mouth to reply, but Bao cut her off again. “And I’ve had just about enough of waxing philosophic with you. I’m going to search your ship now. It would go a lot easier for everyone if you would call all of your crew down here. People tend to get upset when armed soldiers begin rifling through their things. They become indignant, they imagine they are being oppressed, and sometimes they make poor decisions.”

  Staples knew that, at least in this, the man was right. She glanced at Dinah, and the stern woman nodded in agreement. Overton called the crew down to the shuttle bay. After taking one more look at the damaged robotic body that lay on a plastic sheet in front of her, she moved to the back of the shuttle bay to sit down and wait. Bao and his men did not try to stop her.

  It took only ten minutes to get everybody into the cavernous room. There weren’t that many of them. Six months ago Clea Staples had left Earth with a crew of sixteen. Now they were ten, and three of them, Evelyn, Jordan, and Overton, were fairly recent additions. The search of their ship took several hours, and Staples found herself worrying about what these soldiers were doing to her books. She imagined them lying about her room, torn and tossed, spines mercilessly broken.

  Bao, evidently trusting his men to conduct the search, remained in the shuttle bay with them. Scattered reports came to him from his military-style watch, and Staples overheard enough of them to discern that the body of Sadana had been discovered in the medical bay and that his identity had been verified by a DNA check. She also gathered that the Tyger, which had been ordered to cut thrust when she had, was being simultaneously searched by a separate contingent of soldiers. They had even brought two of their techies to search the ship’s computer.

  After a taxing four hours, during which time Staples grew restless and hungry, the search teams returned. The soldiers had not been cruel to her crew, and they had been given water and bathroom breaks when needed. One of the soldiers even shared a piece of chocolate with Gwen, which she had shyly accepted. Despite these courtesies, each of them had been personally searched. This had been carried out with a modicum of dignity, but it was no less thorough. Bethany had squinted and squirmed her way through it, but she had not complained.

  From various compartments, supplies caches, and forgotten drawers the soldiers had gathered every memory stick and flash drive on the ship. Anything that could hold a significant amount of data was now in their possession, aside from the core, which they had evidently verified was free of AI habitation. One of Bao’s assistants held these in a plastic bag, and it was clear that Bao meant to take them with him. Among them was a small black drive they had found in Staples’ pocket.

  “Those are personal property,” Staples objected. “And taking them makes you a thief.”

  “I think we’ll just call it payment for the repairs, refueling, and rearmament that the Martian Navy provided for you after you were attacked by the Nightshades.” Bao looked down at the bag. “I figure you’ve got a bargain.”

  Staples sighed in despair, but she did not object. There was no point.

  Once Staples and her crew had left the shuttle bay, Bao and his men boarded their craft. It took only a minute for the bay to depressurize, and then they were off, taking Brutus’ remains with them.

  Crowded into the EVA prep room, the crew, as one, turned to look at Staples. Nine pairs of eyes faced her. Most of them sought answers, but it was Overton who finally asked the question.

  “What did we just do?”

  Before Staples could reply, Charis followed his query up with another. “What’s going to happen when they look in the remains of that automaton and discover that there’s no program in there? They’re more than capable of catching us, Captain.”

  “They won’t do that,” Staples replied evenly.

  “And why wouldn’t they?” Jabir asked in his richly accented voice.

  “Because they have what they want,” Staples said.

  Many of the people in the room seemed aghast. Dinah and Jordan remained passive, and Staples had no doubt that at least a few of them would be relieved to be rid of Brutus, but even those who didn’t like the sentient program were surprised that Staples would give him up.

  “You don’t mean you handed him over?” Overton asked.

  “I didn’t have much of a choi
ce, did I?” Staples looked at Charis. “You’re right. If we just gave them an empty shell, they’d be after us in no time, and I doubt Bao would be as courteous the second time around. But please trust me, it’s all going to be all right.”

  Staples moved across the room to the airlock that let out on the starboard side of the ship. The crew watched her, some confused, others plainly angry. She didn’t blame them. From their perspective, she had just given over a member of their crew to save the rest, something that she had always said she would not do. They weren’t wrong.

  After keying a sequence in the code panel set in the wall next to the door, the airlock cycled. During the thirty or so seconds it took the small chamber to fill with air, realization dawned for many of the people in the room. Then the inner door opened and a deep green automaton stepped into the room.

  The form looked around at the assembled humans. “Hello everyone. It is good to see you all again.” The tinny quality of his speech was slightly different than it had been in his previous form, but the cadence and delivery was unmistakable.

  John smiled and stepped forward to shake Brutus’ hand and perhaps pat him on the shoulder, but Brutus demurred, holding up his hands to indicate that they should stay clear.

  “I’m afraid that I am quite cold at the moment, Mr. Park, and it would do you injury to touch me. I have been outside for several hours.”

  “I’m glad you’re back, Mr. Brutus,” Gwen said smiling.

  Brutus looked down at her, then dropped to a squatting position to look her in the eye. “As am I, little one,” he said. “I have heard you all for the past month, but it has been too long since I laid eyes on you, so to speak.” He cocked his head. “Your hair is longer, if I am not mistaken.”

  Gwen tossed her locks glamorously and grinned infectiously.

  “So if he’s here…” John began.

  “Who is in the broken automaton?” Brutus finished. “I am.”

  “You copied yourself again,” Overton reasoned.