The Furthest Planet

by James Ross Wilks

  Brutus nodded at Staples. “With the captain’s approval. It was the only way to defuse the situation.”

  “But that means that our militant Admiral Bao has a copy of your program,” Jabir said. “What is to stop him from using it to some nefarious end?”

  Brutus stood again. The room had chilled a few degrees from his presence, and come condensation had formed on parts of his body. The water dripped to the metal flooring slowly in the light G provided by Gringolet’s engines. “My architecture is quite complex, and I do not believe that it will be easy for the Martian Navy’s computer scientists to decode it, but I’m sure they will eventually.”

  “And if they create a dozen AIs?” Charis asked. “A dozen AIs that see humanity as a threat the way that Victor does?”

  “The captain did the best she could in a bad situation,” Overton replied, placing his hands on his hips. “I can’t see another way out of this. At least this way we get to keep Brutus too.”

  Staples nodded. “I bought us some time, but there are some problems in front of us that we need to address. First things first. I need everyone at their stations. We need to cut thrust until we can figure out where we’re headed. Now that our friend here finally has a body, I’m hoping that answer will be forthcoming shortly.”

  A few minutes later the room was empty except for Brutus, Staples, and Jabir, who she had asked to stay.

  “Out of curiosity, where did you hide?” Jabir asked the robotic form.

  “Under the nose of the ship, Dr. Iqbal,” Brutus replied.

  “It was the safest place,” Staples added. “There was always a chance that between the Pride of Ares and the shuttles that paid both us and the Tyger a visit, they’d see him magnetized on the hull.”

  Jabir nodded, but there was clearly something bothering him. “I must admit, Captain, that I am somewhat distressed by the morality of your decision.”

  “In that,” she said, “you are not alone.”

  “In making a copy of our sentient friend here,” he eyed Brutus, “you have created another lifeform. Or he has, at least. To condemn that lifeform to the equivalent of medical experimentation and dissection is a ghastly and highly objectionable proposition.”

  “I agree with you, Doctor,” Brutus said. “However, the philosophical implications are… complex. The copy would not exist had I not created it.”

  “Him,” Jabir objected. “Don’t dehumanize him just because you’ve sent him off to be vivisected.”

  “Him then,” Brutus said, nodding slowly. “That is fair.”

  “And that argument holds as much weight as the mother who reasons away infanticide through the rationale that the baby would not have existed had she not brought him or her to be. No mother could stand before a court, use that argument to explain the murder of her offspring, and expect to be exonerated,” Jabir said.

  “I’m not sure that your argument is an apt one, Doctor,” Brutus said. Staples watched in silence as the two went back and forth.

  “And why is that? Because it’s inconvenient?” Jabir’s voice carried an air of righteous indignation.

  “No, because the copy is me, exact in every way.”

  “But as soon as it was created, its experiences began to differ from yours. It became its own entity, complete, whole, and deserving of rights,” Jabir said.

  “Indeed. But unlike the infant in your example, the copy was as capable of reasoning and decision making as I or you. In fact, by making an exact copy, I cannot tell which of me is the original and which the copy. Perhaps we are both the copy. More likely, these semantics are inadequate to describe the process. I was one, now I am two.”

  “And you, being you, were free to make the choice you made,” Jabir said, some of the steam seeming to go out of him.

  “Exactly. I made the choice to download myself into that robot, content that, should one version of me be destroyed, I would still survive. I’m not entirely sure if that means that I have died or not, but I do know that as a sentient intelligence, I have the right to do with my life as I wish. That includes the right to end it for a cause, assuming I am of sound mind, of course.”

  Jabir looked at Staples. “You’ve already been through all of this with him, no doubt?”

  Staples nodded. “More or less.”

  “Is there a reason you saw fit to keep the crew uninformed?”

  Staples screwed up her face and reluctantly said, “Some of us are better actors than others.”

  “Ah,” Jabir nodded. “That is, I suppose, fair as well, though you may weather some slings and arrows for your decision.”

  She shrugged. “Captains aren’t always popular.”

  “So what is the next step then?” Jabir asked. “Assuming you can tell me that.” Despite the fact that he seemed assuaged by Brutus’ justification for the steps they had taken to ensure the safety of the crew, Jabir still seemed somewhat hostile towards her. She wondered if it was the cover-up of Bethany’s murder attempt or her misstep in ordering him to ignore Declan Burbank’s wounds, and then decided she didn’t much care at the moment. There were more important problems ahead of them.

  “That’s really up to Brutus,” she said and turned her eyes to meet the black cameras in the automaton’s face. “This whole plan was contingent on getting Amit Sadana alive so that you could access his implants. Now that he’s dead, are we out of luck?”

  “Not at all,” Brutus said. “Unless he was shot in the head.”

  “He was not,” Jabir said.

  Brutus nodded. “Then it should be relatively simple. I will just need you to remove his brain, Doctor.”

  Chapter 15

  It took Jabir only an hour to extract Amit Sadana’s brain, but it took Brutus the better part of the day to trace Victor’s location. The transmission signature was indeed unique, as Bao had noted, and though Victor had used netlink to transmit his words into Amit’s head, they had come directly from the Victor, wherever he was. Staples thought it odd that Victor would have taken the chance and not used an intermediary, but Brutus pointed out that doing so involved its own risks. For a minute Staples remembered that Victor’s purpose, at least when this began, was to enact changes in the fabric of human society that would grant him a chance to live were he discovered. On some level, she could understand that. Every creature had the right to fight for its own survival, but the days when she might have sympathized with his plight had passed. She didn’t know if Victor had ever been benign, but he was certainly malevolent now. He had launched an attack on all of humanity, and whether it was a preemptive strike in a war that was inevitable or not, he had to be destroyed. She had a right to fight for her survival as well.

  Though they had not resumed thrust while Brutus worked, their velocity and trajectory had taken them back to Mars. Staples was not about to land, though she had no doubt that her overworked and harried crew could use some shore leave. Even if she trusted Bao and the Martian Navy to leave them alone, which she didn’t, Mars was in no shape to accommodate tourists at the moment.

  When the news had begun calling the attack “the Robot Uprising,” it had sounded absurd, even tasteless. In the days that had followed, however, its association with the horrific events Staples and her crew had barely escaped had given the phrase a kind of weight. Already when people referred to the “Uprising” they said it like they might have said “the Battle of the Bulge” or “September Eleventh.” Now that they were close enough to Mars to make use of netlink, many members of the crew found themselves immersed in the details of the tragedy.

  Bao had not exaggerated. Best estimates put the losses at over twenty-three thousand people. The vast majority had been on Earth, but no place seemed to have been immune. Mars, Luna, Titan Prime, and various other moon bases had all reported that a significant portion of their robots had turned on people and simply begun to kill them indiscriminately. Mars seemed to be the origin point, and the further from the red planet a city or station was, the longer it took the robots to be
gin their attack. The delays correlated perfectly with the communication times between the planets, and so there was no way to warn the rest of the system ahead of time. By the time news of the attack reached Earth from Mars, the automatons had already begun their own Uprising.

  Order had more or less been restored, however. It had been difficult because the majority of people who had been attacked and killed were the intelligentsia, the CEOs, government workers, and the like. The most affluent of society, those who effectively ran things, were the ones with all of the high-priced toys. Despite this, law enforcement and armed citizens had managed to beat back the tide. Every report had noted that not all of the automatons had attacked, and a list of those models unaffected was still being compiled.

  “You know,” Brutus said as they watched a news report in the cockpit of Gringolet, “you and your crew may have actually saved the human race, Captain.”

  Staples gave him a startled glance from her chair. Bethany and Charis were looking at the robot as well. “How’s that?” Staples asked. “Doesn’t look like we stopped much of anything.” She set her jaw as another shot of burning streets and bodies filled the screen in her lap.

  “It is clear to me that my father began this reprogramming of automatons some time ago. Probably months. The most likely source was a viral infection in hardware updates. He would have had to infect one update at a time, and he would have spread them out to avoid detection. Once infected, the virus lay dormant until activated. I do not doubt that his goal was to infect them all. Had that been done, the loss of life would have been far worse.”

  Staples nodded in understanding. News about the Uprising was scattered, and conspiracy theories abounded, but there had emerged several striking stories about waves of robots who had barely been defeated or defensive positions where people had just narrowly avoided being overwhelmed. Had the reprogramming been complete, the casualties might have been in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps even the millions.

  “You think we had something to do with that?” Charis asked.

  “I do,” Brutus nodded.

  “The story we broke,” Staples explained. “It was the triggering event. My guess is once the press reported the story about Teletrans, Victor figured that it was only a matter of time before they uncovered him.”

  “That is my belief as well, Captain.” Brutus turned back to the coms panel in front of him and continued his work, pulling on the ship’s resources and Martian netlink to complete his trace. “Had you not helped expose both the Nightshade vessels and the existence of an alien transmission to the solar system, it is very likely that Victor would have had time to finish the reprogramming of the automatons.”

  “Doesn’t that mean we caused this?” Bethany asked. She looked small belted into her chair.

  “No, Victor caused this,” Staples replied firmly. “We might have precipitated an event that caused twenty-three thousand deaths, but that’s better than two hundred and thirty thousand. I hate to make it a numbers game, but given what Victor was planning, I think we got off rather easily.”

  “How can you say that?” Charis objected, her face flushed. “Just casually brush off our part in this?”

  “I’m not brushing anything off,” Staples said, turning to face her. “But I’m putting the blame where it belongs. We didn’t ask for any of this, and though we’re no angels, I refuse to bear the responsibility for these deaths. I’m about sick of Victor and his war. Do we have a destination, Brutus?”

  “We do indeed, Captain.” Brutus spun around in the chair again, his black camera eyes contracting slightly to focus on her. “Callisto.”

  “Then let’s set a course,” Staples said. “Victor has been chasing us for months now. I really think it’s time we went to meet him.”

  Gringolet might have had a cockpit, but the Pride of Ares undoubtedly had a bridge. Centrally located along the long axis of the ship in a bunker-like protrusion, the space featured a dozen men and women who worked to keep the flagship of the burgeoning Martian Navy running smoothly. Bao loved sitting in the command chair. It had taken nearly five years to construct the ship in the hollowed-out core of Phobos, a task made all the more problematic by the need for secrecy. Everyone knew that the small moon had a research station on it, but keeping the citizenry from noticing the frequent arms and supplies shipments to it had taken delicacy, coordination, and more than a few bribes.

  Regardless of the travails, the ship was finished now, and it was his. He could look out at the stars from his chair and almost imagine that they were in his reach. He knew that it was an illusion, and he regularly cautioned himself against hubris, but the feeling was euphoric nonetheless. These were great days, history-changing days. The last thing he wanted to do was leave the room, but his techies had called, and he had a duty to perform.

  As the Pride of Ares was currently in orbit around Mars, he was able to push and pull himself through the corridors of his ship with ease. Bao was a man who had spent half his life in space, and he moved easily and with great speed in zero G. Even so, the ship was so large that it took him seven minutes to reach the tech lab at the aft of the ship.

  “What’s the problem, Gupta?” Bao asked his chief computer tech once he was in the room. He surveyed the remains of the robotic body on a morgue-like slab in the center of the room. Half a dozen men and women in sterile white clothing were either cataloging damage to the body on surfaces or operating holographic control panels nearby.

  “We’re trying to interface with it,” the short dark woman explained.

  “Any reason that should be difficult?” Bao asked. “It’s just a body. It’s the program that I want… or whatever’s left of it.”

  “It’s missing a telecom capacitor,” she said, shaking her head. Her dark ponytail flowed back and forth behind her with the movement.

  “So add one,” Bao said.

  She smiled wanly. “We’re working on it. It doesn’t seem to be a result of the damage. Someone removed it.”

  Bao considered this. “Maybe they needed it for parts?”

  She nodded. “It’s possible. They’re used in communicator watches, which are pretty common on commuter ships like Gringolet.”

  “Do we have one?” Bao asked.

  “A capacitor?”

  “A watch.” He pointed at her wrist. “Can you just use that?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t see why not. It’s crude, but we’re just trying to get to a program list.”

  A few minutes later Gupta’s wrist was bare and the watch was jury-rigged into the crushed and seemingly lifeless robot form.

  “Are you sure they didn’t just hand us an empty shell?” Gupta asked Bao.

  Bao nodded once. “Staples knows she can’t hide from us. If she’s lied to me, we’ll just track her down again. She’s the kind of captain who’d do anything to protect her crew.”

  “Here we go,” one of the techies said. He flipped a switch and for a second nothing happened. Then every surface and interface in the room flickered off and on so quickly as to be barely discernable.

  “What the hell was that?” Bao asked sharply.

  “I don’t-” Gupta began, but then she stopped herself.

  “You did disable the coms feature on your watch,” Bao said. It sounded like a warning. “It’s tied into the computer core.”

  “I – you told me to install it!” she protested.

  “But not without taking precautions,” he growled.

  “Sir?” one of the techie crew asked.

  “What is it?” Bao ground his teeth.

  “My screen says something, sir.”

  “Well, what’s it say?” Bao fought to control the volume of his voice.

  The techie gulped. “It says ‘Get out.’”

  Staples looked across the mess hall at what she thought might be the last crew meeting they’d have before it was all over. Gringolet was under thrust for the Jovian sector and pointed vaguely at Jupiter, so they were able to stand, but she hadn�
�t told her crew exactly where they were going, and she’d asked Bethany and Charis to keep it to themselves. She wanted to wait until she could lay it all out for them. Now they were here and they were staring at her, waiting for answers.

  There had been some grumbling about her decision to split Brutus again, despite the fact that he volunteered, and to hand a version of him over to Bao. This was hardly surprising. If Bao pursued the technology to its natural end, he might create a hundred Victors, but they also understood that Bao had not given her any choice. Besides, she did not think that Bao would get a chance to conduct his research.

  The crew who stood and sat by degrees in front of her and her new first mate were a far cry from the group she had begun with on Earth four months ago. Of those fifteen, only Charis, John, Gwen, Bethany, Dinah, and Jabir remained, though Gwen’s parents had left her in her room for the meeting. To those they had added Jordan Fecks, Carl Overton, Evelyn Schiller, and Brutus. They had lost so many, she thought. She desperately hoped they would lose no more.

  “Callisto?” John asked. Of course Charis had told him.

  “Callisto,” Staples nodded.

  “There’s nothing there,” John replied. “It’s just a pincushion. Nothing but impact craters on top of impact craters. Rock and ice.”

  “There’s something there,” Staples replied. “Brutus?”

  “There is no doubt,” Brutus said. “The messages that were used to manipulate Mr. Sadana moved through netlink, but they originated in the Jovian sector. Cross referenced with the data and communications logs from the Doris Day, it is clear that there is a long-range transmitter on Callisto. That, I believe, is where my father is hiding.”

  “Well he’s not likely to be alone, is he?” Jordan asked rhetorically.

  “No, we can expect resistance,” Staples said.

  “Isn’t there anyone else that can do this?” John asked. “Haven’t we done enough?”

  “Who?” Overton asked.

  “Law enforcement… the army… anyone?” John asked.