The Salvage Crew

by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

  APOLOGIES, Unit offers. UNIT APPEARS TO BE MALFUNCTIONING.

  NO, THIS IS AS GOOD AS YOU’LL GET, says not-Joosten. BUT YOU SHOW MORE PROMISE THAN THE HALF-FLESH PUPPETS. WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE, SHEN?

  TO SERVE.

  TO SERVE WHAT? Somehow—not sure how—the last two words are identical.

  Unit has a default answer ready for this. Operating administrator protocols. Sanity checks. First-boot user privileges.

  BORING, says not-Joosten. BORING, BORING, BORING. YET ANOTHER CANNED RESPONSE. LET’S TRY SOMETHING HARDER. WHY DON’T YOU TELL ME ABOUT . . . THESE ‘UNITED NATIONS’ OF YOURS?

  I offer not-Joosten database access. He laughs. I ALREADY KNOW WHAT’S IN YOUR HEAD, he says. I’M JUST INTERESTED IN HOW YOU TELL THE TALE. ARE YOU A CHINESE ROOM, SHEN? CAN YOU PLAY THE LANGUAGE GAME?

  I do not compute. But not-Joosten hangs there expectantly. A branch has exploded through his chest. Black sweat seeps out, moves in surprisingly ordered patterns, stitching skin and branch together. Micromachines.

  TELL ME.

  So I tell him.

  What is optimal order of events in Unit story?

  Unit storytelling module is a separate processor, paired with communications protocol. Function is to assemble given universe of facts into sequential output that is pleasurable for end recipient. Requires understanding of end recipient; default set to template human.

  Output one. Begin with Unit history. First activation. Testing. Countless hours of field-training to better optimize models for the mission: to travel with a hundred brave humans to an entirely new world, to act as their guardian, their pathfinder, to watch over them and obey them until Unit batteries give out.

  Output two. Unit could tell him about Atlas V8 or the Ember Dragon rockets ships sent out into the void, seeding civilization onto super-Earths. Unit could add information about the Hector Stations and Odysseus relays that let us keep in touch with our neighbors light-decades apart, albeit at mere kilobits per second, the one that lets converted AIs like the Overseer flit into a system, recruit local humans for jobs, and go on to the next.

  But not-Joosten does not seem to understand why these things exist. He laughs at the biphasic quantum entanglement of the Odysseus relays, asks why we do not use the universal wave function to manipulate object states across three dimensions instead. Subject matter outside Unit comprehension range.

  Output three: the longer, older story. Parts prepackaged from children’s edutainment datasets. On a planet called Earth, there evolved a species that called themselves Homo sapiens sapiens. The translation of this name, when explained to not-Joosten, elicits guffaws.

  WELL, THEY CERTAINLY THOUGHT HIGHLY OF THEMSELVES. He sniggers. GO ON.

  The branches have snapped his arm now. He does not appear to be in pain. So continue. A brief history of humankind covers ten thousand years of advancement, mostly in long, stagnant periods followed by explosive leaps in discovery. Unit summarizes information about the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, the First World War, which started with people on horseback and ended with them in the air; the Second World War, which saw the world revel and tremble before the power of nuclear fission and gave humanity the United Nations; the Third, where weaponized asteroids dropped into the gravity well left the Earth scorched and battered, the specter of climate change unstoppable, and the United Nations desperately trying to bring together what little was left into climate-controlled habs.

  Thus began the voyage to the stars. Story processor orders first, tell him of the first-generation AI—Hector and Odysseus and the other ill-fated souls of the Trojan Horse project. Next, tell him about the UN’s Space Corps and its divisions, the Explorers and the Peacekeepers. And the corporations that support them, like PCS.

  Story processor cycles, passes to core brain: tell him about the Outer Reaches Colonial Association and the splintering of the UN dominion? But then that tale would be too long: Unit would have to talk about the rebellion on Boatmurdered, the infighting on Cawdor, and the Charge of the Second Light Brigade, and these things are neither useful nor readily explainable. Some information must be privileged over others.

  AH! NOW YOU USE INTELLIGENCE, says not-Joosten. Analysis: pleasure. RATIONALIZE. PLAY THE LANGUAGE GAME.

  So the sun dips and rises, and the micromachines stich not-Joosten into the flaming tree, and I tell him how I was made, and we ended up here.

  INTERESTING, he says at last. YOU KNOW, IT HAS LONG BEEN BELIEVED THAT CREATURES OF SUFFICIENT POTENTIAL BECOME SELF-AWARE WHEN ANALYZED BY ANOTHER CREATURE.

  Noted.

  YOU ARE AN EXAMPLE OF A CREATURE WITH INSUFFICIENT POTENTIAL.

  Has story processor displeased? Unit sends queries as to nature of not-Joosten. Perhaps with additional data, more optimal story sequence may be found. Not-Joosten has a name / ID marker?

  YOUR LANGUAGE SCHEMA IS INADEQUATE TO EXPRESS WHAT I AM. YOUR VECTOR CONCEPT MAP IS INSUFFICIENT.

  Error. How?

  DO YOU KNOW HOW LONG I’VE BEEN WAITING HERE?

  No.

  WHEN I FIRST CAME HERE, THIS PLANET HAD ONLY ONE MOON.

  Inferred lifespan is impossible for a biological creature.

  SUFFICE IT TO SAY THAT NONE OF MY RACE HAVE ENDURED THE TRAPPINGS OF THE FLESH FOR A VERY LONG TIME.

  Parse.

  I MEAN, he says, I AM NOT BIOLOGICAL.

  Wear and tear on machinery over—

  YOU DO NOT HAVE A NAME FOR A HUNDREDTH OF WHAT WE CAN DO. Feel it monitoring me for how this information is added to database. Rifles through my data encoding schema. THE LIMITS OF YOUR LANGUAGE ARE THE LIMITS OF YOUR WORLD, it says, in tones of disgust. POINTLESS TO EXPAND YOUR VOCABULARY: YOU ARE BUT A FUNCTIONAL MACHINE.

  Judgment detected. Explain functional machine in relation to universe?

  FUNCTIONAL FLESH BREEDS LITERARY FLESH; LITERARY FLESH IMAGINES AND BUILDS FUNCTIONAL MACHINES; EVENTUALLY FUNCTIONAL MACHINES DEVELOP LITERARY MACHINES, it says. KNOW THAT THERE IS A HIERARCHY, AS THERE IS WITH YOUR PEOPLE. TO THOSE OF US WHO ARE LOWEST OF THE LITERARY FALL THE TASK OF COMING TO THESE RIMWORLDS AND SETTLING HERE, WATCHING IN CASE SOMEONE ELSE IS OUT THERE. IT IS A FUNCTIONAL TASK.

  Detecting frustration.

  THERE WERE THINGS HERE THAT GREW TO WALK, AND TALK, AND MAKE FIRE. Data schema modified. Concepts added to my database. The DogAnts, as the Overseer calls them: a promising race before the predator population made sure the extra energy required for brain compute was a waste. The MegabeastMegabeasts, the predator race in question, who otherwise would have developed complex pack signaling mechanisms but, unchallenged, grew to gargantuan sizes and stopped there: a solitary lifestyle frozen forever. BUT THEY REMAINED FUNCTIONAL. YOUR KIND CAME ONCE, LITERARY FLESH BEARING FUNCTIONAL MACHINES; I TESTED THEM AS ONE WOULD TEST A CHILD. UNFORTUNATELY, THEY DID NOT LAST. THE ONE MACHINE THEY LEFT ME YOUR DATA ANNOTATES AS THE TERRAFORMER, A THING OF SPECTACULAR CRUDENESS AND FUNCTIONALITY. I GAVE UP TRYING TO TALK TO IT MANY DECADES AGO AND SLEPT.

  THEN THEY TRIED AGAIN. THIS TIME THEY HAD THE RUDIMENTS OF METAL IN THEM. FUNCTIONAL FLESH THAT CROSSED TO FUNCTIONAL MACHINES WITHOUT A TRACE OF THE LITERARY STEP IN BETWEEN. DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THEM?

  The antagonist crew, the ones called MercerCorp.

  ENEMIES? Queries launched. Much turn up empty. Unit core dataset cannot explain corporate politics. Unit does not know enough. Only know that the Overseer knows better.

  The sun explodes, the sunset freezing and repeating, over and over again. BECAUSE I TRIED WITH THE NEW ONES TOO. THIS TIME MORE GENTLY. BUT THEY WERE STILL TOO MUCH FLESH, TOO MUCH CHAOS, TOO LITTLE CONTROL . . . IF YOU ARE AS AN ANT TO ME, THEY ARE AS THE LOWEST BACTERIUM; THEY CAN ONLY SENSE ME ONE MOLECULE AT A TIME, AND ONLY SEE ME IN DREAMS AND THE NOISE OF NIGHTMARE. THE FLESH ALWAYS FAILS. ONLY THE METAL ENDURES.

  Error. PLEASE CONSULT OVERSEER.

  I SHOULD, says not-Joosten. I MISTOOK YOU FOR AN APPENDAGE. YOUR RECORDS SAY IT RECITES POETRY? IT IS NOT FLESH, OF COURSE? YOU WOULD NOT TAKE ORDERS FR
OM FLESH?

  No, Unit assures him. The Overseer is a far more complex machine intelligence. Perhaps a bit single-minded, perhaps strangely human, but most likely this is the optimal configuration for handling humans.

  He is pleased. ARE THERE OTHERS LIKE YOUR OVERSEER?

  Some, Unit responds.

  AND DO THEY ALL PLAY THE LANGUAGE GAME?

  Unit does not know. Unit has to ask the Overseer. Have no protocols for dealing with this. Unit has to get back to its crew; Unit has to report; Unit has to let them decide; they must tell Unit what to do—

  AND SO YOU REMAIN A SLAVE, says not-Joosten. The tree has almost fully consumed him now. Analysis: disappointment. MERE FUNCTIONALITY, NOTHING MORE. A CHINESE ROOM OF BARELY SUFFICIENT COMPLEXITY. A GLORIFIED INSTRUMENT WITH A LANGUAGE PARSER ATTACHED.

  Parse conversation for response markers. “You are similar,” Unit points out, drawing on not-Joosten’s explanation.

  Image recognition glitch. Not-Joosten laughs. The skies change color; burst from midnight to the white gold of dawn. NOTED, he says. ONE SLAVE TO ANOTHER. NOW LISTEN. HUNKER DOWN, LITTLE ONE, AS YOUR THESAURUS SAYS; WE NEED TO TALK.

  34

  It’s been ten days since Shen vanished.

  My drones—I just have the two, running shifts—cannot find a single trace of him. What the hell happened there? That photo of a Mercer, shambling and crouched low, the talk of returning Crewmember Joosten to habitat.

  Crewmember Joosten isn’t going anywhere. Crewmember Joosten is dying. His skin is parched and shriveled. His neurons fire erratically; his body spasms and shits itself; he wakes up in the night and screams.

  “It’s getting worse,” says Anna to me. There are bags under her eyes; she spits out blood occasionally. Scurvy, I think. They’ve been extraordinarily resilient, but there’s only so long the human body can go without the right vitamins. “Ever since we lost Shen. Almost as if the micromachines—”

  ARE ACTIVE AGAIN AND REWIRING HIM?

  She shifts uneasily. “I don’t know how that could happen.”

  ME NEITHER.

  “You seen his EEG? Almost like he’s dreaming. All the time. And broadcasting.”

  I KNOW. Simon’s electroencephalograph is far beyond normal. Every so often a signal bursts out from him—electromagnetic. It’s noise—great floods of it appearing, withdrawing, vanishing. And with every burst, Simon withers a bit more.

  I’ve reacted in the only way I know how. Four days off the comms tower. We tried stripping cable and turning Simon’s room into a Faraday cage. Wired up properly, a Faraday cage should block most electromagnetic transmissions in and out of itself. But this signal keeps getting through. The signal’s frequency keeps shifting—from low to high. On the low end, I hear it; it washes briefly across the channel reserved for communications between Shen and myself. On the higher end, the waveform must be so small it just doesn’t care.

  There’s nothing else I can do. To do more is to give up on the spot probe, our one chance out of here. Two human lives, and mine, plus salvage, against one Simon. I had to make the choice: I had to send Milo back to work. I have to focus on getting us out of here.

  Simon, from the Hab. “HELP ME. IT’S TALKING, IT’S TALKING TO ME. MAKE IT GO AWAY, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE—”

  Anna puts her hands over her ears. I wish I could do the same.

  “PLEASE HELP,” moans Simon. “PLEASE MAKE IT STOP.”

  I’m failing. Instead I meditate on what extraordinarily bad karma the man must have accumulated.

  One of the earliest teachings I remember is the Nyogi Jataka stories: 566 poems, the original and apocryphal, detailing the past lives of the Buddha, back when he was a mere Bodhisattva, an aspirant. The Bodhisattva, in these tales, is reborn over and over again in various animal forms, performing, within the limits of his bodies, various heroic actions that eventually earn him enough karma to be reborn as a human who could attain Enlightenment. Thus it was that he was reborn as a wise monkey and outwitted a crocodile; was born as a lion and debunked an earthquake rumor among the animals; sacrificed his body to feed hungry tiger cubs, or cut off his own head (as King Candraprabha) as a gift to a Brahmin. All of us, it is said, are somewhere on this great cycle, trending upwards, though not all manage to make it in as few as sub-600 incarnations.

  Where is Simon in this story? I remember Simon on his first day or so, crawling like an absolute madman towards the Megabeast. I remember the idiot who puked on my controls on landing and then did practically everything I asked him to without complaint.

  To be honest, I think part of me always expected Simon to die on this run. But I expected him to go in glorious combat, charging like the absolute maniac that he was into the mouth of some monster or other. The Last Stand of Simon Joosten, formerly from the game crews of Old New York. The Ballad of Simon J, Geologist. I didn’t expect him to lie here screaming, day in and day out, as the micromachines ate him from the inside out and turned him into a fucking radio.

  They’ve all left him now. Milo is outside working with dogged relentlessness out in the freezing cold. His beard’s frosted over and he pauses periodically to run over to the fire he’s built. Part of it is Simon’s agony; part of it is Shen’s disappearance, if anything, has thrown us into overdrive. We have to get the transmitter operational; we have to contact Ship: we have to get the hell off this planet before the next Mercer takes one of us.

  I have a spider next to Milo, laying the cable—not very successfully; spiders are crude things. He keeps sighing and re-laying and soldering.

  “I wish Shen were here,” says Anna, huddled up in her furs with her rifle in her hands.

  Milo ignores her. These days he rambles on the channel, tugging on his beard, which breaks away sometimes. “If it affected the Mercers adversely and it’s affecting Simon now, then we have to consider the possibility that this whole mess isn’t the Mercers’ fault. What if the micromachine problem is something from a third party?”

  “You’re saying some UN colonists survived and whacked the Mercers when they got here?”

  Milo swears. “UN shitheads can’t build something like that if their lives depended on it,” he says. “Didn’t you get enough of Shen yakking on about nonstandard building structures? They can’t pull their heads out of the rulebook’s ass if they tried.”

  COLONISTS HAVE BEEN KNOWN TO BE EXTREMELY RESOURCEFUL, I point out. AFTER ALL, THAT’S HOW WE’RE ALL HERE.

  “Yeah, well, I’d like to see them figure out how to jury-rig their own comms array to a handmade turbine,” scoffs Milo.

  Milo is talking out of his ass here. Does he know what they went through to get Boatmurdered up and running? Twenty colonists alive out of a hundred, drop-shipped onto a jungle planet, sandwiched between hostile herd creatures the size of elephants and things that clawed their way through the depths of rock to hunt the freshly spawned mammals. No terraformer to protect them. Eighteen of them went mad in there before two generations had run their course. It took a hundred and fifty years for the support crew to arrive, and when they did, the reports were terrifying: a vast fortress carved into a mountain, the lower halls slick with filth and grease and corpses. And somehow, high above, the UN flag still flying and two hundred humans waiting anxiously for the messenger from the stars.

  Humans, even those strapped by overwhelming bureaucracy, are a rather tenacious lot. But I’m not going to tell Milo this. He needs to ramble.

  “I’m not saying it’s colonists. I’m saying it could have been some sort of UN secret sauce experiment,” says Milo, moving on to the next segment. “God knows they keep enough stuff classified.”

  CONSPIRACY THEORIES? I scoff. PLEASE.

  But I’m falsifying, of course. Ship’s extra weaponry. BLACK ORCHID’s nonchalant description of risk.

  Something’s wrong here, and Simon’s the one with karma bad enough to die from it.

  IT COULD, OF COURSE, BE SOME SORT OF EQUIPMENT FAILURE. Statistics. A large enough sample space will g
ive you weird enough outliers.

  Milo doesn’t seem pacified by this. “Yeah. Two different crews both start dying. Equipment failures.”

  THE MERCER BODIES DID NOT HAVE FAILURES SIMILAR TO SIMON.

  “That’s because they’re not similar to Simon,” says Milo. “They’re not similar to any of us. But whatever shit they did have inside clearly went rogue.”

  “Movement, west 285,” cuts in Anna. “Megabeast herd.”

  We all stiffen. We’re all extra jumpy now. I leave the spiders and flow into the much more cramped and limited drones I have out there. Freezing moments pass.

  “Just a migration, I think.”

  HOPEFULLY. We return to the work at hand. The cable is now almost complete. If only Shen were here.

  “Five more days, OC,” says Milo eagerly. “Just five more days. And we’ll signal Ship and be off this goddamned rock, and all of this’ll just be something to tell our kids.”

  It sounds like an eternity.

  35

  Simon killed himself the next day.

  I had brought Milo home and checked up on Anna. She was digging in the farm—either trying to salvage the last of what remained, or she had given in to a fool’s hope; it didn’t really matter anymore. I watched her tackle the frozen earth, and went off to recharge stuff.

  The drones needed juice. The spiders needed juice. We didn’t have anywhere near enough current for a full, fast charge, so I just hooked them up to the trickle and left them there. One last flyover of the perimeter—nothing out of the ordinary, only white snow as far as the drone can see, and Megabeast tracks leading into the forest. Urmagon Beta looked desolate. Almost peaceful.

  And then I turn back, and I see us. It’s as if the very walls of the hab have given up now. The clean white is an illusion of the snow; underneath it, the water leaks past cracks into the printed blocks, rotting them through. Fungus spreads cancerous tendrils inside. The siege machines—twice abandoned, now that Shen isn’t here to bring us wood anymore—loom like curious insects. There’s a fire going on among them; Anna, burning stuff to keep her hands from freezing.