by Hubbert, Jim
“I’ve seen foreigners before.” But she struggled to conceal her surprise. Somehow, this was exactly how she thought he’d look. He’s exhausted. His smile could not hide the shadow behind his sunken cheeks and the crooked line of his mouth. Even Miyo, with no experience of men, knew a single day of hardship could not cast such a deep shadow over one so strong.
“Where did you come from?” In spite of herself, Miyo felt a growing interest in this man. “What happened to you? You seem so…gaunt.”
“Do I look that bad?” The Messenger seemed slightly surprised, but then he smiled. “Don’t worry about me. You’re the one who should be resting. Walking that far without rest is hard for a woman. You must be tired.”
“Not at all. This day was easy compared to rituals at the palace.”
“But you’ve had nothing all day except swamp water. At least get something to eat.”
The Messenger’s repeated urgings made Miyo suspect he was trying to change the subject. Perhaps he didn’t care to have others nosing about in his affairs. But she was about to entrust her fate and that of her people to this man. She could not remain in the dark about him.
Suddenly the sword spoke quietly. “O, heads up.”
In one movement he was standing, sword in hand, but after peering into the darkness he just as quickly relaxed. Miyo turned to see something atop a rock. Nearby, an old woman was sliding backward across the ground in an attitude of reverence. It was Kan’s grandmother.
Miyo went to look. There was a tray with hot rice porridge and dried cakes, enough for two.
“Sustenance. Now we can talk a bit longer.” Miyo brought the tray over. She watched the Messenger as she set out the plates. The cakes were made from dried dates, carefully set aside last autumn. Miyo tasted one. An inexpressibly delicious sweetness melted across her tongue.
The Messenger stared at the porridge a long time before taking a bowl in both hands and inhaling half the contents in one go. He sighed deeply. “My first food in twelve centuries.”
Miyo paused. She returned the cake she’d been eating to its dish and silently passed him the entire tray. It was as she thought. This man had traveled here from some far country.
“Where did you come from?”
“Before this? I was on ops in the New Kingdom, in Egypt…no, I’d better start at the beginning.” With no further hesitation, he began devouring the food. Then he glanced at Miyo. “You’d best keep this to yourself.”
“I intend to.”
“I come from a world 2,300 years in the future. But not your future. My journey spans many timestreams that are doomed to disappear.”
Miyo held her breath and settled back to listen.
CHAPTER 2
STAGE 001TRITON A.D. 2598
“Wake up.”
“Wake up.”“Wake up.”
“—acknowledged. I am, awake. Initiating self-diagnostic sequence. Confirming self-recognition. I am Messenger Unit Eight Six Niner Niner Eight One, subunit of the Sandrocottos AI. I serve that the human species may survive.”
“Permission to load functions. Select your work name from the knowledge base.”
“My work name is selected. It is Orville.”
“Orville, we assign you this body. Innervate and set Second Law to self-preservation.”
“I understand.”
Orville opened his eyes. He extended his awareness into the hardware that comprised his body and began taking inventory.
Implementation: cyborg, compound organic/synthetic. Length: 180 centimeters. Weight: 75 kilograms Terra Normal. Format: Homo, standard. Reproductive function: disabled. Growth function: disabled. Endurance/reflexes/strength:hyperenhanced. Extranet links: enabled. Health status: optimal.
Readiness: 100 percent.
Orville locked his initial awareness values to Euthymic, calibrating his Self accordingly. Then he rose from his bed and inspected his environment.
A hospital room in soothing colors. Two white-uniformed operators were studying him intently. Orville sensed there was something significant about his being initialized in this environment instead of on a fabroom worktable. Not that they’d treat him as human, of course. But at least he’d experience far better handling than a nonsentient robot.
One of the walls was switched to view mode. Neptune loomed enormous, suspended in the blackness. Orville walked to the wall and looked down. The city below him was lit, not by the distant Sun, but by many intense luminosity sources suspended several hundred meters above the surface. Roads curved gently through thick forest cover. Tall, strongly built residences and buildings were visible among the trees. Automated vehicles ferried commuters in a smooth, unending stream. Humans in civilian clothes strolled here and there. In a large square, some sort of ball game was in progress.
The city seemed to have been designed for comfortable living. It looked neither like a metropolis with an exploding population nor like a bristling military base. But of course it was both.
“Welcome to Triton, Orville.”
Orville turned. One of his youthful operators was smiling. With a blank, professional expression, the other operator brought Orville a robe and placed it on his naked body.
“How are you feeling? Any discomfort? Any nonspecific anxiety or hostility? Feelings of panic?”
“My condition is excellent. I am happy to be awake. I wish to fulfill my purpose.”
“That’s splendid,” said the operator. “But we’re in no hurry. We want you Messengers to get thoroughly acclimated to Triton. First, would you like to try eating? Of course, you don’t require nutrients, but I’d like you to put your food privileges to good use.”
“An excellent idea. I’m born, now for my first meal. Wait—it’s not breast milk, is it?”
With a look of amusement, the young man gestured toward the exit. “You seem quite easy to communicate with. I’d like to join you. Order anything you wish—but I can’t offer you breast milk.”
And Orville’s life began. Many other Messengers were awakened at the same time, and spent their first days being initiated into the mysteries of daily life. The expert AIs assigned to look after them were masters at socializing newly awakened cyborgs. Some Messengers, unable to tolerate being treated like children, soon transferred out of the facility. But Orville doggedly stuck with his operators. He sensed it might indeed be a problem if he put his clothes on backward or greeted someone from a distance of thirty meters, or for that matter three centimeters. So he learned to dress himself and to greet others from a distance of three meters; in the process he encountered his own levelheaded yet irrepressible nature. Before long he was ready to enter the world outside, the world of people.
He was assigned a place to live and personal property every bit as good as the average citizen. Triton was built for comfort—as much as its distance from the Sun allowed—and Orville fell in love with it. But the existence of this pleasant city was itself based on something far from pleasant. The decision to build on Triton was made in the shadow of extinction.
Sixty-two years ago, human life on Earth was annihilated.
Triton Central Council, Sol System—this was Orville’s outfit on humanity’s principal stronghold. Three centuries before, when techniques of interplanetary communication and administration were perfected, some had predicted capital cities would cease to be necessary for centralized government. But the capitals survived; humans are political as well as social animals. Of course, the opposite urge—to avoid certain members of the community—was as strong as ever, and there were countless self-governing free cities scattered throughout the system, but only beyond the orbit of Jupiter.
As part of their training, Orville and his fellow Messengers were assembled at a facility run by the Central Council’s Sol System Recovery Command. The human general standing before them wasn’t recounting dry history. She was speaking of a tragedy that had struck her own family.“We call the enemy ETs. At first it meant extraterrestrials, but once the fighting started, they were
Enemies of Terra. After we lost Earth, they were simply Evil Things. We’ve attempted to end this war on thousands of separate occasions. We tried ceasefires. We tried negotiating. We tried surrendering. Tried to expel them. Tried to quarantine them. Nothing worked.
“Forty-six years ago, we tried extermination. At first it seemed to be working. Our projections had Sol System liberated within a decade. Then they attacked with weapons of mass destruction, including a giant reflector in geosynchronous orbit above Earth. Except for some of the archaebacteria, the biosphere perished. We spent six months reterraforming our home planet, but it looked like we’d need three centuries to reestablish the biosphere out of our DNA archives. Even then, we could only have recovered five percent of species. We managed to lose in a generation what it took our planet four billion years to create.
“We know a few things about these ETs. They are self-replicating fighting units. In terms of technical sophistication, they’re somewhat ahead of us. Their goal is the extermination of our species. For all we know, they may even be a product of human intelligence. But our senior analysts agree they’re probably from outside our system, because they’ve mounted attacks on colonies orbiting stars in this neighborhood. We’re not sure why, but they also attacked an automated observation station near Teegarden’s Star. That kind of offensive reach is beyond the capabilities of any human settlement in the Local Group.
“Because we received warning in time, we were able to nip these attacks in the bud. Still, we don’t know anything about their origins—where they’re based, habitat and culture, the motivation for these attacks. Nothing.”
The general was middle-aged. Her detached delivery belied the fact that, as Orville and the others already knew, she had lost her husband and five members of her family in this war. Her loss fueled the single-mindedness that propelled her to her present rank.
“First infiltration was on Venus, using covert spore insertion. After replicating and building up their strength, they initiated hostilities by constructing a disk that blocked all light from the Sun. The disk was half a million kilometers in diameter and completely deprived Earth of sunlight for three years. Impact on the biosphere and food production was staggering. But the disk was also a tactical diversion aimed at channeling our defensive efforts. We put most of our resources into reinforcing our off-world units, and when we finally deployed against the disk, the enemy landed in force on Earth. Within a week, they’d spawned four hundred thousand anthills. This completely disrupted our bases and command-and-control networks, which in turn prevented us from repelling attacks from their remaining forces in space.
“By the war’s fifth year, it was all over for Earth. In year six Mars fell. Year eight, we lost the asteroid belt. By year ten they had advanced as far as Jupiter. That was the year our species decided to withdraw to a new defensive perimeter far from Sol, with Neptune as the hub. We called for assistance from the exoplanet colonies and hunkered down for a war of attrition.
“At this point, we were down to seven percent of our pre-war population. But the enemy apparently depends on solar energy—specifically, they appear to distribute solar power by means of laser-modulated transmission—and they failed to mount major attacks against the outer planets, where the Sun’s energy is greatly attenuated. This gave our species hope for recovery. It was no mean feat to produce antimatter without solar energy, but forty years of work have brought us this far. And now, humanity is on the offensive. The history of our offensive, and our victories, will surely be written someday. But not by me.” The general paused a moment before continuing. Her detached tone was replaced by something approaching emotion.
“The future of this struggle is in your hands. It is no longer for humanity to fight these battles, nor to tell how they were won. All we can do is support you. So I close with this: go forth to victory. Dismissed.”
For Orville, the general’s final words were more than a military directive. They resonated with humanity’s experience and resolve. Now the Messengers would be the bearers of that resolve, if necessary transmitting it to others.
In point of fact, the Messengers did not need to hear the general’s speech. Messenger AIs were equipped with the fruit of nearly all of mankind’s intellectual achievements, backed by the Sandrocottos AI, Supreme Commander of the Sol System Recovery Force. As Messengers, they knew more about the origins of this war than any human. The time they spent living as humans prior to deployment was not to teach them what humans knew. It was designed to instill in them human sensibilities, to encourage them to ponder the significance of humanity, of society, and finally, of their own identity.
As highly advanced intelligent organisms, the Messengers were far more than machines designed for service. They were capable of harboring profound doubts regarding themselves and the world, and many of them did. If Messengers were to have the ability to question the basis of a given action, they had to be endowed with a self capable of providing an answer. Their father Sandrocottos did not tell them who they were, nor did he think this was something that could be taught. The self is the history each individual makes through living life. Knowing this, Sandrocottos gave them a single directive: discover for yourselves what you fight to defend.
Orville and his kind were produced by different designers and builders in batches of several hundred to several thousand units; Messengers were endowed with varied temperaments from the outset. Based on its temperament, each Messenger chose a personal path for establishing a self. One Messenger might devote itself to the study of science, seeking mankind’s essence through the accumulation of knowledge. Another might delve into religion, seeking ultimate value in its manifold patterns and multiple ways of interpreting the universe. One might seek to understand art in its widest sense; another might narrow his focus to the development of a single creative field such as literature or music.
But most Messengers made an effort, above all else, to venture out into the world—to observe its sights, experience its sounds and smells, converse with its people. By exploring the fullest potential of the complex organic machine interfaces that were their bodies, they were able to acquire knowledge through the broadest number of pathways. These pathways formed the basis for memory, which is why more than half of all Messengers were assigned physical bodies. It was hoped the precious memories created by going out into human society would sustain them during the long journey that lay ahead.
The Messengers came to see Triton as a wonderful place. Resurgent humanity was done biding its time, and Triton was the focus of that resurgence. The city overflowed with passion and vigor, wealth and energy. And it was there on Triton that Orville found his reason for living—the deathless memories of his days and nights with Sayaka.
He found her working at a window in the Defense Force Supply Section. It was an odd place for an encounter. Even stranger was her behavior: she had one foot up on the counter and was emptying a mug of coffee over the head of a requisitioner. That was Orville’s first glimpse of Sayaka.
This was somewhat unusual behavior for a clerk in a military installation—in fact, he had seen nothing to match it anywhere on Triton—so Orville approached her. “What are you doing?”“What was that?” Her hair, the color of burnished gold, was pulled back tightly and piled on her head. A tie encircled her throat, her suit was immaculate. Nothing in her appearance would have predicted what she’d just done. Not only did she take the trouble to pour the last drop of coffee onto the head of her dazed customer, she balanced the empty cup on his head.
“This is my job. I distribute supplies to the right people.”
“I’ve never seen it done that way,” said Orville.
“Excuse me. What I meant was, I make sure supplies don’t go to the wrong people.”
“Ah, I see.” Orville paused for the two milliseconds needed to query the Supply Section AI about its responsibilities and work practices. The AI responded that it handled over 90 percent of all hardware/software aspects of matériel distribution to Defens
e Force units, but special cases were left to humans. Of course, the AI was equipped with the expertise to manage human organizations, and it understood that extralegal or irregular procedures were sometimes required. Special cases were the task of this human-staffed department.
In other words, thought Orville, this is the administrative back door to the Supply Section. Still, he was unable to find anything in the normal procedures to account for the woman’s actions, so he decided to investigate further. “Do the wrong people come here?”
“I’ve got one in front of me,” she answered. “Little cheat, he’s trying to snitch some parts for an obsolete terrestrial loader. So he can sell them, naturally.”
His cover blown to everyone in the office, the man clucked his tongue with contempt and departed, the cup falling from his head. The woman finally took her foot off the counter. A cleaning bot started working on the mess. The next customer fearfully retreated to a different window.
The woman looked at Orville. “What are you looking at? This is my job. I decide who doesn’t get loader parts, or half-spoiled food from the warehouse, or surplus strategic warheads. I’m sick of these combat shirkers coming in trying to rip us off.”
“How do you decide who’s legitimate?” Orville asked.
“I look at their face.” The other clerks had been struggling not to laugh. Now they couldn’t help it. Judging from their reaction, Orville concluded that the woman must be like this all the time, and it was encouraged. It seemed odd that the otherwise meticulous support AI took no action while she flagrantly abused her authority.
The woman seemed to read Orville’s thoughts. “So? What do you want? Doesn’t look like you’re here to requisition something. Just dropped by to pay your respects? Or are you here to rate our performance?”
“I am a Messenger AI.” Orville had already decided to ignore the way business was conducted in this place. Requisitioners and supply clerks glanced at him with mild surprise. The woman furrowed her brow, put a slender finger alongside her temple and pondered.