The Nightshade Problem: Sol Space Volume Two

by James Wilks

  “What galls me, Clea, is that you’re saying what is expected of you. And I believe you mean it. However, I also believe that you think that treating Bethany over Declan was the right decision.”

  “But it was the right decision,” she objected. “You said it yourself; he was going to be okay.”

  “My apologies,” he added. He did not sound apologetic at all. “I mean that you believe that it was the right decision for you to make. It wasn’t. It was the right decision for me to make, and when I make that decision, I make it based on the medical evidence available at the time. It is now clear to me, Declan, and everyone else on this ship except for Bethany that given the choice, you would choose to preserve Ms. Miller’s life over Mr. Burbank’s.”

  Staples knew that she should shut up and take it, but she couldn’t help but reply. “Is that so wrong? She’s younger, more fragile. She’s been through so much already.”

  Jabir was witheringly unsympathetic to her response. “Indeed, you would not want to compound a lifetime of pain with the added insult of death. You must realize how absurd that sounds.” He waited for her to nod; reluctantly, she did so.

  He continued. “Very simply it comes down to a matter of trust. You either trust me to do my job, adequately and with professionalism, or you do not. And though I must tell you that if you cannot trust me, we cannot work together, I would ask that you please think carefully before responding. Do not simply tell me what you think I want to hear.”

  Staples took a moment to consider, then answered. “All right. Fine, yes. I value Bethany’s life over Declan’s. But that’s a personal decision, and as a captain, I have to keep that buried. And ultimately, at least in medical matters, it’s irrelevant. I do trust you. I trust you to make that call. I have to, and I do.”

  Jabir regarded her, his swarthy and handsome features still a few centimeters from her pale and upturned face. “Very well. Please stay out of Medical between now and our arrival at Titan Prime.” He began to climb lightly back up to Medical. “My patients need their rest,” he added.

  Staples suspected from the sound of the knock on her cabin door that it was her first mate. “This is also going to be messy,” she muttered to herself before she opened the door. Don Templeton hung on the recessed rungs of the hallway ladder outside her door, one hand and foot free, his weight easily supported in the light gravity.

  “I know,” she said simply, and stepped aside.

  Templeton stepped into the cabin and closed the door behind him. He rounded on her and said, “if you know, then why did you say it?”

  She shook her head, refusing to meet his eyes. “It was an impulse. We had just lost Evelyn, and I had Bethany’s blood on me. Literally on me, Don. I just couldn’t stand the thought of her dying at that moment.”

  He heaved a sigh, then walked away from her and took a seat at her small table. “Well, I’m not here to tear you up about it. Of course you’d choose Bethany over Declan. She’s small and vulnerable, and really, she’s also a lot more useful to this crew. She had just finished saving all of our lives when she got hit by that shrapnel.” He sat with his elbows resting on his knees and pondered for a moment. Staples was genuinely surprised at his reserved reaction. She had expected bluster and fury from him. She waited to see if he had finished.

  After a moment, he continued. “So, of course you feel that way. I mean, to be honest, I would make the same decision. And I’ll tell you something.” He paused for dramatic effect. “I think the doc would too. Not because she triggers all of the sympathy centers of our brains, but because he knows how vital she is to the running of this ship. It was just stupid of you to say it and not trust doc to do the right thing. I’m not here to yell at you over that. What I’m here to do is warn you that you created a situation on this ship when you said it. Everyone knows, or will know soon, and they’re all gonna start wondering if you’d sacrifice them to save someone else, or maybe worse, whose life you’d sacrifice to save them. Also, you stepped all over Doc’s toes, and he’s not one to like that.”

  Staples laughed briefly. “Boy, you’re not wrong,” she said, thinking that besides Templeton, Jabir was perhaps the only person on the ship who could get away with lecturing her. “I hadn’t really thought about the long-term implications, Don. I wasn’t entirely sure any of us would be alive at this point.”

  “Well, that’s the way it goes. You make decisions to get you through the moment, then you have to live with them. I don’t think it would matter too much except that everyone on this boat is strung out. No one, not one of these people signed on to fight a war against a rogue artificial intelligence. Now they’re stuck in it, but that doesn’t mean they’re cut out for it.”

  “Are you saying you are?” Staples inquired as she sat down on her bed across from him.

  He spread his arms wide and smiled. “Hey, I’m easy.” She grinned at his bravado, and then his demeanor became more serious. “To be honest, Clea, I didn’t have much before I came onboard this ship. My marriage fell apart when I realized that I had spent more than twenty years of my life married to someone of the wrong gender, and my sons weren’t talking to me too much. I don’t really blame them… they were angry at me for leaving, or maybe Karen asked them to pick sides. I don’t suppose it matters. The point is, I needed something new. A new family. And this is it. Despite my mistakes, I know a lot about families and how they work, and I’m telling you that this one is in danger. The only things that kept us going for the past two weeks were a common goal: to save someone who is now dead, and a sense of family, which you just endangered. We’re not going to make it unless we can patch up at least one of those.”

  They had given the robot his own quarters. Though he did not require rest, he still spent much of his downtime alone in his cabin, and no one knew why. It was the subject of quite a bit of gossip when two or more of the crew members found themselves with some spare time, and the theories often leaned towards conspiracy or even paranoia. There was ample evidence that Brutus was on their side, and he had been vocal about his motivations, but it was easy to doubt him given all they had been through.

  So it was with some trepidation, then, that John stood behind his daughter while she knocked on his door. It only took a moment for the door to open, and before the eight-year-old girl stood a white and chrome approximation of the human form. In one hand John saw that it held a book. It was not a surface with words on it, but a printed book. The title was Crime and Punishment.

  Brutus immediately squatted down to Gwen’s height and affixed her with the small cameras that served as his eyes. The rectangular mouth was incapable of expression, but the automaton cocked a head to the side, and the gesture was almost puppy-like.

  “How can I help you, Ms. Park?” Despite the tinny quality of the voice, it was light and friendly, the kind of voice people used instinctively when speaking to children.

  Since Gringolet was under thrust and the back of the ship was currently down, Gwen and John stood on the closed bulkhead door that marked the end of the hallway just outside Brutus’ room. The room doors were double hinged to allow them to open normally when the ship was accelerating; otherwise the door would have opened like an oven, raised and lowered.

  With the automaton’s face so close to hers, Gwen stood rapt for several seconds; she had been fascinated by the construct since she had first seen him in the mess hall, and she seemed to hold none of the adults’ mistrust of him. John poked her in the shoulder blade lightly to prompt her.

  She coughed to clear her throat and then began what was clearly a rehearsed speech. “My dad and I have come here to thank you for saving us.” She said it all with one breath, then gulped a lungful of air and continued. “We were in real danger from the vacuum cleaner… the vacuum, and we want to thank you for opening the door.” She finished and then stood expectantly, staring into Brutus’ camera eyes.

  “You are very welcome, Ms. Park.” His head tilted again. “It was my pleasure. I’m so glad that yo
u are feeling better.” The cameras flicked up to the girl’s father, taking in the bandage and the smile on John’s face. “And your father, how is he feeling?”

  “He bumped his head, but he’s okay. Mom always says he has a strong head.” She said this quite sincerely, and John couldn’t help but laugh.

  To the engineer’s surprise, Brutus chuckled lightly as well. “I suspect that she is grateful for that quality in him, at least in this instance.”

  John held out his hand, and Brutus rose and took it. “We wanted to thank you.” He placed his other hand on the automaton’s wrist. “I wanted to thank you, personally, for saving my daughter. How did you bypass the automated door seal?”

  “I cut the power and opened the door manually,” he answered without hesitation.

  “By yourself? But that would…” John did the math. “You’d have to be able to push over two hundred kilos.” He looked down at the robotic hand that gripped his hand lightly and flinched before he could stop himself from drawing it back altogether in alarm. There was no doubt that the robot in front of him could not only crush every bone in his hand, but it could quite literally tear him limb from limb. If Brutus sensed his fear or took offense to the motion of his hand, he did not show it.

  “I chose this body carefully, Mr. Park.” Releasing his hand, he squatted down to face Gwen again. “And it is fortunate I did for this little one.” He reached out to tweak her nose, and John felt a moment of irrational panic. He forced himself not to react, and Gwen giggled in a predictably adorable fashion and covered her nose with her hands.

  John had come here to tell the newest member of their crew that he didn’t care what the others said, that Brutus was okay with him, that he would defend him to the death for saving his and his daughter’s life. Instead, he found himself unsettled by the odd combination of power, mechanization, and personality in front of him. If Brutus had just been a robot, it might have been simpler, but he was plainly more than that. For a second, he understood why people used the word abomination. Brutus was too strange to be considered human, but too obviously alive and sentient to be anything else. He wanted to say everything he had come to say, but he knew it would make him a hypocrite.

  Instead, he asked, “Where did you get the book?”

  Still squatting in front of Gwen, Brutus looked down at the novel, then back up at John. “Captain Staples loaned it to me.”

  John forced a grin. “I should have guessed. But don’t you… can’t you just download the book? I’m pretty sure we have it in the master computer files.”

  Brutus nodded. “Yes, but I have been enjoying reading recently. The concept of written creation is fascinating. There are only twenty-six letters in your alphabet. Combined with a few pieces of punctuation and spacing, they can be fastened together in nearly infinite combinations. There are hundreds of millions of books, and yet, authors create them by putting one letter after another, one word after another.” He stood and glanced down at the book again as he flipped dexterously through the pages. “How do they know what to write next? How do they choose the right word? It seems to me that the process of writing a story is one of making infinite turns on an infinite number of roads and somehow arriving more or less precisely where one wishes to.”

  “I never thought about it like that,” John said quite honestly. “I’m more of a mathematician. There’s an elegance in numbers and equations, a balance and beauty to the order of it all.” Suddenly he remembered whom he was talking to and felt as though he were explaining a color wheel to Van Gogh.

  Brutus cocked his head to one side as he had before. “I am something of a mathematician myself, but I must admit, the beauty of it eludes me. I suppose you could say that I never thought about it like that.” Brutus leaned forward as he spoke his last sentence and looked at John. There was a sense of expectancy, and John realized that he had meant to be funny.

  He smiled, but it felt false and a second too late, and suddenly he felt guilty and awkward, and he wondered if there were a gulf of understanding between them that could never be bridged.

  A half an hour later, Brutus ascended the recessed ladder rungs outside his cabin and climbed up into a hallway. At the end of the hallway, Dinah Hazra had just stepped off the ladder, headed down to the ReC from the mess hall.

  “Hello, Ms. Hazra,” Brutus said congenially.

  The woman did not reply but began to walk towards him, her eyes wary. Brutus moved forward as well, but reached out a hand as she passed him. Instantly Dinah seized it with her left hand and pushed it away. She shifted her balance and slammed the robotic form against the wall beside them with her right forearm against his neck, such as it was.

  “Ms. Hazra, my apologies. I merely meant to stop you and ask if-”

  “Stay away from me,” she spoke in a voice just above a whisper, but one full of menace. “Do you understand? Don’t talk to me. Don’t touch me.”

  The cameras in the blackened sockets of Brutus’ white faceplate flicked back and forth between Dinah’s eyes for a few seconds. Then he sighed audibly. “I understand, Ms. Hazra. Please put me down.”

  Dinah didn’t put him down. She held him pressed against the wall for another ten seconds, staring into his face. Then she pursed her lips and dropped him. He landed easily and stood watching her as she walked to the end of the hallway and descended the ladder.

  Chapter 4

  If they escape my wrath, they will flee to Titan Prime. So had said the word of God, and so Amit Sadana was on Titan Prime.

  He stood in the marketplace and let the sea of humanity wash over him. It was a small sea. Shops and stalls lined the sides of the domed chamber carved into the rock. Here an aging barber with a Chinese accent tried to entice passers-by into his shop. There men and women haggled over perfumed cloth that had been imported from Earth’s Middle East. The scents of soup, heavily spiced, drifted to him from a storefront. Men and women barked, crooned, cajoled, and promised. From where Amit stood, he could see two dozen shops and perhaps five hundred men, women, and children.

  The sight was familiar. The fact that this market, like the exchanges in the city of his birth in nearly every way but size, existed over a billion kilometers from that home stunned him. Children ran around the legs of the adults, and one of them paused long enough to attempt to pick his pocket. It was a girl, perhaps seven years old, and she was not very good at it. He caught her hand as a matter of reflex and looked into her pale face and green eyes. Her clothes were ragged but clean; the girl might have been poor, but she was not starving, and she had a home.

  She stared back at him in fear, though she did not attempt to pull away. He was aware of a small group of children watching the interaction from a side alley, ready to run if need be. Amit produced his wallet with his free hand.

  “Is this what you were after?” he asked quietly. She stared vacantly at him, sensing a trap, unsure whether to confirm or deny. He flipped open the wallet with his left hand, his right still gripping the girl’s wrist, and pulled out a crisp hundred. On Earth, most transactions were digital, but in the Jovian sector, cash was the local preference. The wallet he slipped back into his pocket, but the bill he held out silently.

  “Next time, try asking,” he said softly. “You may find that God will provide.” He released her wrist and held the money out to her. The girl took one last look in his eyes, and then she and the money were gone.

  It still amazed him. Humanity could carve towns into rocky moons all over the solar system. They could make it possible to breathe, to eat, to reproduce, even to thrive so far from the motherworld, and yet people did not change. The setting was unfamiliar, and yet he knew every move of this dance, from the smells that assaulted his nose and the press of the bodies to the stink of their breath. The irony, he thought, was that here, so far from where he had started, he blended in better than he had in the city of his birth.

  That city was Mumbai, the largest in India, and the place he had called home was Dharavi, still the larges
t and most populous slum in the world. Many things had changed in the last hundred years: the people of the motherworld enjoyed free healthcare and free food, but there would always be the poor, the disenfranchised, and the desperate.

  Amit’s home had been a tin shack. It wasn’t the worst place in Dharavi, nor was it the best. The average resident of Dharavi enjoyed about one square meter of personal living space. That was just about enough room to lie down. Amit had had it good: he was an only child. His mother and father slept behind a partition, and that meant that he had at least a modicum of privacy growing up. He never minded the limited space; he couldn’t really imagine anything else, nor what people would do with it. Home was just fine with him. It was leaving that was the problem.

  Amit and his parents were Christians - part of a minority population and one not particularly beloved of the neighboring religions. Many of his neighbors were Muslims, but they weren’t the problem. Most of them left him alone because he was a monotheist. The problem was the Hindus, and they constituted the majority of believers. Christianity was dying; all religions were dying, in fact, but it was a slow death, and it was not always a peaceful one.

  As science had allowed humanity to colonize other planets and battle back disease and hunger, the world had changed. People had embraced the scientific method and the certainty it provided. Belief in a higher power was still prevalent, but the older institutions of religion had begun to fade. Amit knew all of this now, had studied it and seen the trends, but he had not understood it when he was seven. When he was seven, he had understood only the most immediate expression of religious conflict, and his name was Ishaan.

  Ishaan was two years older than Amit and a good deal larger. He claimed to be a devout Hindu, and though Amit did not understand Hinduism very well, as far as he could tell the primary tenet was this: make Amit suffer. On his way to school, on his way home, when out in the market, Amit was always on the lookout for his tormentor. The bully did not run alone, of course; boys like him never did, but he was always the primary provocateur. It was Ishaan twisting his arm behind his back, stealing the few pennies that Amit had managed to scrape together, slapping him, calling him names. He was called traitor, foreigner - though he was as Indian as Ishaan and the other boys - idiot, liar, Westerner, and a host of other less palatable insults. Amit’s parents wanted God to be the center of his life, but in truth, it was Ishaan. It was Ishaan whose wrath he feared and whose mercy he begged for, albeit in vain.