Resister: Space Funding Crisis II

by Casey Hattrey

  “Blistering red dwarfes, Arianne! You were only supposed to talk to him. At the very least it would have been a good idea to think things through. But no, you just charge in, hoping your gut reactions will carry the day.”

  Holt was now just a few paces from Arianne, and he wafted a dismissive hand at her.

  “You’re all tactics and no strategy!”

  Holt looked down at Arianne. She couldn’t bare his anger, but had no idea what to say. Everyone else was frozen into silence. With an exasperated shout, Holt turned around and stormed off into the bush, marching double time.

  Arianne took a step to go after him, but Dart held her back.

  “Let him go, he didn’t mean it.”

  Arianne was still too shocked to speak, so she just sat down on a log.

  “Look,” said Dart, “let’s see if we can get this fire going.”

  Idris readily joined Dart. They worked together in silence to form a small pile of kindling, in a ritual a million years old, though aided by a jury-rigged spacecraft spark plug. Eventually, a flame appeared, then spread. But Arianne just sat there. Eventually, Dart looked up at her.

  “Come on, Arianne, snap out of it.” Said Dart.

  “Well …” began Arianne, “he was right, though, wasn’t he?”

  “About what?” asked Dart. Arianne picked a dry twig from the floor and began fiddling with it.

  “I never really think about what I’m doing. I just kind of … start things, and …”

  “… hope they end up working out?” offered Dart.

  “Yeah. But more often than not, I just get lost on the way.”

  Dart sat back from the blossoming fire, and came to put an arm around Arianne. Arianne sniffed lightly, then spoke softly.

  “One of the first projects I did at university was on cultural evolution of religious music. I never really understood most of the songs – people singing about the purpose of life, of the direction of God’s will, of committing to a vision of the universe and to acting as a witness. They promised to go out and profess what they believed. Most of the songs were so ambitious and victorious … but I’ve forgotten them all now. The only one that stuck with me is one that seemed a bit different. The start was just as triumphant as the others, clear and single-minded in their knowledge of what was right. But the last lines always seemed odd to me:

  There enraptured fall before him

  Lost in wonder, love, and praise.”

  Arianne turned to Dart with a face more serious than Dart had seen in a long time.

  “Lost in wonder,” said Arianne, half incredulous. “Not searching for wonder, not bound for wonder, not carefully considering, but lost. It seemed like a very honest line, an admission that sometimes what those people were doing was not preparing for a great event, not seeking wisdom … but seeking beauty. And being caught in the moment.”

  Arianne looked again into the fire.

  “That’s all I really wanted – was to somehow be a witness to the amazing complexity around us.”

  Dart gave her a squeeze, but spoke in a steady voice.

  “It’s not enough, Arianne,” said Dart.

  Arianne shifted to look at Dart. Dart gave her a kind but steady smile. A smile she had seen before on the face of her old supervisor, Professor Golden. It meant ‘well done on getting this far, now it’s time to grow up’. Arianne felt a child’s urge to defend herself, but didn’t have the heart. And she knew the truth of what Dart was offering.

  Dart broke eye contact and shifted slightly, still with her arm around Arianne.

  “So anyway,” said Dart more loudly, “Idris – know any good stories?”

  “Eh?” Idris was sitting on the other side of the fire, politely ignoring the other two.

  “This is a campfire now, it’s traditional to tell stories.”

  “Er, well,” started Idris, tiredly.

  “For example,” offered Dart, “do you know the one about how the Great Convergence started?”

  “Ah!” said Idris. “Of course.”

  Arianne sat up a bit straighter. She realized that she hadn’t actually even asked Idris about this yet. Another lack of ambition.

  “Well,” began Idris, “it was like this. I was working at the software design institute on Gliese. We’d been developing a new ebrain firmware architecture based on DNA transcription. But we started seeing that all the participants in test trials began acting strangely, focusing on immediate rewards and not caring much about future events.”

  Here he looked away from Arianne and into the fire, but continued.

  “We realized that the new operating system was rapidly reading and writing to the ebrain’s memory – much more extensively than other systems – and this was creating resonant patterns of electrical charge inside the ebrain. But the charge was leaking through to people’s real brains – to their auditory cortex, just next to the ebrain implant.”

  “It was stimulating their brains?” asked Dart, fascinated.

  “Yes” nodded Idris guiltily. “Of course, as soon as we realized it we abandoned the project.”

  Idris dipped his head and took a breath before continuing.

  “However, a few years later we found that development was continuing at another lab.”

  “Let me guess,” said Dart, “the Panini Press?”

  “That’s right, the Active Theory Alignment group. We saw some hints in a few conference papers that they must have been using our firmware. We tried talking to them, but they were being absolutely secretive. I didn’t like it. I decided to see for myself what they were up to. So I hacked into their repository.”

  “With the mass assignment virus?” asked Dart.

  “Yes, how did – ah. I guess that’s how you found me.”

  “Yep. Though I never really understood how it worked exactly.”

  “Well,” said Idris, “the problem was that the repository was hosted by Proxima Insurance. They have very tight security. The virus needed to be adaptable to the shifting security measures but simple enough to go undetected. So I used the architecture from our firmware to create a kind of emergent artificial intelligence. It had a very rough idea of what I wanted to find, and would just trawl around until it found it. Not unlike a real virus.”

  Dart was listening to Idris’s explanation like a child to a bedtime story.

  “Ooo, that’s awesome. You weren’t worried they’d come after you?”

  “I knew it was a risk, but the Panini Press is a very low-level client, so I didn’t think that Proxima would try to kill me over it. But a few days after I released it, the virus granted me access to two repositories, not one.”

  “What, why?” asked Dart.

  “I don’t really know. That’s the price of using emergent programs, I suppose – they can adapt to any situation, but you never really know how they are going to behave.”

  Arianne chuckled darkly. Dart gave her a covert nudge.

  “So what was in the repositories?” asked Dart.

  “The first was from the Panini Press. As I suspected, they were using our firmware. They had found that the leaking resonant electrical patterns were interfering with the dopamine reward system. At a very low level, it was affecting the way people learned. It was only a small effect, but it nudged people gently towards thinking in a particular way – seeking immediate payoffs and easy thinking over more substantial rewards. There were a few files on an idea that this would affect the way people spoke – and might be a way of getting everyone to speak the same language across the galaxy.”

  “Ach – they’d love that,” spat Dart.

  “Yes, it was rather sinister. They said we need a galaxy of ‘resonant sisters’. Or Resisters, I think they called them.”

  Arianne’s left eye winced involuntarily.

  “Resisters?” she whispered.

  “Have you heard that name before?” asked Idris.

  “Not exactly” said Arianne, looking out into the gathering dusk. “I once came across a
group who were trying to force everyone to be the same. Trying to strangle any diversity out of everyone – mind and body. It sounds like your group had the same idea, but were moving a whole civilization with a million tiny nudges.”

  Dart was nodding along. “Convergence to the prior bias,” she said.

  Idris also looked out into the gloom. “What was worse is that they had already started some live trials on a remote colony. I decided to confront them and try to convince them that their plan wouldn’t work.”

  “With a conference talk?” asked Arianne.

  “I thought they would listen to reason,” said Idris defensively.

  “You clearly haven’t been to a conference before,” she said, slouching back into a dejected heap in Dart’s arms.

  Dart rolled her eyes, gave Arianne a nudge and looked more kindly at Idris.

  “The convergence won’t work?” she said.

  “The convergence had spread amazingly quickly during the time I was in transit, but it’s all being maintained by constant stimulation from the firmware. As soon as people find out that it’s manipulating them, they’ll stop using it. Or it’ll just go out of fashion. And when it does, people will diverge again. There’s no getting away from diversity.”

  “Yeeessss!” shouted Dart, spooking a flock of winged things into the air behind them. Both Arianne and Idris jumped. Kotlin’s frazzled face appeared out of a hole in the ship’s hull and she shouted down in alarm.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Dart laughed and shouted back gleefully. “We get to keep our jobs!”

  Kotlin retreated into the ship, muttering something about being the only one working. Dart was attempting an elaborate fist-bump with a dazed Idris. It was good news, thought Arianne. There was no unstoppable dark force invading humanity, just a few misguided linguists causing a temporary nuisance. She tried putting the story in order – the Panini Press was promoting the glitchy firmware in order to get everyone speaking the same, making them fit neatly into their theories. She glanced over at Idris who was puffing out a dejected sigh. He wasn’t to blame for it really, he’d just underestimated the zeal of the ATA. But the insurance company’s reaction didn’t quite make sense. She had thought that they wanted to stop everyone finding out about their research duplication, but if the convergence really wouldn’t work, why were they so angry? Sure, any breach of their security would provoke a stern response. But they had been desperate enough to put a spy on her own ship – and who knows how many others – then send a whole fleet of armed drones to invade Planet Conference and terminate Idris and anyone associated with him. Arianne knew that linguistics was probably the most important field in all of science. That was obvious to everyone. But was it that important to bean-counting insurers?

  “What was in the second repository?” she asked Idris.

  Idris did some more puffing. Then he reached inside his jacket.

  “I’m not totally sure,” he said, pulling out a tiny, chrome memory card. It shifted colors in the flickering firelight, and the three campers studied it with curiosity.

  “It’s a set of trajectories in deep space,” he said, looking at Arianne. He handed the tiny card over to her, and she held it in the palm of her hand.

  “Trajectories?” asked Arianne.

  “It’s assembled from about a dozen sources. I think Proxima was pooling knowledge from many of its clients.” Idris furrowed his brow. “They joined up some dots, and were tracking something.”

  “Tracking what?” asked Arianne, focusing intently on the card as if she could bore into its data with her eyes.

  “I don’t know,” said Idris, shrugging. “They just keep calling it the Outside Agency.”

  As soon as Arianne heard the words, everything went dark.

  Idris and Dart had disappeared.

  The campfire was gone.

  Even the sky was no longer there.

  A loud robotic voice boomed out above her.

  FORTY-TWO

  Arianne blinked sharply, and tried standing, only to find that she was already standing. She was alone in a dark space. She staggered, totally disoriented. Had she fallen asleep? Was this a nightmare? And what did the number forty-two mean? It could mean anything. Or everything.

  FORTY-ONE

  Well whatever it was, it was getting worse. She shook her head and tried to think.

  FORTY

  Then she realised: she had been zapped. Someone had hacked her ebrain and put her out cold. She blinked in disbelief and instinctively tried to cover her head just above her left ear.

  THIRTY-NINE: FORWARD LOCKOUT VERIFIED

  “Idris! Dart! They’ve hacked our ebrains!” she called, but nobody answered. Arianne quickly accessed her chronometer.

  32 years old (subjective, local); 525 years old (objective, local)

  She’d been in chryo for a long time, so she had been transported. Perhaps a long way. To some kind of very poorly lit room. With very poorly considered décor.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  She suddenly understood where she was and was flooded by a horrible resignation. With a full exhalation of her lungs, she turned around and saw three people in mold-grey clothing sitting behind a desk.

  “Thank you, Doctor Arianne,” said Professor Tarry, “this part of the interview is now complete.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  La Quana must have placed a subroutine in her ebrain which triggered when she’d got the data from Idris. The subroutine must have zapped her then alerted some some of his Planet Conference lackeys to come to scoop them up, and now she was back on some CAFCA hub being debriefed.

  The mire corduroy lady began speaking, barely keeping the disdain out of her voice.

  “Well, I must say that your methods were not exactly orthodox,” she said.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Of course, thought Arianne. Of course! This whole tank-busting, bot-evading, ship-hopping, laser-skirting adventure had just been part of an interview. And now this drab trio were going to tell her “well done on getting this far, but we’re not looking for a disorganised psychopath”.

  THIRTY-FIVE: TRANSFER TO INTERNAL POWER

  She should have known. All she’d done was follow her nose, she hadn’t stopped to think about what she was doing, or why. She hadn’t even spotted the subroutines that La Quana must have planted in her ebrain. But now it was too late.

  The woman was continuing her scathing review.

  “… not strictly necessary to kill all those people …”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Arianne wasn’t interested. It was clear from their moldy faces that however much she’d succeeded, they didn’t approve. They were obviously just building up to a full condemnation of her decisions and abilities. The robotic voice must be counting down the time until she’d be put back to sleep in a red bubble under the ice fields. To be forgotten forever.

  Well, no point hanging around, she thought. She shook her head and interrupted the lady’s droning voice.

  “Meh,” she said. And trudged out of the room.