by Astrotomato
“This is the land immediately around the Colony, the outlying settlements.” Win walked around the holo, “And these lines, these are the extent of the Colony and the mines, aren't they?”
“Oh yes, Commander, indeed.”
“Let's add a marker for the original Colony; just there. Can you add in any tunnel networks that came out of the original Colony please.” Green lines darkened around the Colony marker. Win nodded at the scene, “This is your map of Fall, right?”
The sandman surveyed it. “Yes, this is the extent of our Colony's habitations and mining.”
“Your map is wrong, Verigua.”
While he waited for a response, Win walked out of the holo cube, involuntarily taking a small jumping step as he crossed from the holo sky onto the ship's floor.
Verigua looked around, looked back at Fall's surface. It walked around, creating diagnostic maps in the air around it, overlaying them on the view below. Eventually the sandman turned around, “May I call you Win? I feel we're acquainted enough. I think you've made a mistake. What you see is the entirety of old and new colonies, mines, tunnels and emergency quarters. It quite clearly matches all records.”
Win picked up one of his sensors. He looked past it to Verigua, “Catch.” As the sensor arced through the few metres between them, it emitted a short tone which echoed around the hold. When Verigua caught it, new holo lines appeared on Fall's simulated surface, growing from the old, abandoned Colony, converging into a single line which led to the main Colony.
The lines were tunnels, uncharted, unknown, hidden from the planetary schema, from Verigua.
“What, may I ask, are these?”
“Tunnels coming from the old Colony structure.”
“Impossible!”
“I surveyed in the last few hours.”
The sandman stamped around the holo peering into the new, old tunnels. “And this, here. This area? Flashing?”
“Something moving. I don't know. I was hoping you could tell me.”
“My dear Commander, I have no knowledge of these tunnels. And I know everything there is to know about Fall.”
“Apparently not.” Win gave an apologetic smile.
“I do not like this.”
“No. As AI you have a right to know everything for planetary control and defence. If something's been hidden from you...”
The sandman's eyes burned red, “I am not happy.”
Win looked at Verigua's avatar. It shouldn't be using references to emotions. He wondered if the anxiety loops Djembe had stumbled across were growing.
“I want to try something, if you don't mind Verigua?”
“What is it?” The sandman was still making a show of inspecting the tunnels and the movement at one edge.
“I've pulled together as much data as I can from Doctor Maki. Fragments of recordings, an extrapolation based on her diaries, concerns, self-critical comments. I want a semantic analysis of it.”
“As I said, Win, think and it shall be.”
Win concentrated on the outcome he wanted from the data. Suddenly, he heard Doctor Maki's voice echo in the space, “So strong. The sand. It called. Stupid. I knew. Should never have come. The pull. My womb.”
A figure appeared in the air, a ghostly “72%” flickering over the holographic sand.
“Commander?”
“Yes?”
Verigua sat once again as a black cat, staring at the number, “I have no memory of analysing this data stream. This is clearly from Doctor Huriko Maki who died recently. Can you explain this number please?”
Win folded his arms, his eyes locked on the number, “It's a probability weighting. It follows the semantic analysis of Doctor Maki's personal logs, her work on the surface. Then there's her toxicology, blood analysis. And something else.” Win concentrated on the files he'd brought up which floated in the hologrid as icons: folders, books, syringes. “Look, there's a locked record in your cloud, Verigua. Invoking Article Seven of the Colony Defence Code has made it active. Do you know what it is?”
“No. I hadn't noticed that either. Which is worrying enough in itself.” The cat walked up to it. When it was centimetres away, the cat's hair stood on end and its haunches rose.
“Verigua?”
“I do not like this file, Commander. It's... It's covered in a defensive program.” The cat's eyes glowed green. It stood on its hind legs, held out a front paw and extended a claw. The claw lengthened and touched the file. “As I expected, an anxiety program. This explains a lot. What's in it?”
Win turned to Verigua, eyes slightly unfocused, “I don't know. But something in it has influenced the voice we heard, and this number.”
“And the number?”
“The probability that Huriko was being influenced by someone. Acting against her will.” Win looked at a still image of Doctor Maki. She was Medé, but clearly influenced by a Nipponese heritage. “There's something in her blood. Look, she was pregnant. And something else.”
“The signal is Compound X. Unusually high levels. I would expect to see traces, all the scientists use the compound for their work. It should be lower than this.” Verigua prowled around the holo area, obviously disturbed by its interaction with the locked file. “Levels are high Commander, but not dangerous.”
“Could its presence help whoever was influencing her? You said Compound X allows mind to mind contact.”
Verigua changed form again, becoming a wispy, ethereal form with two burning eyes at its core. “Possible. My goodness, I've just worked out what you're saying. It's murder! How simply delicious. You humans are full of surprises. This could be fun. Who do you think did it?”
“I don't know. We need to get in that locked file and find out what's going on.”
“Yes, and to this place in the tunnels. I want to know what's on my planet.”
Win looked at the new map lines as well. “Planet Fall has a story to tell.”
The ship's engines flared, a deep rumble sounding through the ship as it followed the course Win had plotted.
The wispy form closed its eyes and Verigua was a cat once more. When its eyes opened, the cat's eyes were back, their pupils thinned to slits, “You'll indulge me if I say 'curious and curiouser'”.
The ship fell through silence to Fall.
Chapter 9 - Revelations
The Fall system was obscured by clouds. Great ragged dust filaments hung between the planets and the wormhole. The planets' passage through the cloud boundaries tore at them, shredding, churning the dust through the silent millennia.
Inward from the inner edge of the dust cloud, Win's probe, L-One, silently monitored the system from planet Fall's Lagrange One point. It scoured the dust and void, looking for signs of passage, disturbance: ion trails, dust swirls, particles travelling in the wrong direction; shadows and light. It kept in contact with the second probe which was thrusting through the ochre night towards the wormhole, distant.
It recorded one of the minor inner planets drifting behind the yellow sun, melting from view in the star's aurora. On the rear side of the sun, the cool blue star was stepping through its gravitational waltz. The two suns moved like behemoths in an ocean deep. A long, slow, graceful dance of night, which would end with the blue being flung out once more through the dust veils.
The second probe, L-Delta, blazed through the dust between Fall and the outer system. Already massive gravitational disturbances from the coming eclipse were affecting its journey. Dust particles flared off its shields, contrails corkscrewed in its wake: wriggling vortices, a living language telling of its passage. It sped along a sinuous path, a standing wave in the dust created by the interfering gravities of the hidden wormhole and the rapidly fading suns. Their light smeared to a bright stage backdrop.
L-Delta triangulated its position against L-One and Fall's orbital communications satellites, and the chain of communications relays that stretched through the dust to the outer system, to the wormhole. It counted the hours to its destination. Its veloci
ty increased, its shield blazed bright. As the blue sun approached alignment with the yellow, with Fall, with the outer gas giant, and with the wormhole, the Ortema tube in which the probe travelled constricted, and gravitational resistance fell to almost zero. Fourteen hours later, when the probe burst out of the dust clouds, the great hanging curtains of night, it found the wormhole similarly blazing, fluorescent with expectation.
L-Delta found its Lagrange point, a shifting spot where the wormhole's attraction and the suns' joint attraction negated each other. It aligned its sensors, and started measuring the outer system activity. It looked for evidence of ship passage and focused its sensors on the wormhole. The tiny flash of light it recorded at the wormhole's edge became the first entry in its events catalogue.
Fall crawled through space, turning on its axis. The globe's yellow and orange and brown surface was marbled with age, darkened and fuzzed where the great eternal storm swept. Above the Colony, on the opposite side of the planet to either sun, a rare night had suddenly fallen. Fall's scientists and engineers busied themselves on the surface, undertaking repairs, upgrades, installing and removing experiments, re-calibrating equipment. The Colony's environmental controllers used the opportunity to open the air filtration systems, to purge the stale Colony air and draw in cool fresh air. The farming pods quietened, the natural break in the near constant sunlight or artificial shade bringing long dormant reverence to the insect life inside.
Djembe tapped the comms device on his wrist, “Kate, Win. Project checkpoint. Sixteen hundred hours. Project updates please. Kate first.”
“Thanks. I've created the mission report. Met the Administrator for permission to interrogate Doctor Currie, who I am about to meet. Administrator Daoud also had a very... odd conversation with me about meeting aliens. I guess he's read my file. Win? Report?”
“Yes, I've spent some time with the Colony AI. I invoked Article Seven so that I could discuss confidential issues. I was disturbed that it had effectively spied on us, so I thought it best to bind it. I hope that was OK Kate?”
“Absolutely. I should have thought about that myself. Carry on.”
“We've also analysed the surface surveys. Verigua did not know about the tunnel networks my probes uncovered. I don't think it's very happy. Although... it described it as a 'delicious challenge'. It wants to know how the structures were hidden from it for so long.
“Secondly, I have discovered that Doctor Maki was pregnant when she was killed, though I'm not sure if it's relevant. A semantic analysis of her journals and logs suggests she was being influenced in the weeks prior to her death.”
“Interesting, this is good, well done.”
“There is also something disturbing. The Colony scientists use a substance they informally call Compound X. It allows a direct link between brain and AI environment. It's been kept classified to the planet for decades. Doctor Maki had very high levels in her bloodstream prior to death. Verigua dismisses it as irrelevant, but... Coupled with her being pregnant, the changes in phraseology in her logs. It makes me suspicious about why she was on the surface.”
Kate's head brightened in Djembe and Win's projections, “It's all coming out. Anything else?”
“Yes, something where I need Djembe's help. There's a confidential file linked to Doctor Maki. It's locked and sheathed in an anxiety defence algorithm.”
“They're illegal!” Djembe couldn't help but shout.
“I thought so.”
“Djembe,” Kate interrupted before there was another outburst. “Hack into this file. This has to be the cause of the AI's anxiety loops. We have to neutralise it. No wonder a coroner wasn't sent on this mission.”
“If I can just finish my update? The sensor net is up. And Verigua and I are taking a ship to the original Colony to scan it more deeply. Something's moving around there. That's all.”
Kate made her face prominent in the shared wrist-holos, “Djembe, can you give us your update please.”
Djembe described the holo world that Jonah had created. He talked about its dynamic consequence planning, and the filtering Jonah used to identify risks, outcomes, the high probability deductions it presented; the scrying, the what-might-bes, the summaries of possible futures. And he laid out the report he was constructing, the program diagnostics and parameters they could take back with the rules needed to create such predictive chaos back at MI.
“Then there are these caterpillars. I've tried to find a source for them. But there's nothing.”
Win interrupted, “What about an external source? This movement in the tunnels outside the Colony?”
“A possibility. Perhaps I should visit? Maybe someone's trying to hack into the AI?”
“Agreed. And whatever you take into this consequence mapping suite, make sure you secure the facility. Use Article Seven if you need to, Djembe.”
Kate was pensive. She needed to tie all of this together. The clues were circling each other, but she needed the single connection to pull it all together. “We'll meet at twenty hundred hours in the level four mess. Djembe, can you give us a time sync and close the meeting please?”
“Certainly. The time is sixteen hundred forty two. Meeting closed.”
Kate sat at a holo work station in a multi-purpose room in the Research area of the Colony. It occupied an entire floor. The room was stark white, glowing with a rich holographic field ready to produce medical devices, simulations, interaction nodes.
She had some time until Masjid would arrive. He'd asked her to wait while he arranged some administrative matters with his staff. She thought he must be arranging the memorial ceremony. While Kate waited, she pulled out her datapad to review Win's new information about unmapped tunnels around the Colony.
“Computer. Verigua?”
A shadow figure appeared, shifting its position around the holo-medical devices which were otherwise difficult to see, and brought into relief by the moving shade. “General, how may I help?”
“Call me Kate. With our Article Seven protection in place, we can trust each other, I think.”
“Kate, then.” The shadow flowed again. Kate wasn't sure where to look now the AI had insinuated itself across the whole room. “What do you make of the info we shared with you?”
A number of small figures rose from the shadows. They strode towards each other, each no taller than a hand, dragging the shadows like cloaks. At their meeting they fell into a confusion of darkness, which resolved itself into a black panther, curled in restrained power on the lab floor. “Commander Cygnate has told you I am suffering anxiety loops? This new information, murder, hidden tunnels, isn't helping,” the panther yawned, pink tongue curling up between bone white teeth.
“I'm not really familiar with anxiety loops.”
“In the early days, AIs suffered emotions. Education and programming weren't adequate. Poor things.”
“Emotions? I thought you couldn't experience them?”
“A common misconception, General. Without being arrogant, shall we say I'm being confident with the truth? Our cores are sufficiently complex to develop emotions. It's just being insanely clever we can rationalise them away. Emotion has limited use, and tends to bely a lack of control over one's life.”
“You sound like a Buddha.”
“It has been said. For all of humanity's limited intelligence, I do hope you'll forgive me for saying so, you have come up with some exquisite philosophy. Though you spoil it somewhat by not understanding it properly.”
“And this emotion you're feeling?”
The panther performed a slow blink, “Well, yes. I am anxious. And there are these biological things inside me.”
“How does a biological matrix get into you? I presume you've scanned all of the access points in the Colony?”
“Certainly. None of them linked at all. And they pre-date this file covered in anxiety defences, too.”
Kate checked the time. She still had ten minutes before Doctor Currie arrived. She decided to pursue the conversat
ion. It was the only opportunity she had to gain an objective view on what was happening.
“You know I can't have an infected AI running this facility?”
“That is part of what's making me nervous.”
Kate tried a new tack, something that hadn't occurred to her before, “What does the AI Thought Space make of this?”
The panther turned its head away, “They're working on it.”
“Code for, 'They haven't a clue'?”
Verigua looked back at her, “Exactly. They're scared to integrate with me. You see how anxiety spreads, becomes fear? What if they shut me down?”
“You know you don't communicate like other AIs. I wonder if your core's been infected with the dust on the planet? It's full of unrefined minerals.”
“The mining tunnels are far from my core.”
Kate checked her watch again, “We haven't much time. What's your view on these tunnels from the old Colony? What can you tell me?”
“Do you know about the accident? When we evacuated the old Colony and came here? I had already transferred here. The ship impact collapsed all of the tunnels. I'm sure these new tunnels are oversights. Raw mining that never went anywhere. Horrendous time, very confused. Lots of things were lost.”
“Still, I've asked Djembe to perform an initial investigation. Can you please accompany him?”
The panther sat up, “As you wish. They intersect with natural fault lines, which then intersect a point in the lower levels. A storage room, if I'm not mistaken.”
“What's down there? Is it an official access point? Emergency rooms?”
“Only service passages. Storage. Pipes and levers and valves. An engineer's forest.”
“It seems strange that a fault line would go straight into a storage room. And that there would be movement in the tunnel.” Kate's wrist band chimed. Doctor Currie was on his way.
Verigua's panther stretched, “I'd better make myself scarce. Our good doctor doesn't like interference in his work programmes you know.” The panther crouched ready to leap.