Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  “—and they have to choose, one thing or another.” She made an aha sound as she apparently found what she apparently had been looking for and began to shuffle papers back into order.

  “What does that mean for a computer?” Mattie asked.

  “It means a computer can hold more information in less space. It means a computer like that would be more powerful than any computer we have now.” She held out her hand for the papers Mattie held, and when he passed them to her, she slipped a computer data chip between his fingers.

  He effortlessly slid it into his palm, closing his hand, hiding the transfer from the cameras. That was almost everything: the maps of System troop movements on that part of Miranda and the access codes to the nearest base, all up his sleeve. He just needed the key card Verge had promised to steal. Constance would be pleased.

  Across the table from him, closing up her briefcase, her blonde hair a gleaming fall over her shoulder, Verge smiled.

  “That’s the future,” she told him. “And it’s coming. When it gets here, it’ll destroy the infrastructure we have now…render it all obsolete. A whole new world.”

  FORWARD

  This time when Mattie and Ivan arrived at Jupiter, the Jovian system was alight with war. Ivan wasn’t surprised. Constance had that effect on people.

  Mattie piloted the Copenhagen, not Ivan; he’d been obsessive about that lately, as if he thought Ivan might collapse at the wheel or get them lost between the stars. It didn’t matter to Ivan who drove as long as they arrived.

  The fighting was centered on Europa, and a swelling hope filled Ivan’s chest. They were near. She was here.

  Mattie skirted the area as long as he could, drawing carefully closer and closer until Ivan nearly shouted at him to just get in there. But he refrained, instead leaning over Mattie’s shoulder to stare at the unfolding scene.

  There were two fleets in battle as far as Ivan could tell. Every now and then a ship in one of the fleets would be blown out of the sky and fall inward toward Europa’s gravity. For the moment they crashed on uninhabited ice, but sooner or later Europa’s slow orbital revolution and the movement of the battle would bring them over the glass-encased inhabited parts of the moon. Then, when the ships crashed down, they would shatter that glass and set free the trapped atmosphere. All the people in that region of the greenhouse enclosure would die unless they could get through an air lock in time.

  Explosions flashed like new stars against the backdrop of black space. Ivan studied the two fleets, trying to distinguish between them, but he couldn’t. They both had been rebel fleets once, of that he was certain. But he did not know Constance’s ships well enough to tell which side was hers.

  “She must be in one of those ships,” Ivan said as the Copenhagen inched nearer, slower and slower, all their sensors trained on the battle below. Where there was a battle, there was Constance Harper.

  Mattie said nothing. Ivan felt the Copenhagen’s slow deceleration in his gut.

  “As soon as we figure out which,” said Ivan, “we can—”

  “We’re not going down there,” Mattie said.

  He was not looking at Ivan—would not, perhaps. Of all the times for his stubborn side to surface. Ivan said, “We’ve talked about this.”

  “No, you’ve made decisions, and then you’ve talked at me until I shut up and let you do what you wanted.”

  “Constance is down there right now,” Ivan said. His words came out more sharply than he’d intended. “This may be our only chance to save her. I know you’re mad at her. I know that you’re used to her being able to take care of herself, and you—she’s your big sister. I understand. But now”— Ivan pointed to the viewscreen, at that ice-silver planet—“now she needs our help.”

  Mattie said, “She got herself into this mess.”

  “We have a responsibility to her.” That was the bare truth of it. Ivan had said it to Mattie a hundred times in a hundred different ways, but in the end this was all it came down to. “We can’t run away from that.”

  “Can’t we? We have a ship.” Mattie flung one hand out at the rest of the Copenhagen. “We have our freedom. We can fly away from this, find a place to wait, and meet up with Constance when it’s safe if you still want to. It’s that easy.”

  “Easy?” Ivan said, and knew too much of his anger had shown by the way Mattie recoiled, but he couldn’t quite control the tension in his own voice; it leaked out in vowels and between consonants like blood soaking through a bandage. “I was the one who gave Constance this plan. Everything out there is something that I started, and you want me to fly away?”

  “You didn’t make her—”

  “You were there, too,” Ivan said. “How do you not feel this weight on your back?”

  “Because I didn’t do this, and neither did you,” Mattie snapped.

  “Didn’t you create Ananke?”

  “That has nothing to do with—”

  “Doesn’t it? We ran away from her, too.”

  “Ivan, I’m not going to sit here and watch you try to kill yourself.”

  Something dug into Ivan’s chest, piercing, similar somehow to the fear he’d felt whenever Ida Stays had come too close to uncovering some secret he’d been desperate to keep.

  He responded the only way he knew how: turning the blade back. “You were the one who detonated the bombs on Earth.”

  Mattie went very still.

  “Did you think I didn’t know? Constance couldn’t have done it; she doesn’t know how. Without me there, it had to be you. Can you still say that you have no part in this, that none of this is your respons—”

  “You’re trying to punish me for that?”

  “Of course not,” Ivan said, and took the one step up the piloting platform, bringing his head closer to Mattie’s level, bringing them closer together. “But you need to see it. You’re a runner, Mattie, but you can’t run from this. We’ve been with Constance every step of the way—and everything that’s happened because we helped her, that’s on us, too.”

  Mattie had watched Ivan approach the same way a cornered stag might watch the approach of a wolf. Ivan took another step closer, and when Mattie still didn’t move, he laid his hand on Mattie’s chest, over where his heart beat a furious measure faster than normal.

  “She’s your sister,” Ivan said, gentling his voice further as if there was no one who mattered but him and Mattie. “I know that you love her. You—”

  So suddenly that Ivan hardly saw it, too quickly for him to anticipate, Mattie shoved him back. Ivan stumbled, his knees hitting the chair, and caught himself on the wall between the blinking instruments as Mattie strode away into the Copenhagen’s narrow cabin, gaining as much distance from Ivan as he could.

  “Don’t treat me like a mark!” Mattie said from the safety of the middle of the room, and Ivan’s hand closed into a fist automatically to keep his fingers from an unconscious arrhythmic beat.

  He said, “I wasn’t—”

  “You were doing what you do to all the others; you were—” Mattie struggled to find the words or struggled to express the words he meant, and Ivan felt something strange and sick in his chest—as if he had lost something he had never had but always could have taken—a burn and sting like rejection and shame.

  “So you want to help Constance?” Mattie said suddenly, changing subject but still with that same terrible anger, the forest fire coming down on them both at last, the same sickening horror of watching Constance turn from Ivan on Mars, scarf fluttering out from between her fingers. “Just out of the goodness of your heart? And if you happened to die during the process, then—”

  “I’m not—”

  “This was never about Constance,” Mattie said, and somehow anger on him was more terrifying than it had ever been on Constance Harper. “This is about you. Constance was just another way to get yourself killed, wasn’t she? From minute one. You never really loved her.”

  “Of course I did,” Ivan said.

  Some
how, that only seemed to make Mattie angrier. An alarm was going off in the front of the ship—proximity—but Mattie did not react to it, and it meant so very little compared with the terrible expression on Matthew Gale’s face. “Maybe the two of you did deserve each other,” Mattie said. “I was wrong about her; I’ve been wrong about you, too. I watch you lie to people every day, and I thought you would be different for us? You never cared for Constance.”

  “I made mistakes—”

  “You say that now that you can’t do anything else about it!” Mattie shouted back. “Tell me how this isn’t one last ploy to control her and get yourself killed. And what about me?”

  “No,” Ivan said, no longer certain what precisely he was denying while the light from the battle at his back flashed white over Mattie’s face and that alarm increased in volume.

  “You’re using me,” Mattie said as if he were pulling bloodied pieces of his heart out of his mouth, “and you’ve always been using me.”

  He fell silent, looking, perhaps, for a response from Ivan, but Ivan could find words no more than he could have spread wings and flown. He was not like Mattie. He could not pull his own heart out of his mouth.

  “You don’t give a damn about me, and you never did,” Mattie said. “If it had been me on the Ananke, you would have left me there to die.”

  And at the raw sound of Mattie’s voice, something opened in Ivan’s throat.

  “How could you even think that?” he said in a voice that should not have been loud enough to cross the space between them, not with the cacophony of sound from the front of the ship. But somehow it did, and somehow Mattie heard it. Ivan knew he did from the way he went still, as if for the first time Mattie cared that the sharp edges of his own words might cut himself on their way to carving Ivan.

  For a time that stretched out into infinity they stood there and looked at each other, caught on a raw and wounded edge.

  In a moment, Ivan knew, he would say something or Mattie would reach out. What he would say or how Mattie would reach was beyond his prescience, but he knew—

  The radio came on like a shot, static spilling out like sparks, bullets raining down on them. Ivan flinched as if they were bullets indeed, the raw sound of the static scraping his nerves like steel wool. Across from him, Mattie stared numbly at the front of the Copenhagen, where the computer had come to life all on its own.

  And then out of that spilling static, rising like a phoenix great and terrible all at once, came a disembodied voice.

  The voice said, simply, a name:

  “MATTHEW GALE.”

  It was not a greeting. It was a command.

  It was the voice of Althea Bastet.

  For an instant Ivan did not move. For an instant, he knew that he and Mattie, tiny things that they were, were seen by something larger and more terrible than both of them.

  The Copenhagen shook and reeled as something hit it alongside. When Ivan pushed himself up from the floor, the transmission had ended. He looked around for Mattie and found him rising as well. Their eyes met for a brief and piercing instant, and then Ivan moved for the piloting platform. Mattie beat him to it, climbing into the chair and bending over the viewscreen to stare out at the chaos before them.

  The space battle around Europa had moved. It had drawn away from the planet; one of the fleets was retreating, the other in pursuit, and in its movement it had drawn near enough to the Copenhagen for the ships to mistake the Copenhagen for a combatant. The ship that had fired on them was reeling up close, gun ports alight, watching for the Copenhagen’s response and ready to fire before the Copenhagen could hit it back.

  While Ivan watched those gun ports glow, filled with a strange dreamy curiosity and the insistent press of some unseen weight on his back, Mattie’s hands fumbled over the controls. He got a grip on them and jerked the ship to the side, but the other craft gave chase.

  The jolt of the craft shook Ivan from his daze. He braced himself on the wall and looked for something useful to do. Perhaps he could put his lying tongue to good use.

  But where there should have been light dials and a readable screen there was nothing but blackness. Ivan knew without touching the controls that that part of the computer was dead.

  Mattie had been thinking along the same lines. “Get on the line with them; tell them we’re friendly.”

  “The radio’s out,” Ivan said. He did not think it had been the result of the ghostly summons. Instead, the other ship’s first blow had knocked out their communications.

  Mattie was darting the Copenhagen around with an impressive display of speedy flying, but Ivan could tell he had no chance of escape, not here and now. There was no space to run. The area around Jupiter was too crowded with debris to reach relativistic speed safely. If they hit even a pebble at a fast enough velocity, it would pierce the ship’s shell and kill them both.

  Yet Mattie was still trying to run from Europa. When another blow rocked the Copenhagen, Mattie wheeled the ship around to face their pursuit while still rocketing away.

  Ivan realized too late what he was trying to do. “No!” he said, but Mattie had already fired. The weapons struck the other ship’s armored side uselessly and gained them nothing in their attempted flight. The attack on them redoubled now that they had become a threat. Mattie zigged away, trying to avoid the shots fired after them.

  By accident or artifice they kept getting turned around from open space despite Mattie’s best efforts. Ivan watched the scratched silvery surface of Europa get closer and closer. Mattie made another useless bid for open space and was repulsed once more, the Copenhagen shaking with another solid blow. There were six ships on them now.

  Mattie swore under his breath and Ivan watched him try to change directions, but there was something wrong. The ship rattled and then flopped, failing to turn. The gravity under Ivan’s feet shifted, sending him stumbling. A blinking alarm indicated that the engines on the port side were dead.

  Europa was growing near, the glassy ice surface of it flashing distant sunlight up at them. Under Ivan’s arms, Mattie struggled with the controls, trying to turn away from the planet. Panic was written plainly over his face.

  “We have to land,” Ivan said. He did not mean it as an urging, only as a statement of fact. Mattie did not answer.

  Another failed bid for open space, another blow against the side of the ship. Even if they escaped Europa’s gravitational pull at this point, they would be dead out in the open, unable to fly or maneuver. When the ship swung around once more, Ivan leaned in. He gripped Mattie’s shoulder with all the strength in his fingers and felt it warm and shaking under his hand.

  “Land this ship,” Ivan said for Mattie’s ears alone, “or we’re going to crash.”

  “God damn it,” Mattie said, and then he was turning the ship and controlling their headlong fall. The greenhouse glass of Europa was right below them. The Copenhagen spun wildly in spite of Mattie’s death grip on the controls.

  He was trying to control their fall, Ivan realized. They were going to crash; Mattie was trying to land them somewhere close to an air lock so that when they shattered the greenhouse glass and released the trapped atmosphere, they would have a chance of survival.

  The metal edge of the Copenhagen struck the enclosure with a force that did not seem to match the seeming fragility of the glass, shattering through it. In less than a second, Ivan knew, they would hit the glassy surface of the ice; he did not even have time to brace himself before the impact, and Ivan crashed, with the Copenhagen, into black.

  BACKWARD

  The locks on Verge’s briefcase shut with a surprisingly solid sound, echoing in the empty classroom.

  “We’re the ones who will make the future,” she said with a smile that spoke of their shared secrets, of Constance Harper blazing with righteous anger and planning the destruction of every shadow of the System. “That means we’re responsible for what it’ll look like.”

  She paused, rubbing her fingers absentmindedly ov
er the space between her shoulder and breast. “Could you pass me my jacket?”

  Mattie went to the chair on the front row and grabbed Verge’s jacket, which was dark blue and heavy. In the right front breast pocket, just as she’d signaled him, there was a key card. It joined the codes and the troop movements up his sleeve.

  He passed her the jacket over the table. “Thanks,” she said, and started to shrug it on.

  “No problem,” Mattie said. All the information had been passed along, ready for him to transfer to Constance. They just had to wind up the scene.

  “Do you know what the difference between a human and a computer is?” Verge asked.

  “Sex,” Mattie said immediately.

  She laughed. “You haven’t seen the machines I’ve seen, Matthew Gale. The difference between a computer and a machine is arbitrariness. A normal computer can’t really produce true randomness. It can only approximate it, using the date, the time…Give me a number between one and ten.”

  “Seven,” Mattie said.

  “A computer can’t do that.”

  “I picked seven because it’s my foster sister’s birth date,” Mattie said. “My number wasn’t random, either.”

  “But it was arbitrary,” Verge said. “A normal computer can’t do that. A quantum computer could.”

  “So, what? It’s a person?”

  She smiled. “Imagine a computer that could be arbitrary. Imagine a computer that could think. A real AI, not one of the System’s toys.”

  Years later he would realize how young she had been, though at the time he had been too young himself to recognize it. Not long after she passed off those troop movements to Constance through him, the System came into her classroom while she taught and took her away. He was not there when she was taken or he, too, might have vanished without a trace before he ever met the computer that would become Ananke.

  “I think,” Mattie said then, before the weight of all that knowledge, “that it would still just be a machine.”

  The weak nuclear force wasn’t weak at all. It was weak only in that it ended sooner than the rest. But the weak force was the force that caused atoms to decay, that caused fission to occur, that brought about the explosive force of a nuclear bomb. The weak force was a revolutionary force, and so Ananke found it intriguing.