Yngve, AR - The Argus Project

by The Argus Project (lit)

  6: Bringing Up Argus

  "Colonel, our prime task is to help you reach your full potential," said Boulder Pi from the other side of the glass wall.

  The Kansler nodded agreement.

  Gus, or "Argus", understood the meaning of the glass partition: he might easily kill them by mistake, before he re-learned his basic motor skills.

  "Look at your workbench," the Kansler told the waiting cyborg. A panel slid open on top of the workbench; a slender glass, half full of water, was pushed up onto it. "You must begin each new shift with this test."

  Argus's forehead showed furrows of puzzlement.

  "Simply lift the glass and drink the water. Once you've accomplished that, we can let you out of this apartment, and allow you to move among the personnel."

  Doesn't sound too hard, thought the black-clad cyborg, and felt his thirst increase. He carefully jerked his arm forward, more successfully this time, encircled the glass with his thick black fingers, grasped as gently as he could...

  The glass instantly shattered in his crushing grip.

  "Um, there is a way to speed up the pace of the tests," Boulder Pi explained, his face showing a mixture of pity and fear. He was sitting on a table, his stubby legs dangling without reaching the floor.

  Argus reflexively moved to wipe sweat off his brow, as Gus Thorsen had done in a thousand sparring matches - but instead he slapped himself hard, and felt that the skin of his face was dry, like plastic. His features hardened, so quickly it seemed like a two-frame animation to his small audience, and he gave them a furious glare.

  "Give me another glass!"

  It smashed.

  "Another glass."

  That one smashed too.

  "Again."

  Smash.

  "Again!"

  The sixth glass rested perilously in his hand for several seconds, until it began to slip from his loose hold, and he closed his fingers - the glass cracked into three pieces.

  "You're making progress," the Kansler grinned with measured enthusiasm, "and much faster than I expected. What were you saying before, Boulder?"

  Boulder Pi explained that once Argus had mastered basic self-control, he could adjust the speed of his own reflexes and movements, so as to accomplish certain training tasks in a shorter time.

  "How?" asked Argus.

  "It's all in your mind," Boulder replied, beaming with pride over his creation. "To begin with, you can access a personal options menu by simply touching your thumbs with your little fingers. The same fingertips are used to move through the menu system and select control choices. As your skills grow, you will learn how to trigger those controls using only mental commands."

  "Hey, it works!" Argus exclaimed. "I can see this computer menu, on top of what I see around me!"

  He could see small red and green control panels with dials and numbers, glowing at the edges of his vision.

  "Try the wavelength spectrum settings," Boulder suggested. Argus fiddled with the "WAV" setting - it was much easier than moving his body - and found that he could see in infrared and ultraviolet. He let out a laugh.

  "This is great! I see your hearts beating... and your brains at work! Boy, those things are hot!"

  Argus stopped laughing, when he saw how many implants were in Boulder Pi's body to support his skeleton and leg muscles. He understood suddenly, that the dwarfish scientist was born to live on one of Jupiter's moons, and just barely managed to survive here on the Earth's single moon - and he felt sorry for Boulder Pi. If this was the enemy, it didn't seem very dangerous...

  "Is the system working?" Boulder Pi asked, seeing a sad expression flash across Argus's very human face.

  "No... everything works fine. Kansler, why do I need all this extra equipment? Don't the pilots in the war have it in their ships already?"

  The Kansler sat down, astonished by how quickly Argus was adapting to the new situation - as if his new body was transforming his mind.

  "I'll explain, as soon as we come to your military training. In order to fly in space combat, you not only need to understand the nature of gravity, orbital mathematics and how to navigate space. You must in fact learn how to become one with your spacecraft. For unlike our current breed of pilots, you can't fly by remote control or use standard instruments. The nature of this conflict pushes the physical and mental demands on our fighting men above the human - I mean the normal limit."

  Argus frowned, both frightened and curious about the challenge. "I am eager to learn more, sir."

  Boulder gave the Kansler a questioning glance; he and his boss retreated to another room where Argus could not overhear them, and discussed what to do next.

  "Something's wrong, Kansler. Colonel Clarke isn't acting like himself at all."

  "You never met him in the flesh. Trust me, he can be very different in private."

  "Not this different. What happened to all his previous mannerisms, his training, his circle of friends? Why hasn't he asked to see any other officers from the Martian Security Forces?"

  "Clarke has no friends here, or on the Moon. He's unmarried and strictly Pro-Earth. And this is a top-secret installation - he knows damn well he can't go around chatting with outsiders during training."

  "Right. Right." Boulder Pi half-heartedly gave in, still unable to quench his doubts. "Okay. We can put him in the training center anytime you see fit. Your hologram presence is required, plus a few simulated trainers to take your night shifts. Since Argus has little or no need for sleep, he can work double shifts."

  "How hard can I push him? His predecessor was agile, but didn't impress the Fleet in the strength and stamina department."

  "But this is the combat model, Kansler. Argus is built much, much sturdier than Venix. All test readings show enormous potential. I'm really giving this project all I've got, Kansler."

  "We begin immediately, then. I have promised Earth quick results, and the Statistics Department has estimated me one month before the public loses its patience and starts to object to the war taxes."

  Just before the two men parted ways, the Kansler set his most threatening glare on Boulder's bearded, worried face, and made an open threat.

  "Should I ever hear that you express doubts about Colonel Clarke's mental state and fitness, your security clearance will be removed. Think of what happens to Jovians who are brought to Earth for questioning by Intelligence."

  Boulder looked to the floor, paralyzed with fear. Several times, he had seen classified intelligence footage of war prisoners shuttled down to Earth from his home system. They had always died horribly. First, the higher gravity caused intense muscle and back pains. Second, a Jovian's skeleton would snap as soon as his unique low-gravity diet was interrupted, and his body failed to keep the bones strong enough. Third, the higher atmospheric pressure squeezed the lungs, eyes, and brain in the most painful way. Fourth, airborne pollen and chemicals in the Terran atmosphere caused devastating allergic reactions to a body born in almost sterile, unpolluted air.

  And in the terminal stage, Earthbound germs that were virtually nonexistent on the cold Jupiter colonies caused simultaneous outbreaks of diarrhea, pneumonia and gangrene. Ultraviolet rays from the stronger Terran sunlight could turn a Jovian colonist's skin into a bleeding mass of tumors in a matter of days.

  Boulder Pi took a stimulant to drive this personal nightmare from his overstressed mind. He returned to his work, his lab and the machines he loved, shutting himself off from the world of Terrans where he did not belong. Sometimes he managed to smuggle information off to the Outer Planets. There was no reward involved; the people of the Outer Planets had no soft spots for traitors.

  ***

  Slow... the world seemed so slow to Argus. He could use his internal system settings and speak many times faster, but to what end? No one else matched him in speed. One advantage, though - he had plenty more time than before to consider what to say, before speaking. He was in the training center, an annex of the lab complex where he had been created, where he alone
could move about and train his abilities. Getting there had been a matter of sitting still and being transported. Argus was eager to use some elbow space.

  "This centrifuge," the hologram of the Kansler explained, "also doubles as a racetrack. When you gain momentum, you can run around it on the walls. This exercise cannot make your artificial muscles grow - they are as powerful as they'll ever get. But your nervous system will fine-tune its control over them, and this makes the advanced exercises easier to complete."

  Argus studied the cylinder-shaped chamber with his senses, and measured it to be twenty meters wide, five meters high. He took a tentative few running steps - and took off into the air, slowly falling down with his feet pumping.

  "Try to get a foothold on the walls, then run with your head pointing toward the center of the room," the Kansler's voice boomed. "Adjust the amount of grip in your feet with the internal menu system."

  "I can't set the foot grip above standard setting," Argus objected. "The pressure on my foot-soles goes up, and they start to itch."

  "Set foot-sole sensitivity down to Running Mode." Argus obeyed, and made an angled run against the wall. He flew up, twisted his legs, and touched the wall with both feet - but bounced off in the opposite direction."

  "Set a stronger foot grip!" barked the hologram. "Don't be such a baby!"

  Argus grunted a curse, set his foot grip to double strength, and tried again. This time, his feet stuck to the wall just enough and he broke into an uninterrupted run.

  "Keep moving, don't stop! Just go faster!"

  The speedometer on Argus's eye display showed 20 KMPH in the first few seconds. It was easy to accelerate; in another second, he had increased his running speed to 40 - the next second, 55... and he didn't break a sweat. He breathed harder, not knowing if he should experience chest pains. It was like borrowing the body of a super-athlete.

  "Question," he gasped to his instructor.

  "Yes?"

  "If I have no lungs... why do they hurt when I breathe... faster?"

  "It's all in your mind, Argus! The nervous system for your internal organs is partly severed, but much of the threads and the brain that controlled them still exist in synthetic form. Breathing reflexes cause your chest to move, and the nerves react to the strain and friction. You must slow down your breathing, even as you run faster!"

  "That's... impossible!"

  "You're wrong! I'm the only man you can trust now! Not those eggheads in their labs, not your past life. I know what you can or can't do! Now slow down your breathing!"

  It shouldn't work, Gus kept thinking, even as it happened. It defied all previous experience. He decreased his rate of breath to that of a slow walk. The black-clad feet beneath him were like a remote-controlled machine that carried him ever faster - 75, 90, 100, 120 KMPH...

  "Faster!"

  The runner ceased thinking of what was possible, increased his speed to the 200 KMPH mark - and past it. To the Kansler and the others who observed it through the cameras, Argus's legs were just a dark blur, thumping so rapidly against the walls that the centrifuge vibrated.

  The sight was surreal, Argus spinning round and round, sideways, like some runaway toy figure.

  "Listen to that," the Kansler's deputy said. "Sounds like rolling thunder."

  "Take a note of that," the Kansler said. "We could use it in his official theme song."

  The middle-aged, potato-nosed commander began to hum an improvised tune to himself, thinking of power - power without end or limit - the one thing he wanted, the one hunger that always raged within him, always craving more. Let the effete masses of Earth have their robot servants and replacement organs, their petty fads and drugs. I, Kansler, shall have the universe at my feet for a billion years, maybe more. Star systems shall be rearranged in the shape of my face. I shall spawn entire new species. I shall become the god of the Local Galactic Cluster, I am to become mankind in its ultimate form -

  "Kansler?" the deputy interrupted his fantasies.

  "What now?"

  "It's time for your scheduled meeting with the Joint Chiefs of the Outer Defense Ring. The Fleet's recent battle is on the agenda -"

  "On my way," the supreme commander of the Outer Defense Ring said shortly, and stepped away from the hologram cameras. On his way out, he switched on his hologram persona, an avatar program that would oversee Argus's training in his absence.

  Argus hardly noticed that the hologram of the Kansler was acting without human interference. He finished his run by slowing down gradually to human running speed, and let himself drift down to the floor. He landed clumsily on hands and feet, but stood up proudly with his balance regained.

  "Was it okay?" he asked the waiting hologram.

  Perhaps a part of Argus had retreated into a fantasy of his own, where he was back in the gym on Earth and the Kansler was his trainer... but even Argus himself wouldn't have been able to tell for certain. The Kansler had offered his support when his recruit was at his most vulnerable, and Argus had grasped at the Kansler's authority with quiet desperation.

  In fact, the Kansler did not try very hard to earn the cyborg's loyalty. The hologram, controlled by a low-grade intelligent supercomputer in the lab complex, nodded and gave Argus a thumbs-up sign.

  "You are ready for the next event," the hologram said in a lifelike simulation of the Kansler's drawling accent. "Or do you want a rest?" Any rest, now, would force Argus to consider his alarming predicament. He'd rather not think at all.

  "Let's get on with it," Argus said, trying to make a posture of gusto and gung-ho. At least he managed to stand straight.

  "Good. Let me show you the speed-learning unit, a device specially adapted for your abilities..."

  7: The View From Ganymede

  Millions of miles from the Moon, the Outer Planets were at war with Earth. At stake was economic and administrative independence for Jupiter's ten colonized satellites - or so the colonists preferred to put it.

  But as in many previous wars throughout history, the really important stake was not mentioned in the propaganda of either side - namely, property. In this case, the property fought over was the most valuable planet in the Solar System apart from Earth.

  From their vast floating airship fleets in Jupiter's upper cloud layers, Jovian colonists mined mankind's most important energy source: the hydrogen isotope deuterium. The gas was separated, gathered into balloons that soared up into Jupiter's stratosphere, where passing spacecraft towed them into orbit with grappling hooks on mile-long cables.

  The process involved thousands of Jovian workers; several of them died each year from atmospheric storms, lightning bolts, radiation-induced sickness and other accidents. Still - in the face of danger, extreme cold and hard labor - these small, sturdy, loosely organized thousands persisted, producing millions of tons of deuterium shipments each Earth year, feeding the Solar System with cheap, powerful nuclear fuel.

  And in the longer perspective, Jupiter was of even greater importance. The time was nearing when mankind could begin its next large migration - to other star systems. And any craft leaving the Solar System was forced to make an extra orbit around Jupiter, so that its enormous gravitational pull could "slingshot" the spacecraft out of the Sun's field of influence. That, plus the fuel resource in its atmosphere, made Jupiter nothing less than mankind's doorstep to the stars.

  Ganymede, the largest, most densely populated satellite dominated the ring of Jovian colonies. Spanning a diameter exceeding three thousand miles, its subterranean glaciers, caves and oceans provided 10,000 men and women with the raw materials for synthetic air, food and clothing.

  The icy, airless surface is an extremely cold wasteland, constantly bombarded by charged particles caught in Jupiter's magnetic field. Now, in the fifth or fourth year of the Jupiter Wars - depending on how "war" is defined - much more than cosmic radiation is pounding at the ridges and craters of Ganymede...

  ***

  "BREACH!!"

  BEEEEP

  BEEEE
P

  BEEEEP

  BEEEEP

  One gets used to hearing it, thought Caver Pi, putting on his oxygen mask and eye-goggles with swift, ingrained habit. He ran to the nearest emergency tunnel door, closely followed by his wife who carried their youngest baby. She put on a protective mask first on her 1-year-old baby, then on herself. The draft grew to a roar of wind; electric fans whined in protest as they pumped in air to compensate for the fresh leak.

  Caver Pi, being no taller than the average midget-size adult colonist, was a pale, blocky man. His serious face was covered with the traditional thick dark-brown beard. The long mustaches were set with knots and beads in the clan colors, the customary way of distinguishing one another in this crowded underground society.

  His wife sported a white shawl over her blond head, and her large eyes were accentuated by white eyeliner. The use of white, inherited from the spacesuits of previous generations of colonists, signified an attachment to the past. Terrans often misinterpreted the red dot on a Jovian's forehead as the mark of a Hindu - while in fact the mark was painted on every child born in the Jupiter sector, symbolizing the Red Spot on the face of Jupiter. Caver Pi was second-generation Ganymedean, his wife first-generation.

  The couple was not alone in running; all around them, people were in a hurry, rushing on short legs, or used spindly, wheeled vehicles to travel as fast as the environment allowed. Ganymedeans usually moved in couples or families, so as not to lose each other in the tunnel mazes; as a rule, parents never, ever left their children out of sight until their twelfth birthday.

  300 kilometers to their north, cover fire from the retreating Terran Fleet had scored a lucky hit, and penetrated the outer crust of Ganymede. One driller missile had detonated, and several Jovians were buried in cave-ins. The artificial atmosphere was leaking out faster than it could be replenished, until the breach could be repaired. But those problems were minor compared to the worst damage done: Ganymede's major power station was in danger of overheating.

  Caver Pi received the news in his helmet communicator. Serving this year's duty as head of the planetary defense council, Caver Pi was told everything of importance to the survival of the colonists. It was not a job he would have volunteered for, but the council's computers had picked him for his skills.