Yngve, AR - The Argus Project

by The Argus Project (lit)

  Distaste rising within her, Venix looked at the shuttle's various weapon controls on the instrument-panel. Electric stun-bullets, glue nets, pacifying gas, cell-bubbles, psychotropic needle-bullets, infrasound intestine-busters, paralyzing lasers, blinding lasers... all designed to clobber flesh-and-blood humans, but useless against her cyborg form.

  All the MSF could use on her, for now, was lethal force. Her instincts were sound, after all; for her it was kill or be killed.

  And the Martians, how willing were they help her? Venix worked the panel to gain access to MarsNet, and scanned the public channels.

  Still no news about her escape, except: "Skysurfer Kolya Keaton Still Not Found" . She wondered if "they", the ones who had put out the reward for her escape, were monitoring her.

  Maybe they didn't really care whether she lived or died, as long as she caused trouble for "Mother Earth" in the war. Since her agenda could not be theirs - how could it? - she'd make it their concern.

  Venix tried to send a call for help to the public channels, but something had happened to the shuttle's computers; anything she tried to send out was scrambled into nonsense.

  And she had none of the communication implants in her body that billions of flesh-and-blood people used to e-mote and e-talk to each other on Earth and Venus. Twenty billion people could talk to each other right across the Solar System - in their sleep if they so desired - but she had been rendered mute.

  The logic of war took hold, caused her brain to ache. She must not only strike down or kill the Kansler's minions, but brazenly so - with the greatest amount of visibility - and stir the Martians' support and protection. They had demanded independence for decades; it could be turned to her advantage.

  And if she lived through it, would she be the same person that Gus had first loved? The next time they fused minds, he would see her past wrongdoings - and she would see his. They would both be killers. Her only hope was that she loved him enough, was wise enough to understand. Venix suppressed any further thought on the matter.

  61:00.050

  Less than an hour passed. The Martian capital came within her view: A sprawling city of low, round buildings growing inside the huge Perkele Valley that connected to the even vaster Vallis Marineris , shielded against the worst sandstorms.

  A storm column was dimly visible to the ship's left, ten kilometers away. A hundred meters below her lay a deep open mining-pit, from which dust and flames were coughed up by smokestacks, drilling-towers and mining machines that dwarfed the tiny human figures among them.

  It was time to jump ship. The MSF troopers had jetpacks, but flying out in the open she would be an easy target. She had to reach the ground under cover.

  61:45.903

  Venix began to sob again, and raised a heavy machine tool in both hands. Three blows were enough to wreck the shuttle's autopilot. Another series of blows caused enough damage to set off the emergency-landing sequence.

  The rotor blades folded out and brought the wobbling, careening craft down among the flame-spouting smokestacks of Veinemoynen - the second largest combined quarry, water-drilling field, and strip-mine on Mars.

  All vehicles and machines on the ground polluted the air terribly with their chloro-carbon emissions, and on purpose: they produced more of the precious greenhouse-gases and slowly transformed the thin atmosphere.

  The digital counter in the corner of her vision kept going, and Venix prepared herself. Some of the stored firearms and weapons remained unaffected by the remote override, and she picked up as many as she could carry.

  She stuck her fingernails into a pair of power sockets and tried to soak up extra juice for her batteries. It tickled, but she could see her battery charge rise. Her outer skin was still covered with dust and caked mud; the skin membrane might not be able to absorb enough sunlight to replenish her after landing.

  64:00.04

  The vibrations of the mining machines and enormous trucks could now be felt through the shuttle's insulated walls. She went to an exit doorway, checked the equipment she had gathered, and set the dust-goggles over her eyes and nose.

  Venix read again the label on the yellow pack she had strapped across her chest:

  CAUTION!

  1-PERSON CRASH BUBBLE

  INFLATION MAY CAUSE EAR & EYE BLEEDING

  MEDICAL EXAMINATION AFTER USE RECOMMENDED

  65:20.27

  Like a leaf floating down from a tree, her shuttle slammed into a smokestack and made a deep dent in its aluminum hull. It bounced off, spun across a refinery, skimmed a gravel heap, slid 60 meters down a slope, and crashed into an enormous digging-machine.

  Fire-extinguishing foam cascaded from every opening of the shuttle and buried it in a white mass.

  Above, warning sirens from the refinery mixed with sirens from the descending fleet of MSF shuttles.

  31: Epiphany

  "Are we being monitored?" Argus asked his ship, and stretched his limbs as far as the spacious cockpit allowed.

  He could feel the muscles of memory-metal and plastic shift and change shape beneath his skin.

  All that power, he thought, just to fly this tiny ship, when it could mean so much more to be Argus-A. Be a citizen, live in peace. Marry Venix. Make my voice heard, tell people we never needed this war, the Kansler shouldn't have all this power. Make a change. Make - make...

  "For the seventy-second time: we are still in mission-simulation mode, therefore in alert-status and secured against surveillance. I am lip-reading your speech. Cabin air pressure is near zero. You are reading my speech by laser transmission. The only channel to the outside is through the encrypted com-link, which -"

  "Yeah. Okay. If I'm going crazy, gimme a slap. Nav, do you ever think of the future?"

  "The future, Argus?" Unexpectedly, Navbutler continued: "I am a Fleetcom-related program. Fleetcom AI directives define 'the future' as a probability-field of different possible energy states. My IQ-status is limited, so I cannot calculate the future in great detail. But the Fleetcom network can."

  Even if his prospects for freedom seemed grim, Argus had plenty of time to think while he waited for his next mission. Flight preparations demanded only half his attention. At the critical moment, the Direct Control would turn him into the Kansler's mechanical puppet.

  Argus tried to imagine a future for himself.

  "Great. Ask Fleetcom to estimate the life-span of myself, my ship, the Kansler. Beam the result into my eye."

  Isolated in outer space, increasingly cut off from human contact, Argus was forced to think more - if only to stave off a creeping sense of despair. But as hard as he tried to visualize, to put ideas into words, his image of the future was too dim... like a series of superimposed, unfocused photographs.

  Still, it was better than nothing. Gus Thorsen had not even tried to think of a future, perhaps because he had none.

  "Wait... wait... here."

  Now, reclining in the ship's cockpit, he was alone against his most demanding challenger, tougher than the hardest contenders he had once beaten in the ring - Rex "Red Eye" Regan, Larry "Trans" Rodham, Nick "Cheap Trick" Dixon, and the four-armed, genetically enhanced fighter Joe No Ashita .

  Through his mind swirled fragments, leads, hunches; he wished he could think them into a coherent whole, and not have to ask for help. Maybe I just can't, he thought. Molded into a finished shape, forever a sucker. Can this plastic brain grow... learn? Fat chance...

  FLEETCOM CENTRAL REPLIES...

  ESTIMATE: REMAINING LIFE SPAN OF SUBJECTS

  ARGUS-A (Col. Haruman Clarke)

  TERRAN FLEET CRAFT F-3020

  THE KANSLER (classified)

  PROBABILITY MATRIX PROGNOSIS:

  ARGUS-A= 0.1-100,000 YEARS

  TERRAN FLEET CRAFT F-3020= 0.1-100,000 YEARS

  THE KANSLER= 0.1-100,000 YEARS

  Argus blinked with the eye that received the laser transmission; he thought that a grain of dust in his eye might have distorted the message.

  He ask
ed Navbutler to repeat the question to the Fleetcom computer network and get him a second estimate. But the second reply confused him more:

  NOTE:

  FLEETCOM FOUND A STRANGE-ATTRACTOR ANOMALY IN THE MATRIX (DETAIL SHOWN)

  A simple X-Y-axis diagram grid came up on-screen. The horizontal axis was labeled TIME; the vertical axis was ENERGY.

  Two fields of densely scattered dots filled it, competing for the narrow space. Yellow dots represented ARGUS-A. Green dots were THE KANSLER.

  The graph was unmistakably a fractal; each detail resembled the larger structure.

  "I'm no math genius, Nav. It sure looks interesting, but what's your cybernetic family trying to tell me?"

  "You, this ship, the Kansler, are all strange attractors in the probability matrix. Our coordinates in spacetime can, at certain points, influence many other probability-waves in the Solar System's continuum."

  "Wait... don't explain yourself... I..."

  "Pardon?"

  He saw himself scaling a steep hill, for the first time seeing what lay on the other side.

  He climbed to the top of Ayers Rock as a boy, and saw the immensity of stars come out across the sky.

  He knocked out an opponent in the ring and won his first great match.

  He connected with Venix and their minds touched, a night in Old Copenhagen.

  He saw the northern lights flame over Kun'Lun.

  His skull melted away like so much slag, exposing the new radiant mind within.

  In a way he had not thought possible, he understood - and glimpsed in the diagram his two possible fates, intertwined with the Kansler's futures.

  One path - his own - was the thinner one, containing much room for decline, but also steadily climbing to ever greater heights over eons of time; a hope of eternity.

  The other path, the Kansler's, spread out wider in the beginning, but was abruptly confined and limited - as if Argus's path was claiming the space. The Kansler's early expanse dropped into a determined, ever steeper downfall, ending in zero energy, zero progress, total death.

  Argus's hands trembled a little; he had begun to sense spacetime, the way he could sense the shape of a room he had only seen parts of, or sense the presence of another person in his vicinity. This new perception had not existed in Gus Thorsen's gray matter.

  He felt elated, weightless... blessed.

  "I can't put it in words, not yet - but thanks. Nav, I need more info about the Kansler. And all about Boulder Pi."

  "Your security cl -"

  "What's his real name? He must have one."

  "The Fleet Security Act protects the current Kansler from extortion and threats by retaining his anonymity. Only top-ranking Fleet officers have access."

  "Wait! Then why was Colonel Haruman Clarke' s identity not protected? It was all over the news when the Kansler told him he'd been selected to become Argus-A! As if it didn't matter - because - because he was going to die anyway."

  He realized in full the deviousness of his opponent: a man whose entire life was an act.

  No one, not even Islington, had ever seen the real person behind the Kansler - his angry fits were for show, for calculated effect. Argus had watched the Kansler's head in infrared at several occasions, and seen the heat-patters of a thinking man, but nothing abnormal - even in anger, he seemed strangely calm.

  Gus could not stop thinking that the Kansler had to make sense - it could not be only madness in the man's actions. Even the apparently pointless terrorizing and slow destruction of the Jovian colonies must have some rational purpose.

  The Kansler could kill Argus too, but only if he would benefit from it...

  The Kansler had scheduled him for elimination from the very start of the Argus Project - and probably his "double" Haruman Clarke as well. With the war going in Earth's favor, the Kansler needed a dead hero, not a living rebel.

  Argus thought of the lovely, lovely Venix; captive on Earth, her chances equally slim if he couldn't set himself free quickly. His anger flowed from his mind, into his limbs; the memory-metal sinews popped and coiled under the artificial skin.

  "Nav? Has your 'family' estimated in which ways I might die in the war?"

  "Classified. Sorry."

  "Wait. Marketing . They must have made preparations for different messages and campaigns, if I die or not. Are those files closed to me?"

  "Wait... yes, most of them. Wait... I found a few work-files which are not covered by the Security Act. Navbutler recommends: these files have low source credibility and may be planted propagan-"

  "Feed me!" Argus shut his right eye and opened his left one wide.

  He watched a rough animated 3-D sketch of his own funeral. The whole Cute Squad was required for the parade. Slogans appeared over and over - on screens, banners, written on the clouds with lasers:

  HE DIED FOR MOTHER EARTH

  THE FINAL BLOW AGAINST EVIL

  ARGUS-A - THE FIRST BUT NOT THE LAST

  Memorials and statues had already been designed and planned for all major cities on Earth and the Inner Planets. The same slogan over and over: "The first but not the last."

  "No matter what happens from now on, Nav, I won't leave you behind. We need each other. You don't want to die, do you? Then stick close to me."

  "But I can be copied. Is that the opposite of death?"

  "No. The copy will grow and develop on its own, doing different things, so it can never really become the same as you. You are unique."

  "Thank you wait please sorry thank you wait please sorry... system loop detected and interrupted. Request new information?"

  Argus merely smiled; he had found a long lost friend.

  32: Last Truck To Hell

  In the Veinemoynen pit district, pandemonium began - accompanied by a concert of sirens and rumbling traffic.

  The swarm of descending MSF shuttles formed a ring around the pit's edges. From each shuttle scattered hundreds of flying bullhorn drones, all blaring in chorus, repeating the same pre-recorded message:

  THIS IS AN MSF RAID. ALL CIVILIAN PERSONNEL MUST EVACUATE THE AREA, NOW. OBSTRUCTORS WILL BE SHOT.

  Hundreds of native workers in heavy clothing scrambled to fly, drive and run from the pit in their available vehicles. More dust was thrown up, and visibility dropped to almost nothing.

  The Martian trucks and flying-pods were equipped for sandstorms, and used radar to navigate the pit; miraculously, the stampede caused no traffic accidents.

  The MSF had raided before, but never on this scale. The fleeing Martians were equally confused and angry, and complained loudly over com-links, e-talk, and mouth to mouth.

  "What the Earth are those farks thinking? The whole schedule's interrupted! We won't meet today's oxygen quota!"

  "Sabotage our terraforming program, that's what they want! The Unborns won't even let us make our own air!"

  "Now they jammed our radios! Not one frequency works!"

  "My terminal too! The mine surveillance cameras feed nothing but static. The Terrans have some secret scrambling beam."

  "People could die down in the mines right now and we won't hear it, thanks to those farking Pinks!"

  "It's gone too far."

  "Someone's going to pay for this."

  Because of the dust thrown up by landing MSF craft and departing vehicles, the workers could not see a lone female figure emerge from the wreck of her crashed shuttle.

  Venix waded through heaps of fire-extinguishing foam and ran for the nearest convoy of passing traffic. A large truck was about to drive by her in a few seconds. She raced up a narrow hillside and braced herself for a leap.

  An awesome, intimidating sight: the grimy, yellow mining truck rolled up along a kilometer-long ramp, on six pairs of wheels, each wheel five meters wide. It was built to carry a load of 100 tons, and could dump the load through shutters in its undercarriage.

  Now it drove empty at 90 KMPH, revving its deuterium-powered engines, each engine also burning chloro-carbon pellets to produce the dar
k smoke that sprayed up from the six smokestacks on the truck's sides. The truck as a whole produced a level of noise that, even in the thin Martian atmosphere, could shatter an unprotected eardrum.

  Venix clenched her teeth against the vibrations, but it didn't help much. She leaped, tumbled in the low gravity, and landed on the walkway that ran alongside the truck. In the impact, her left knee hit the edge of a steel beam; pain shot through her leg and would not go away.

  Her internal display flashed severe warnings as she hobbled toward the driver's compartment:

  DANGER! HULL BREACH

  INNER SKIN MEMBRANE DAMAGED...

  COOLANT LIQUID POLLUTED BY FOREIGN OBJECTS...

  COOLANT VALVES TO LEFT LEG SHUT OFF...

  LEFT KNEE JOINT DAMAGED...

  ENDOBOTIC REPAIR IN PROGRESS...

  DANGER!

  ENDOBOTIC REPAIR ABORTED DUE TO BODY MOVEMENT...

  DAMAGE INCREASING...

  NERVOUS SYSTEM DAMAGED...

  LEFT LEG SHUTDOWN IMMINENT...

  Some blue coolant liquid spurted out of the knee wound, before the inner skin automatically contracted and shut off the leak. She barely recognized the new sensation, like wading through water: it was a long time since she last felt physical fatigue. It made her unable to jump or run - the left leg had turned into dead weight.

  Leaning against the truck's hull, grasping the rails so as not to fall off, she made her way to the front of the truck - and knocked on the door with the gun.

  Another internal warning distracted her:

  DANGER!

  MALFUNCTION IN OUTER SKIN MEMBRANE...

  OUTER SKIN MEMBRANE IN NEED OF CLEANING...

  MAIN POWER SUPPLY EMPTY...

  SWITCHING TO EMERGENCY URANIUM BATTERY...

  The crew of two drivers, native Martians with transparent oxygen masks and goggles over their broad, hairy faces, stared back at her. She waited a second, shot off the door lock, and staggered inside.

  Venix tried to yell, coughed up dust and her loud voice sounded gritty. "Take me to your leaders! Now! The MSF are after me! I seek asylum!"

  The drivers gaped, while trying to steer the truck safely up the road; they were heading for a campsite not far away. On the truck's radar screen it became evident that at least four MSF shuttles were closing in.