by Titan Books
It would not happen.
His company had been targeted, his daughter’s life had been threatened, and everything he had worked for lay uneasy beneath a looming cloud. Peter Weyland would have understood, but by all practical accounts the legendary man was gone. His fate had been surmised, if not confirmed. That had been enough to allow Yutani to take over his company, his people, his innovations.
That historic acquisition would not be lost.
Murmuring instructions to his chair, he directed it across the room to halt facing a blank wall. He needed to clear his mind of the tangle of possibilities. Another couple of words addressed to the chair saw the wall come to life. Startlingly sharp three-dimensional imagery filled his vision. Like many of his generation, he was a lifelong Sumo enthusiast. One of the greatest compliments he had ever received was when a business competitor, half seriously and half in jest, had called him a rikishi.
As the larger-than-life-size action he had chosen unfolded before him, Yutani occasionally shifted the location of his chair in order to observe the projected combat from different angles.
The sport had been better, though, before they had begun using robots.
XI
No one had told the scientists or engineers working at the top-secret company complex why the usual, already-tight security had been further increased. “Just standard corporate procedure,” they were informed when anyone bothered to inquire. Security at the government facility had always been extreme, of course, but never so lethal.
Despite the official explanation, some of the men and women working at the heart of the complex were troubled. The abrupt appearance of more people with weapons was disconcerting. A number of employees found themselves fixated on the presence of so many additional guns, looking over their shoulders when they ought to have been absorbed in the work at hand.
Nevertheless, everything proceeded more or less on schedule. Which in the case of Walter meant twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Everyone knew they were working to a deadline that was rapidly approaching. Even so, with a rotating staff of specialists assigned to the prestige project, there was time off allotted for all involved to recover and reinvigorate. Despite the importance of the work, they progressed with an intensity that was notably less fraught than with their counterparts in far-off Greater Tokyo, or nearby Greater London.
Most likely it was the location of the complex in the English countryside that produced the comparatively relaxed state of mind among the scientists and engineers. Guns or no guns, heightened security or not, it helped to commute to work among rolling hills, ancient hedgerows, and villages that seemed to have changed little—externally, at least—from less-polluted times. Framed in native stonework with a minimum of glass and metal, the buildings of the complex reflected their sylvan surroundings with such adroitness that it had won several architectural awards, as well as a Queen’s medal.
Inside the complex, it was very different.
Nowhere more than three stories, the structures of the complex appeared inadequate to the task of researching and bringing to fruition the marvelous concepts originated by their founder, Peter Weyland. Such work had continued unabated since his disappearance on the ship Prometheus. The only indication that anything had changed was the intentionally low-key replacement of the signs at the main entrance and throughout the complex. Formerly they had read “Weyland Corporation,” with new ones proclaiming “Weyland-Yutani.”
What few people outside the company realized was that the bulk of the work that took place within the complex occurred not in the three visible, countrified levels, but in the five subterranean ones that had been blasted from English bedrock.
It was on one of those levels that Harbison and Gilead stood contemplating the Tank. Though constituting the liquid womb for the new kind of artificial intelligence called a synthetic, the Tank was decidedly unimpressive. Some wag on the research team had christened it the “hot tub.” More rectangular than circular, it was at present filled with the most expensive stew on the planet: an incredibly complex and astoundingly diverse mélange of proteins, minerals, and assorted other biochemical spices that when solidified and knitted together would form the body of a synthetic.
An artificial human.
Even after a synthetic left the Tank, much remained to be added. Intelligence, data, the web of neural networking, the refining of facial features.
The two women scrutinizing the tub were project supervisors both, charged with making sure every iota of the project came seamlessly together to produce a viable being. The demands on them were enormous. Harbison wasn’t a biologist, but she had to be an expert on biology. Gilead was not a skeletal engineer, but she had to know as much as was known about bones.
As a team they were intentionally redundant. Neither outranked the other. Neither could override her counterpart’s directives. They worked together because they had to: the short, vivacious Gilead and her taller, stouter, ex-footballer colleague Harbison.
No one on the Walter team questioned being supervised by two women. Such antediluvian conceits as male dominance had long since been banished by corporations whose overriding desire was to make money. If it could be shown that a mutant Martian could appropriately enhance a company’s bottom line, said creature would immediately be hired—most likely with the offer of a bonus.
Both Harbison and Gilead had been with Weyland for a long time. As senior executives they had known Peter Weyland personally, had grieved over his disappearance and loss. Neither had allowed the tragedy to interfere with her work—perhaps the most fascinating and stimulating employment to be found on the planet.
For thousands of years it had been said, sometimes seriously and sometimes in jest, that one could not play God. Working on the Walter project and its predecessor, David, was as near as one could come to disputing that proposition.
There had been many failures—so many failures—along the way. Often were the times when the corporate board had argued for pulling financing from the David project, and using it to fund other ventures within the company. Each time, the protests and arguments of the bean counters had been beaten back by the brilliance of Peter Weyland himself.
If the arguments were economic, Weyland found funding elsewhere. If they were organizational, he shifted people around or hired, bribed, or otherwise acquired the necessary personnel. If they were moral, he obtained appropriate dispensations from the favored religious authority of the moment.
Thus, the David project had progressed steadily forward—sometimes smoothly, other times in fits and starts, overcoming all obstacles. Without the strength of Peter Weyland’s personality and reputation, the project would certainly have gone under. Eventually as well as literally, it had given birth to—
David.
Unfortunately, Weyland had insisted on moving forward the first David’s testing so the synthetic would be commissioned in time to join the founder’s mysterious and ultimately inconclusive deep space mission. Both Gilead and Harbison preferred to refer to the Prometheus mission as “inconclusive,” even though that ship and its crew were considered lost by nearly everyone else, including the expedition’s insurers.
Harbison smiled to herself. Peter would have been pleased to learn that the bulk of the policy payout had been directed into the Walter project’s fund, giving it a financial boost just when it was needed.
Unlike the progenitor of the David series, the Walter line would—with one caveat—not be rushed. There was no corporate founder or other unassailable entity in a hurry to see the first of the line commissioned. Hideo Yutani himself had insisted that announcement of the Walter series would not be made official until every one of the program’s department heads had signed off on its readiness. The one caveat was that a functional synthetic had to be finished in time to join the Covenant mission.
And they were on schedule. Walter One was almost ready to be declared capable and sent up to the colony ship. Even his attire waited in read
iness. Once on board he would look and act like the rest of the crew, even though he would not have to eat, void, or sleep.
While other industries were clamoring for the advanced synthetics, Weyland’s vision was to place a mobile artificial intelligence on board every deep space vessel. There they would serve both as a supplement to the onboard AI, and as a suitable interface between “Mother” and the human crew.
Everything was ready. Certainly Walter was. If asked, he would have replied with equal confidence. Every department within the company had signed off on the completed product.
All but one. Harbison looked down at her counterpart.
“Have you spoken to Steinmetz lately?”
Gilead responded with a derisive snort. “Every hour, it seems. He’s still not ready to sign off.”
The slightly older Harbison was visibly disappointed. Moonbeams danced in her coppery hair, a by-product of her makeup, and not the lighting that illuminated the fourth sub-floor. When she stepped out into sunlight they would dance in her eyebrows, as well. Despite the fact that such innovations could prove a distraction on the job, she persisted.
“What is it this time?” she growled, frowning now. “Something new? Or is he still mumbling on about the same old concerns?” Harbison didn’t think she could stomach further dissent. Not at this stage. Not with the Covenant entering into final preparations for departure.
Turning, Gilead headed away from the hot tub and its tangle of conduits, tubing, and instrumentation, and started toward the nearby bank of lifts. With her longer legs, Harbison easily kept pace.
“No, nothing new,” Gilead replied. “Just the same damn thing, over and over. Modifying the neural linkages held over from the first David model.”
Harbison’s currently unilluminated brows rose. “He’s still on about that? I thought that problem had been resolved months ago.”
“Apparently not—at least, not to the good doctor’s satisfaction. Regrettably, his associates seem to agree with him. Hence the continuing hold.” She glanced over at her counterpart. “You still worrying about cost overruns?”
“Not any more.” They entered the lift together. Gilead identified herself to the controls and requested transport to the ground floor. For security reasons, no elevators ran from the underground levels to the three situated above ground. Anyone making that journey had to get off and change lifts.
“At this point all that matters is getting the first Walter on board the Covenant,” Harbison continued. “If throwing money at it would fix the damn problem, it would already be solved and done with. I’d override Steinmetz if I could, but his design team would throw a fit, the engineers would probably balk, and the result would inevitably leak. The media would have a field day.” She let out a sigh as the lift arrived at the ground floor. “So we wait. We can push him and his team but we can’t bypass them and order an official commissioning.” She muttered under her breath as they swung left to enter a waiting, vacant elevator that would take them the rest of the way up to the third floor.
“I’m really beginning to hate neurologists,” she finished.
Gilead nodded in assent. “It seems like such a small thing, this inconsistency that’s holding them up. I’ve parsed the particulars.” Her left thumb nervously rolled the ring on her left index finger, back and forth, back and forth. “I don’t like it when scientists start bantering metaphysics.”
“Same here.” The lift deposited them on the third floor. In contrast to the artificial illumination that lit the subterranean levels, the lighting on the top floor of the complex was mostly natural, adjusted and filtered for comfort. “I wish they’d just stick to their hardware and leave the rest to the programmers.”
The shorter woman made a face. “There’s no hardware that tells a conflicted synthetic what to do and when to do it. Ethics have to be downloaded. Not so very different from people, really.” She turned in the direction of her office, which occupied the southwest corner of the building. “Let’s do this: I’ll nudge Steinmetz again, remind him that the Covenant can’t leave without a synthetic.”
“It could,” Harbison reminded her. “The ship’s central AI could handle the voyage by itself.”
“Very likely,” Gilead agreed, “but Weyland-Yutani couldn’t manage the resultant bad publicity, and I certainly couldn’t manage the eruption of displeasure that would come out of Tokyo.”
“There is that.” Harbison frowned. “Speaking of directives, I find all this increased security irksome. You’d think that as co-chief of Operations here, I could drive my vehicle into the garage without having to wait for it to be scanned.”
“I know.” Gilead sympathized. “Whatever this is all about, it doesn’t respect rank or position.” She smiled. “Posoli in Tokyo tells me it’s just temporary.”
“Let’s hope he’s right.” Harbison looked back over her shoulder as she parted from her colleague. “We don’t need any additional slowdown in operations, and I think it’ll go better if I’m the one who talks to Steinmetz. I’ve watched him when you’re together. You get on his nerves.”
The retreating Gilead laughed. “You’d think a neurological engineer would be able to deal with that.”
* * *
The head of the Department for Neurological Engineering, Weyland-Yutani Greater London Division, sat in his office. Loess Steinmetz was not a big man. Sitting at his work station, simultaneously perusing three heads-up displays, he seemed to shrink in his chair so that he appeared even smaller than he was.
For a man in his 70s still operating on the cutting edge of his chosen specialty, he displayed a retrograde fondness bordering on affectation for such physical aids as small round glasses and a physical hearing aid, though at least the latter was nearly invisible.
Likewise disdaining the use of follicular enhancements or chemicals, he was completely bald. He justified this as a practical rather than a scientific decision. The resultant bare skin was easier to take care of. Harbison felt there were other physical attributes he would similarly have been happy to dispense with, had their removal been easy and painless.
While unused to being kept waiting, Harbison stood patiently with her arms crossed in front of her dark green dress as he continued working, until at last some movement—or sound, or possibly smell—caused him to look up from the task at hand. With Steinmetz one could never be sure what might cause him to respond. Much of the time he, like so many engineers, tended to live in a different world.
“Ach. I didn’t notice you standing there, Elena.” Uncertain and openly upset at being interrupted, he nonetheless reacted politely, courtesy being a burdensome requirement of working with others. “Won’t you sit down?”
She did so, in a nearby chair which in that office was as much an afterthought as was the filigreed waste basket that was devoid of discarded paper.
“Loess, we’re approaching a crossroads,” she said. “By ‘we’ I mean the company. By the company, I mean you and me and every employee assigned to the Walter project.”
He smiled up at her, his old-fashioned glass lenses catching the light. For such a small, unprepossessing man, he had very penetrating black eyes.
“There have been many crossroads in the course of developing Walter. All of them have been, well… crossed.”
Her naturally husky voice fell even lower as she stared back at him. “Then what, Loess, is the hold-up? What is the reason for the continuing delay on the part of your department?” She did not say “on your part.” That would have been tactless. Although, she reflected, he probably wouldn’t have reacted anyway.
Reaching up, he minutely adjusted his glasses. “In order to sign off on Walter, we need to be absolutely certain about every neural pathway, every installed memory and bit of knowledge, and how it all interacts.”
Harbison pressed her lips together. She knew all this. She and Gilead had known it since the start of the project. Repetition wasn’t an adequate response.
“You’re an engineer,” she
said. “Be more specific.”
He looked back at his displays, as if wishing he could live within them. “There are still certain aspects of synthetic cogitation with which some of us are not entirely comfortable. It would be easy enough to negate them, or even remove the relevant installations entirely from the cerebral cortex. Yet it is impossible to guarantee that the synthetic will operate successfully if its neural interlacing is not a hundred percent.” He struggled to avoid taking a professorial tone with the woman who was, after all, his superior within the company.
When she didn’t respond, he continued.
“Let us say that a situation arises on the Covenant that requires the synthetic to react in a certain way. If we remove or deactivate the areas that concern us, this could also leave the synthetic unable to respond to that situation in as efficient a way as possible. The situation might still be successfully resolved, but it might take longer, and the results may not be as effective. Thus, we are caught between our desire to make the Walter series as faultless as possible, while avoiding certain… hypothetical negatives.”
She waved it off. “I’ve read your department’s extracts and the conclusions. So has Gilead. We both agree that there’s nothing of sufficient concern to justify holding up the entire project. The concerns you’ve expressed are exactly as stated: hypothetical.”
He shrugged. “All of the dangers affecting a colony ship and its crew are hypothetical—until they become real.”
Despite her resolve she found herself on the verge of becoming angry. “That’s science!”
“Yes.” Steinmetz remained maddeningly unmoved. “But it is not engineering.”
Rising from the chair she began pacing the office as if stalking an invisible quarry. “It’s not economics, either, but that’s what I have to deal with.” She stopped so abruptly it startled him. “Here’s how things stand now, Loess, and I’m not being hypothetical. If we don’t sign off on the Walter project, then the possibility exists that the Covenant leaves without a synthetic. Everyone concurs that it would be better for the ship to have one on board—even if it’s flawed—than not to have one at all. It’s what Captain Brandon would want.