The Compleat McAndrew

by Charles Sheffield

  I was watching McAndrew, otherwise I might not have caught it. On the wall of the corridor, above him and to his right, a small monitor camera began turning to track his movements. I switched my suit from local to general circuit. What I said would be picked up at the Merganser, and rebroadcast back to the Ark.

  “I see that you are following our progress. Where are you inside the Ark? And what kind of trouble are you in?”

  A moment of silence, and then the woman’s voice again. “We need—assistance. Proceed as—you are—doing. The corridor will lead—you—to us.”

  No fluency. Instead, the strained precision and hesitations of someone speaking a foreign language. I looked around and up. I had noticed only one monitor camera, but now that I was seeking them I saw that they were everywhere on the walls and ceiling. Floor, walls, and ceiling also held pressure pads every few yards, to register any slight contact that might take place in the negligible gravity of the Ark. Ahead of McAndrew, another door stood cracked open just a fraction. As he moved toward it, the hatch smoothly slid wide to reveal a chamber beyond as dark, airless and empty as space itself.

  Monitors everywhere; sophisticated sensors; doors keyed to open upon the detection of human presence. This was the very antithesis of an Amish world.

  McAndrew had moved on, through into the next room. He turned, waiting for me to come through the hatch and join him.

  I switched to local communication mode, hoping that the circuit would not easily be overheard and unscrambled.

  “Mac,” I said softly. “Don’t take another step. I was wrong. This isn’t the Amish Ark. It’s the Cyber Ark. They created their AI, and the damned thing is running the show.”

  McAndrew stood dead still. I knew that he had understood exactly what I said—he’s quicker than me on the uptake on any scale that I can devise—but he seemed unsure what to do next.

  I said, more urgently, “Don’t act alarmed. Just come back this way. As slowly as you can stand to.”

  It was too late. Either the AI read the significance of his movement toward me, or a massive intelligence had received our first transmissions and cracked the compression code used in suit communications. The reason did not matter. What did matter was that the hatch began to slide closed as McAndrew hurried toward it.

  There was a control panel on my side of the hatch, but I didn’t trust it. The AI might have an override. I dragged the power laser from my pocket and aimed high, where the upper edge of the hatch met the wall.

  There was a lurid sputter of sparks and a vibration that I felt in the soles of my suited feet. The hatch, welded to the wall, ground to a stop and McAndrew ducked his head and hurried through to my side.

  “We’ve got to get outside,” I said. “We’ll be safe there.”

  I led the way. As I headed for the outer port I experienced an odd sensation that the whole Ark was coming alive around me. I could feel vibrations under my feet, and golden lights in walls and ceiling were winking to life. I ignored the lights, but I used the power laser to burn out every monitor that I saw. A cleaning robot, all arms and legs and vicious scraping blades, rumbled out to block the corridor. I fried its video sensors and soared on over the top of it without missing a step.

  Twenty meters in front of me the door of the outer lock was starting to close. I halted, set the laser to tight beam, and aimed carefully. The wall above the top of the door turned orange-white. The door froze in its tracks. Three seconds later I was outside and moving under the baleful light of the Cassiopeia supernova.

  I turned to make sure that McAndrew was still with me. He was, but a single glance back at the Ark was enough to tell me that I had erred on the side of optimism. The whole outer surface of the modified asteroid seethed with activity. Cranes were turning in our direction, metal manipulator jaws stretched as far as they could toward us, mobile cargo units clanked our way across the uneven surface, and the long booms of communication antennas swung out to block the path between us and the hovering Merganser.

  “Straight up and out, Mac,” I cried, and fired my suit jets at maximum thrust. A rapid vertical rise, a quick controlled zig-zag to avoid a swinging antenna boom, and I was clear. The Merganser lay ahead. In half a minute I was standing in the air lock. I looked back.

  McAndrew had reacted more slowly and taken longer to avoid the threshing antenna booms, but he was clear and on the final two hundred meters of his approach. Sighting beyond him, I realized that I had been optimistic yet again.

  “Inside, Mac,” I shouted. “Right inside—and hang on.”

  Instead of cycling the lock I did an emergency override, allowing all the air in the interior of the Merganser to puff away through the lock and into space. No problem, we had plenty of reserve and could replace it—if we survived and had the chance.

  The AI inside the Ark had control over its lifeboats and space pinnaces. Four of them were lifting away from the surface and heading in our direction. They lacked space-weapons systems, but they wouldn’t need them. A direct collision at maximum acceleration would be enough to make sure that McAndrew and I did not return to the vicinity of Sol. If we survived the crash, our fates would depend on the whim of the AI.

  Mac was inside, slamming shut the hatch of the life capsule. I headed for the controls. We had no space weapons, either. But we had one thing that the Ark’s lifeboats and pinnaces did not.

  I dropped, still fully suited, into the pilot’s chair and flicked the Merganser’s drive to its maximum value. The life capsule sprang into flight position and a fiery plume of plasma, hotter than dragon’s breath, spewed out on all sides of us and away behind the ship. Everything in the path of the drive exhaust melted away in a fraction of a second to its subatomic components.

  The lifeboats and pinnaces exploded in eruptions of violet sparks. When the sky cleared I saw, beyond them and slightly away from the line of the drive, the floating bulk of the Cyber Ark.

  I was turning the Merganser to bring its deadly drive into alignment with the Ark when I felt McAndrew’s suited hand over mine on the control stick.

  “Jeanie,” he cried—louder than he ever spoke. “What are you doing?”

  “It killed them,” I said. We were fighting each other for the controls, and my voice was as shaky as my hands. “Killed all of them, all two thousand people. We have to destroy it.”

  “Why do you say the AI killed them?” We were face to face, and his eyes were wild.

  “Look at the sequence, Mac. The first message was genuine. It had them trapped, except for the ones who tried to escape in the lifeboat. It grabbed them with the manipulator.”

  “But the others—the messages.”

  “I don’t think it realized that the others had a way to get a message out until our signal was received at the Ark. But then it knew, and it opened the whole interior. It killed them all. Those jerky messages were synthesized, the AI made them up just for us.”

  “That’s why you can’t kill it. Don’t you see, Jeanie, it’s intelligent. Super-intelligent—it learned our language, interpreted our messages in no time at all.”

  He was stronger than me, but he had poor leverage. I was winning, and the drive had almost reached the outer limb of the Ark.

  “We have to kill it because it’s super-intelligent,” I said. “Super-intelligent, and insane. We have no idea what it might be able to do. There’s never been anything as dangerous to humans in the whole Universe.”

  “You wouldn’t kill a baby, would you, because it was crazy?” McAndrew had changed position, and his hold on the controls was as good as mine. “Think for a minute, Jeanie. It’s morally wrong to kill any intelligent being. You’ve told me that a hundred times.”

  I let go of the control stick. Not because I accepted his argument, or even because the drive on the Merganser was inadequate to sterilize the whole Ark, though it almost certainly was. I had a more practical reason. We were accelerating at a hundred and eighteen gees. In the ten seconds that we had been wrestling for the con
trols, the Merganser had flown almost sixty kilometers. Over such a distance our drive exhaust would inflict only minor damage on the Ark.

  I took a long breath, moved away from the controls, and forced myself to begin the routine task of refilling the life capsule with air. Until that was done we could not remove our suits. We were quite safe in them, but we faced a long journey home. After a few moments McAndrew came over to help me.

  Logically, he and I could and should have continued our discussion on an appropriate fate for the AI that now controlled the Cyber Ark. In fact, we said not a word to each other about the matter; not then, not when we took off our suits, not at any time during our long journey back to the Institute.

  What did we discuss? We talked about everything that people do talk about—when they want to avoid talking about one particular thing.

  When we finally spoke again about the AI, the Cassiopeia supernova was far past its peak. That stellar beacon had dwindled and faded, and in its place shone the wan, unspectacular remnant of a dwarf star. Paul Fogarty was back from his trip, and his findings at the solar focus were enough to provide him with a respectable amount of media coverage.

  Of McAndrew’s doings regarding the supernova, the Cyber Ark, or anything else, the media said not a word. He did not call me, write me, or send me any other possible form of message.

  I tell you, the man is as obstinate as a mule. So it astonished me when, as I was monitoring the loading of volatiles for a routine Ceres run, he showed up at the L-4 loading area.

  He stood at the side of the deck and did absolutely nothing until finally, in exasperation, I swung over to his side.

  “What, then?”

  “You know what,” he said. “I’m going. Again. To the Ark.”

  “I thought you might. Who’s going with you?”

  “Lots of people. Too damn many people. Computer types, military, AI specialists, psychiatrists, the works.”

  I kept my mouth shut, but I think my eyebrows rose because McAndrew said, “Aye, you heard right. Psychiatrists. The leading theory is that the AI is mad.”

  “I told you it was insane when we first encountered it.”

  “Well, now we have others saying the same thing. Crazy, they say, because the AI has been so long in isolation, without inputs.”

  “It had inputs from the humans on the Ark. And it killed the lot of them.”

  “I said that. When I did, the United Space Federation just added more people. It’s going to be a whole three-ring circus out there.”

  I waited. He had ended his sentence on a rising note, and I knew from experience that meant he hadn’t finished.

  “So well then,” he said after a while. “What do you say, Jeanie?”

  “What do I say to what?” I can be as awkward as McAndrew when I feel like it.

  “Why, are you coming with us? With me. Out to the Cyber Ark.”

  “If I said yes to that I’d be as crazy as the AI. I’m amazed you’d come here and ask me such a thing.”

  “Ah, well, there’s more that you don’t know.” He took my hand and sat me down next to him on the edge of the lading bay. “Simonette will be leading the USF party.”

  “Simple Simonette?”

  “The same. You know his solution to every problem: blow it away. He has to take the psychiatrists along, the USF insists on it, but he’ll take no notice of them. He agrees with you. We should have destroyed the AI when we had the chance.”

  “It’s a bit late for that. Anyway, I’ve been thinking, too.”

  “Oh aye?”

  “I was wrong and you were right. It’s criminal to destroy any self-aware intelligence.”

  “Then you should come with us.”

  “And do what?”

  “Be another voice of reason—a voice of sanity. Argue against destroying the AI.”

  “I’m not sure I can argue that way, either.” I ignored the squeeze of his hand on mine, and went on, “We were both right, Mac, and we were both wrong. There’s no good answer. It’s morally abhorrent to destroy the AI, assuming that it is an intelligent, self-aware, thinking being. But it’s also unthinkable to risk the future of the human species by allowing the continued existence of something with the potential to destroy us.”

  “You’re coming, then?”

  “Of course I’m coming. You know damn well I’m coming.” I was angry; with myself, with McAndrew, with a universe that offered such unacceptable alternatives. “But I know I’m going to be upset, no matter what happens.”

  Upset was too weak a word for it. Destroy the AI or allow it to live? That decision, whichever way it went, would be with me for the rest of my life.

  I damned the AI to hell, and every Ark with it; and I wished that I had never heard of the solar focus.

  A voice of sanity. I should have had more sense, and so should McAndrew. My job as a cargo captain is respectable, and my reputation excellent. McAndrew is the system’s greatest living physicist, and according to people competent to judge such things he ranks with the best ever. But when it comes to real clout, we are no more than flies buzzing around the admiral’s table.

  I realized that when Mac and I flew on a navy vessel to the staging point and we saw the forces assembled there. I counted fifty-five ships before I stopped, and they were not lightweight research vessels or the cargo assemblies that McAndrew and I were familiar with. These were hulking armored monsters, ranging from high-gee probes employing giant versions of the McAndrew balanced drive, to massive orbital forts hard-pressed to reach a twentieth of a gee.

  I asked Mac how long it would take one of the gigantic forts to travel out to the location of the Cyber Ark. He thought for a moment and said it would be a year’s trip.

  “Great,” I said. “What are the rest of us supposed to do until the forts arrive? The AI could kill the lot of us.”

  “It might.” The speaker was not McAndrew, but a blond navy officer. Captain Knudsen had very pale skin and a straggly Viking beard, and he looked about eighteen years old. “But the forts aren’t there to prevent our being killed,” he went on. “They won’t be going all the way out to the Ark.”

  “So what will they be doing?”

  “They’re our last line of defense. They’ll make sure nothing can hit Earth and the Solar System colonies.”

  That quiet comment gave me a jolt in the right place. Say what you like about Simple Simonette, he was taking the threat of the Cyber Ark AI seriously. The last line of defense…

  McAndrew and I were assigned to the Ptarmigan under Knudsen’s command. It was the lead ship, equipped with a four-hundred gee version of the balanced drive and able to make the outward journey in four days. It was also, though no one mentioned it, the tethered goat. If, when we arrived, the AI found us and gulped us down, the rest of the fleet would learn from our fate and structure the rest of its operations accordingly.

  It was a change for me to travel as a passenger. McAndrew had retreated inside his head, so I spent the four-day journey scanning the sky ahead with the Ptarmigan’s sensors. We had observing instruments aboard more sensitive and more sophisticated than anything that I had ever seen. Apparently they weren’t quite sensitive enough at extreme distance, since I found no trace of the Cyber Ark.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day, when my worries were mounting, Captain Knudsen cut the drive of the Ptarmigan and joined me. “Locked in yet?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Nothing.”

  “But we show as within a hundred thousand kilometers.” There was a touch of reproof in his voice. “McAndrew assured me it couldn’t travel far, it doesn’t have the drive engines. We ought to have definite target acquisition by now. Let me have a try.” He eased me away from the mass detector controls and bent over them. “There’s a bit of a knack to using this, you see, you have to get used to it.”

  I could have pointed out that I had been trained in the use of mass detectors when he was still blowing milk bubbles and filling his diapers, but I didn’t. I
let him take over the controls, certain that he wouldn’t find anything.

  Certain, but wrong. Within five minutes he said, “Ah, there we are. Mass and range are just the way they should be. I’m locking us in now.”

  I leaned over beside him. Sure enough, the signal was there, strong and definite. How could I possibly have missed it? I turned to the optical sensors for confirmation, and found it there also.

  “You’re right, and we’re getting visual confirmation,” I said. “There’s the Ark, right in the middle of the image. There’s a weaker, diffuse signal surrounding the central one. It’s spread over a much bigger volume. Any idea what it could be?”

  “We’ll know soon enough.” Knudsen was decent enough not to gloat. “The target doesn’t seem to be moving. We’re approaching fast.”

  “And then what?” McAndrew had wakened from his trance at the sound of our voices, and now he drifted over to stand beside me.

  “Let’s take a look.” Knudsen entered a coded query sequence. “I was given sealed orders that apply only after target acquisition. Guess that’s now.”

  He completed the string, and we read the words as they appeared. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO DESTROY THE ARK. DO NOT APPROACH CLOSER THAN FIVE THOUSAND KILOMETERS TO THE ARK. DO NOT ENTER INTO DIALOG WITH THE AI, EVEN IF IT SEEKS TO DO SO. IF THE ARK SEEKS TO APPROACH YOUR SHIP, RETREAT. FOLLOW THE ARK IF IT OTHERWISE CHANGES POSITION, AND INFORM THE FLEET CONTINUOUSLY OF ITS LOCATION.

  “Sounds easy enough,” Knudsen said. “That’s exactly what I would have done anyway, even without instructions.”

  “The orders say, don’t try to destroy it.” I had mixed feelings about that. Who could say how dangerous the AI might be?

  “I’m not sure the Ptarmigan could destroy it if we wanted to.” Knudsen was much more relaxed now that his sealed orders were open. “We don’t have the firepower. We’ll leave that job to the big boys.”

  “If we decide it’s absolutely necessary to destroy it,” McAndrew said. “We don’t know that.”