The Galapagos Incident by Felix R. Savage

by Discover Sci-Fi Special Edition

  ~The United States?

  ~Of America. Oh, and it wasn’t just any German philosophy—

  ~I know that, Elfrida interrupted, but due to the signal delay, she still had to hear Yumiko saying Heidegger, a bad word—thanks to the philosopher’s role in the Mars Incident—that Elfrida had purposely avoided saying.

  Wanting to shut down the topic, she subvocalized brightly, ~ And that, boys and girls, is why we have restrictions on AI today.

  ~Ha, ha! I’m not that smart. Or, maybe you could say I’m smart enough not to waste my time marinating in Teutonic nihilism. Anyway, the reason I brought it up—

  Before the last words reached Botticelli Station, Elfrida had interjected, ~I’m also half-Austrian. My Viennese relatives are the happiest people I know. Not nihilistic at all.

  ~Touchy, much? Yumiko replied. ~I only asked because I thought maybe you had some funny ideas about AI. You know, political convictions or something.

  Elfrida was stumped for a reply. What business had Yumiko asking about her political convictions? Not that she had any, as such.

  But the question touched on an uncomfortable reality. A century and a half had passed since the Mars Incident. The very fact that opposition to AI was now thought of as a political position, rather than common sense, hinted at the difficulty of sustaining it while simultaneously relying on variously regulated, override-enabled, and deliberately crippled machine intelligences to support human colonization of the solar system.

  In short, humanity was embroiled in a titanic ideological struggle whose outcome remained unpredictable.

  Elfrida was vaguely aware of this, and she felt it as a tension in her relationship with Yumiko.

  ~I just wondered why you keep me disabled so much of the time, the MI said humbly.

  ~I do not, Elfrida defended herself. ~I mean, you covered for me while I was busy on 5597 Mahandra, for example.

  This was perfectly true. While Yumiko travelled towards 11073 Galapagos aboard the Kharbage Can, Elfrida had completed a preliminary assessment on 5597 Mahandra, supervised the evacuation of 12846 Elvis, and written up a recommendation that 8033 Vasilov not be purchased for the Project, based on its status as a net contributor to local trade networks. For each of these missions she had used a different phavatar. None of them were stross-class. None asked her about her private life. And none got their feelings hurt because she disabled them from time to time.

  ~Sorry, she subvocalized, thinking how ridiculous it was that she should be trying to soothe a machine intelligence’s bruised ego. ~I just like to make my own decisions.

  ~I totally admire that! Yumiko exclaimed. ~It’s just that I’m really excited about this mission, so don’t shut me out, ’kay pleeeease?

  Elfrida promised she wouldn’t, while promising herself that she would not put up with this emotionally draining crap a minute longer than she had to. 11073 Galapagos was gradually overhauling Venus. During the Kharbage Can’s 5.9 million kilometer journey to the asteroid, that 20-second latency period would dwindle to 10. The scheduled 30-sol duration of her mission would see it shrink all the way down to 3 seconds, on the edge of plausible solo operation.

  ★

  Despite her promise, she backgrounded and muted Yumiko when they reached 11073 Galapagos. She was determined to manage their initial encounter with the residents herself.

  The Kharbage Can decelerated, matched the asteroid’s velocity, and anchored itself to the clamps installed where the squid’s mouth would have been, if 11073 Galapagos were the cephalopod it resembled. Elfrida climbed into a spacesuit—Yumiko’s high-end frame did not actually need protection from radiation or the vacuum, but she had to keep up appearances—and followed Captain Okoli out. Half a dozen blue berets came with them, toting shoulder-mounted flechette cannons that made them look like mutant beetles.

  The asteroid’s gravity was next to nil. Elfrida clipped a tether onto her suit. When she stepped off the base of the landing platform, she floated down to a dusty layer of regolith marked by overlapping bootprints.

  “But where is everyone?” she said.

  “Hey! Over here!”

  The shout rudely blanketed all the local communication frequencies. Yumiko painted a blood-red route to its origin, complete with blinking arrows, on Elfrida’s heads-up display. Muted or not, she was obviously straining at the leash to participate.

  Elfrida detached her tether and bounded over the surface of the asteroid on her gecko grips. A blue beret yelled for her to come back. Screw that. This was her mission.

  She risked drifting off into space with every step, but if she did, the Kharbage Can would retrieve her, so all she really risked was looking dumb. Anyway, Yumiko’s reflexes were a dream. Sailing spinwards across the terminator, she passed from day into night. Stars hailed across the sky, and Yumiko let out a parp of excitement.

  “Stop right there. Any further’n that,” said the all-frequencies voice, “and they c’n recycle you.”

  Elfrida looked down. On her chest glowed the angry red cross of a laser targeting system.

  Ten seconds had passed, of course, between this moment and her experience of it. Realizing that Yumiko might by now be a spreading cloud of debris, she lost control of her bowels. She flinched at the warm gush of solids and liquids into her diaper, but with a huge effort she maintained her concentration. She flung out a passionately sincere appeal for civility.

  The crosshairs vanished. Elfrida bounded back across the solar mesh. The asteroid tumbled her into blazing sunlight, and across the terminator stalked several spacesuits. Rad-shielded faceplates reflected the ungainly silhouette of the Kharbage Can. Splart-patched elbows cradled projectile rifles.

  “What the fuck, Yonezawa,” Captain Okoli complained. “You scared the pants off of my little friend here.”

  “You try living in this neighborhood,” said the rude male voice.

  Elfrida couldn’t believe this was happening. She tight-beamed a plea to Major Roy, the commander of the peacekeeping platoon. “Can’t you do something?”

  But her appeal had lagged events. Before it could reach the major, she saw eight sparks dart out of a port in the Kharbage Can’s crew capsule. They moved too fast for the human eye—but not Yumiko’s optic sensors—to follow. Deploying microcable grapples, each one pounced on a Kalashnikov and carried it off, like a tiny hawk with a giant rabbit. They danced into low orbit with their prizes.

  “Couldn’t have done anything,” Major Roy tight-beamed back to her. “No electronics in those antiques. Nothing to emp. It’d have come down to bare knuckles, metaphorically speaking.”

  Okoli gloated, “Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but you can’t argue with offensive drones. If I give the order, Yonezawa, they’ll need an electron microscope to find what’s left of you. Well?”

  “You wouldn’t do that,” Yonezawa said with a smug conviction that seemed to Elfrida very much unwarranted.

  “That decision would be his,” Okoli said, saving the face of Major Roy. “But I will never hesitate to put my firepower at the disposal of the United Nations for the purposes of peacekeeping in the solar system. Now have your popguns back, and next time don’t aim them at your best friend in this volume.” He pointed at Elfrida.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’m Yumiko Shimada.” Space Corps protocol dictated that agents use aliases, to avoid any potential contamination of their real identities by complaints from disgruntled colonists. Since this phavatar had a name, she was using it. “Hajimemashite. I’m here from the Space Corps, under contract to the United Nations Venus Remediation Project, to conduct a preliminary assessment of this asteroid’s human population. As you know, 11073 Galapagos is on the shortlist of entities which may be purchased by the Project for Cytherean terraforming. My assessment will be submitted for the consideration of the requisitioning committee that will make the final decision with regard to this matter. That’s just to let you know I haven’t got powers of life and death here. Laugh.” She punctuated her sp
iel with the emoticode for a laugh, one of the codes that had spread from text-only communication into regular speech. Emoticodes were handy when the other person couldn’t see your face, for instance when a tinted faceplate was in the way. “I’ll just be taking a look at how you live, your standards of living, any unique cultural and ethnic factors that may impinge on your potential resettlement, and submitting that data to headquarters.”

  While her speech was still on its way to 11073 Galapagos, Yonezawa started shaking his head and protesting. She involuntarily overrode him. But this worked out for the best. By the time she’d droned to her conclusion, the fight had gone out of him and his companions.

  “All right. Whatever. The whole process is rigged, anyway.”

  “Let me prove to you it’s not,” Elfrida said eagerly. “We care about community rights. Not many people know this, but we only recommend purchase in seventy-two percent of cases.”

  Before her response went through, Okoli said, “Cheer up. You still have a chance. Make her think resettling you would be too costly, and you might get to keep this rock for another few orbits.”

  “While paying rent to you,” Yonezawa said.

  “I’m just helping you understand your options. Kharbage, LLC wins either way.”

  During this exchange, Elfrida’s little speech about community rights grabbed one of the public channels. Yonezawa gave her a funny look. He had noticed her apparent disregard for the give and take of conversation.

  Yumiko said urgently, ~Let me take over. Now.

  Unwillingly, Elfrida enabled the assistant. Yumiko was right; she couldn’t keep up in this fast-paced context.

  Before the Kharbage Can departed, Captain Okoli took her aside. He pointed at the end of the asteroid that resembled stretched-out tentacles. “See that?”

  It was presently night. Sampling a range of optic filters, Elfrida distinguished from the starry background a cluster of lights that crowned the ‘tentacles’ bristling from 11073 Galapagos’s far end. At the same time she experienced a shift in perspective and saw that the ‘tentacles’ might equally resemble spires or steeples, cloaked in silver solar mesh that stretched across the gaps between their bases like roofs.

  “These people are crazy enough to build a cathedral on a goddamn asteroid. That’s my kind of crazy. Regardless of what they believe, they deserve a fighting chance.” Okoli gave a trekkie’s shrug, a simultaneous lift of both elbows. “Anyway, as I said, we win either way.”

  The Kharbage Can cast off its clamps and glided out of the asteroid’s shadow. Sunlight reflected off its forward radar dome, and limned the twin hab modules rotating like a propeller around the ship’s spine. The asteroid whirled back into day. Unfolding, the Can’s radiator fins momentarily eclipsed the sun.

  Yonezawa turned to Elfrida. “That all the luggage you brought?”

  ★

  Scrambling through the labyrinthine tunnels of the asteroid, Elfrida queued a comment for Yumiko to make when appropriate. “Quite some spin you’ve got on this thing!” As soon as they entered the asteroid, she had felt the spin gravity taking a confident grip on her suit. “How short is your day? I was getting whiplash out there.”

  “Present rotation period nineteen minutes forty-four seconds,” Yonezawa said. He had grown a little friendlier, but Elfrida suspected this meant his distrust of her had set in stone. Superficial friendliness was his way of dealing with it. “As you can imagine, the whole asteroid would’ve flown apart at this rotation speed, if it was still in the condition we found it. We’ve been spinning it up gradually over time, and at the same time reinforcing the splart bonds.”

  Sunlight stabbed through natural shafts, splintered into prismatic colors by multiple intervening layers of splart. This nanotic epoxy, the superglue of the space age, would stick anything to anything. Cheap and light, it was the asteroid squatter’s go-to containment fix. The colonists of 11073 Galapagos had made extremely liberal use of it. Thick, bubbled splart windows following the contours of rock crevices allowed Elfrida to peep into chambers full of vegetables. The plants looked healthy. The asteroid spun into its short night, and darkness enfolded them. Yonezawa and his companions switched on their helmet lamps.

  “Here we are. Do you know how to use an airlock?”

  “Wow,” Elfrida gasped, involuntarily. Yumiko muted her, for the phavatar had already uttered a timely compliment. Though realizing this, Elfrida couldn’t help vocalizing her wonderment, even if it was only for Yumiko’s ears. “This is incredible.”

  11073 Galapagos was the type of asteroid known as a rubble pile, the commonest in the solar system—and the hardest to detect, which explained why astronomers of the First Space Age had underestimated the number of asteroids out there by half. Rubble piles were mostly made of vacuum. When human beings squatted on them, they usually filled them with prefab habs tethered in spinning torus configurations. Sometimes they used metal liners to seal off a whole void. But the people of 11073 Galapagos had joined up its interior voids and sealed them off from space with nothing more than cheap, translucent splart.

  The result was a cylinder shaped like a segment of intestine, about one kilometer by three, lit by UV sun tubes suspended lengthwise along the asteroid’s spin axis. Elfrida and her escorts stood on an inwards protrusion like a bonsai mountain, among some of the biggest trees she had ever seen in space. Her olfactory sensors transmitted a rich piney scent.

  ~Japanese cedars, Yumiko informed her. ~Low-gee-adapted. Amazing! They look more like birches. Elfrida yanked her head around, disturbing Yumiko’s remote analysis of the foliage. She had seen something more interesting. ~Birds! she subvocalized. ~Those are real, live birds up there!

  ~Where? Oh God! I see them!

  But before Yumiko could zoom in on the birds and start analyzing those, Elfrida saw something even more amazing. She switched to maximum magnification, enabled a dark filter, and stared into the UV ‘sun.’ Beyond that glare, an upside-down cross on an upside-down steeple jutted into the ‘sky.’ Over there, on the far side of the cylinder, stood a church in a garden of sculpted shrubbery.

  Every other visible surface of the entire habitat was crowded—no, not merely crowded, but sushi-zume, packed like sushi in a box—with flimsy little houses.

  A sense of impending tragedy, all too familiar from previous missions, settled on her. These people were sitting on a metric shit-ton of recyclables.

  “Any questions?” Yonezawa said. He had removed his helmet, proving that the air was fine. His surprisingly young-looking Japanese face wore a smirk.

  “Yeah,” Yumiko said, taking the initiative. Elfrida felt her remove her own helmet. Long black hair, a frivolous gift from her designers, tumbled down. “I thought you guys spoke Japanese?”

  “Ee. Shaberimasu ga, gaikokujin muke ni wa daitai eigo to narimasu,” Yonezawa said, but he spoke in a distracted manner. He was staring at Yumiko’s face. His companions stared with equal intensity. Were they surprised to see that she, too, was Japanese? It wasn’t surprise, exactly, on their faces. More like … revulsion.

  “Oh, shit,” Yonezawa said. “You’re a robot.”

  v.

  ~SUIT COMMAND: Disable assistant.

  “I’m not a robot. I’m human.” She prayed they weren’t smashing Yumiko’s head in with rocks at this very instant. “This is a special kind of robot known as a phavatar.” How had they guessed? They weren’t supposed to guess. Geminoid phavatars usually fooled people. Yumiko was the ultimate geminoid: she even got goosebumps in the cold. But Elfrida didn’t have time to wonder what had gone wrong. “I’m operating the phavatar remotely. I can hear and see you. I can even smell the trees, and it also smells like something’s cooking nearby. Maybe tonkatsu? I wish I was there. But I’m not. I’m a long way away. So we can do this in real time, bypassing the phavatar’s MI functionality, but there’s going to be a thirty to forty-second lag before I can respond. Is that OK with you?”

  They were whispering fiercely to each other. All o
f them jumped when she spoke. They had drawn away from her to stand in a knot under the broomstick-shaped cedars. Behind them was a torii gate with the airlock splart-sealed into it. A spindly old man crawled between them on hands and knees, scraping up bird droppings and putting them in a baggie.

  “I know what a phavatar is,” Yonezawa said. “They’re used for telepresence. I’ve seen them in vids.”

  He approached her and scrutinized her face. His clear dark brown irises reminded her of her father. It wasn’t just the eyes. It was the self-possession, too inordinate to be the real thing, the brittle presence of a man with too few doubts.

  “Prove you’re human,” he challenged her.

  Elfrida’s mind went blank. This situation had never arisen before, even in training. “I don’t know. Ask me anything you like.”

  Yonezawa laughed. “All right. Date of birth, mother’s maiden name, the name of the first boy you ever kissed, and how about that penalty kick in the Luna versus Earth game?”

  Elfrida stumbled, “23 August 2259, she kept her own name—it’s Haller—Ivan from coding class, and I didn’t watch it. I don’t like sports.”

  That got through while a youth in glasses was delivering a rat-a-tat philippic against United Nations v. Google, the landmark case that had, imperfectly, defined the cut-off for machine intelligences. He broke off in surprise, and when she finished speaking they all laughed. This time it was genuine laughter.

  “No bot could fake that,” Yonezawa said. His certitude was out of date, but he didn’t know it. “OK, let’s go. This is going to be funny.”

  He and his five companions took off their spacesuits and stowed them in lockers near the torii gate. Out of the bulky suits, they had the frail, pigeon-chested frames of the spaceborn. Elfrida wondered why they weren’t taller. The average spaceborn adult stood a hair over two meters, but Yumiko could look all of these youths dead in the eye, and she was an Earth-standard 1.6 meters. She took off her own spacesuit and stowed it. One of them, a girl with a rash on her face, looked enviously at Yumiko’s shiny black hair and rounded limbs. “We can’t take her through town,” she said. “It’d upset people.”