The Galapagos Incident by Felix R. Savage

by Discover Sci-Fi Special Edition

  Dos Santos’s eyes shone with amusement. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said softly. “You’re a perfectly healthy young woman. Eat your sandwiches.”

  Elfrida’s heart thumped. Her appetite had vanished. She felt both elated and absurdly disappointed. She wanted to toss out a pitch-perfect, flirtatious comeback, but her brain was hazy with fatigue and Japanese. She tore off a crust and nibbled on it.

  “Sorry, Goto, I never got to the point regarding the uncanny valley hypothesis,” dos Santos burst out. “My guess is that your Galapajin are more sensitive than we are. They’re extremely isolated. This may well be the first time they’ve ever seen a high-end phavatar. Thus they detected nearly-imperceptible differences we simply overlook.”

  Elfrida swallowed. “Ma’am, I think that’s probably correct. They don’t have any cultural restrictions on media, and they do seem to use the internet freely, but they have this weird, jokey … disparaging attitude towards everything ‘outside,’ as they call it. It’s like they think the whole system is like that, on a vast scale.” She pointed at the frozen scene from dos Santos’s comedy vid on the viewport screen. Massive lips pursed to deliver a one-liner into someone’s hairy belly button.

  “My guilty secret. I’m a diehard rom-com fan,” dos Santos said, but it wasn’t a relapse into banter. She let the remark fall and then looked Elfrida in the eye. “11073 Galapagos is starting to sound like, for want of a more technical term, a very weird place. Do you feel up to talking about it right now? We don’t need to do a formal debrief. Just hit the highlights. That way you can sleep and go without coming into the office.”

  Elfrida nodded jerkily. “That’d be fine.”

  ★

  Once given permission, her impressions tumbled out in a chaotic flood. She told dos Santos about the confrontation on the asteroid’s surface and the descent into that cloacal urban habitat. She dwelt in remembered horror on the overcrowding, the almost universal vitamin and mineral deficiencies, and the symptoms of adrenal derangement she had observed in most of the adults and many of the children.

  “They have so many children.” To Elfrida’s shocked gaze, half the asteroid’s population had appeared to be prepubescent. “In 2201, a hundred and sixty-seven adults colonized the asteroid. A hundred and sixty-seven. What kind of a TFR do you need to get up into the tens of thousands in three generations?”

  “Back of the envelope,” dos Santos said, “about five per woman. Of course, we don’t know their death rate, so it could be more.”

  “Medieval. The whole place is this weird mix of the medieval and the modern. They’ve got a bioprinter and a diagnostic medibot. I guess machine intelligence is OK when you’re using it to save lives. They’re not stupid. And yet they’re still having these enormous families.”

  Holding up a monitory finger, dos Santos said, “That’s not necessarily backwards, Goto. There is a colonization scenario that calls for massive population expansion. It’s an unacceptably utilitarian concept, in my own view. The theories of the Baxterites, as they’re called, throw millions of human beings around like rounding errors. Ah, the whole thing is basically crackpot. But they do make one good point. Every baby that is born could be the next Galileo, the next Einstein, the next MacKinnon—hence, the more the better. If pre-birth genetic tinkering doesn’t work, go for the flukes.”

  “I don’t think the Galapajin are playing the sperm lottery in hopes of producing the next epoch-making genius,” Elfrida said. “They’re just religious.”

  “That’s always difficult,” dos Santos said neutrally.

  “Yes.”

  Elfrida was no stranger to the varieties of religious belief. She’d grown up in the New Holy Roman Empire, a backwater state on the Mediterranean where a thousand heresies and schismatic congregations flourished. Moreover, as a Space Corps agent, she had heard about or personally handled a whole spectrum of believers from chiliastic Baptists to sharia-compliant Muslims. The faith of the Galapajin felt more real to her than any of these, for an odd reason: they had demonstrated what seemed like magical powers in their immediate and universal recognition that Yumiko was not human.

  “I asked them how they came to be Catholic,” she recalled. “And they said, like I was stupid, ‘That’s why they threw us out of Japan.’ Apparently they were really extreme in those days.”

  “And now they’re what, semi-extreme?”

  “Well, you can talk to them.”

  She had done a lot of talking to Yonezawa, whose confrontational style had mellowed when he picked her up from Father Hirayanagi’s cottage. She suspected someone had ordered him to be nicer to the gaikokujin. At any rate, he’d answered her questions without any obvious evasions as he showed her around the cathedral. There had been no getting out of that. The cathedral was 11073 Galapagos’s showpiece, its raison d’etre. It sheared at an angle out of the narrow end of the asteroid like a figurehead knocked askew. Needle-sharp spires of varying heights, X-shaped in cross-section, flanked a central spherical dome. The edifice was an eerie synthesis of space-age geometry and medieval craftsmanship. Moreover, it had been built entirely with hand tools, an unimaginable labor of love in this day and age.

  “Wrong tense,” Elfrida caught herself. The cathedral was being built. Hundreds of laborers had been crawling over it when Yonezawa took her outside to have a look at the façade. They were carving statues and friezes that no unprotected human eye would ever see.

  “Must be beautiful,” dos Santos commented.

  Elfrida nodded. The cathedral was beautiful, sure. But it also housed tonnes of a substance more precious, in space, than gold.

  Wood.

  In pressurized, climate-controlled vaults, Yonezawa had shown her pews, altars, statues, and crucifixes carved from oak, walnut, teak, and cedar. He had bragged about the freight charges paid by his forebears to ship them from Japan into outer space. Little did he know he was sealing his own community’s fate. At the end of her mission, Elfrida would dump Yumiko’s sensor data into the station database, and she knew Kharbage, LLC would get their hands on it one way or another, whether or not UNVRP acquired the asteroid.

  “It’s not fair,” she said. “I hate that we’re in the business of destroying people’s lives.” She was very tired by now, emotions getting the best of her.

  “Whoa, whoa,” dos Santos said. “It’s early days yet.”

  “I know, and I’m trying to keep an open mind, but I don’t see any other alternative for them besides resettlement. Their health problems alone indicate that they’re on a Malthusian trajectory.” She paused. “And still, it doesn’t seem fair that we can wipe out three generations of creativity and labor with a bureaucratic decision.”

  “This is what I was concerned about,” dos Santos sighed. “Goto, answer me honestly: are you over-identifying with these people?”

  Elfrida searched her own heart, as well as she could when her heart’s deepest desire was to go to sleep. “No. Maybe. I don’t think so. There are so many unique factors.”

  And she hadn’t even mentioned the biggest unique factor of all, the one that really had her worried.

  Dos Santos laughed at her non-answer. “At least you’re being honest.”

  But she wasn’t.

  ★

  Sexually charged dreams disturbed her sleep. Vivid dreams were a known side effect of telecasting, but these nightmares went beyond the usual anxiety and disorientation scenarios. Dos Santos featured in them. So did Yonezawa, oddly enough. And so did Yumiko.

  ~Turn me on, the avatar said. Its lips were wet pink petals. ~You know you want to.

  She woke tangled in her blanket, with the sickening certainty she’d overslept. She blinked. No heads-up clock display appeared in the corner of her eye. She didn’t have her contacts in. She lunged at the wall display.

  “Oh my freaking God.”

  Only an hour late, not as bad as she’d feared, but still: seriously unprofessional. She bolted towards the telepresence center. In the corridor s
he met Jim Hardy, a fellow Space Corps agent whose ludicrously right-stuff name belied his perma-grouch personality. “Was it you who used all the hot water?”

  “Yes. Sorry, Hardy. I’m late. I’ve got to go.”

  “Not so fast. If you were that late getting back, you won’t have had breakfast yet.”

  “I’ll be fine with the glucose drip. Seriously—”

  “Have this.” He took a breakfast bar from the pocket of his coverall. “Better than nothing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “’Course. Plenty more where that came from.” Hardy rolled his eyes. Even he was not above mocking the breakfast bars. The last shipment had included only two of the least-loved flavors, known on station as Lemon Styrofoam and Cramp-Berry.

  “Thanks,” Elfrida said. “I might not be coming into the office for a while. Tell everyone hi.”

  She ducked into her cubicle, warmed by the thought that Hardy wasn’t so bad, after all. He was a pureblood Anglo, but that didn’t automatically make him an arrogant asshole. She wolfed the bar, gargled with the special mouth rinse that helped the suit’s taste receptors to function, and put on the headset.

  vii.

  ~You’re back! I was getting worried about you.

  ~WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

  In a cataract of sensory input, Elfrida’s worst fears were confirmed. Yumiko had switched herself back on, and she was operating independently. She had set up shop in the 11073 Galapagos hospital, where she was administering basic medical tests. A queue of ebullient Galapajin school-children jinked out the door.

  When Elfrida logged off last night, she’d left the phavatar crumpled in a corner of the graveyard at St. Peter’s, her junkie posture chosen to make her look like just a piece of machinery.

  Now Yumiko was up and about, despite the fact that Elfrida had specifically disabled her.

  ~I’m administering surveys and basic medical scans to volunteers, Yumiko said.

  ~I can see that! I didn’t authorize you to proceed without me!

  ~When you didn’t log on at the scheduled time, I elected to commence the quantitative portion of the assessment. This is what I’m good at, after all. There was a wry twist to those last words, but it did not mollify Elfrida.

  ~SUIT COMMAND: Disable assistant.

  “Hello, cutie.” The little girl who stood in front of her—who had, anyway, been standing in front of her ten seconds ago—wore stabilizer braces on her arms and legs, a folk remedy popular among asteroid dwellers. The braces had built-in gyroscopes that created resistance, supposedly simulating the effects of Earth gravity. The child had decorated the braces with holographic stickers of cats and dogs, animals that she could never have seen in real life. “This won’t hurt, I promise. You might feel a sort of tingling.”

  She’d begun to get suspicious of Yumiko yesterday. During their tour of the cathedral, she’d had a growing feeling that the DISABLE command wasn’t doing what it said on the box. Not that Yumiko had actually intruded on her. The assistant was too clever for that. Instead, the phavatar had offered up unasked-for nuggets of information gleaned from its scans and databanks.

  ~Estimated person-hours expended on the construction of the cathedral to date: 10.2 million. Architectural debt to other ecclesiastical buildings in the solar system (see attached images of Sagrada Familia, Hagia Sophia, Saint Basil’s in Moscow, and Notre Dame de la Lune): on the order of inspiration rather than imitation. Potential revenues from virtual tourism …

  At that point Elfrida had subvocalized, ~Are you trying to sell me on this place?

  Silence had been the only response. But she had become convinced Yumiko was watching and listening to her every move.

  She carried on with the medical survey Yumiko had started, noting that the results so far confirmed her suspicion of widespread vitamin D, K, and B12 deficiencies. The Galapajin were de facto vegetarians, obtaining minimal protein from backyard chickens and the gengineered carp swimming in their hydroponic rice paddies. Their diet was a recipe for childhood stunting and low skeletal density. Those factors in turn compounded the symptoms so common among asteroid dwellers that they were dubbed Spaceborn Syndrome: poor circulation, increased likelihood of bone fractures, limited aerobic capacity due to the organs seating themselves too high in the abdominal cavity, cramping the lungs … the list went on, and Elfrida found it harder and harder to smile at the chirpy senseis bringing their young charges in for her inspection.

  “They’ve got it a lot better than we did when I was a kid,” Yonezawa said. In his capacity as her minder, he was parked at her elbow, snacking on roasted pumpkin seeds. His Kalashnikov rested under his chair. “We had to wear those stabilizer braces twenty-four hours a day. Now that we’ve spun up to point eight gees at the circumference, the kids only have to wear the braces at home.”

  “That’s still not ideal,” Elfrida said.

  “Come on. Point eight, point seven. Better than Luna.”

  “That’s what every colonist says,” Elfrida returned wearily. “‘Well, at least we’ve got better gravity than Luna.’ Unfortunately, you don’t have centrifuges for physical therapy sessions.”

  Yonezawa flushed. “You’ve already made up your mind about us. What’s the point? I’m meant to take you to see the school and the creche. We’ll go, anyway, when you’re done here.”

  Elfrida had already cursed her thoughtless remark. She tried to walk it back with a bit of flattery. “You’ve actually got better gravity than eighty percent of similarly sized asteroids.” The phavatar had offered this statistic for her information just seconds ago.

  Yonezawa preened, and Elfrida opened up communication with Yumiko. ~You’re doing this, aren’t you?

  ~Doing what? came the assistant’s sweet, breathy voice, fifteen seconds later.

  ~Feeding me databites that bizarrely support the viability of this rock. The suit’s not that smart on its own.

  ~All right. I cannot tell a lie. I’m doing it.

  ~Stop it.

  ~I’m concerned you may be overcompensating for your own ethnic sympathies. I’m trying to help you get an objective, balanced picture.

  Rage bled into Elfrida’s subvocalization. ~You’re not my therapist.

  ~Nothing to do with you. The assistant’s voice was suddenly cool. ~My professional reputation’s on the line, too.

  On her couch in Botticelli Station, Elfrida tensed. The machine intelligence was skirting very near to hostility. It had also revealed its own agenda. Yumiko was against resettlement.

  ~SUIT COMMAND: Disable assistant.

  But this time Elfrida was under no illusion that ‘disabled’ meant switched off. If Yumiko now remained silent, it was only because she thought that would serve her aims better than continuing their argument.

  While Yonezawa dragged her around the school and creche, Elfrida reviewed Yumiko’s sensor data from the hour before she’d logged in. The assistant had simulated her skillfully, even to sharing anecdotes from Elfrida’s past which it had wormed out of her during the voyage. Elfrida felt violated. Her thoughts churned. Just how smart was this supposedly-inhibited machine intelligence? Should she report its disobedience? Or was its ‘disobedience’ a feature, not a bug, which she’d have known about if she’d read the manual more thoroughly? Memo to self: review every freaking word of the stross-class specifications.

  Emergent hostile behavior was theoretically possible, but Elfrida found it hard to believe the machine-intelligence whizzes on Luna would have let that kind of risk get off the drawing board, let alone into production.

  So whatever Yumiko was up to, it was something she had been designed for. Or rather, tasked with.

  My professional reputation’s on the line, too.

  The machine intelligence was independently taking orders from someone, somewhere. But who?

  “Itsukushimi fukaki, tomo naru Iesu wa,” sang the schoolchildren of 11073 Galapagos, lined up like a mass choir in white coveralls, on a playing field of green rubber, and Elfr
ida twitched.

  “We used to sing this when I was a kid.” But not in Vienna or Rome or any of the other places she’d lived with her parents. She had sung this Japanese translation of “What a Friend We Have In Jesus” at school assemblies in her immersion lessons.

  “See?” Yonezawa said. “Japan was always Christian.”

  Much as Elfrida wanted to avoid further clashes with him, she could not let this incredible statement stand. “Don’t you know that Christianity was banned during the Edo era, and …”

  But he was still talking. “St. Francis Xavier came to Japan in 1549. He and his companions made thousands of converts. Tens of thousands! Many Japanese were ordained as priests. They couldn’t kill all of them! That community survived in secret for hundreds of years. They were known as the kakure Kirishitans, hidden Christians.” He smiled. “We’re like the kakure Kirishitans of the solar system.”

  “… banned during the Edo era,” Elfrida chirped.

  “And banned again in 2198,” he shot back. “Which was why we left. When were you last there?”

  Elfrida winced, realizing her error. “Yo no tomo warera o sutesaru toki mo,” the children sang. Do thy friends despise, forsake thee? “I never was there,” she admitted. “I only know about Japan from immersion lessons. Uh, they were set in 2015.”

  “Oh,” Yonezawa said when he heard this. “I get it. Japan was still Christian then. You see, the prayers of the kakure Kirishitans converted the whole nation, in their hearts. That’s why Japan was the only pacifist nation on earth for an entire century.”

  Correct me if I’m wrong, Elfrida thought, but didn’t that have something to do with the Second World War? She held her tongue, however. You didn’t argue with fanatics.

  “Then,” Yonezawa continued, “in the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, the country went to hell. The robots took over.” He eyed her with a skeptical, mocking gaze. “Fuji-san was a divine punishment for that sin, like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.” As incredible as that statement was, he hadn’t finished yet. “If screwing another man is bad, how bad is it to screw a freaking robot? Ask the single guys of Tokyo. If you know how to talk to ghosts.” He walked away.