InterstellarNet- Enigma

by Edward M. Lerner

  “Why keep asking for your okay? So you won’t suspect they already have the tech?”

  “That’s my guess.” As he guessed that Glithwah knew he would turn her down. Given Ariel’s ongoing labor shortage, not to have asked for such useful tech might also have made him suspicious. So who lied to him? The wily Snake, or the wily Snake AI?

  Danica netted, “Suppose the locals did obtain Boater robotics. We’re talking designs, nothing physical. Sure, the Snakes could smuggle the banned designs to this world. But why? You’d see if the Snakes built a new, modern factory. Which, I assume, you haven’t seen.”

  “You’re right,” he conceded. “I gather that in your poking around, you haven’t, either.”

  “Nope. So maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree. Maybe the Snakes are working a different scam.”

  “Maybe.” Or maybe, as whenever he sat down to b’tok with Glithwah, he was several moves behind.

  CHAPTER 19

  Amid the grove of miniature pines in the settlement’s lone terrestrial park, Carl caught up with Corinne. Full access to the settlement’s security cameras helped.

  “Hey, stranger,” he said. “Busy, I see.”

  “Hey, yourself.” She kept glancing at the ceiling, at the unconvincing sky simulation he had, over the years, trained himself to ignore. Her left hand clutched a pinecone. With her right hand, scale by scale, she was picking apart the cone. “You’re looking well.”

  “I look like someone’s grandfather, but thanks for making the effort.”

  He didn’t remember her as a fidgeter. Of course, he hadn’t seen her in … five years. People changed. Witness that she hadn’t radioed that she was coming. It made him sad.

  “How’s your better half?” he asked.

  “Fine, thanks,” Corinne said. “Though Denise is less than thrilled at me jaunting three billion klicks from home.”

  “Can you blame her?” But that sounded judgmental, as though he wasn’t happy to see Corinne. He changed subjects. “I met Grace. She seems nice.”

  “Nice enough.” Corinne shrugged. “Just a temp. My regular pilot caught a bug. I was lucky to find someone on short notice open to making the trek to Uranus. ‘Maybe just this once,’ Grace told me. Truth be told, her chief motivation seems to be bringing home a Banak. Without middlemen, without shipping costs, she ought to turn a tidy profit.”

  “This rock isn’t a big tourist attraction,” Carl agreed. As for Dolmar Banak’s work, no matter how trendy the sculptures might have become in-system, they did nothing for Carl. Any Snake art was odd enough. As for Snake impressionism—

  His implant pinged, sparing them both his impersonation of an art critic. He said, “Work calls. Give me a minute.” Expecting within that minute to be offering his excuses—because the ping was cosmic ultra.

  “It’s about time you made contact,” said the avatar that appeared on the link. “I couldn’t risk being seen to be looking for you.”

  It was Corinne.

  • • • •

  “It’s complicated,” the avatar netted. It wore the battered captain’s hat he had favored back when he had worked for her. Odyssey’s familiar, cluttered bridge provided the backdrop.

  Only this couldn’t be Corinne. He wondered what game Danica was playing.

  “Life is complicated,” he netted back. Aloud, gesturing at a park bench, he said, “Why don’t we sit?”

  Corinne tossed aside the tortured pinecone. Glancing around, admiring the park, she sat. “Reminds me of Nottingham. Ever been there?”

  Nottingham? As in the Sheriff of? He couldn’t imagine any resemblance, not unless Sherwood Forest had been reduced to a dozen trees.

  Whoever it was on the link netted, “You don’t believe I’m me, despite the encryption.”

  He didn’t know what to think. Cosmic ultra crypto was seriously compute-intensive. To handle the load, a neural implant needed a major upgrade, and it did not suffice to know the top-secret algorithms. You had to get the code across the blood-brain barrier, then splice it, just so, into the implant. Accomplishing that required a fancy designer microbe, combining Snake microbiology with a terrestrial retrovirus. And lest, somehow, the tech get stolen—or recovered from a dead agent’s brain—the transporter microbe incorporated elements of viral meningitis. Take the microbe without a dose of the matching, tightly controlled vaccine, and you died. Quickly. And badly.

  “Convince me,” he answered.

  “I have a message for you,” the avatar netted. “From someone I hope you will believe.”

  The Corinne avatar receded, its Odyssey bridge backdrop with it, to a corner of the consensual meeting space. In their place: an iridescent sphere afloat in a featureless mist. A padlock icon showed the sphere to be spinning—and also a recording secured with cosmic ultra encryption.

  “Ir am Robyn Tanaka Astor,” the message began.

  The pronoun. The avatar, devoid of personality. Both suggested an Augmented. (Not that he’d ever known one. The tech had yet to be invented when he had first hidden himself away on Ariel.) The voice, without emotion, without a trace of gender, pointed to the AI component as dominant when the recording was made. And Robyn Tanaka, secretary-general of the Interstellar Commerce Union, was among the senior UP officials apt to have cosmic ultra clearance. Within the ICU, perhaps even the only one.

  Nottingham, Corinne had said. Nottingham. Sherwood Forest. Robin Hood. Robyn Tanaka. He could connect the dots. But what could the ICU want with him?

  “The United Planets faces a serious challenge,” the sphere continued. “Security, at the highest levels, has been compromised. Ir cannot go through normal channels. Corinne is among the few outsiders enlisted to help. She nominated you as another. Ir hope you will accept, because worlds are in peril.”

  Left unstated: giving cosmic ultra access to Corinne was itself a security breach at the highest level. That Tanaka Astor had been entrusted with this technology didn’t give her the right to pass it along. That she had, somehow, so equipped Corinne signaled a scary amount of reverse engineering, or an unsuspected vulnerability within the cosmic ultra implant tech, or both.

  If he reported this, someone would go to prison for a long time. If he kept it to himself, he might end up in prison. But what if this undefined threat was for real?

  The sphere faded. Corinne’s avatar expanded to reclaim the entire consensual meeting space. “Just from me having high-level codes, you know I’ve made a friend in high places, whether or not you believe that friend is Robyn. So, where can we talk?”

  His office? Get Corinne inside that shielded room and he would know at once whether she was the one on the secure link. But to have Corinne in “the warden’s” office would not be keeping their encounter casual.

  His ship, then? It, too, was well shielded. He just needed a pretext.

  Carl netted, “Ask me about the rash of accidents in Snake industrial facilities.”

  “I was wondering,” Corinne said aloud, “about this rash of industrial accidents. The Foremost doesn’t care to volunteer much. Can you tell me anything?”

  “Better than that. I was going to fly out tomorrow to see for myself what’s left of the old deuterium refinery.” Halfway around this little world. “Care to ride with me?”

  “That’d be great,” she said, standing.

  “Thanks,” her avatar added with a wink. And dropped the link.

  • • • •

  Carl radioed the tower to report an air-recirc fan had died and needed swapping out. Traffic Control bumped his shuttle to the end of the line for takeoff. As he sifted through hand tools in a drawer, he got a ping. Cosmic ultra.

  “I imagine that little charade was for me,” the avatar netted. Corinne.

  “Now I know it is you.” He closed the drawer and sat. “We’re secure here to just speak. I figure we have fifteen minutes or so before anyone checks on us. Use them wisely.”

  She unbelted from her crash couch, stood, and stretched. She was short enoug
h to manage despite the shuttle’s cramped cockpit. “This will take a few minutes to explain. You won’t want to believe it. Neither did Robyn, at first.”

  “Why don’t you begin at the beginning?”

  “That’s a half billion years ago.”

  “Talk fast, then,” he suggested.

  She laughed. “Here’s the deal. Half a billion or so years ago, very quickly, life on Earth changed. Whole new phyla of life appeared. Pretty much every sort of animal life more complex than a bacterial colony. Paleontologists call that period the Cambrian Explosion.”

  “Not an obviously existential threat to the present world order,” he said.

  “Maybe not, but a bunch of worlds had similar experiences at around the same time.” She waved off his objection. “Coincidence? Hard to swallow, even if that were the only eleven-of-a-kind concurrence. It’s not.” She rattled off others. “And if the known intelligent species—native to worlds differing in age by billions of years—hadn’t all developed high-tech within a few years of one another. And if—”

  “You mean the InterstellarNet members,” he got in.

  “Yeah.” Rummaging beneath the copilot console in a tiny corner locker, she found a drink bulb of water. “Eleven species close together, in a galaxy that’s otherwise silent. Quite the twist of fate—if it is. We call it the Matthews conundrum. And if …”

  Carl let the words wash over him. He could scarcely grasp the broad outlines, much less pore over the timelines and data files Corinne transferred as she spoke. So what did he think? That he sought out conspiracy for a living. But a conspiracy dating back to the Cambrian era? Seriously?

  When he objected, Corinne said, “We think they have the technology to slow the passage of time. Slow it way down.”

  He just looked at her.

  “That’s another long story,” she said.

  Time they didn’t have, if he planned to keep up appearances and take off soon. Something had to wait, and magic tech to slow time seemed like a good candidate.

  “Talk to me.” With stiffened fingers, Corinne jabbed his shoulder. “You look, shall we say, less than convinced.”

  “I’ll say this for your bad guy. He’s persistent. A half-billion years after conspiring with the trilobites, he’s whispering in Mary Shelley’s ear as she writes Frankenstein. And to some Czech playwright, as he writes about robots.” Carl ended on a rising inflection, not remembering much about the play. He was pretty sure, though, that it ended with the robots rebelling against their human masters.

  Corinne nodded. “R.U.R. Standing for Rossum’s Universal Robots. And Karel Čapek didn’t just write a play about robots, he invented the word. The thing is …”

  “There’s more?”

  “Yeah. Literature like Frankenstein and R.U.R. crops up across InterstellarNet species. And everywhere the effect is the same. Whole lines of scientific inquiry were rendered untenable, at the least delayed, for many years.”

  Uh-huh. Maybe anxiety over new technology was normal. Maybe stories in which everything went smoothly didn’t catch on. But if he turned around Corinne’s suspicions ….

  “Okay,” he said. “Suppose that selected research was discouraged. How many lines of investigation got encouraged?”

  “Huh.” She gave him a sideways look. “No one has asked that question. See, this is why we need you.”

  Carl’s console display showed they had been talking for about ten minutes. He called the tower. “Tempest, here. My fan problem is fixed.”

  “Roger that, Tempest,” Traffic Control radioed back. “We’ll have you on your way in a few minutes.”

  Corinne plopped back into her crash couch and buckled up. “Which part is hardest to swallow?”

  “We’re talking about aliens, right? Only not any we know. Someone from waaaaay back. Impossibly far back.” She didn’t comment so he plowed ahead. “What am I supposed to believe? That the aliens look like us? That they have robots or androids or whatever that do? Or that human agents serve these aliens for reasons we don’t yet know?”

  “Something like that. Pick one.”

  “Secret, starfaring aliens.”

  “Robyn named them the Interveners,” Corinne said. “And I don’t see starships as a big obstacle to belief. We have starships. As do the Centaurs.”

  As would the Snakes—instead, in fact, of humanity—if the hijacked Centaur ship hadn’t been wrested away from them.

  Helping to retake Victorious was one of the few true accomplishments in Carl’s messy, muddled life. Not so much destroying the starship in the process. That was the stuff of nightmares. His other recurring nightmare was that the Snakes secretly had another starship under construction. They had had control of Victorious for decades. What if they had learned enough to copy it?

  Awake, he told himself no one could hide an undertaking of that magnitude. Not even someone as devious as Glithwah.

  “You okay, Carl?”

  “Yeah.” He could worry any time about the Snakes. “So why, exactly, would these Interveners do all this?” If they even exist. Her evidence, such as it was, seemed entirely circumstantial.

  “Haven’t a clue.” Corinne sighed. “Robyn hasn’t a clue. Neither half of her. Well, she believes Frankenstein and the like were intended to discourage tech developments, but she hasn’t a guess why. As for the larger questions—why influence us at all, why interventions vary by solar system, why the meddling began so long ago—she’s as in the dark as me.”

  Traffic Control interrupted. “Tempest, you’re next up for takeoff.”

  “Roger that.” Carl gave his console a final look-over. He radioed back, “Ready when you are, tower.”

  “One other thing …,” Corinne said.

  Nothing good, he guessed. “And that is?”

  “Bad stuff happens to people who come too close to seeing the pattern. They disappear, suffer odd ‘accidents,’ have unexpected things befall them.” She netted yet another file, and his quick skim turned up names in the ICU and the UP Secretariat. “I got into this mess by investigating an historian’s strange disappearance.”

  Mess was an understatement. “Any more good cheer to share?”

  “That’s it.” Corinne flashed a wan smile. “So, are you in?”

  “To do what, now?”

  “What you can. What’s necessary. In your line of work, you’ll know better than I what that might be.”

  The tower radioed again, clearing Tempest for immediate take-off. It was a relief to turn his attention to ship’s instruments, to concentrate on the pitted and fractured landscape racing past a few klicks below. Flying over one of Ariel’s sinuous canyons, hundreds of klicks long and in places ten deep, even the largest crater seemed puny.

  How much punier, mere humans?

  Was he in? And what would being in mean? Apart, by failing to report the compromise of cosmic ultra tech, from being in league with traitors. Apart from, at least technically, becoming a traitor himself.

  It all boiled down to Corinne. Was she insane, a traitor, or every bit as savvy and honest as he had always believed?

  It wasn’t even a contest.

  He told her, “I’m in.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Caliban (moon): a small outer satellite of Uranus, discovered in 1997. Caliban’s irregular orbit—both retrograde and dramatically tipped from the planet’s equatorial plane—suggests a captured asteroid rather than a moon that formed with the planet. Caliban’s composition (as a codiscoverer had predicted, “A plum-pudding mixture of rocks and ice”) and reddish hue imply an origin in the Kuiper Belt. Like most Uranian moons, this one is named for a character in the play The Tempest. Shakespeare’s Caliban was the brutal and misshapen slave of the sorcerer Prospero.

  Caliban’s small size (80 kilometers in diameter), remoteness (mean orbital radius of 7.3 million kilometers) and irregular orbit render it unattractive for commercial exploitation. This tiny world has seldom been visited and remains unsettled.

  —Int
ernetopedia

  • • • •

  With hand and claw, tentacle and pincer, the warriors fought. Grappling, they smashed and slashed and tore out entrails. They struggled and they died. A short distance away, across a dim and rocky plain, others dueled with laser rifles and projectile weapons, shock devices and grenades.

  Boaters designed their robotics for industry, not infantry. Re-optimizing for combat required testing and time.

  Over the theretofore silent mind’s-eye video, the narration began. “Progress substantial, faster than my forecast.”

  No matter the voiceover’s redundancy, Glithwah found pleasure in that summation.

  Each communication entailed a risk, however small, of interception. Encryption might safeguard content, but the UPIA had only to back-track an incoming message to uncover Caliban base. And so, besides robustly encrypted, reports were infrequent, sent at low power, and relayed through a string of scattered, stealthed comm buoys, those also few and far between.

  As Pimal narrated, the visuals continued to speak for themselves. Combat robots, several octets of them, undergoing their final field trials. Weapons, of every sort from personal arms to MIRVed rockets. Secret factories humming, the Boater robotic designs instantly productive for that purpose. A deuterium refinery operating at full capacity. Vessels of the clan’s reconstituted navy—the scoop ships reported lost and several of the captured vessels—armed, armored, and made stealthy. All concealed within roofed-over craters on the remote moon.

  Over a reprise of robot duels, Rashk Pimal concluded, “Combat competitions informative. Finalization imminent of combat chassis design.”

  Though this was all welcome news, Glithwah permitted herself a moment of envy. Day after day, year after year, she was the clan’s public face. She cooperated with her jailors. Projected contrition. Exhibited patience. Feigned assimilation. Was seen to enforce the UP’s onerous rules. Complained only enough to maintain credibility, to allay suspicions—

  All the while—in the privacy of her head, and with the anonymity only possible in the infosphere—planning and conspiring.