The Machine Awakes

by Adam Christopher

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  For Sandra

  Acknowledgments

  My heartfelt thanks to everyone who helped with this book, in particular my editor at Tor, Paul Stevens, and my agent, Stacia J. N. Decker of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. My thanks also to Ardi Alspatch, Patty Garcia, and Irene Gallo at Tor, Natalie Laverick, and Ella Bowman at Titan, and to Will Staehle.

  And to my wife, Sandra, without whom I really couldn’t do any of this. Thank you! You are, quite simply, the greatest.

  GOD IS A NUMBER

  “Goddamn it, I’m good!”

  Chief Mining Engineer Ramin Klaus clicked his tongue and sat back in his chair. Stretching his arms, he interlocked his fingers behind his head and gave the planetary projection in front of him a satisfied nod. Pay dirt. Big time.

  Around him, the usual quiet efficiency that characterized the huge circular control room of the Jovian Mining Corporation’s refinery was broken by a smattering of applause and even an enthusiastic whistle. Two dozen mining engineers, clad in the high-collared magenta uniforms of JMC technical crew, were seated around the planetary projection in two long, curving, semicircular consoles. In the center of the minimal, white chamber was the planetary projection of Jupiter itself, a photoreal holographic sphere, ten meters across and filling the control room with swirling orange and red light.

  Klaus accepted the congratulations of his colleagues as he watched the slowly rotating bands of Jupiter’s atmosphere. Jupiter’s rich, rich atmosphere. Holy crap, the bonus on this storm alone was going to be enough to pay off his indentured contract with the JMC. Klaus clicked his tongue again and let his sprung chair push him forward as he reached for his keyboard. A few taps later and the storm—a bluish oval a quarter the size of Jupiter’s famous red spot, slowly sliding clockwise around the planet’s upper latitudes—was outlined on the projection with a yellow computer overlay. Another tap, and a series of red lines were drawn—vectors from a scattering of bright green triangular icons that were spread out across the side of the planet facing Klaus’s console. Klaus sat in the center of his row; on either side, the other engineers got back to work, murmuring into their comms as they studied their own holodisplays floating above each station.

  Storm identified, vectors plotted, it was time to get to work. Klaus tapped at his controls, and hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, fifty of the largest robotic mining platforms—the Sigmas—changed course.

  The JMC refinery floated in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, at a zone where the external pressure was more or less Earth-normal, and the atmosphere, while still turbulent, was much more stable than the deeper levels. The Sigmas, each a factory bigger than the city-sized refinery itself, floated at varying depths according to need, their fully autonomous AIs programmed to search for and extract the richest belts of gas, processing the valuable product and sending it in solid, frozen shipments up to the refinery by automated cargo drone. At the refinery, the gas was further processed, the more exotic trace elements separated, and the product shipped out to the miniature planetary system of Jupiter’s moons. There, safely out of the Jovian atmosphere, the JMC ran one of the biggest logistics operations in Fleetspace, packaging the product for sale to their primary customer: the Fleet.

  Seated on Klaus’s left, junior engineer Parker frowned, his hand held against the side of his head as he listened to something on his comms.

  Klaus turned in his chair toward his colleague. “Everything okay?”

  Parker nodded, but the frown remained plastered to his face. “Yes, sir … just…” He tapped at his console and squinted at his holodisplay. “Just an echo off of something. Sigmas Five and Forty are bouncing a transmission between each other.”

  Klaus shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. This the first time you’ve been storm chasing?”

  Parker’s frown melted into a smile. Good lad, thought Klaus. The young man was no doubt thinking about his storm bonus. As they all should be.

  “Right,” said Klaus. He pointed to the planetary projection, to the green icons representing the Sigma mines as they slowly tracked toward the new storm. “The mines will coordinate between themselves for maximum efficiency. Storm like this, don’t be surprised if you hear all kinds of chatter from them. They might even reconfigure their superstructures for maximum extraction.”

  “Eavesdropping on the mines again?”

  Klaus and Parker both turned in their chairs, looking up to the high, railed gallery that ringed the control center. There a man leaned on the railing, looking down on the control center. “I’m not sure they like that, mister.” Then he grinned broadly.

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, sir,” said Klaus. He glanced sideways at Parker, who visibly gulped, then turned back to his station. Klaus laughed and looked back up at his boss. “All under control.”

  “Glad to hear it,” said the refinery controller. “Send me a full storm projection for review, will you?”

  “That’s an affirmative, sir.”

  The executive tapped the gallery rail with the large ring on his right hand, the sound echoing across the control chamber. The gallery was dark—intentionally so, allowing visitors to observe the workings of the refinery control center without disturbing the engineers—but the exec was lit up in the reds and yellows of the huge Jupiter projection, his teeth and eyes glinting as he nodded. He tapped the rail with his ring again, then turned and vanished into the shadows.

  Klaus spun his chair around. “Okay,” he said, addressing everyone seated around the room. “You heard the boss. I want a full storm projection. Duration, yields, profit margins, the works. Get to it, folks.”

  There was a murmur of acknowledgment from around the room as the engineers hunched over their stations, compiling the individual reports that Klaus would then check and assemble into a single document for the refinery controller.

  Next to him, Parker pursed his lips.

  Klaus raised an eyebrow. “Yes, Mr. Parker?”

  “Are the mines okay?” he asked. He pulled at the earpiece in his left ear. “There seems to be a lot of something going on.”

  Klaus shook his head. “That’s normal, engineer, like I said. Turn off your comms, and pull up your projects for the executive report.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As Parker turned back to his console, Klaus allowed himself a small smile. Ah, was he ever as young as that? Maybe he had been. He couldn’t really remember. And maybe one day young Parker would be in his chair, as chief mining engineer on a JMC refinery.

  But, in the meantime, they had a storm to catch.

  * * *

  An hour later, the chief engineer stood in front of the controller’s desk in th
e plush management office. Like the rest of the refinery, the décor was in corporate colors—all muted purples and white—but Klaus had to admit that he didn’t really like it. There was a clinical, almost medical atmosphere in the office.

  Which, if he was honest, befitted its occupant.

  His boss sat behind a smoked glass desk, dressed in the same magenta as the engineers. But instead of the pseudo-military tunic of the workers, his suit was an elegant designer piece, with a crisp high-buttoned shirt of the same color beneath the jacket. His steel gray hair, brushed back into a high pompadour, matched his eyes, which were small and hard. True, he was pleasant enough, but he represented a class of company employee existing in the rarified echelons of the JMC board that Klaus couldn’t really identify with. As the executive tapped at his datapad, Klaus saw he was wearing cufflinks studded with red gems as big as his thumbnail. Klaus might have had a comfortable job in the controlled environment of the JMC refinery today, but he was a starminer through and through. He’d started his career digging herculanium ore out of slowrocks with nothing but a plasma pick, his thin spacesuit the only protection from the vacuum of space as he worked on one airless, low-gravity asteroid after another. But while his JMC boss knew his stuff, Klaus couldn’t really picture him in the cramped confines of a mining ship, studying stellar mineralogy charts, plotting his course from one belt to the next.

  Of course, that life was so long ago for Klaus that he couldn’t even remember when he’d won the position at the JMC. Must have been, oh—

  “Hmm.”

  The executive frowned, drawing a manicured finger over his top lip as he studied the report. Neither of them had spoken for some minutes. Klaus, snapping out of his reverie, rubbed the skin under one eye as he returned his thoughts to the problem at hand, running some possible explanations—and solutions—through his mind.

  It seemed that Parker had been right. Two of the Sigma platforms were bouncing a signal between them, but after running diagnostics, Parker found that neither mine was acknowledging the other. Parker, on his own initiative, had drilled deeper into the status logs and discovered that the data stream from Sigmas Five and Forty—coincidentally, two of the very deepest of the Jovian gas mines—had been choppy for three cycles now. That wasn’t necessarily a problem, or even unexpected, Klaus knew that. As he had explained to Parker, so far down in Jupiter’s cloud deck conditions were difficult, to say the least. Besides the colossal atmospheric pressure and temperature—not to mention the frankly insane meteorology—there was electromagnetic radiation. A boatload of it, generated by electrical activity in the very storms the robotic platforms were supposed to mine.

  And sure, the platforms were shielded and the communications network that linked the robots together, and the refinery to the robots, had enough automatic error correction to compensate. But this storm? Well, it was something special, a once-in-a-lifetime event that had brewed deep in the soupy layers of the planet before rising to the surface. The level of data loss was huge, although the JMC’s central AI hadn’t flagged it, content instead to let the mines—each an extension of the JMC AI anyway—get on with their jobs. Each giant mine was designed not only to overcome any routine problem on its own, but even to devise new techniques and methods, designing its own improved platform systems and using its factories to reconfigure their very own structures. Sometimes when a Sigma mine was later inspected by engineers, it bore little resemblance to the original design spec.

  The controller flipped through a few more pages on his datapad. “Fascinating,” he muttered, but he didn’t look up. Klaus wondered whether he should answer, or whether his boss was talking to himself.

  Klaus cleared his throat. There was something else about the signal bouncing between the Sigmas that he really needed to get an executive decision on.

  “Strictly speaking, it’s not outside normal operating parameters, but—”

  “This is quite a storm, Mr. Klaus.”

  Klaus paused. He nodded. “That it most certainly is, sir.”

  The executive flipped through some more pages, nodding to himself. “Helium-3, tibanna, oxozone. Not to mention five percent vertrexan and zero-point-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-five percent lucanol.” He dropped the datapad onto his desk with a clatter and looked up at his chief engineer as he reclined in his chair. “Good work, Mr. Klaus. It’s going to be a bumper payday for all of us.”

  Klaus gave a small bow. “Well, I hope so, sir.”

  “You hope?”

  Klaus gestured to the datapad. “The behavior of Sigma mines Five and Forty, sir. We’ve run the signal they’re bouncing to each other, but it’s not a diagnostic code. To be honest, I’m not sure what it is. I’ve worked on these platforms nearly forty years and in all that time I’ve never—”

  “Don’t worry about the Sigma mines, engineer,” said the controller. He steepled his fingers and looked at Klaus with narrow gray eyes. “They can look after themselves.”

  Klaus frowned, and locked his hands behind his back. “Well, sir, we can continue with the extraction, but I’d like to take Five and Forty offline for inspection. They’re about due anyway.”

  The executive rolled his chair closer to his desk and leaned his elbows on the glass top. “Postpone that inspection, Chief. I want full extraction on this storm. I don’t want a single molecule of lucanol to be missed. Understood?”

  “If we take the two platforms out, we’ve still got forty-eight converging on the storm. There should be no impact on extraction.”

  “And there certainly won’t be if all fifty are chasing it. Proceed as normal, engineer.”

  With that, the refinery controller picked up his datapad and began reading something else. The chief engineer’s audience was over.

  Klaus gave another small bow. “As you wish, sir,” he said, but this time his smile was tight.

  * * *

  Dammit, this wasn’t right. There was something wrong with at least two of the mines. And the timing was less than perfect—if they lost the storm, if they didn’t extract every single molecule of value stirred up from the depths of Jupiter, then the boss would have his guts. Klaus had no doubt about that whatsoever. The mines could look after themselves, that was true—but even so, that didn’t make them infallible. Machines could break down. Computers—even AIs—could glitch.

  The chief engineer strode away from the office and headed back toward the control center. It was a fair distance, easily traversed by elevator, but Klaus wanted to cool his heels. He took the long way, a brisk stroll around the curving orbital corridor of the refinery. The exercise would help clear his head and give him a few extra minutes to think.

  What the hell was the signal from Sigmas Five and Forty? It made no sense—just a string of numbers. It sounded like quickspace coordinates, but the sequence was missing two digits. And while the transmission was garbled by the magnetic interference from the storm, the constant repetition between the two mining platforms had allowed them to check and re-check the signal. They’d got the whole thing. It was just … strange.

  Parker had shown initiative, digging it out from what should have been a routine observation. Klaus wondered what he would have done, had he picked it up before the junior engineer. Probably nothing. The machine code chatter between the mining platforms was just so much background noise that Klaus had learned to tune out years ago.

  Maybe he was getting old.

  Klaus huffed and kept walking.

  The refinery’s orbital corridor had a continuous curving window that looked out into the Jovian cloud deck. The glow from Jupiter’s atmosphere was bright, but Klaus found the purple-orange cast gloomy, the way it bleached the color from his own purple uniform and stained the otherwise gleaming white interior of the refinery into a muddy, dirty hue.

  Huh. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe it was just routine. Maybe he’d made an issue out of it when there was no problem, the over-enthusiastic junior engineer casting unnecessary doubt into his mind. The robot mines kn
ew what they were doing. Okay, so the engineers in the control room ran the entire JMC operation—in theory. But, the business of gas mining aside, the JMC’s primary concern was really automation. Driven by pure profit, the corporation had pursued robotics and AI research to such an advanced level that its tech was way ahead of even what the Fleet itself—their primary customer—had. Gone were the days when the storms of the gas giants were chased manually, with pilots and their crews risking their lives aboard the giant extraction platforms. Hell, the Sigmas knew more about gas mining than even a veteran like Klaus. And he knew it.

  But … it was bugging him. Something wasn’t right, and Klaus was sure of it—forty years of gas mining had given him an intuition about things like this. The problem needed to be investigated and fixed, or something would happen and they’d lose the storm. And their bonuses. Let’s see if the boss liked the sound of that.

  Klaus nodded to another crewman passing from the opposite direction. Then he stopped and turned around.

  The orbital corridor behind him was empty.

  Klaus had stopped by an intersection, a point at which the wide corridor opened into a large, high-ceilinged atrium, complete with elevators and even seating. The space was designed to be open, something like a public square in a regular city, but the purple-orange Jupiterlight from the windows gave the whole place an eerie, dusky glow.

  Klaus frowned. Whoever had passed him had vanished around the curve of the orbital corridor. He’d been distracted by his own thoughts, but it had seemed that the crewman hadn’t been wearing the company uniform. Official visits from the Fleet were commonplace—there were always sales contracts to argue over—but, as far as Klaus knew, there wasn’t a delegation due for several cycles.

  Huh. It was nothing. His distracted mind playing tricks.

  He turned back around and jumped in fright as he nearly ran into two people standing in the corridor—a man and a woman, dressed in black, their faces hidden behind featureless masks.