Spheres of Influence-eARC

by Ryk E. Spoor

  “And now one person—one woman—will be in charge, the effective ruler of humanity? This is not just a step backwards, it is a complete and utter reversal of our civilization, back to the days of empires.” She looked levelly at Ariane. “And though you say we could give a time limit, ten years is still a long time, and one in which someone with near unlimited power could easily find ways to make ten into twenty, twenty into a hundred, and a hundred into forever.”

  DuQuesne looked to Ariane, knowing how this echoed Ariane’s own fears. Her gaze flickered from Esterhauer to her friends, and he could see the uncertainty there, as she looked into Simon’s eyes. She was focused enough, now, that they could at least make the connection to her. Ariane…Simon sent.

  She’s right, you know. Even if she’s wrong.

  An electronic sigh came from Simon. Yes. Yes, she is. But at the same time…

  It’s all right, Simon. DuQuesne felt her decision—though he couldn’t quite see it—and saw her straighten, looking for an instant to him; he gave her a simple nod and then returned his focus to the network that was overlaid on every activity throughout Kanzaki-Three.

  Marc C. DuQuesne, I have isolated fifty-nine percent of the active threads and processes in the room.

  I’ve got most of the rest. I think Vincent and Mio have the few left.

  Everyone had a different experience of the raw network; to DuQuesne, networks were brilliant spiderwebs of light, pulsing and flickering, with symbols that he could read that told him what the traffic was, allowed him to see how information was moving around him, then—in a situation like this—mapped the network traffic to the real world. Unlike most people, he could actually grasp the entirety of the local net and its relationships—one more backhanded gift from Hyperion; they tried to make me able to comprehend hyperdimensional physics they’d made up, and now I find it’s not entirely useless. Now, in the sealed Council chamber, there was one faint, almost undetectable line of light that passed the virtual boundaries; all the rest were sealed off, self-contained within the chamber. That’s our meddler. Monitoring. But if he opens a channel…

  Marc DuQuesne, Mentor said through the Network, you have the scope and power of vision necessary; be sure, therefore, that you attend to what is happening in the physical world as well as here. It may be that a sign or signal will be given there as trigger.

  Good thought, Mentor. I’m on it.

  With considerable effort, he focused on the overlay, brought up a perception of things as they were happening in the physical here-and-now. It was hard to do; time perception in the electronic world and that in the physical world were not the same thing, for all that the same clocks might mark the passage of seconds. The physical world, where Ariane was confronting the general, was molasses-slow, yet almost infinitely complex compared to most network overlays except in the world-simulations. Scarcely a second or two had passed; Ariane was only now answering General Esterhauer’s speech, and he heard her through a shimmering halo of data that dusted his perceptions with stars.

  “You are very eloquent, General—and you’re right, in some ways,” Ariane said calmly. DuQuesne could guess just how hard it must be for her to stay calm.

  “In some ways?” repeated the general.

  A shimmering pulse streaked from the general, echoed through the forces she was obviously directing. A directive to attack? No…she’s telling them to wait. He felt a surge of cautious optimism. She really doesn’t want a fight, and she’s starting to listen. Maybe this will work out.

  Ariane laughed. “In almost all ways, really. Did you think I came to this decision easily? That I want to be this stupid ‘Leader of the Faction of Humanity’? All those things you’re afraid of—I’m afraid of them too. Afraid of not being afraid of myself one day. Afraid I’ll accept too many expediencies without thinking enough about them.

  “But,” she held up her hand as General Esterhauer was about to speak, “at the same time I am terrified of what is going to happen to us if we’re playing idiotic power games within our own tiny faction while the Molothos close in on us. We can’t afford it. If things had gone just a little differently, you’d already have someone else as the Leader of Humanity—maybe one of my friends, maybe not—the entirety of the secrets of Humanity that I know would be in the hands of the Blessed To Serve, and worse. Our ally Orphan would almost certainly be dead, his faction gone with him, and you wouldn’t even know how it happened. All because people had already decided I wasn’t the person for the job.”

  General Jill Esterhauer tilted her head, and started to open her mouth.

  And the dim, shimmering thread blazed into coruscating brilliance as the connection went fully active.

  DuQuesne stiffened. Got you! he thought grimly, and forced his own connection protocols to hack into the encrypted stream. Mentor!

  I am here, Marc DuQuesne, as are we all.

  His vision saw it as a seething, crackling vortex of energy, a metaphor that made the encryption and security defenses seem as dangerous physically as they were electronically—and if you were, as DuQuesne now was, immersed in the electronic world, some of those defenses could actually kill you—trace your patterns back into your own skull and wipe you out like a deleted drive. He was exposing himself directly in order to use all of his brain as a weapon and a sensor, a perceptual filter that even the highest-order AISages couldn’t match, though their physical speed should vastly outstrip his capabilities.

  But they aren’t Hyperions.

  Mentor, Isaac, Mio, and Vincent were trying to tap into that deadly sealed column—in more mundane terms, trying to suborn the connection from the general’s end so they could find out who and what they were dealing with. Which means that technically we’re trying to hack the general’s brain, but if our suspicion’s right—she’s already been hacked.

  Suddenly the connection broadened, and something burst out of it—no, a lot of somethings. He recognized the network feel immediately—piranha seekers, advanced active worm codes that were designed to locate other active local processes and shut them down.

  Vincent was struck immediately, and vanished from the Net—shutting down and severing his connection to prevent destruction. Hope it’s enough…and that he didn’t take any with him into Gabrielle’s headware. The other AISages seemed to be holding their own, though barely. Hang on, Isaac, Mio!

  His own defenses—manifested as shields of light this time—shunted the seekers away. Mentor simply swept them away, and his own counter-seekers wiped the worm code.

  Try to just jam it! DuQuesne said. Yeah, it’d be nice to get a look at our adversary, but he’s prepared. Probably running the defense off the general’s own network! We’d have to shut her down in order to stop it!

  Our adversary has locked down the transmitters, Mentor reported.

  Dammit. He could perceive the lock commands holding the transmitters out of control. Take time to break that—time enough that people in the regular world might even notice.

  I need some way to shut down those locks. But with the lock commands encrypted, those things’ll stay inoperable unless I can break the encryption. And I don’t have time. Blast! And nothing I’m carrying on my physical person has nearly enough power to…

  He paused at that thought. Power…

  HA! Got it! You’re messing with the wrong power engineer, my friend!

  He pinged the others. Hold onto your hats, everyone—network’s going down…for just long enough!

  Instead of triggering the locks, DuQuesne called up the specs of the room transceiver systems from headware, and on the fly calculated and sent a pulse through the local controllers that looked, to those controllers, like a dangerous overvoltage from a shorting direct line. Automatic, built-in cutoffs cycled, shutting off all power to the Council Chamber network systems for a moment—and thus removing the temporary software locks on the transmitters. DuQuesne had been ready for that, and as soon as the power came back on, he activated the main transmitters in jamming mod
e.

  He snapped back to full physical consciousness with a jolt—with that powerful a jamming pulse, there was no staying connected with the local network. The pulse faded and the network restored itself…but the powerful outside connection was gone. We won that one.

  The battle had taken, perhaps, two-tenths of a second from start to finish.

  Chapter 55.

  Ariane sensed something going on and then realized that Mentor had—for a few moments—completely vanished from her senses.

  At the same time, General Esterhauer paused, mouth open, unmoving for an instant; then she slowly closed her mouth, looking momentarily puzzled, confused. Finally she blinked, shook her head, and said, “I see. But if you agree with my basic principles, you must understand how I must view your…demands.”

  I certainly do, Ariane thought, but was trying to understand what had just happened and figure out something more useful to say when Simon spoke up.

  “General,” he said, “Might I ask you a—I hope—simple question?”

  She shrugged. “Go ahead.”

  “Is there, in fact, anything that Captain Austin could do that would convince you to give this plan a chance? Or is your mind so made up that nothing anyone could ever say would change your mind?”

  That stopped Esterhauer cold for a moment. Slowly, a wry smile spread across her face. “I would like to think my mind is not totally shut…but I will admit, Doctor Sandrisson, that I cannot think of any argument or point she could make that would change my mind.”

  “Then perhaps I can offer a compromise,” said another voice. Looking in that direction, Ariane saw Robert Fenelon standing. “To summarize, we have two, apparently diametrically opposed sides: Captain Austin, who feels that it is necessary to unite both sides of humanity under a single Leader, as the Arena seems to imply, to provide for quick and unified decisionmaking, especially in this time of crisis; and that of General Esterhauer and her allies, who are not going to permit any individual such unlimited power.”

  A general murmur of agreement greeted Representative Fenelon’s statement. He smiled, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “Then allow me to present to you a scenario that allows both of you to get most of what you want, based on some rather old history—Rome, among others, had to deal with similar problems on occasion.

  “I propose that the position of Leader of Humanity be an appointed one—by the SSC and CSF—and that a specific oversight group be selected which can decide to strip the Leader of his or her authority, but not to second-guess or undo decisions of the Leader directly. Such work would be left to the next selected Leader.”

  Now wait a minute. She could see several ways this could go wrong. “I—”

  “Hold on, please,” he said. “We will also make it so that the oversight group can only be assembled to do this sort of action by a supermajority vote—exact proportion of attendees to be decided—and that barring such extraordinary action the Leader’s actions in the Arena and her authority over Arena-related activities here in normal space are to be reviewed and her appointment renewed—or not—for five years. And further as the first Leader, if you agree to all stipulations of the arrangement, you will be guaranteed two such terms unless your actions cause us to both call up the oversight group, and the oversight group decides to strip you of your authority.

  “On the Leader’s side, she (or, later, he, perhaps) will have effectively absolute authority over the activities of the SSC and CSF that relate to the Arena or the defense of the Solar System against potential enemies. This is similar to the imperium authority of ancient Rome.”

  That seems…quite reasonable to me, Simon said over the link. What do you think, DuQuesne?

  Yeah, Fenelon’s always been a sharp one. He might have something here, he just might.

  It could work, Ariane said cautiously, beginning to hope that there was a way out of this mess.

  Robert Fenelon looked at Ariane. “If I understand correctly, if you agree to our arrangements you would be bound by them—that is, if we did vote to strip you of your authority, we would be able to do so and then choose—ourselves—a new Leader?”

  Ariane nodded slowly. “That’s the way I understand it, yes. If I accept the arrangements, then the Arena accepts that those are the rules. Seemed to work that way with the Blessed—they had specific rules and they followed them.” Especially when I take into account what happened with Sethrik. Obviously the hoops that had to be jumped through had to be done in the right order.

  “Good,” Fenelon said. “Then that would address General Esterhauer’s main concern. We would not be dependent on whether you wanted to follow our rules; we could, in fact, remove you if the situation were grave enough, and we would not need force of arms or any argument with you or yours, simply a vote of an emergency committee.

  “At the same time, it gives you the full authority of law to act as you see fit, as long as you don’t…go so far that we feel ourselves impelled to act. A five-year interval for what amounts to a vote of confidence should not be overly onerous, I would hope. I could also see us agreeing to confirm some, though not all, of your candidates as potential successors. Perhaps a list which includes one of yours, one of ours, and so on.” He looked at both the general and Ariane Austin. “If we can work out the details, would you both be willing to accept this compromise?”

  Ariane looked at the others—and especially at DuQuesne and Simon. “What do the rest of you think?”

  DuQuesne shook his head. “Before anyone gets ahead of themselves, I don’t want it said that any of this was being agreed to while anyone was not really fully in possession of their faculties.”

  “Eh?” Fenelon looked confused, as did most of the others present. Ariane echoed the sentiment. What in the world are you talking about, Marc?

  “General Esterhauer, you were in communication with someone outside of this room at crucial moments—despite the blackout we had attempted to impose. Moreover, when we finally succeeded in disconnecting, you seemed momentarily at a loss.”

  “When you…” Jill Esterhauer glared at DuQuesne. “The fact that my advisors were not cut off is hardly evidence that my faculties were diminished; rather it’s evidence that I have better preparations in my comm-net than most people.”

  “Just a question, General,” Gabrielle Wolfe spoke up. “Do you sanction the use of lethal force to protect your advisor connections?”

  Esterhauer looked honestly taken aback. “What? No, of course not.”

  “Well, then, you have a problem, ma’am, because the defenses of that connection included piranha seekers at top level capability. My AISage’s doing a full cleansing restore and reboot now and it was a near thing that he didn’t drop the code in my brain—meaning I’d be probably brain-wiped or close to it.”

  My God, Ariane thought, appalled. That kind of malicious code was one of the true horrors of brain-computer integration; you could catch the same mind-destroying diseases, and instead of months or years, the loss of everything you were would take seconds.

  It was indeed that bad, Mentor’s voice said inside her head. I have, however, isolated one of the instantiations in case someone wishes to examine the design.

  “If you want to look at the evidence,” Ariane said to Esterhauer, “My AISage caught one of the seekers. And recorded the whole sequence of events.”

  A shadow of the same suspicion showed on Esterhauer’s face, but there was also concern and confusion. “I…would very much like to have my people examine all of the evidence,” she said. Then she wavered and collapsed to her knees.

  “General!” Saul Maginot was next to her. “What is it?”

  The stiff military bearing was gone now; Jill Esterhauer was obviously badly frightened. “I was trying…to dig out the memory of what…who I was talking to…and I can’t. My AISage, Damon, he cannot recall the connection, he went active, I’m…confused…”

  “Quick!” DuQuesne snapped. “Shut her down, Gabrielle! Her and her AISage—need to get th
em stabilized now!”

  Gabrielle Wolfe looked helpless. “I…don’t think I have the right—”

  Oasis Abrams shouldered the others aside and whipped an injector from one of the pouches distributed around her body; in a single smooth motion she knelt and jabbed the injector right into the base of Esterhauer’s skull. The General immediately collapsed, caught by Oasis before she could hit the floor.

  “You just happened to be carrying a dual-mode anesthetic dose on you?” Ariane said in disbelief.

  “Not ‘just happened,’ no. I’ve had a lot of…interesting jobs over the years, Captain. Having a way to shut down someone and their AISage simultaneously has always been a very useful thing to have.” She turned to Esterhauer’s soldiers, some of whom were still trying to cover the group. “Put your weapons down, people. We were talking, not shooting, and your commander needs medical help, not guns.”

  One of the armored figures, in the markings of a CSF Master Sergeant of Marines, glanced over to White Camilla and then to Saul; both nodded, and the squads stepped back and put away their weapons.

  Gabrielle was kneeling next to Esterhauer. “Sorry y’all, but we need to get her to a real hospital stat—Kanzaki Central will do. No telling what kind of damage has been done, or might get done if they wake up. Sounds like whoever she’d been in contact with had some kind of logic bombs set up—both in her, and her AISage. Hope we can salvage most of her, though.”

  “Of course,” Saul agreed. “Captain Austin?”

  For a moment she didn’t understand what Saul was asking, then it hit her. “Of course, one moment.” She concentrated. Mentor, open up channels.

  The sense of the wider net came to her instantly, and she could see the ripple in the rest of the assembly as they felt full senses and access restored. Immediately the emergency services group responded to Gabrielle’s signal.

  It’s never simple, is it? She sighed. “And just when I thought we had everything settled.”