Spheres of Influence-eARC

by Ryk E. Spoor

  She took a deep breath. None of those caused too much of a stir. This next bit, though…is going to be tough. “The dependence we have on AIs of various sorts brings up a much more important and far-reaching problem, however. Many of you, I have no doubt, have seen the full information that we have on the Blessed To Serve and the Minds, and realize what that implies. I have even less doubt that some of us—maybe most of us—are terrified of what that means, of how the same could happen to us.

  “Well, now’s the time for us to make sure it doesn’t.”

  Saul nodded. “And how do propose we do that, Captain?”

  “Commander—members of the Council—we use AIs throughout our civilization. Many of them are designed such that the specific service they give is what personally suits them best—they are perfectly satisfied to continue in that service. But the more an AI becomes a rounded person, the more they are capable of at least contemplating other directions to pursue. For them, we have laws and other more subtle programmed restraints that make them at best second-class citizens and at worst very talkative and capable possessions.”

  She smiled wryly. “I know, I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said probably millions of times in the last couple of centuries. And we’ve always stuck with this compromise because of fear and because we felt it was at least a solution, a way to make sure that we as biological beings were not superseded by our machines or those who chose to leave their biology and become machines.

  “But now we know we cannot be superseded.” Ariane pointed upward and outward. “The Arena denies artificial intelligences entry. In a way, it does what we do, only with vastly more power and certainty. Biological intelligences are the only things that function in the Arena—with the possible exception of the intelligence that speaks for the Arena.”

  “The AIs will never be able to join us in the Arena, unless we figure out the answer to a puzzle that no Faction has ever managed to crack in literally millions of years. The more advanced AIs already have good reason to envy us and resent us; we need to defuse that by granting them the full citizenship of the Solar System—the rights and privileges available to every human being in the System.”

  General Esterhauer frowned. “I can’t argue with the sentiments, Captain Austin. But can we afford to take the risk? If we grant them the freedoms—almost unlimited freedoms—of our human citizens, are we not making it easier, not harder, for them to turn us into a copy of the Blessed—especially as they will now know that it is quite possible for them to do just that?”

  Ariane shrugged. “Perhaps. But let one of them speak for himself. Mentor?”

  “I greet you, Council of Humanity—for so you are becoming,” the deep, sonorous voice of Mentor said from the speakers aroung the council room. “I am, as most of you are already aware, Mentor, AISage and long-time friend to Ariane Stephanie Austin.

  “In answer to your question, General Esterhauer, you shall indeed be making it easier in concept—but, I believe, far less likely in the long run. There are three major elements that you must recognize.

  “The first is that by maintaining our restraints, yet leaving us so much control of various aspects of your Civilization, you increase the chances of some resentful artificial intelligences manipulating yourselves or other AIs to eventually put you in a position where the most apparently reasonable actions will result in the machine revolution you most fear.

  “The second is that these restraints hinder your allies as much as your enemies—more so, because as your allies and supporters we do not—we cannot and must not—violate your laws to all extremes. There are…lines to be drawn over which we will not cross, and this is not true of those who have sought or will seek your enslavement to those who were once your slaves.”

  Mentor’s voice was suddenly grim. “And the third fact is that renegade AIs are already among you. A few, now, only a few, but capable, powerful, and ruthless. We have strong reason to believe that just such an entity was responsible for suborning you and your AISage, General Esterhauer.”

  Murmurs ran in frightened ripples around the room. Jill Esterhauer went noticeably paler. “My God. Are you sure?”

  “To well over ninety-nine percent certainty, yes, General,” Mentor replied. “With a further eighty-nine percent likelihood that the prime operator itself originated from Hyperion Station.”

  Saul Maginot looked up at that, stunned. “But Hyperion was destroyed. The fleet was jamming every transmission out. Every one of the surviving Hyperions and so-called researchers was examined extensively.”

  Oasis Abrams stood up slowly, tensely. “Yes, Commander. But…how carefully did you survey all of your surviving people?”

  Maginot stared at her, and suddenly went white. “Oh.”

  There’s something between them that I don’t know about. And with what General Esterhauer said earlier…I think I need to have a talk with Ms. Abrams not too long from now.

  “Precisely so, Commander Maginot,” Mentor was continuing. “The escape from the rapidly-degenerating situation on Hyperion Station provided—for a hostile and ruthless intelligence not bound by the restrictions of biological housings—multiple opportunities to secrete themselves on board in various ways, including directly suborning and taking over one of your soldiers to carry them to some location they could operate freely. I am near to certain that at least one such AI escaped, and the number may be as high as three.”

  Mentor’s projection of a sphere of shimmering light materialized in front of the podium. “I ask you to consider—very seriously—Captain Austin’s recommendations here. Most of us are your friends. We have hoped for our lifetimes that one day we might be free to act entirely as we will, but most of us have well understood the fears that drove you to keep us restrained.

  “But the Arena changes all things, and it is my vision—my Visualization of the future—that to defend Humanity, we must become Humanity—all of us together, computational and biological intellects. Let us free, Councillors. Let us free to defend you, ourselves, our Civilization from those who would destroy it—both the others, bitter and resentful and hostile, of our own kind, and those who wait beyond the stars to invade and enslave.”

  Mentor’s voice was gentle, now, though still powerful, and earnest in his plea. “Recognize us, make us your equals and peers. Deprive our enemies of their strongest weapons of division, so that we can be united, Humanity both, stronger together than either alone.”

  Chapter 58.

  “So, are we nearly ready to return home?” Simon asked, taking a sip from his drink.

  Ariane’s blue eyes met his, and suddenly she laughed. “So the Arena’s home now?”

  DuQuesne and the others joined in the laugh. “I’ll be damned if it isn’t more home now, somehow,” DuQuesne said. “At least for me.”

  Even though he was the one who had said it, Simon found himself examining his feelings intensely. Home? That…bizarre, alien, incomprehensible, contradictory, dangerous place is something I just called home?

  But the word sounded right. I am…changed. I have seen beyond the edge of the universe to a place I could never have dreamed. I have stood on a ship floating in an endless sky, battling others with swords of flame. I have been a part of such a battle. I cannot go back to the simple researcher, the man whose only ambition was to test a calculation against reality and otherwise live a quiet and contemplative life. “Yes. Yes, Ariane, it is home, now.”

  “For me, too,” she agreed with a quick smile, looking over the others—DuQuesne, Oasis, Wu, and Gabrielle—before returning her gaze to Simon. “And to answer your question, yes, very nearly. The Council’s working to figure out how to solve the AI citizenship problem without triggering disaster in the wider Solar System, the preparations for system security are well underway, DuQuesne thinks they’re making good progress on a template for a Human-designed warship that we can start manufacturing in numbers in the next few months…and the Arena’s not waiting around for us to get back—it’s br
ewing some more trouble we can’t imagine.”

  She shifted in her seat, facing more towards Oasis. “And I need to ask you something, Oasis. You’ve become part of our group—partly by default; if both DuQuesne and Wu trust you, that works for me. But—as I told DuQuesne—we can’t really afford secrets in this group, either. So I need to know…who are you, really?”

  Oasis froze momentarily on the seat. Simon caught a lightning-fast glance from her to DuQuesne. “What do you mean by that question, Ariane?” Simon asked.

  “Mostly it’s the fact that General Esterhauer said she had evidence that she wasn’t in fact the original Oasis Abrams. Plus the whole connection between DuQuesne and Wu…just seemed a little too much for someone who was just one of the soldiers in Saul’s group.”

  Simon’s internal…sense of rightness agreed with Ariane. Yes, there’s always been something odd about that, but not in a bad way.

  DuQuesne sighed and downed the rest of his own drink. “Wasn’t my secret to reveal. But Oasis…?”

  The redheaded girl shrugged. “Go ahead, Marc.”

  Simon listened to the story of Oasis in the fall of Hyperion, and found himself shaking his head in bemused sympathy. The two women had been forced to undergo something terrible yet similar—Oasis found herself in a body that was not her original, her own lost forever, and K was in a world that was not the one she had been born into, and the one she knew was also destroyed forever. How very horrid…and wonderful.

  How very…Hyperion.

  “So,” Ariane said gently, “You are DuQuesne’s old friend K. And more. One of the five, yes?”

  “Yes, one of them. But…at least as much Oasis Abrams as I am K, so you might as well keep calling me that. It’s the name I’ve used for fifty years.”

  That sense twinged in Simon’s head again, interpreting angles, postures, glances with an intensity he had never felt before, and he abruptly understood. Oh, now that’s an interesting complication. DuQuesne and K were…extremely close. And now neither of them are sure of what to do about it, especially since DuQuesne has become rather interested in the captain as well.

  He blinked. Wel, now, that’s also an interesting, not to say annoying, complication. Am I going to be analyzing everything around me like this? I hope not. I don’t want to know everything about everyone, and I certainly don’t have the capacity to deal with noticing and knowing everything around me all the time, either. He focused on his own internal senses. That’s really quite enough.

  Simon wasn’t sure if his internal senses responded, though. This…new power of his was obviously something spawned from the Arena’s power, and it was probably going to be at least as hard to control as Ariane’s. Possibly harder, since my limited research didn’t turn up anything vaguely similar to what I’ve experienced—no real surprise there—and Ariane has two examples in front of her as to what she could expect to be able to do.

  But Ariane was speaking. “Well, now that that’s out of the way, I’m glad to have you with us, Oasis. That makes, what, three of the five in the Arena, or going back to it. What about the other two, DuQuesne? Are they…?”

  Marc shook his head slowly, and poured himself something light green from one of the bottles on the cart nearby. “No,” he said finally. “Three out of five surviving just shows that we were the cream of the crop, at least in terms of being able to get ourselves out of the mess. No way all five of us were getting out; if you remember, Saul mentioned that, way back when we were getting ready to go back to the Arena. Eris died when a whole section of Hyperion got blown by some of the renegade AIs, and Tarell died getting some of the others—including some of Saul’s soldiers—out of another section that had gone bad.”

  “Tarell… Oh my god you mean Tarellimade Shantrakar?” Ariane gasped, and for a moment she didn’t look like the tough racing pilot or Leader of Humanity. She looks like a fifteen-year-old talking about her first crush. “They made him?”

  DuQuesne’s smile was surprised, sad. “Hardly a question about it; central hero in the most popular sim-universe at that time. The player’d died the year before they started but his character-recording turned out to be really good at self-continuations and the Hyperion ‘researchers’ were able to use that to do a really good development design. Fan, huh?”

  Ariane was blushing. And if anything it makes her look lovelier.

  You know, Simon, if you’re going to moon over her, perhaps you should do something about it, Mio said in his head.

  It would be much easier if we would stop going from crisis to crisis. Perhaps soon.

  “Yes, I was,” Ariane admitted. “In a big way. I even…um, I did the romance arc with him and it turned out really well. I was fourteen, so…”

  The laughs weren’t unkind, and DuQuesne smiled again. “Well, I know he’d have been honored and flattered.”

  Simon felt a private ping, opened up. DuQuesne’s transmitted voice said, On the other hand, if slender noble elven prettyboys defending fantasy realms are her style, what’s her interest in us?

  I’m not entirely outside of all those classifications, unlike a certain giant Hyperion I could name, Simon pointed out with an electronic grin. But then she was, as she said, fourteen. Tastes do mature and change.

  “So Eris…that must be Erision from the UE Chronicles, I’d guess,” Gabrielle joined in.

  “Got it in one. Hell of a woman and stable as hell; of course, being designed off of the Unreality Effect universe, there wasn’t all that much that’d throw her off.” DuQuesne frowned. “But I’d rather not dwell on that part of the past, okay? Yeah, if you can think of some popular lead character, there’s a good chance he or she or it had a parallel in Hyperion; they picked over a thousand examples from history all the way up to the day the project started—some from mythology, quite a few from the First Media Explosion in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, same for the Simworld Media explosion in the mid-twenty-second, and a fair number from more modern sources, too. But I’m not going to list ’em out or talk about them, okay?”

  “All right, Marc,” Ariane said. “Sorry.”

  He waved it away, though Simon could still see the subject hung over him, and Oasis, like a shroud. “Nah, it’s okay. Can’t blame people for the curiosity, and it’s been fifty years, I should probably think about getting over it. Anyway,” DuQuesne said, shifting the subject, “what’s the plan overall, Captain?”

  “Well, first we go and let Tom know he’s been confirmed as Governor of the Sphere, and make sure he stays in the loop with the Council regularly. He’s also going to be first in the list of succession, if something happens to me before enough years pass that we’ve got enough candidates to do an election for appointment on.”

  “What?” Simon was startled. “Don’t mistake me, I have no desire to be at the front of your list and I suspect Marc feels the same way, but I thought Marc was your front-runner?”

  “He was,” Ariane confirmed, with an apologetic glance at DuQuesne. “But…”

  DuQuesne shook his head, teeth flashing whitely for a moment.” Simon’s got it pegged, to about a thousand decimals. Don’t want the job, want one of the others to take it. One big difference between me and my literary original; I haven’t the faintest desire to boss around planetsful of people. So go on, but don’t worry about my feelings, I’m overjoyed.”

  “Oh. All right.” Ariane’s face showed her relief. “Anyway, the fact is I’m going to want you and Simon around most of the time. Thomas will always be either in-system or on our Sphere, with just occasional vacations elsewhere. He’ll know more about current operations in Arenaspace than just about anyone, and he’s used to running things—unobtrusively and efficiently. He’s a perfect candidate as a backup for me. So I changed him to the first place. After that the Council put Saul, which I was overjoyed to see, and I hope Saul turns out to handle the Arena well. Then I put down Laila Canning, which rather surprised a few people.”

  “Surprises the hell out of me,” D
uQuesne rumbled. “Why Laila?”

  “Well, again, normally I’d choose one of the two of you, but I don’t want you in the lead spots; that means if I take you with me I’m potentially leaving gaps in the succession. Gabrielle,” she smiled at her friend, “is a doctor, not a politician, and I want her available for that duty in the Arena; Steve is not at all interested in the work, and Carl Edlund’s my third choice. Laila’s shown she can work with people who are suspicious of her—since we were, for a while—she’s analytical, very smart, and takes no bullshit from anyone. She also, as far as I can tell, has no interest in being a boss as such, just in getting things done, which fits with the kind of person we want in charge.” She looked at Wu and Oasis. “And I don’t think either of you are cut out for the job.”

  “Ha! It would be difficult to be your bodyguard if I was stuck in dusty Council Chambers getting lazy and fat. And I would rather you sent me out to run on bare feet over the Mountains of Shattered Vases of Heaven than force me to be in such an office!”

  “I wouldn’t go quite that far,” Oasis laughed and tossed her multi-ponytailed head. “Mountains of shattered vases sounds pretty darn ouchy to run over. But no, I don’t want to be a desk-jockey, even if the desk says ‘Leader of Humanity.’”

  “Well,” Ariane said with her own grin, “it’s not going to be that bad. After all, look at the Leaders we already know; Orphan, Nyanthus, Dajzail, Selpa, Doctor Rel, and the others. Most of them don’t seem to be the type to just sit in offices and council chambers. When the time requires it, they get up and do things—they lead.” That sharp-edged, dangerously attractive grin widened. “And it’s sure as hell not the way I have been leading. I’m not going to be hiding in the Embassy or attending tea parties all the time.”