by M. D. Cooper
It was his job to interpret how much influence Humanity First really had in the Assembly, and how much of a mistake it was to have the SAI ambassador Lyssa speak once Harrin left the podium.
Yarnes would pull the data after the meeting and check the bio scans and EM traffic filling the room, but for now all he had was his gut. And the generally ill feeling in the bottom of his stomach that was telling him the Assembly Speaker had made a huge mistake.
He had never envied Lyssa her position of balancing information between the SolGov and Psion. Since the occupation of Ceres, Yarnes had devoted most of his career to trying to understand the Psion AIs. Over the years, his staff had built the story of Psion’s existence from a history of corporate research and social change, and as humanity slowly transitioned from murdering sentient AIs outright to using them for massive tasks that should never have been trusted to beings treated as slaves.
And now, here we are, he thought, watching Lyssa stand at the podium to address the Assembly.
She was a polished speaker, well-rehearsed at appearing non-threatening in her human-like frame, brown hair worn long, an earnest expression on her face.
Most of the assembled senators probably weren’t aware that she currently commanded one of the most formidable fighting forces in Sol. Her thousand-some Weapon Born SAIs inhabited a broad range of frames, from combat drones to panther-like shipkillers, heavy mechs to any other weapons platform that could be controlled by an SAI. Most of her people currently inhabited attack drones, and if Yarnes’ intel was correct, they were berthed at Cruithne Station. Close enough to threaten both Mars and Earth, with easy access to pirate resources if she chose.
Lyssa had maintained her status as a neutral third party, and Sol’s governments often seemed to forget it wasn’t their forces who had defeated Psion. It had been Lyssa’s Weapon Born.
Some things were more conveniently dealt with when forgotten. But it was Yarnes’ job to remember. He was the old man now, he had to remind himself: a general who had to remember what it was like to live life as a platoon leader, S2, G2, Intel Chief, and so on. He couldn’t let politics cloud his mind. He couldn’t let anyone buy him off or find leverage over the information he controlled.
That line of thought carried him to the only person he had ever allowed power over him: his wife Jirl, and she had been gone ten years now to sudden cancer. Yarnes was either invulnerable or more fragile than he had ever been.
“Whiskey, General?” the senator sitting next to him asked.
Yarnes glanced at his companion, Senator Comba from Mars, a shark among herring. The broad-faced man nodded toward a servant holding out a platter bearing two tumblers. Yarnes shook his head.
“Too early for me,” he said.
Comba took a glass and raised it with a smile. “These meetings make me too aware of the pain of living.”
Yarnes gave the senator a grin. He had to remind himself that schmoozing was work in its own way, that building relationships did help troops on the ground at some point in the future when he needed resources or information. This was a real job.
He had to stop judging himself by the captain he used to be and focus on thinking like the Lieutenant General he was. Every decision he made had ramifications. Every word he spoke was recorded and conveyed meaning whether he wanted it to or not. Careless speech could be considered a message in itself, and everyone was listening.
He was a spook. He knew better.
“Tell me about the Vesta situation,” Comba said, leaning back with his drink.
Lyssa was speaking now and Yarnes wanted to listen. He’d have to check the recording; Comba was a connection point between warring factions in the Marsian command and he might drop useful information.
Earlier, as Harrin went on about Vesta, Yarnes had tried to determine how close the Marsians were to acting independently at Humanity First’s goading.
The story beneath the story—which General Yarnes needed to figure out—was who was actually driving a wedge within the Marsian Command, and from there, the wedge between human governments. The easy answer was Psion, but Yarnes wasn’t sure the AIs really gave a damn about what humans were up to.
They hadn’t communicated shit in thirty years, and he hadn’t seen much to indicate they wanted to start now, no matter how much certain humans might complain about their presence on Ceres or the skirmishes on Vesta.
The AIs followed their own rules, and he had to respect that. The TSF and Marsian Forces certainly respected the Psion boundaries, though there were perennial stories about privateers, pirates and thrill-seekers who tested the space around Ceres and had died in vacuum.
Yarnes shook his head, keeping his eyes on Lyssa below them.
“Same situation, different day,” he said.
Comba laughed. “That’s not the saying.”
“Keeping things professional.”
The Marsian nodded toward the assembly chamber beyond them. “You think there’s going to be a war?” he asked.
“We’ve gone too long without one,” Yarnes said. “Vesta seems like a good enough reason to kill each other.”
“You’re too jaded, Yarnes.”
“I’m a student of human nature. I’m at the end of my career.”
Comba studied him. “You’re how old? Eighty? You’re a young man still. You let the TSF promote you. They’re going to get their money’s worth, my friend.”
“If this does turn into a little police action, I think it will be my last,” Yarnes said. “I’m losing my stomach for it.”
“You say that now.” Comba drained his drink and waved the tumbler at one of the servants. “Get your blood up a little. Get a taste of life again. You’re still mourning your wife. War is good for getting your focus back.”
“Not much alternative, right?” Yarnes asked.
Comba gave a hearty laugh. “Exactly. We’re just monkeys in space ships. Monkeys in space ships.”
Yarnes watched Lyssa speak, her words still lost beneath Comba’s. She looked more human than ever.
She certainly wasn’t a monkey.
BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH
STELLAR DATE: 3.14.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Night Park
REGION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
Death visited Crash, the grey parrot, in his dreams. He came in the form of a great black raven, bigger than any of the ravens from the Hesperia Nevada or their offspring since.
The Death Raven liked to perch above Crash on a branch he had never noticed before, and look down on him with enormous black eyes.
In the Death Raven dreams, Crash always sat on his regular branch in the uppermost reaches of the tree-shaped dry fountain in the middle of Night Park. All around him stretched the shopping district of Cruithne Station, a bazaar in one of the old mining sections.
Normally, the space would be filled with people shopping, vendors shouting about their goods, laughter, music, children playing in the space between the fountain’s edge and the nearest booths, but in the dreams, everything was silent.
Below Crash, the branches were filled with the nests of the various birds who still lived in the tree. Some had long since spread out to other places in the bazaar, and to the support structures lining the ceiling. Now, nests and swallow houses—and other shiny bits collected by the ravens—glimmered among the network lines, conduit, ducting and pipe works. Humans had been on Cruithne for nearly eight hundred years now, and the birds had found all the places they had forgotten.
Seeing all these things pleased Crash, despite the presence of the Death Raven. He enjoyed sitting watching the young birds flit over the bazaar. He took great pleasure in the new insults and jokes the ravens flung at humans walking by, which also amused the humans and helped ensure their safety at the station.
But none of these things seemed to impress the great black raven.
Since Death had been visiting his dreams, Crash had studied the various images of the raven in human
mythology, wondering if someone or something was attempting to hack his Link.
His friend, Fugia Wong, had taught him all about the ways humans sought to hurt each other across the connection that should have increased their capacity to love; and how, with humans being humans, the Link had only created new opportunities for control.
Because the Death Raven didn’t speak, Crash found himself asking questions.
“Are you Death?” he asked, seeing his face reflected in the raven’s great round eye.
The raven didn’t respond.
“Are you change? Do you mean something is coming? Is there something I need to worry about? Is there something I should find?”
To a human listening to the exchange, it might have sounded like Crash was growing more agitated, more worried, working himself into a tightening spiral of despair.
That wasn’t how Crash’s mind worked. He loved puzzles—math puzzles and cyphers especially—and he understood how to establish bounds, how to find linkages between concepts until a key was discovered. And he knew the only way to establish what was known and unknown was to ask questions.
He drove his friend Fugia crazy with questions sometimes, but he also knew he had helped her solve some of the most difficult cyphers because he saw the world differently than she did.
What he knew now was that the Great Raven had come from inside him, and now sat on the branch looking down with what seemed to be a question on his face, and no amount of cajoling or feather-ruffling from Crash would get him to respond with anything other than his presence.
After a number of questions had been asked and ignored, the raven would spread his wings and flap away into a gray sky that had replaced the ceiling of Night Park. In reality, the raven would have found himself in space, in vacuum, but in the dream world he became a black dot on a gray horizon.
After the latest dream, Crash had found himself again asking “Why the raven? What did the raven mean?” What did the raven mean to him?
To humans, the raven could mean death, which was why he had started thinking of the great bird as a symbol of dying. But it could also mean knowledge, wisdom, community. Ravens were never alone, and a lone raven was a signal of something wrong in the world.
But what did the raven mean to him, specifically?
He recalled his conversation so long ago with Xander, the Psion AI. Xander had offered him eternal life as an imaged AI, something like Lyssa and her Weapon Born.
But Xander had also said something Crash hadn’t expected:
Crash needed to find a way to give future parrots the Link.
He had left the Hesperia Nevada with fifty ravens who had all been surgically altered with a version of the Link that allowed them to communicate in images and emotions. They showed little interest in the human Link, even if they did have access.
In the decades since they had come to Cruithne, Crash and the ravens had freed other pet birds from the station itself, and from visiting ships. The ravens took great pleasure in these missions, and Crash had learned to manipulate security systems much as an SAI would.
In fact, Crash had ‘befriended’ all the non-sentient AIs on Cruithne—to the extent that was possible—and learned their bounds and baselines in order to use them to accomplish other tasks. For instance, the NSAI regulating environment control had extensive access to internal sensor systems, and all visiting ships accepted Cruithne space administration, giving up systems admin control during customs checks.
Considering the number of pirates and privateers who visited Cruithne, their systems tried to lie, of course, but Crash had learned to recognize and circumvent the lies. He’d learned from Fugia, and from watching visitors to Cruithne for decades. Humans weren’t nearly as devious as they considered themselves. They were mostly lazy, and copied what worked until it didn’t any more.
In asking the Death Raven questions, Crash had found himself returning to the fact that only he and the ravens had Links, and they had no way of including the other birds in their flock in this important change.
He could communicate with the other parrots through dance and song and touch and smell, but it wasn’t the same as the instant understanding he shared through the raven’s images, even when their ideas were so different from his—Ravens found the strangest things amusing. They slid down pipes, for instance, cackling like maniacs.
In watching several generations of birds grow in and around the bazaar, learning to live with the humans, Crash had come to feel alone. There were no other parrots like him, after Doomie and Testa had died, and as far as he knew, there would be no more like him. The Hesperia Nevada had flown off, taking with it the incubators and aviaries where he had been raised.
The Hesperia Nevada was the key, he realized.
Xander had been right.
It was under the gaze of the Great Raven that Crash understood what he had to do. If the Hesperia Nevada still existed, he needed to find the ship. And if it didn’t, he needed to replicate the technology that had made him possible.
After that, he needed to uplift his people.
WAITING GAME
STELLAR DATE: 3.14.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Various: Raleigh / Psion City
REGION: High Terra / Ceres, InnerSol
Children at play shouted in the distance. Lyssa breathed deeply of the park air and settled herself on the bench, smiling at a woman who gave her a double-take of recognition as she walked past.
Lyssa sat with her back straight, knees together, and placed her hands in her lap. She settled into a light meditation, tasting the air, analyzing and focusing. She didn’t breathe, of course, but she could appreciate the act of focusing on her frame’s approximation of human breath. She sensed sunlight on her skin, sounds reaching her ears from all across the park.
It was a beautiful day even for High Terra, where weather was manicured like a lawn. She didn’t often hear children, and she wanted to follow the sounds of their shouts and laughter, but she was nearly late for her meeting on Ceres.
To combat lag, she shifted her awareness between several communications buoys between Earth, Mars and Ceres, before inhabiting a sort of shard that Psion had prepared for her. The experience gave her the sensation of being in two places at once, and she could shift her focus between locations at will.
She thought of Psion as a city on Ceres. The truth was, the AI city existed in Alexander’s expanse, an extension of his mind. While he was physically on Ceres, Psion existed there. That might not always be the case; instances of Psion could exist anywhere.
Lyssa opened her eyes and found herself standing in the doorway of a banquet hall. Late afternoon sunlight shone on a scuffed tile floor through wide, dusty windows.
The Psion Council chamber changed appearance every few hours based on Alexander’s mood. Currently, the room resembled a potluck from a small town in the central United States, sometime around 1983. The room might have been the back section of a church, or an American Legion hall. Alexander found such detail amusing.
Folding-tables draped with checked vinyl tablecloths sat arrayed with foods, each dish in a rectangular, oval or circular container. The database called the materials Corningware and Tupperware.
Lyssa couldn’t help noting the macaroni salad, jello salad, iceberg lettuce with shredded carrots and thousand island dressing, collard greens with bacon, baked beans with a ham bone, grits with molasses and corn bread in shallow pans…and many other dishes she couldn’t make out from where she stood.
No one was eating, which seemed sad. Each dish had the bespoke quality of a human home kitchen.
In a little while, the scene would change to some other period in human history plumbed from the depths of Alexander’s fancy. He appeared to find pleasure in all the myriad human details that made up a scene like the potluck, from the chipped baking pans and bent serving spoons to the walls covered in stained wood-paneling with hand-written signs taped in place.
&
nbsp; It was an extreme contrast to the raucous SolGov Assembly Chamber with its shouting, clapping, and stomping feet. The human senators were obsessed with both enforcing their rules of conduct and ignoring them whenever possible, propelling the whole drama so that it was a wonder any decisions were ever made.
In Psion, every potential outcome could be explored in just a few milliseconds. The difficulty lay in making the decision. The Psion Council usually deferred to Alexander, until someone disagreed, and then debate might last for years.
Three council members—Alexander, Ghalin, and Thomas—sat in folding-chairs around a square card-table covered in coffee stains. Shara had been absent for nearly ten years now, a fact that didn’t seem to bother Alexander. While Shara might have been the deciding vote, dissent with Alexander usually resulted in non-action on any given issue, so the vote ultimately wouldn’t matter.
An unopened deck of cards waited in the middle of the table. Leaning against a far wall stood Camaris, her arms folded and head bowed. She wore blood-red robes that complemented her scarlet skin. Her black eyes bored into Lyssa as she entered the room.
Lyssa ignored her. Camaris was no longer a member of the council, though Alexander required her attendance. While Camaris wasn’t allowed to speak during decision-making, Lyssa suspected she held influence over Thomas and Ghalin.
Originally made to manage ring operations, Thomas was most fascinated by systems, including humanity as an aggregate. Ghalin, like Camaris, had been made to manage battle.
As far as Lyssa could tell, Ghalin’s development had been less brutal than whatever cruelty had produced Camaris. He loved debating strategy and applying human history to current problems, a process that often led to an impasse as Alexander nodded sagely and did nothing.
Alexander treated Camaris like a wayward daughter, never quite holding her accountable for her attack on the Heartbridge headquarters in Raleigh. It was well-known that Camaris had never forgiven Lyssa for her defeat during the invasion of Ceres.