by Stephen Moss
“Children. Hekaton Missile-Mine Phalanx. Launch protocol begins in just over three weeks. What changes in three weeks that we must launch then?”
An array of hands went up. Several of the students began speaking without calling, and a matching number of Amadeus hushed the uninvited answers with varying levels of severity. The real Amadeu mentally glanced at the list of names pinging for a turn to speak. He picked three of them, as well as four others who hadn’t volunteered but who he wanted to hear from. The answers came in a wave, his virtual selves nodding appreciatively within the confines of their programming as the various students spoke.
He heard snippets from each, siphoned and summarized. Wrong answers were dismissed and addressed automatically by his AIs, correct but unimaginative answers were dismissed almost as quickly. For Amadeu was looking for a more complete analysis, if one was to be found.
Per Amadeu’s style, the system allowed the student mass at large to hear one wrong answer, then a correct one. From which student they heard each depended on whom they were grouped with, and thus sitting near.
“In three weeks we reach the apex of chance,” said several students, “where the likelihood of the approaching Armada seeing that we are actively preparing for their arrival outweighs the increased damage we hope can hope to inflict by continuing to build on the size of the Missile-Mine phalanxes.”
That was the correct answer, the textbook version. But one boy, a boy named Guowei, ‘volunteered’ as he had been, took a little longer to answer, as Amadeu had expected him to.
Eventually the young chinese boy, born to poor but well-educated parents and volunteered by a Chinese government keen to showcase the effectiveness of their state mandated child-assessment programs, spoke up. “In nineteen months, the light density leaving Earth will be high enough to no longer be masked by static caused by the sun’s radiation at the point where that light connects with the incoming Armada.
“At the highest reliable speed at which we can send our missile-mines, they will need to leave Earth in just under three weeks in order to stay ahead of that light for long enough to connect with the Mobiliei Armada while it remains still unaware of our work to resist them.”
Amadeu smiled. It was mimicked by every virtual version of him in the classroom.
“Yes, Guowei,” said Amadeu. “But you speak of that point in time as an absolute.”
“I do,” said Guowei, countering almost immediately now, “but only because other responders already mentioned the apex of chance. To mention it again would have been redundant.”
Amadeu stared at the boy and quickly queried the system. Guowei, pinged as he had been in the first round, had not heard any of his peer’s less detailed answers before saying his own, though from the other children’s perspectives his reply had, indeed, come after them.
Amadeu smiled more broadly now. Not just book smart, but truly perceptive, thought Amadeu, saying, “Yes, given the other responses, I guess it would have been obsolete, Guowei.”
There were smart people, then there were geniuses. But Guowei was one of those children that was bright enough to shine even among these austere ranks, such was his light density.
“So, is that why we are stopping production in three weeks?” Amadeu asked the greater auditorium.
Again, a range of volunteers. He picked them off quickly, not pinging Guowei this time, who once again did not volunteer. He would see what the boy did. There were some variations on agreement, some caveats and some expositions. The majority were valid, even insightful. These were, after all, very smart children. Ranging in age from twelve to thirteen, these were the best.
So good, in fact, that some of their abilities as pilots had actually started to diminish. They were all close to Banu. But they had discovered that while a certain level of intellect was a requirement when pushing the speed limit, at some point it started to actually become a disadvantage, just as it did in everyday life.
Some of these then, Guowei chief among them, were no longer pilot candidates. They would soon be pulled from those ranks. They would be groomed for something else. They would, and indeed already were starting to, play other roles in TASC’s actual organization. Administration, research, they were slowly being woven into pretty much all of TASC’s work, even if it was as seemingly simple a task as creating games, puzzles, and battle simulations for their fellow War School students, the pilot elite.
All that said, Guowei still did not raise his hand. Amadeu cocked his head. He had wanted to see if the boy would take the bait. He hadn’t.
“All good points. Guowei, nothing to add?”
“No,” said the boy, his eyes alight though, waiting to be challenged. He was enjoying this.
“Nothing?”
Some children, Amadeu knew, were happy to see Guowei getting called out like this. Amadeu let them see it.
“No, Professor Esposinho,” Guowei said, once more. Then, “Because the question is specious. Production does not stop in three weeks. It only shifts, and, if anything, accelerates.”
Amadeu answered immediately and with genuine passion, not directed toward Guowei, but at the boy’s classmates, “Absolutely right, Guowei! Listen, class. Listen to everything. Not just because I might trick you, though I may well try to do just that, but because I might be wrong. You are here to learn from me, yes, and learn you must.
“But you should assume nothing! You should take nothing for granted! Precision is all and I demand it from every one of you, all the time. You must analyze everything you are told to do, every question you are asked.”
He pinged his AI to have his avatar look every student in the eye as he said this next part, “Never assume your leadership knows all the answers. Never assume an instruction is correct unless you have considered every part of its foundation, every reason, and, most importantly, every consequence.”
He leant back. “That is your job. That is your part in this great effort. Because if you don’t learn to constantly analyze our strategies, our tactics, how will you be able to create new ones when you are in the brief moment of battle … when you are out there.”
He let the view unfold behind him, using his control of the simulated viewpoint that was their backdrop to swing them outward, to face the blackness, and to a specific point in that dark, a shining point, a growing beacon.
Damn, but he loved this environment, thought Amadeu. If his teachers had been able to this with their classrooms then he might have actually paid attention at university. But probably not, he thought, smiling to himself.
He let the previous point sit out there a while. It was not a new one. He probably said it, in one form or another, at least once a day. He saw more than a few unamused faces in the crowd, even a rolled eye or two, though not many. Guowei was not one of them, though. He got it.
Taking a deep breath, Amadeu moved on.
Chapter 33: Catcher’s Mitt
The realignment had cost Birgit and Rob nearly forty percent of their home’s mass, but the space-terminal turned spaceship had been designed for a hundred times as many people as it currently held anyway.
It had come to her as she looked for ways to slow themselves as they span outward from Earth into the blackness. Eternity in ever blacker space didn’t sound very pleasant, so Birgit had looked for a gravity net, another of the sun’s planetary sons and daughters to call home while she worked on solving the greatest scientific puzzles that humanity and the Mobiliei had ever known.
Or failing that, a place to wait until the war was over. After that they could either hope for a rescue or wait out the rest of their lives watching a victorious Mobiliei Armada inhabit their home world. Not a pleasant thought, really, so they tended to stay away from that topic.
There was some good news, though. As Birgit had searched for potential planets to slow them, the possibility of an additional benefit had reared its head, and Birgit had quickly become all but obsessed with the plan. But the truth was Birgit and Rob’s future together was like a
dying tree, the vast majority of the branches of possibility ending in brittle, leafless twigs. But there were a few avenues that still held life. A few that might bear fruit, and the seeds of new hope.
And it was out onto one of those last branches of prospect they were now starting to shimmy. With several of Terminus’s labs jettisoned in a violent but calculated act of sacrifice, they had thrown themselves to one side, down and across, into a new and profoundly elliptical orbital plane. They could not hope to completely halt their flight from Earth by this method, but they could speed their passage to another island in the darkness.
And her plan had worked, or at least the first part of it had. And now, years after leaving home, they found themselves approaching a new world, or rather, falling across its path as they had hoped to do. They could certainly have hoped for more precision, but they wouldn’t get it. Precision was the product of planning, and no one had planned for them to be hurled out here, with only their wits and a seemingly random set of tools to craft their new destiny. They were interstellar MacGyvers, they often liked to joke.
“My calculations hold, mini-minnie, this will have to do,” said Birgit to the air, and the response came into her head as a voice. She had all but given up on mind-to-mind communication with her amalgam of Minnie, it only reminded her of this version’s limitations. Instead she spoke to it like she did to her friend Rob, with her voice, unenhanced and unembellished.
“Of course, Birgit,” replied mini-minnie, “but I have received back from my self on Earth a revised orbital path that may require less manipulation.”
Birgit stared out of a porthole. Far away, a disc was coming into focus. It was, as she had known it would be, a dusty red, like a plate of ground cinnamon, and it was growing fast now.
In Birgit’s mind a graph appeared showing their approach. It dealt in far greater margins of error than she would like, but they would have to deal with that once they got themselves stabilized.
For while they were set to enter orbit around Mars, that was not Birgit’s true target. Her plans were even more ambitious than just wanting to be the first human to visit another planet. The object she sought was much, much smaller, but, in its way, so much more accessible than the planet itself.
She sighed as mini-minnie questioned her calculations once more, then replied, “I am sure we can do it more efficiently, mini-minnie, and I am sure the real you has a better way to get into stable orbit, but that isn’t the end state here, is it?”
“You talking to yourself again?” came Rob’s voice as he slid in through the bulkhead from what was left of their living quarters.
“I am, it seems,” she said, as he slid up to her. She was, as always, keenly aware of his physical presence, as he was of hers, no doubt. It had been years since she had seen another human, and while there were days when she dreamt of butchering the man, if only so she could cook him in place of another dried protein satchel, she also had ever more vivid dreams of doing ever more elaborate sexual acts with him as well.
She forcibly set them aside as she always did. It was something he’d had to do as well, though he never said anything either, of course. Unwittingly, she had become the sole source of every one of his fantasies. They had a data link to Earth that rivaled many a wifi, barring the whole hour-long request response time, but he doubted whether it would be well received if he requested even the most innocuous of dirty pictures from their Earthbound contacts.
So he lived with and suppressed his desire for her, as she did hers. They would be together for God knows how long, maybe even for the rest of their lives. No place for such silliness as a relationship, especially given the fifteen-year age gap between them.
Damn it, she thought, frustrated, why am I thinking about this again?
And she focused once more: on work, on the calculation, on the calculated risk.
“You arguing over the orbit again?” he said, and she snorted a laugh.
“Yes. We are arguing over the orbit … again.”
The circular argument Birgit had been in over the past few months was a perfect demonstration of the difference between the copy of Minnie and the real thing. On the one hand, mini-minnie was not complex or deep enough to really care about the danger of what they were hoping to do next. But when the real Minnie heard about it, and calculated the precise chances of them pulling it off successfully, the real AM most certainly did.
And then, once the real Minnie convinced this one of the need to dissuade Birgit of the enterprise, mini-minnie was both too dogmatic to back down and too limited to have a real discourse on the topic.
“I know their objections … her objections. But …” said Birgit, trailing off.
“… but you don’t give a shit?” said Rob helpfully.
She laughed. “Yes, something like that.”
She was aware that she was gambling not only with her life, but with his as well. She had allowed him access to the data, both her interpretations and Minnie’s, and said he should vote on this, speak up if he wanted her to stop. But he could not understand Minnie’s objections any more than he could understand Birgit’s counterarguments.
It was like a child trying to vote on which house his parents should buy, or which route they should take to school. Sure, it affected him too, it affected him very much. But that did not make him any less ignorant of the nature of this disagreement of geniuses, and so it didn’t make his vote anything more than honorary.
“Well, how about this?” said Rob, looking very serious all of a sudden. Birgit’s expression became one of skeptical curiosity, “How about mini-minnie stays here with me and you go on ahead. If the water is warm give us a shout and we’ll come and join you.”
She laughed.
“Sure,” she said, chuckling, “and if I find work I’ll send for you.”
He smiled broadly and with genuine affection. Their eyes stayed locked a moment too long. She turned away, but the nature of the systems she worked in did not give her a computer screen to stare at or a binder to read, so she closed her eyes instead, looking inward to her link to the station’s systems … to her calculations … to her plan to crash land the entire station into the moon called Phobos.
Chapter 34: The Ball Rolling
Madeline was waiting for Amadeu when he finished his class. Before accepting her meeting request, he validated that the request had come via standard channels, ready to initiate a certain protocol should it be required. But, he saw, it had come via the main system. He would not need his protocol today.
Amadeu: ‘good morning/afternoon/evening, whatever it is where you are.’
She laughed through the system.
Madeline: ‘hello, amadeu.’
Amadeu: ‘hello. yes, that’s so easy for you english-speakers. we don’t have that in portuguese. i tried using ciao for a while, but too many people think i am saying good-bye by mistake.’
Madeline: ‘so let’s come up with a new word. ¿how about ‘neal?’ we could say, ‘neal be with you.’ or ‘goodneal to you.’
Amadeu did not laugh. She took the hint and got on with the real reason for their conversation.
Madeline: ‘i just met with moira, like we discussed.’
Amadeu was curious. Her and Birgit’s work was bordering on madness, he felt sure of that, but then when he dipped his toes into any of the theoretical pools behind subspace technologies it all felt very cold and uninviting. This was not the stuff of science, as he understood it. This was too esoteric. It did not feel … safe. And this from a man whose life’s work was messing with people’s spines, dicking around with people’s brains.
But this, this was different, this was more unsettling even than Amadeu’s burgeoning science of the mind. This was messing with the fabric of space, of reality, and it specked of hubris that we should hope to circumvent the rules of the very universe and not risk breaking the game itself.
But it was, he feared, too great a prize to pass up. And in the end, they may well need success there in o
rder to survive, if only because of his own ongoing failures to break the ‘limit’ by any appreciable margin.
But Madeline did not have the news he had hoped for.
Madeline: ‘moira is … skeptical.’
Amadeu: ‘¿skeptical?’
He did not stop his disappointment from bleeding through to her, and in turn saw that she shared it.
Madeline: ‘she does not say it is without hope, she just says … well, she says it is not something she sees a conclusion to. she insists that this does not mean birgit cannot do it. ¿but in the end, if moira cannot see a light at the end of the tunnel, even moira, can birgit be that much further along that tunnel than her?’
Amadeu: ‘don’t ask me, madeline. ask … neal. he’s the physicist.’
But Neal was not a physicist, not in the sense that Moira or Birgit were, not even close. And neither was he someone that they really wanted to invite into this conversation.
They said nothing for a moment, and then Amadeu did two things. He spoke and initiated the very protocol he had not thought he would need in this meeting. Madeline felt both happen at the same time.
Amadeu: ‘well, madeline, i appreciate the update anyway. thanks for coming by. i guess i should get back to the school.’
Madeline: ‘of course, amadeu. sorry for disturbing you. i wish i had better news, but there it is.’
Amadeu sent a mental nod and then the signal was cut.
The space around him went suddenly black as the system began unloading subsets and running looped mind-maps. He waited. It was working without him now. A little part of Minnie that she had sectioned off just for this purpose. Sectioned off and then abandoned, wiping the memory of her own actions from her very own mind.
The connection came back online now, muted and simplified. The most minimal version of a link possible. So thin and slight that it could be hidden in static, piggybacked on the trillions of other bytes of data swarming around in Minnie’s world-spanning network. Hidden even from Minnie herself, as she had designed it to be.