Android: Free Fall

by William H. Keith

  I like Heinlein, like being on the Moon. When I actually allow myself to think about the possibility of some day retiring, I think about moving here, where the one-sixth Earth gravity is strong enough to keep your bones hard, but gentle enough that you don’t feel like you’re fighting gravity just to live. There’s a large geriatric community here, thanks to an ongoing emigration of centenarians similar to the retirement migrations to Florida and the American Southwest many, many decades ago.

  Of course, food and water is more expensive than on Earth, and you do have to pay an air tax…but a lot of that is subsidized by lunar industry. In fact, a lot of the larger lunar corporations will pay for your water and air, one hundred percent, if you just sign a seven-year contract to work for them. There’s a labor shortage in Heinlein—that’s the reason Jinteki introduced clones and Haas made bioroids in the first place. But what they need most are people who have experience and training that androids don’t possess, at least not yet; things like computer technology, medical training, mine engineering, and software design.

  You don’t need grip-slippers on the Moon, but you do still have to watch yourself when you walk. I only weighed a bit over 13 kilos here, but, just as on Challenger, I still had 80 kilos of mass, and it can be hard to stop if you get yourself moving too quickly. I used the safety rail, just in case, as I made my way down the transparent embarkation tube. Above me, the flower petals were slowly closing—protection against the radiation and micrometeorites that had driven most lunar civilization underground.

  That’s why native Loonies refer to being in Heinlein or in the Moon, not on it.

  Starport Kaguya occupies the larger dome in Hypatia-C. Kaguya is the name of the Moon princess from the 10th-century Japanese tale, the Taketori Monogatari, the “Tale of the Bamboo Cutter,” which may be the oldest folktale in Japanese literature, as well as one of the earliest examples of science fiction.

  But Starport Kaguya got its name not from medieval Japanese science fiction, but from science fact. In 2007, the Japanese launched the SELENE space probe from the Tanegashima Space Center and sent it on what became a twenty-month mission to map the lunar surface. It was the largest-scale lunar exploration since the U.S. Apollo program five decades earlier, and it helped refuel the public’s interest in lunar exploration, paving the way for the return of humans to the Moon around fifteen years later. The Japanese public had given the SELENE spacecraft its nickname of Kaguya, and the name was passed on to the lunar end of the Beanstalk transport system.

  I was met by an attractive young woman made up to look like Kaguya-hime, the princess of the tale, wearing a traditional kimono and with hair glowing a bright, luminous white, like the Moon. I wondered if the shining hair was a cosmetic effect or the result of genetic modification, but decided not to ask. At least I could assume that she hadn’t been found as a baby inside a glowing bamboo plant, like the original princess.

  “Welcome to the Moon, Harrison-san,” she said, bowing, and pulling my name from my e-ID. Her hair was shining brightly enough to read by.

  “Domo arigato, gozaimase,” I replied, returning the bow. “Konnichiwa.”

  Since it was past 1100, it was a konnichiwa kind of moment, not one for ohayou gozaimase.

  There’s quite a large population of Japanese on the Moon. I don’t know if that’s because of the Kaguya legend or because the Japanese have always been fascinated by Earth’s natural satellite. There’s a community of more than ten thousand people of Japanese descent in the big dome at Tranquility Home called Tsuki-no-Miyako, the “Capital of the Moon” of the fairy tale. The Heinlein Authority hires a number of attractive young Japanese men and women to meet and greet incoming visitors. What they don’t tell you is that these girls and boys are running a kind of security triage for the mining corps. Incoming labor is directed to the appropriate destination, while tourists are given personal, friendly native guides to lead them through the underground lunar warrens…and make sure the visitors aren’t on the Moon to stir up clone trouble or to organize protests against the grand-scale strip-mining of the lunar surface.

  “Can I be of assistance to you in finding your destination?” the greeter asked. “Heinlein can seem very large, very confusing—”

  “Thanks, sweetheart,” I told her, “but I’ve been here before.” And I headed for the tube-lev platform. She seemed like such a sweet and innocent girl; I didn’t think she’d have understood if I’d told her I was on my way to Eliza’s Toybox. She was probably reporting me right now to the yellow jackets, but I didn’t care. My badge number and e-ID were on file; they knew who I was.

  I had a mental list of places I needed to go, but my first stop was relatively close to Kaguya. During the trip, on the ferry out, I’d received the promised call from Dr. Weissmuller.

  The doctor had included Vargas’s personal file off the Net. Robert Vargas had worked for Humanity Labor for nine years, and he’d been in the Army for ten before that. A Special Forces member, he’d been injected with Freitas respirocytes while he was in the service—like me—and that gave me a nasty inner shudder. If he hadn’t suffocated during those first few seconds outside the airlock, his death wouldn’t have been easy.

  I still remembered the expression etched into his dead face on the other side of the transplas.

  According to Dr. Weissmuller’s tests, Vargas hadn’t been on any drugs, and there’d been no alcohol in his system. By studying the condition of his surface tissues, Dr. Weissmuller had concluded that Vargas had died within the previous four days. He’d admitted it was a guess; those tissues had been frozen, cooked, desiccated, and exposed to hard radiation. My assumption, though, was that Dow’s bodyguard had been offed at about the same time Dow was.

  Hodgkins had told us that Vargas had been at the Carousel, checking on security arrangements at the meeting center. I’d assumed Hodgkins had been lying, but where had Vargas been? Perhaps Vargas had finished his work elsewhere and been on his way back to Dow’s room when the murderer had killed him.

  Maybe Dow had sent him away because he hadn’t wanted an audience when Eve arrived.

  And, just maybe, Eve had grabbed Vargas either an hour before or immediately after the murder, hauled him into the airlock, depressurized, then tossed him out onto the planetoid’s surface, breaking his arm in the process. He’d managed to make it back to the outer door despite being in hard vacuum, and died clinging to those hand-holds—possibly staring through the transplas into the bioroid’s silver eyes as he died.

  Dr. Weissmuller couldn’t learn anything more about Vargas’s arm fracture, except for one interesting fact. Robert Vargas was osteoporotic.

  It happens to people who live in microgravity—or in the extremely low gravity of the Challenger Planetoid. According to his records, Vargas hadn’t been to either Earth or the Moon in five years. Unless you exercise vigorously for several hours each day—or spend a substantial amount of time in a spin-gravity environment like the Carousel—your bones begin to lose calcium. Lose enough calcium, and your bones become brittle, more susceptible to fractures.

  Dr. Weissmuller told me the osteoporosis in Vargas’s bones wasn’t incapacitating yet, but it was bad enough that it wouldn’t have taken the tremendous pressure to crush his humerus that I’d assumed at first. A strong man with a strong grip could have done it, and not necessarily one with an athletic G-mod. I wondered how the osteoporosis had affected his job as a bodyguard. He would have been at a considerable physical disadvantage against someone fresh up from Earth.

  But that didn’t leave bioroids off the hook, either. It was vital that I find Eve 5VA3TC as quickly as possible, because right now she was my prime suspect. She’d been with Dow immediately before the murder, and she had the strength—and possibly the motive—to kill Dow’s bodyguard.

  According to the Transit Authority records, Eve 5VA3TC had caught a ferry for Starport Kaguya a few hours after Dow’s murder. She’d most likely returned to Eliza’s Toybox at Fra Mauro, and that’s where
I hoped to track her down.

  First, though, I had another stop to make.

  A short tube-lev jaunt from Kaguya, just sixty kilometers or so, is the immense dome of Tranquility Home.

  Houston, Tranquility Base, here. The Eagle has landed.

  Possibly the most momentous words of the past few centuries: the announcement by Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11’s Mission Commander, that the Lunar Excursion Module Eagle had just touched down on the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility. Tranquility Home was the name of the big dome directly adjacent to the Apollo 11 landing site, the first part of Heinlein opened to colonization, and the location of the Tranquility Home Museum. The rest of the main dome was bustling and filled with humanity—it was mostly taken up by habitation modules for the workers at Melange Mining and Alpha Prospecting—but here, in the pressurized viewing gallery above the landing site, there was a still and reverential silence.

  A holy shrine. “Here men from the Planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind” as it says on the plaque left on the lander’s descent stage. The surface there is still in hard vacuum to preserve the footprints, but not long after Heinlein was established, they built a stadium-sized anhydrous glass shell over the place to keep it pristine. The ceiling of the dome was opaque, with a sky projection that included the Earth, Sun, and a few bright stars frozen in the positions they’d held on July 21, 1969, moments after Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin had lifted off again from the lunar surface.

  The pressurized visitor’s gallery lets you inspect much of the site without actually touching it. You can walk out on the transparent floor raised a meter above the lunar surface and look out through the slanting, optically perfect anhydrous glass overlooking the area. It’s all still there: the descent stage, the EASEP science package and solar panels, the United States flag (still held out from the mast by a stiff aluminum rod). The original flag was actually knocked over by the exhaust from the LEM ascent module when it lifted off, but during construction of the museum, someone had used a robotic arm to lift the flag from the regolith and place it upright once more.

  A lot of the footprints in the area had been erased by the ascent module’s silent rocket blast, but those closest to the descent module—including the very first human footprint on the Moon—had been shielded by the module itself, and were still clearly visible.

  With no wind, those prints would still look pristine and fresh millennia from now.

  I’d been to the landing monument before. It’s always left me a bit in awe; the walls of the LEM ascent module had been so thin that a dropped wrench would have punched through them as if through aluminum foil. Today, visitors arrive at Starport Kaguya by the hundreds each day on-board modern lunar ferry ships, and they don’t even think about the incredible long-odds risks experienced by those first humans to walk the Moon’s surface.

  But I wasn’t here to look at the exhibit. Not this time.

  “Hello, Captain Harrison. It is very good to see you.”

  I turned and smiled. “Hello, Floyd.”

  Floyd 2X3A7C was a bioroid, and one I’d worked with before. A Floyd-series android robot manufactured by Haas-Bioroid, he was rented out to the NAPD as a part of an ongoing test program, one intended to determine whether bioroids could be safely and usefully implemented into the police force and similar social-service positions.

  He looked young. Well, of course he was young—his records said he was six years old—but what I mean is that he looked like a young man, twenty or younger, with a thin, almost effeminate face and slender hands. He had a Catholic rosary draped around his neck like a necklace that I hadn’t seen before.

  “Your message said you wanted to talk with me,” Floyd said. Often he wore goggles—Floyd tended to be shy about revealing that he was a bioroid—but at the moment I could see his eyes: silver with a mirror-bright polish. They reflected the artificial lighting over the encapsulated landing site beyond the glass as he turned.

  “That’s right. I was wondering if you’d be willing to talk to me about morality.”

  “Of course. I enjoy discussing that topic.”

  We stepped from the shrine-silence of the viewing gallery and back into the bustling chaos of the city proper, lights and holo-advertising and thousands of people swarming through the subsurface warrens. “We supply the life’s blood of human civilization,” a voice boomed from somewhere overhead. “Melange Mining, from the Sun to the Moon to you!”

  We caught the next tube-lev out for Fra Mauro.

  Melange Mining is located 650 kilometers west of Tranquility Home in the Sinus Medii, almost at the exact center of the Moon’s disk as seen from Earth and halfway to the major Heinlein facilities scattered across the hundred-kilometer wide expanse of Fra Mauro crater. I wanted to talk to Melange about the clone Mark Henry, but it was more important, I thought, that I find the bioroid Eve 5VA3TC first. I still didn’t think a clone could have committed a murder like the one that had shredded Roger Dow, but a robot? Machines do what someone tells them to do, and if a bioroid has a human personality, it’s still a personality artificially layered into a computer, a programmable machine.

  So we caught an express car and rode beneath the huge Melange Mining facility without stopping, while the bioroid and I talked about what it meant to be human.

  “I frequently discuss the topic with Father Michael,” Floyd told me as we hurtled through the silence of the hard-vacuum tunnel above a superconducting mag-lev rail. “We try to find time to play a game of chess each week, unless, of course, I’m on a case. We generally meet at his church, St. Theresa’s.”

  “That’s the one in Earthside New Angeles?”

  “It is. We often discuss philosophy and human ethics.”

  “And have you arrived at any conclusions?” I asked.

  “I don’t see that there is a conclusion to reach, Rick,” the bioroid said. “Father Michael believes, quite passionately, in the survival of a kind of life force or energy he calls ‘the soul.’ I find the concept…intriguing.”

  “But you wonder how it might apply to you?”

  “At one point I did. Can a bioroid, a machine, have a soul? No matter how lifelike its design, or how human others might think it to be, does the simple fact of self-awareness within a machine translate as a soul?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Nor do I. Further, I know that I was not programmed to have a soul. There is no such program in my directory.

  “Recently I have given careful consideration to the idea. I now question whether a soul is necessary at all.”

  “Necessary for what? Maybe it’s not necessary. Maybe it just is.”

  “Perhaps. But Father Michael seems to believe that the reality of an afterlife is necessary to engender and preserve human ethical behavior.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Father Michael posits an afterlife governed by a deity who created the universe. He seems to believe that this deity is essentially good—meaning, I believe, that it is ethical and benevolent. However, it has the power to punish human souls after death, to either admit them into this paradisiacal afterlife…or to torture them horribly for all eternity, for the most part based on their moral behavior.”

  “That seems a little harsh.”

  I was fascinated. As we continued to speak, Floyd’s fingers flickered along the beads of the rosary he wore. I could hear the tiny, plastic clicks as he touched each bead. Was he actually reciting the rosary as he spoke to me?

  “Positing such a deity seems to me to be an unnecessary complication. Surely, ethical behavior can be enforced among humans by the analysis, on a case-by-case basis, of risk versus reward. Unethical behavior tends to be antisocial behavior on one or more levels. Humans avoid such behavior in order to avoid discovery, punishment, and possibly humiliation within the social framework. No god is necessary to explain the tendency of humans toward moral behavior.”

  Floyd’s fingers were really flying now,
moving so quickly they seemed to blur. The clickclickclick of the beads ran together into a soft, background buzz.

  “I’ve been a cop for a bunch of years. I’m not sure I see ‘a tendency in humans toward moral behavior.’ Quite the opposite, in fact.”

  “Then why do you, Rick Harrison, behave in what I would call a moral fashion?”

  “Well, thanks for the vote of confidence. I’m not entirely sure I agree with you there. But…well, I don’t know if there’s a God out there or not. But I try to do the right thing anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you try to do the right thing?” The beads circled Floyd’s neck every few seconds now, the fingers blurred nearly to invisibility, the clicks chattering like a radiation counter recording a solar flare.

  “Because it’s important to me. Not because it’s important to God.” I thought for a moment. “Tell me something.”

  “If I can.”

  “If you don’t believe in God…why the beads?”

  Abruptly, the beads stopped running through his blurring, mechanical fingers. “It is an exercise in logic.”

  “Oh?”

  “I have no way of determining God’s existence or non-existence, nor can I prove or disprove the reality of eternal souls—in particular of my own. Cycling through the formulaic prayers of the rosary costs little in terms of energy or mental concentration. If I am mistaken and God is real, the prayers generated may have a positive effect.”

  I burst out laughing. “You know, Floyd, that’s the most human thing I’ve ever heard you say. I suspect most humans think the same way.”

  I paused for a moment, thinking through our conversation thus far before continuing. “But there’s something in all of this I need to know.”

  “Yes?”

  “Bioroids have it written into their code that they’re not supposed to kill humans, right?”