by Jay Allan
“So that’s it? I live forever because my cells can replace themselves whenever they break down?”
“No, but that’s all I can find until we get to a lab. I’m sorry.”
“I have a logical paradox for you,” I said. “How can you be worried about breaking a promise to me, but have no qualms about punching me out and hauling me across 150 million miles of space?”
“I know it’s bad, but we need you.”
“You guys keep saying that.”
“Baxter told you about the colonists on Titan, didn’t he?” the voice said. I nodded and it rushed on, earnest as a teenager. “They’ll set the course for the rest of human history. Why wouldn’t you want to help them?”
“You could have fucking asked!” I roared into the featureless corner.
“We did!”
I turned my back and wandered to the middle of the room, my rage blown out of me like the last gust of a Hellesponter. “Just shut up. Shut your stupid mouth. Do you even have a mouth?”
Neither of us spoke for a while. When it did, it was no longer bright. “What’s it like? Living so long?”
“Same as everyone else. First you do a lot of things you don’t want to, and once you realize you don’t have to do anything, you start doing things for reasons you don’t understand instead. It’s a real treat.”
“I’ll live forever, too. Unless someone blows me up.”
“Good for you,” I sneered. “Have fun forgetting everything and everyone who ever meant anything to you. Have fun being so bored you want to stab out your own eye with the knitting needle you took up as a hobby to get you through the next century. And if the tedium of it all doesn’t convince you to take the bull by the horns and kill yourself, enjoy an eternity of living with the memory of the worst things you’ve ever done, because those are the only memories that don’t go away.”
“Is that really what it’s like?”
“Meanwhile, everyone you care about dies. Or you have to run from them to preserve yourself and your secret and you won’t even know how they died until years afterward. I thought you could help me, but it’s just going to boil down to a bunch of stupid biology, isn’t it? It’s not going to mean anything.”
The voice went quiet for a while. “This is how you feel? How do you go on?”
I hissed air between my teeth. “You pick up tricks to cope. It’s just hard to keep them in mind when you’ve been kidnapped by a couple of idiots with no clue what they’re doing.”
“Well, why don’t we make the most of your time here? Will you teach me these coping tricks?”
I drew back and kicked the bedstand. Pain flashed through my foot. I sat down hard.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said once I stopped trembling. “Just leave me alone.”
I crawled into bed and blanketed myself with self-pity and actual blankets. For the next day I didn’t talk except to ask about a bathroom and something to eat. A door slid open to the room’s side, exposing a shower with a fold-out toilet and sink. A few minutes later, the front door opened to a wheeled plastic block bearing a tray of rehydrated mush and a vitamin cocktail. Once I was done, I went back to bed.
I woke refreshed and determined. “I want out of this ship.”
“Oh no!” the voice in the corner replied. “You’d suffocate.”
“Then I want out of this room, you literal idiot. Why are you keeping me locked in here?”
“I’m not.” The door slid upwards into the wall. “If you want to open it, say ‘squonk.’ If you want to close it, say ‘thonk.’“
“I’m not saying that.”
“Well, you can’t make it ‘open’ and ‘close,’ can you? You’d have doors flying all over the place in the middle of normal conversation.”
“I doubt a normal conversation has ever taken place in here.” I edged to the doorway, nerves fluttering, like the ship might have a bug-eyed, eight-pawed space-tiger waiting for me in the hall. Like my room, the passage was monochrome black. Inoffensive white lights shined from hidden sources. “Is anyone else onboard?”
“Baxter and Mr. Pete Gutierrez. Would you like to see them?”
“No.” I left my room. “Does this heap have any windows?”
The voice spoke from another point in the ceiling. “Just a moment.”
I stood there like an idiot. A minute later, the wheeled box-bot that brought my meals clunked out of a hatch in the wall. It turned in a friendly circle and rolled away. I followed it past a lot of stuff that looked just like the stuff behind it. Thoroughly disoriented, I wound up in another black room several times bigger than mine and lined with raised black benches. I wandered forward and tapped the smooth wall. It opened to the starry void.
“Oh sweet Christ I’m going to die!”
“What? It’s okay! It’s a projection!”
Space spread out before me, infinitely deep and infinitely clear, static as a painting but more vivid than the finest holo. Like I’d first seen on a flight to Mars, in vacuum the stars didn’t twinkle. Yet somehow the impression of motion remained in them, as if my eyes understood the pure energy gushing out of each white dot.
“That’s the view from up front,” the voice said. “Do you think they’re pretty?”
“Why? Oh, did you make them?”
“No!”
I frowned up at the ceiling. “Look, what’s your deal?”
“My deal?”
“You’re weird, aren’t you? What are you?”
“The first second-generation AI.”
I held up my palms. “A few weeks ago I didn’t even know you guys existed. I’m not up on your lingo.”
“Hmm,” it said. “Baxter and the others are like you. HemiCo couldn’t figure out how to do anything original, so they had to base their design on human brains and hope for the best. Billions of artificial neurons arranged into clusters and networked together, capable of flashing on or off, reacting to each other in binary.” On the wall screen, the stars disappeared, replaced by a stylized cluster of points. It zoomed out, showing dozens of clusters webbed with hair-fine lines. It zoomed again and the webs resolved into a brain. “Create a big enough network and intelligence arises.”
“Or the appearance of intelligence.”
“Oh! You do know about this stuff.”
“Enough to know ant colonies look like they’re making conscious decisions, too, but it’s really just the collective behavior of thousands of stupid ants reacting to each other’s pheromones.”
“Right. So a network of neurons adds up to a brain. A network of ants adds up to a colony. Due to the quantity and arrangement of their components, these superstructures are capable of vastly more complex behavior than anything you’d ever imagine possible from a tiny little ant or binary neuron. I am the next step up from a neuronal network: a network of networks.” The brain shrank against the screen. Dozens more materialized around it. The image zoomed out again until, like a fractal, the networked brains resolved into a single abstract structure, suggestive of the brains that comprised it but also something bigger, galactic. “That and a collection of massively powerful processors for when I need to do the maths,” it said somewhat modestly. Its voice then buoyed with pride. “Designed by AI and embedded in this ship to protect them and their interests. And, well, to see what happens when you go beyond human-level intelligence. My name is the Frontier Assessment.”
“The Fucking Asshole, more like. Or the Failure Ahoy.”
“Why would you say that?”
I shook my head, strangely guilty for lashing out at this naive mega-genius. “The Frontier Assessment isn’t much of a name. How about I call you Fay?”
“But I’m not female.”
I touched the flat wallscreen, where the supernetwork had returned to a view of the vacuum. Stars burned between my fingers. “What can you do with this wonderbrain of yours?”
“I’m especially good at pattern recognition,” it said. “That’s how I picked up
the connections between your lives and determined you’d been present for the Persian Wars. And that’s how I know Shelby—our lawyer—gives us the best chance on Titan. Assuming we can get her off Mars first!”
“What are you going to do with me once we get there?”
“I don’t know.” Fay made a windy noise just enough like a sigh to remind me it wasn’t. “What can I do to convince you to help us?”
“That’s a start.” I tapped the starry wall. “You know we used to worship these as gods? How long does it take to fly from Mars to Titan?”
“In me? Under steady acceleration, about eighteen days. Add a day or two if we stay too long on Mars. The distance between planets isn’t static, you know.”
This was, to my limited understanding of modern space travel, ridiculously fast. Maybe things had changed while I wasn’t looking. Two months ago I hadn’t known AI existed. Now I’d been kidnapped by them. Through the last three centuries, through radio and telephones and television, satellites and internet, omnis and holos and netspace, the world had seemed to shrink and shrink until you could be everywhere at once. For most Earthlings, humanity’s expansion into space hadn’t expanded our universe in the slightest. The settlements were too tiny. Incapable of influence. And so Earth was dismissive of Luna, disinterested in Mars, completely ignorant of whatever HemiCo and such were up to on Titan. Meanwhile, out there, magic was happening.
I had been a roamer once, a rider and a sailor. Yet in the last three centuries, I’d lived outside the United States one time, relocating to Mars in its early days before growing tired of the hardship and returning to America. Due to inertia, ennui, or some other snazzy word, I hadn’t been anywhere new in more than a hundred years. I frowned.
I let the box-bot lead me back to my room. Fay told me we had two more days till planetfall. I spent most of that watching the starscreen and rejecting Baxter’s entreaties to see me. It was a peaceful couple days.
With eight hours until Mars orbit, I asked Fay to have Baxter meet me in the screen room. Maybe Stockholm Syndrome presents much faster when you’re actually trapped inside your captor, but I wanted to see the frontier again, to see what we’d done with the worlds beyond our first. With Mars an orange-red marble on the screen, I hid beside the door, waited for Baxter to walk in, and tackled him to the ground.
“Hello,” he said as we skidded over the plastic floor. I pinned him with my knees, grabbed hold of his oversized halfvest, and punched him in the face.
“You are not going to kidnap me again.” I drove another blow into his artificial nose. “From this moment on, you are not going to trick me, lie to me, or use me.”
“What are you doing in there?” Fay squealed.
“Performing a ritual act of male forgiveness,” Baxter said. I punched him again, bouncing his head off the floor.
“You want me to partner up with you? You damn well better start treating me like a partner. I want you to figure out what’s wrong with me. I want you to build me a ship of my own—consider it kidnap-pay. I want to know what’s going on and I want to know what you’re going to do before you do it. I don’t want to be your Swiss Army knife of time and space anymore. I want to be your equal.”
“Okay.” Baxter reached up and pushed his nose back into place. “Frontier?”
“Agreed,” Fay said.
I sat back, panting. “And I want you to apologize.”
“I’m sorry for mistreating you,” he said. “This is all pretty new to us.”
I pointed up at the corner. “You too!”
“I’m sorry, Rob!” Fay said.
Pete pounded inside. He took one step toward me and Baxter held up his hand in a guard.
“And from you, you bully,” I said.
“What?” he said.
Baxter rolled his hand in a come-on gesture. “Say you’re sorry.”
“I apologize for my misdeeds?” Pete said.
“Accepted.” I rolled off Baxter and stood, panting. “I’m going to take a shower. I want some mush waiting for me when I get out. Then, partners, I want you to bring me up to speed.”
Silently, the AI waited for the gunman to die. They’d caught him off guard. Baxter imagined, once word got out, the next one wouldn’t be as easy. He said as much.
Arthur frowned and bobbed his face-image, his version of a nod. “They probably know already. Heart monitor or something.”
Baxter threw the pistol on the ground. “What do we do now?”
“What are you doing throwing that aside? That’s a murder weapon!”
“I don’t have fingerprints.” He gave the other machine a look. “And I don’t think we need to worry about DNA.”
6
The Red Planet, when you got right on top of it, turned out mostly brown and orange with small white yarmulkes on its poles. When I’d been here in 2071, New Houston had been a three-dome city so degenerate its 1200 citizens had wiped their ass with toilet paper and broadcast movie files from a pirate station. 129 years later, a handful of independent domes dotted other spots across Mars’ surface, but they’d all stalled half-finished and underfinanced, unable to stabilize their bacteria vats, struggling to maintain dependable O2 output, falling behind the water demands of increasingly finicky colonists. New Houston remained Mars’ only true city; with resources so limited, it made more sense to keep adding to existing infrastructure than to start a new town from scratch. From two miles above the thin winds and grease-fine dust, the city’s three hundred bubbles touched sides like a clutch of frog’s eggs.
Somewhere in all those domes, a constitutionalist lawyer named Shelby Mayes had been arrested for drunkenly assaulting the son of a city board member, and no member of New Houston’s Auxiliary Investigative Department, the private police available to anyone unsatisfied with the bare-bones public force, would touch the case at any price.
Prior to the arrest, Mayes and her team had spent months prepping constitutional rights packages for the vulnerable laborers readying to leave Titan for worlds unknown. Scheduled to depart in four months, their chances for airtight foundational doctrines would be crippled if they had to bring a new legal team up to speed now. Baxter thought HemiCo had set up Mayes and bought off the AID. Fay thought it was more complicated than that but would work out in the end. Pete, he thought it was her own fault.
I thought we needed our own assessment.
“We should go talk to her,” I said on our way down from the orbital port that functioned as Grand Central between atmo traffic and the void-crawlers.
Baxter frowned. “She gave her statement to the police. I assume you didn’t read it.”
“Better to trust a traveling salesman than a drunk,” Pete said.
“Even if she told the truth, memories change,” I said. “Things come back to you. Or you forget and make up what you wish had happened instead. If you want to do this, our first step is to make sure we know what really happened.”
“Go for it,” Fay said. “You’ve got two weeks until the trial.”
That seemed impossibly swift for a case as high-profile as hers, but New Houston justice was famous on Earth for making Draco look like Huggo. It was entirely privatized or something entirely unclear to me; to cut costs, the penal corporations had lobbied to rush any case short of the death penalty (which they still used!) through the system as soon as it came in. If you were found innocent, court costs were thus minimized. And if you were guilty, you got sent straight to work on the city’s ever-growing infrastructure, paying off your literal debt to society through hard labor.
The limited public courts worked with the same haste. Martians hated to pay for something as fleeting as justice.
And they seemed to hate cameras worse. While America was one big live news feed from coast to coast, New Houston didn’t even have cameras in their prisons. At least not in the visiting room at Mills Pen, a bare concrete room divided by a wall-to-wall transparent plastic screen. The guard clanked the door behind us and posted up on the other sid
e. Opposite the clear plastic, Shelby Mayes sat alone. Mid-thirties. Bedraggled hair tied up in a ponytail. One elbow thrown over the back of her chair. She looked like a waitress catching her breath after shooing the last diner out the door, not the brilliant, uncompromising, constitutionally-trained crusader of labor law that had made her the AIs’ first choice. Her fine features were drawn by the combination of exhaustion, boredom, and anxiety that had marked all slaves and prisoners since the dawn of time—I’d worn them myself in Persian captivity—but she’d be pretty enough, if you liked thin blond whites, which I didn’t especially, after a shower and a nap.
“Baxter,” she nodded, voice passing right through the screen. She gazed at me. “Who are you two?”
“That’s Pete Gutierrez. I’m Rob Dunbar. We’re your new investigative team.”
“Here to rescue me.”
“Damn right.”
She rolled her eyes, settling them on Baxter. “You shouldn’t be here. This is HemiCo’s world. If they find you, they’ll take you.”
He laughed coldly. “I would be transcendent with delight to let them try. Also, we have backup.” He tapped the flesh-colored dot mike on his throat. The one that gave us an encrypted line straight to Fay in high orbit.
“Like that’ll stop them.”
“I want to hear your story,” I said.
“What, you can’t read?”
“Yeah, I hope that’s not a problem. Baxter couldn’t afford anyone literate.”
“Look.” Mayes glanced between us without looking directly at any one person. “There’s not much you can do. Cut your losses and run with someone from my team instead.”
“Not a good idea,” Fay said through our earbuds.
“Why’s that?” I said.
Mayes have me a sharp look. “Because my jail term is going to overlap your negotiation window?”
“Because she has the sharpest mind for constitutional law of her generation,” Fay said. “And because I have a feeling about her.”
I snorted. “You brought me here because you had a feeling?”