by Jay Allan
I shook my head, as if Fay could see me through the yellow haze. “You don’t understand.”
“You want him to be like a lone hero out of one of your Greek myths,” the spaceship said. “After all we’ve been through, don’t you see it’s about more than any one person? Why do you think we went through all that trouble to gather such a specific crew?”
I snorted. “So you could pump them for information about how to stay sane when your life could last for thousands of years?”
“Er.”
“I told you I didn’t want to be used.”
“I didn’t make you answer anything. You wanted to talk. To share your great wisdom with the little toddler spaceship.” It buzzed like an engine revving through its red zone, but the noise quickly faded. “I’m sorry. If I’d told you the truth, I was afraid you’d say no.”
“It’s okay.” And it was. Nothing but the last few weeks seemed to matter. I tried to remind myself that would change, given time. “You can ask me whatever you want.”
“I will, later. Hey, you up for visitors?”
“Send them in. Given this bed, it’s not like I can sleep.”
A steady bass sounded from the hall. It grew louder by the moment, a rumble like a bowling ball careering down an alley; soon, it seemed to come from my room itself. I struggled and failed to sit up. I was dehydrated, exhausted, in need of drugs. Hallucinations, aural or otherwise, were not out of the question.
“Rob!”
I rolled to my side. A tiger-striped sphere bounced on the floor.
“You—” I laughed, eyes stinging. “What are you doing here?”
“Shooting HemiCo until they blew up!”
“What if someone sees you?”
Tiger rolled side to side, shrugging. “We think it’s about time the universe hears about us. We don’t have to be afraid anymore!”
“I didn’t think I’d see you again,” I said.
“Heh heh! Me neither.” It spun to a stop like a dropped coin. “But I wish Baxter were here.”
“So do I.”
“You took him from us!” it wailed.
“You helped me smuggle him up to Fay, you little—” I pressed my lips together, then reached for the AI’s smooth striped casing. “He saved us, Tiger. I think he needed to.”
It rolled slowly back and forth. “Did you spend a lot of time with him?”
“Sometimes more than I liked.”
It tipped back. “Can you tell me about him?”
“Of course.” I cocked my head. “There’s one more thing we can do for him, Tiger.”
It jumped from the floor. “Tell me!”
“How many of you came out here?”
* * *
I limped from the tunnel into the waning daylight. To my right, Shelby and her lawyers strode forward. To my left shuffled the eighteen veterans of Thermopylae who were currently able to walk. Five more rebels followed in two open-roofed carts. The vehicles’ soft whirr was drowned out by the steady thunder of four hundred AI rolling along the boulevard toward the white-capped green glass of the Pyramid.
“If there’s any more shooting,” Shelby shouted over the rumble, “I’m going to kill you.”
I held out my empty hands. “I’m not even carrying.”
Her mouth turned down at the corners. “Just about everyone else is.”
“It wouldn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to get all these people together only to be run off by a couple armed guards, would it?”
“What are we doing here, anyway?”
“Making Baxter proud.” I shrugged at her and the three members of her team. “Not that there’s going to be anything legal about this, but I thought it’d be a good idea to have all our resources in play.”
She shook her head, blond hair sweeping her shoulders. “You know we’ve won, right? It’s time to clean up the mess, not stir up more chaos.”
Six soldiers in green uniforms poured from the Pyramid’s brassy double doors and knelt on the steps. It was somewhere near ten percent of Olympian Atomics’ forces still fit to fight—the AI, on entering Shangri-la, had helped round up, disarm, and detain all the troops they could find. The troops on the steps trained their rifles on me.
I stopped at the base of the stairs. “Put those away before I fire you.”
The soldiers exchanged glances. Small arms clicked to all sides of me, gripped by the fleshy hands of our conscripts and in the wireframe arms of the AI.
On the Pyramid, a woman with a shaved head lowered her rifle. “What do you want?”
I jerked my thumb at the multicolored spheres. “Lay down your arms before these little wrecking balls knock the place down. And get Linigan out here.”
The woman gazed at our patchwork army. Her shoulders shook with laughter. “This was not in my job description.”
She led her soldiers down the steps and surrendered their arms. Linigan appeared in the doors, brown hair askew, hands clasped over his paunch. The tall pea-coated man from the negotiations accompanied him, along with three others I didn’t recognize.
Linigan blinked in the thin yellow sunlight. “I’d tell you to get off my property, but it’s a pretty long walk to anywhere we don’t own, isn’t it?”
“Not anymore,” I said. “We’re taking charge.”
“What makes you think you can do that?”
I glanced between the AI and my rebel troops. “My army, obviously. We are here to requisition Shangri-la. As of this moment, Titan belongs to those who built it: your employees. The details of this will be worked out between them and these brilliant lawyers I’ve brought with me.”
Shelby’s mouth tightened into an O. “This isn’t just illegal. It’s insane.”
“I don’t own Olympian Atomics,” Linigan shrugged. “Thousands of stockholders do. That’s who you’re stealing from.”
I chuckled. “The few of them poor enough to notice the dent in their portfolio will have to be consoled by the massive cuts to their energy bills. We’ll sell the System its fuel at cost.”
He blinked, smoothing his hair. “You don’t have the faintest idea how to run this place. Do you know how many people will die when you bungle up their main source of power?”
“That’s why we’ve got all these consultants.” I turned to the sea of AI. Some were pure white. Others were painted in jungle-bright colors. Others yet were striped or checkered or fractaled. A few had tinted themselves to match the fuzzy yellow-orange of Titan. “Anybody interested in helping to run this place?”
Most of the ones with wire arms waved them. Others bounced up and down, smacking against the pavement. Something round and stripy bolted forward and crashed into my leg.
“To hard work!” Tiger hollered.
“Fay?” I said.
“I’ll pitch in until I leave for Centauri,” it said. “We should have this place stable by then. You maniac.”
“Tell me it’s not what he would have wanted.”
Fay laughed, bright and clear. “It’s not HemiCo, but you’ve destroyed this bunch more thoroughly than he could have dreamed of.”
“Maybe it’ll convince the others to shape up.”
My exuberance evaporated as I met with our troops and the AI about their takeover of the Pyramid and its operations. That accomplished, I headed down the steps, hands in pockets. Shoes slapped behind me.
“Do you honestly think they’re going to let this happen?” Shelby fell in beside me. “You just stole trillions of dollars.”
“Oops.”
“What are you going to say to the media? To Earth? To the fifteen billion people scared to death when they learn not only do AI exist, but they’re now in charge of their main source of energy?”
“They’ll calm down fast once they realize those spheres have freed them from one of their oldest needs.” I let out a long breath. “Anyway, I don’t give a shit. I’m not going to be around to hear it.”
She grabbed my wrist. “Rob, what’s wrong? I thought you just go
t shot in the leg. Did they gas you?”
“I’m not dying. I’m going with Fay to Alpha C.”
“You are?” Fay said in my ear.
“You are?” Shelby said in my face.
I glanced up at the dome roof. “I’m not going to find out where I came from down here, am I?”
She peered at my head, parting my hair with her slim fingers. “Are you sure you didn’t get your skull rattled?”
I pushed away her hands. “I’m tired, all right? I’m three thousand years old and I’m dead tired.”
She laughed through her nose. “I know how you feel.”
“I highly doubt that, Shelby. I mean I was literally born three thousand years ago.”
The words spilled out of me. I had never told anyone but Baxter, who knew my secret before he even met me, but these days my best friend was a lightning-fast hyperintelligent battleship. I had nothing to worry about. And frankly, I was sick of hiding.
“I’m older than rock music,” I said. “Than Rome or the New Testament. I’m older than heliocentrism and democracy and peanut butter and jelly. And I want to see something new.”
She drifted away as we walked, touching her ear. “Fay, there’s something seriously wrong with Rob. He needs medical attention.”
“He’s not insane and he’s not kidding,” Fay said. “His unique historical perspective is the reason we targeted him for this mission.”
“So did you know Jesus?” she spat, her concern taking an abrupt turn into the anger of someone who’s had enough of the joke. “Adam? The cavemen?”
She drifted to a stop. Faced with my silence and Fay’s, the anger slid from her features, leaving behind a thick bed of confusion. “But you seem so...normal.”
I managed a smile; her adaptability was one reason I liked her. “You get normal around other people. It’s when you’re alone you get strange.” I scuffed along the pavement, leg dragging. “But I could use some time to myself, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure,” she said briskly. “Of course. I need to get busy on all the work you dropped on me at the Pyramid.”
She drifted back, giving me my distance. Before I descended into the tunnel mouth, I looked up at the sky. “Why can’t you bring him back, Fay? Can’t you download him into a new brain?”
“The structure of his brain is part of what made him Baxter,” Fay said. “And that was destroyed down in that tunnel.”
I walked into the one in front of me. Then, as had so often been the case, I was alone.
* * *
Pete’s bulky arms quivered on the support bars. He slumped, panting, skin dewed with sweat. The red seam of his wound blazed from the dent above his forehead. According to Vance, he’d stripped the stimulators from his limbs the minute he woke up, demanding to rehab the old-fashioned way. The same way he’d built his fighter’s body in the first place.
Pete gathered himself for another try, stepped forward, and stumbled. Vance rushed to the bars. Pete swatted clumsily, waving him back.
“Hands to yourself,” Pete slurred, left eyelid and cheek hanging slack.
He shuffled on for another ten minutes, fighting the fractional gravity until he could barely lift his head. He let Vance lead him to bed, smiling when the skinny lawyer tucked him in. I retreated to the hall. Vance joined me once Pete, aided by meds, nodded off.
I rolled my lip between my teeth. “What do they think?”
Vance wiped his hand down his tired face. “They say they can regrow about thirty percent of the damage. If he sticks to his rehab, it’s a good shot he’ll be kicking my ass again in no time.” He smiled with half his mouth, then shrugged one thin shoulder, as if he were unconsciously imitating his wounded boyfriend. “But you know how dicey these things are.”
I touched his elbow. “He’s tough. He’ll come back.”
A fragile grin lit his face. “Did he really knock you out once?”
“With one damn punch.”
I headed upstairs to check on Jia. Asleep again. Her replacement lung was next on the queue for Shangri-la’s limited vat space. O2 pills kept her going in the meantime, but her tan face was delicate and as sickly yellow as old paper.
Eight days later, she still hadn’t recovered enough to make the memorial. I walked alone to Thermopylae. Dome 27’s power and heat had been restored, but at the tunnel entrance, it felt strange to see the hundreds of gathering citizens dressed in shorts and skirts instead of blankets and shiny thermalwear.
A solemn throng filled the space where the med tent had stood. To either side of the tunnel, a mosaic of candles and notes carpeted the ground. The omninets were restored and citizens traded holos of the dead. Departed faces glowed in the darkness. Some were static, others video. One popular format cycled between images of every man and woman lost in the fighting.
A vast and silent holo played in the air above the tunnel mouth, broadcasting in realtime the voyage of the cargo ship carrying the bodies of the 58 citizens and 197 Olympian Atomics soldiers who had died in the tunnel of Thermopylae. I watched it track above the razor-thin rings of Saturn. The image zoomed as the ship closed distance, stretching the storm-tossed planet’s stripes through thirty feet of empty air.
The ship blurred, then cratered into the whirling gases. People gasped, sobbed, cheered. The divot stretched, distorted by the nonstop winds. Lost below the surface, the ship cruised on, carrying the troops and most of Baxter’s remains to Saturn’s hard heart.
“It’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it?” Hermalina stood beside me, curly hair tumbling from her upturned head.
I nodded. The crater frayed at its edges, an unraveling oval. “I hear you’re staying after all.”
“Who told you that?” she laughed. “Your all-knowing flying friend?”
“It likes to gossip.”
She smiled at the holo of Saturn, the night sky beyond the dome. “I know it’s a pain in Fay’s ass to keep track of who’s going and who’s staying. But it’s a lot for me to process, you know? Why go all the way to another system when we’re about to make a new world right here?”
“Will you go into the tunnel with me?” Impulsively, I reached for her hand. “I’m not sure I can do it by myself.”
She pushed out her lower lip, puzzled, then nodded. The battered battlewagon had been driven from the tube, the furniture and trash removed along with the bodies. The walls and trenches and crater had been smoothed. In the restored tunnel, citizens lined it end to end, faces lit by the ghosts on their omnis. They stooped to rub dirt between their fingers, stretched to touch the bullet-scarred walls, whispered to each other and to people who were no longer there.
I walked to the midpoint, crouched beside a wall, and buried the scorched fragments of two artificial brains in the yellow dirt.
* * *
I stomped the cart’s brake, cursing, then waved at the giggling boy scampering across the pavement. Tiger had tried to talk me into letting him drive us to the spaceport, but I’d vetoed that at once. It had bounced unhappily until I’d promised to let it sit in the copilot’s chair on the way up to Fay.
People sat in the sunlight outside cafes, drinking coffee and browsing their omnis. I slowed to catch snatches of conversation: stories of the strange habits of their AI coworkers; debates over which luxuries NightVision’s ships should truck from Earth first; laughter over frantic vidmails from Earthbound mothers worried that steel-jawed robots would devour their Shangri-lese children in their sleep.
In dome centers, AI waved their wiry hands at humans, who tried to keep a straight face while the AI argued that you had to plant the plaza flowers in patterns a lot more interesting than rows. The Talk over the new parks had convulsed the threeater for hours. Too frivolous, said some. A waste of money that could be spent on real problems.
Opinion split down the center until Fay, perhaps bored with its finalized colonist manifest, spent a few seconds mocking up a series of designs—some geometric, some fractal, some chaotically organic—and explained, o
ver the stunning holos of its proposals, how the plants’ extra oxygen would offset costs. That the project could be further subsidized by selling plants to anyone looking to liven up their sterile apartments, which in turn would create extra jobs for botanists, cultivators, vendors—
At that point, its bright voice had been drowned out by calls of support from the seated citizens. The formal omninet vote carried two to one. Other proposals had Talked less smoothly (I’d heard about two fistfights already), but the citizens were adapting.
I ascended from the tunnel to the spaceport dome, puttered the cart to the communal drop-off, and endured the steely gaze of several blank-faced bodyguards—NightVision’s financier Lee Jefferson had hit orbit a couple hours ago and her shuttle was due any minute. At the gate, Tiger spun to face me.
“You ready?” it squeaked.
“Sure am,” I said. “You been onboard the Frontier Assessment before?”
“Yeah! I helped build it, dum-dum.”
“Dear lord.” Shelby appeared from a crowd of well-wishers around the closed umbilical and glanced between me and Tiger. “Is this how you’re going to be all the way to AC?”
“Most likely,” I grinned. “What do you care?”
“Because I’ll need to convince Fay to blast one of you out the airlock.”
I made a face that must have looked very stupid. “Wait, you’re coming? Since when?”
She shrugged. “It’ll be easier to talk through a new constitution when I’m going to be one of them.”
“You realize it’s a seven-year flight?”
“Oh shit, why didn’t anyone tell me?” She rolled her eyes. “If I get bored, maybe you can tell me what the history books got wrong.”
I nodded, speech centers of my brain overridden by the same parts that had flown into high gear in the bakery in Athens when Demostrate announced the end of her engagement.
We boarded. Titan fell away beneath us, a fuzzy yellow tennis ball above an endless black court.
* * *
“Can I talk to you?”
I glanced up from the star-speckled screen. It was a strange request from a ship who could speak to me from any part of its spartan interior, but I could guess why Fay felt the need to ask permission. Over the first month of our journey, I’d become increasingly asocial. Ducking Tiger’s requests to play games in favor of sitting in my room replaying our decision to rebel. Shrugging off Shelby’s invites to dinner to contemplate all the things I could have done differently. Lately Fay’s chirpy voice had been tarred with obvious worry. That didn’t help me want to keep an open line of communication.