Worldwired

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Yes,” Patty said. “All right.”

  Wainwright was becoming more comfortable than she had ever intended to be with having a ship that gave her backtalk, but she wasn't about to admit it. Especially not to the ship. “Dick.”

  “Captain?”

  “Is Charlie making any progress on the nanites?”

  Richard didn't take over a monitor to present her with a visual image, but she almost heard him shrug. “They've stopped going blank on us. Whether that was because the recode was successful, or because whatever was blocking them decided to give it a rest, I'm not yet ready to hypothesize.”

  “It's your ass on the line, too, Dick.”

  “Trust me, Captain. I'm intimately aware.”

  Wainwright really didn't like not having any translight pilots on board at all. Of course, Casey's testimony was finished. Wainwright could recall her now, if she wanted, and have one pilot on board the Montreal within twenty-four hours in case of emergency, counting travel time and time up the beanstalk. Not that the unwired, sublight pilots couldn't handle the ship perfectly well anywhere in normal space. Not that Richard wasn't perfectly capable of keeping the Montreal in tiptop shape. But it might be prudent to recall Casey.

  On the other hand, Wainwright didn't really want Casey back until the trip to the shiptree that Riel had ordered had taken place. Because Casey would push to be allowed to go, and Wainwright didn't want that. And Riel obviously hadn't told her it was happening, because Wainwright hadn't gotten any annoyed messages. Which was good: Wainwright wanted a tidy, cautious little team—Charlie Forster, she thought, and Jeremy Kirkpatrick, and the Montreal's safety officer, Lieutenant Amanda Peterson, who had her shuttle cert and more hours pushing vacuum than any other two crew members put together. She could shift the EVA up to Sunday, send them with extra oxygen, let them take the Gordon Lightfoot and synch it in orbit with the shiptree and they could just stay there for a week, or until they figured it out or got killed, whichever came first. And she'd hang on to Elspeth and Gabe, thank you; they could do their work by remote, along with Leslie, and complain all they liked about it, too.

  Wainwright pushed the thought of Leslie Tjakamarra away firmly and steepled her hands over her interface plate. No. She wouldn't recall Casey. Casey could stay safely on Earth for a while, out of the way. Patty Valens hero-worshipped Casey, whether Casey saw it or not, and could probably use the moral support—as Xie Min-Xue could use Patty's.

  Wainwright grinned. And if she did say so herself, Jenny needed the vacation. Likely more so now than she had before. And it was good to have her out from underfoot for a while. “How's Miss Valens's testimony going?”

  “You've been watching the news feeds, Captain.”

  “Of course I have. But I prefer to hear it from the horse's mouth, so to speak.”

  “Patty says she is fine,” the AI answered, a slight formality tingeing his voice as a hint of Alan's personality overlaid Richard's. “She thanks you for asking.”

  And isn't it weird that Patty talks to Alan rather than Richard, when they're the same . . . person? Which reminded Wainwright of something else she needed to attend to. “And has the UN decided to accept your offer to testify yet?”

  “They are discussing. The legal implications are daunting.”

  “And if they declare you a person? What changes?” He didn't answer. She reached up manually, when she could have blinked a command or issued one verbally, and changed the image on the second largest monitor to a shot of Mars from the Arean Orbital Platform. She stared at the dusty red globe, the glitter of its icy poles, and fiddled her fingertips against her trousers.

  “Richard.”

  “Captain.”

  “I received a communiqué from the prime minister regarding you. And your refusal of Canadian citizenship.”

  “And it concerns you, with regard to my presence here.”

  “Yes.” Her mouth was dry. She swallowed to wet it.

  “Prime Minister Riel still plans to work toward a more effective world government, when the current issue of criminality in Chinese and Canadian actions is resolved.”

  “That's not an answer, Dick.”

  “I know. You understand my moral predicament.”

  She changed the feed again; a filtered shot of Saturn from one of the drones surfing its rings, revealing bands of color on the vast planet's surface that were invisible to the naked eye. “You no longer feel yourself in a position where you can choose one government's interests over those of others. You feel your . . . stewardship has been expanded to preclude that.”

  “I'm not fond of that word.”

  “Stewardship? Do you deny that's what it is?”

  “I can't guarantee I will take the commonwealth's side in any negotiations,” he said. “But you need me to assist in the operation of the Montreal, and negotiations with the Benefactors, and in going with her on her further missions of research and study. And to be perfectly frank, Captain, there are people on this ship for whom I bear a personal affection. But I'm not interested in a role in loco parentis to the human race. That sounds . . . extraordinarily boring.”

  “It seems to me that you are going to have to evolve an entirely new ethical framework to handle this, Dick.”

  “Actually,” he said, “I'm hoping for some sort of nominal world authority, or a cooperative venture between space-faring powers. Failing that . . .”

  “Failing that”—Wainwright folded her shaking hands into her elbow joints and tried to pretend that the sinking sensation in her gut was worry about the power of the entity she confronted, and not distaste at telling off a friend—“if you cannot guarantee your loyalty to the Montreal, her crew, and Canada, I will be forced to ask you to abandon your input into her operations.”

  “I have a counterproposal.”

  “Let's hear it.”

  “I spawn a subpersona that shares the loyalties you require, and house its processes in the Montreal rather than the worldwire. The Montreal gains an AI of its own, a discrete one.”

  It had possibilities. “And the Vancouver? And the Huang Di?”

  “Likewise. Entities of their own, in communication with the worldwire but not a part of it. Like the discrete nanonetworks inhabiting the bodies of the pilots. Those personas will be able to generate additional AIs as needed, for additional ships, and I will still be able to talk to them, and you to me.”

  “And the Chinese get one, too.”

  “Anybody who wants one gets one. I, however, determine and program the limits of their obedience.”

  “And that doesn't place you in loco parentis, as you said? When your . . . spawned personas, whatever their loyalty might be, can summarily refuse to follow orders? What if they decide they want to switch sides? What if this hypothetical AI decides to stand back and let the Chinese obliterate us next time, because pacifism is programmed into it?”

  “Don't think I won't fight if I have to, Captain.”

  His tone drew her up, sharp. Even knowing that every emotion he betrayed was calculated and processed in advance, she hesitated. And then she swallowed and forged on. “Or we could have Elspeth and Gabe go back to producing intelligent programs.”

  “You could,” he said, his voice hanging in the air.

  Abruptly, she wished he had given her an image to watch while they spoke . . . not that a holographic icon would have given away anything he didn't choose to either.

  He continued. “But that's very hit or miss. And in me, you know you have a . . . moral creation.”

  “I sure to hell hope so,” she said. She couldn't keep the bitterness from her tone. In an attempt to chase it out of her mouth, she got up and began to pace from bulkhead to bulkhead. “You won't be able to maintain neutrality, Dick.”

  “I can try.”

  “If you were truly devoted to staying out of our human wrangling, you might consider the option of suicide.” She turned her head to the side, sneaking a sly look at the monitors so he would know that she was k
idding.

  “The genie won't go back in the bottle, no matter how hard you wish him there. But not everything has to be a weapon.”

  “We're primates,” she reminded him. “Sooner or later, everything is. All right, then. We'll cross that bridge when they burn it out from under us. So let's discuss our options for this EVA to the shiptree. I want to do it Sunday.”

  “I want to do it sooner than that. Saturday. Tomorrow. Game five of the World Series is tonight, and game six is Sunday.”

  “And you don't want to miss the game?”

  She got it deadpan enough that he snickered. “Well, there is that, of course,” he said. “But Janet Frye is scheduled to testify on Monday, and if the whole thing doesn't go to hell in a handbasket, we'll have had some good news to release on Saturday, when there's nothing else eating up bandwidth. We'll look like we're accomplishing something up here.”

  “And if it does go to hell in a handbasket?”

  “What does it matter?” he asked. “We'll be getting screwed on Monday anyway. Frye has to have an ace in the hole.”

  6:30 AM

  Saturday October 13, 2063

  HMCSS Gordon Lightfoot

  Earth orbit

  If the birdcage looked like a fantastical Christmas ornament, the shiptree looked . . . well, like the whole damned tree. Shimmering gaud and tinsel, although the thing's curved, asymmetrical, organic outline reminded Charlie more of a satiny branch of driftwood wrapped in microlights than a traditional conifer. Charlie leaned forward against his five-point restraints, his helmet cradled in his lap, and gawked as shamelessly as a child. Beside him, Jeremy was doing the exact same thing, and Dick and Leslie were watching through his eyes.

  They sat behind Lieutenant Peterson in the second row of crew chairs in the Gordon Lightfoot, leaving the copilot's chair beside her empty. The panoramic forward windows on the shuttle showed a broad slice of space, far more expansive than the triple-thick airplane windows with their rounded corners back in the passenger compartment.

  Charlie's gauntleted hands tightened on the shatterproof crystal of his helmet. At least if the shiptree slapped the Gordon Lightfoot out of the sky, Leslie would know everything he did. There'd be no foolishness with final transmissions and telemetry and black boxes—do shuttlecraft even have black boxes?

  “Yes,” Richard said in his head. “And they also have me, these days. And relax. The shiptree never did anything about the unmanned probes we sent.”

  Neither did the birdcage. And the probes didn't try to find a way inside, he answered, but he forced his hands to ease around his helmet. A moment too soon, because Peterson set the autopilot and lifted her own helmet off the carrier beside the pilot's chair. “Hats on, gentlemen,” she said. “I suppose I should thank you two for getting me out of the office again, shouldn't I?”

  Jeremy laughed, a hollow sound amplified by the dome he was settling over his head. The gold-impregnated glass caught the shuttle's interior lights, making him look as if he wore a Renaissance angel's halo over his faded gingery hair. Basset-hound eyes, drooping at the corners, and a long hollow-cheeked face completed the illusion of an old master's work, disconnected in time and place. Charlie seated his own helmet and checked the latches, then checked Jeremy's. Jeremy leaned forward to inspect Peterson's, and Peterson went over Charlie's seals.

  “Leslie must be furious he isn't here for this,” Jeremy said, as Peterson seated her hands on the yoke again. Charlie, who had started his shuttle cert but never finished it, noticed that she engaged the dead man's switch when she did so.

  “He's spitting.”

  Jeremy was silent for a moment. “I'm missing Patty's testimony.”

  Thanks, Charlie, Leslie said. I'm quiet and well behaved, and you're telling Jer lies about my behavior? See if I buy you a beer when we get back to Earth.

  It was meant to ease the lump in Charlie's throat when he thought of Leslie out there somewhere, drifting. It didn't. What makes you think they're ever gonna let us go back to Earth, Les?

  Leslie's laughter almost sounded real. Then they'd bloody well better start shipping up some fucking beer.

  Charlie snorted, fogging the inside of his helmet, and rolled his eyes as he switched on the climate control. “All ready back here,” he said, out loud, so Peterson could hear him.

  “Right,” she said. “We're going in.”

  The shiptree grew slowly and steadily in size as they slid up on it. Charlie already knew the lights weren't portholes. Like all the contact team, he'd studied telescopic images and the data from the unmanned probes. He knew that the hull of the vast structure—the autonomous space-faring vegetable, as he had described the hulk he and Fred Valens had explored on Mars—was comprised of a substance not all that different from cellulose reinforced with monofilamental carbon fiber. Buckytubes: the same substance that had been engineered to make the beanstalks possible—but the buckytubes in the shiptree's hull were grown, theoretically, not manufactured.

  Unless the nanosurgeons had built them, reworking the Brobdingnagian shape from whatever it had once been, into a starship. Always a possibility.

  And in another fascinating twist, the conductive carbon filaments in the shiptree's hull were sheathed in a substance analogous to myelin, and interconnected via organic transistors—carbon filament diodes, which Gabe said were nearly identical to the ones used in humanity's own early experiments with nanochips, before the Benefactor tech had rendered Earth's nanomachine research obsolete.

  Charlie's hands closed on the arms of his acceleration couch, the jointed gauntlets pressing creases into the flesh of his fingers as the Gordon Lightfoot braked on a long smooth arc and came about, paralleling the kilometers-long hull of the shiptree. Firefly green and neon-tetra blue, the lights rippled in response to the passage of the smaller ship.

  “Do you suppose she's hailing us?” Jeremy, his voice dulled and echoing through the helmet. He hadn't turned on his radio.

  “It's as good a guess as any,” Charlie answered. “I think that's bioluminescence, which means that it's likely either for communication or for luring prey. Of course, a critter evolved for space would find light an efficient signal.”

  “You don't think the ship is the intelligence, do you?”

  Charlie shrugged. “Why not? It's possible, and it shows up in enough science fiction that way. The one we found on Mars looked like it had something very much like the VR cables our pilots use, though. Admittedly . . .”

  Richard's voice, through external speakers so Jeremy and Peterson could hear him. “Those ships were so many eons old that we can only speculate how much the species that designed them have changed.”

  “My thoughts exactly.” Thank you, Dick.

  Jeremy nodded inside his helmet, and started talking before Charlie could remind him to speak out loud. “Well, which leaves us with the following question. They—it—never exhibited any kind of semaphoring behavior at the unmanned probes. Do you think it knows we're out here?”

  “I can feel them,” Charlie said. “It stands to reason that they can feel me.”

  “And the probes didn't have red and green running lights,” Leslie added, over the speakers rather than inside Charlie's head. “If we're theorizing that the shiptree uses bioluminescence to communicate, and its lights are all at the green and blue and indigo end of the spectrum, maybe it's seeing the Gordon Lightfoot's green running lights as a friendly wave hi.”

  “You never thought to shine a spotlight on it?” Charlie couldn't be quite sure, but he was reasonably sure that Jeremy was rolling his eyes.

  “I'm a biologist,” Charlie said. “This is why we hired you guys.” He craned his neck to get a better look at the whorled shell gliding by under the Gordon Lightfoot's floodlights, emerging from darkness before and disappearing into darkness again behind, outlined by its own rippling glow and the trembling silver-gray threads of whatever it was that trailed off the smooth hull between them. It was like the hulk of some long-submerged wreck re
vealed and then vanishing in the lights of an exploratory submarine. He could have seen it more plainly in the holoscreens, but there was something about the evidence of his own eyes that tightened his throat and made breathing an effort.

  “Lieutenant,” Jeremy said, “can you dim our lights?”

  “Dim them? Or shut them off?”

  “Well, all the way off. But just flash them a few times.”

  “Damn, look at that thing; it's got no symmetry at all, not bilateral or radial. It's just kind of there.”

  “It's got a fractal pattern, though,” Richard pointed out. “The smaller whorls build to larger whorls and then larger ones. The whole thing looks like a giant toboggan if you squint at it.”

  “How are you managing to squint, Dick?” Charlie shot back, drawing a laugh from Jeremy. The AI was right, though. It was as apt a description as the one that had come to Charlie, of water-worn driftwood. “You know what it reminds me of?”

  “Coral,” Jeremy said promptly, and Dick said “Gypsum crystals, only curved.”

  “Ready to flash lights.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.” Charlie strained against his restraints to get a better look.

  The sudden darkness in the Gordon Lightfoot, inside and out, was shocking. The cabin lights went out, followed—Charlie presumed, unable to see for himself—by the running lights lining her sides. Isolated in his suit, Charlie counted breaths, counted heartbeats. He could feel Richard and Leslie, feel Jeremy and Peterson in the cockpit of the shuttle, feel his suit and the trickle of cool air into his helmet, and none of it meant a thing beside the . . . weight of the shiptree, its presence, like an enormous silent breathing beast in the darkness alongside the fragile bubble of the Gordon Lightfoot.

  The darkness lasted three heartbeats. Peterson flashed the shuttle's lights once, twice, a third time . . . and then left them on, and Charlie drew a single tremulous breath.

  For a moment, the shiptree hung shimmering in space, silent and lovely, quiescent as a slumbering dragon. Until, without warning, the entire length of the strange curved hull went dark.

  “Damn,” Jeremy said.