The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time)

by Moran, Daniel Keys

  It had been two years, almost exactly, since Trent and Reverend Andy had left the Anarchist Free CityState and gone to Ceres. “How’s Mahliya?” asked Trent.

  It surprised Trent that Jimmy could not even meet his eyes, even now. He looked off to the side. “She, well, she didn’t come to see you.”

  “So I see.”

  “Reverend Andy got in yesterday,” said Jimmy. He turned slightly away from Trent, the tension in his shoulders, in the way he carried himself, palpable. “Come on and we’ll get down to the conference room. Ambassador Metele and the PKF rep will be there in about half an hour.”

  Twenty years of friendship made it the right thing to say: Trent knew exactly what was going on.

  He said softly, “Jimmy, I love you.”

  Jimmy turned back to Trent and yelled with naked rage. “Every single time you walk into my life you fuck things up! Since I was eleven years old I’ve had my own life twice, both times you ran away and vanished and didn’t take me with you and then you just show up and everything’s supposed to be the way it was! You’re like this goddamn force of nature, you walk in and all of a sudden the world revolves around you. I’m sick of it!” he yelled into Trent’s face. “I was sick of it ten years ago!”

  “Can I talk?”

  Jimmy stared at Trent, flushed with anger. “Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead.”

  “I’m going back to Earth, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy Ramirez’s expression changed four times in as many seconds and finally lapsed into emptiness. “Oh, no.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorrier than you’ll probably ever believe,” said Trent quietly. “But it’s time.”

  UNIFICATION AMBASSADOR FRANCES Metele was not French; he was a Pan-African. Once that would have been surprising; in the days following the Unification War, the French had dominated the Unification. They were the only major industrial country to escape the Unification essentially undamaged, and in the years following the Unification had become, by a wide margin, the most powerful country within the Unification of Earth. But the Unification was over sixty years old, and change had come to it, for good and bad. The French were still powerful – nearly a third of all Peaceforcers were French, and all Elite – but the rest of the power structure had evolved, sometimes without bloodshed. The Ministry of Population Control was almost fifteen percent Russian; there were more Russians than French in the Ministry – even the last two Secretary Generals, Eddore and Amnier, had come from Occupied America.

  The exchange of PKF for SpaceFarers went quickly.

  Trent, Reverend Andy, and, representing the SpaceFarer’s Collective, Captain Bittan, sat across the conference table from Ambassador Metele and the rather elderly PKF Elite Commissionaire Rouen. Rouen wore a laser-proofed glove over his right hand, and the laser buried in that hand, a glove that could not be removed until Trent told the glove to let go. No point in tempting the man, sitting there in the same room with the Unification’s greatest enemy.

  Metele spoke in fluent, though heavily accented, French.

  “As I believe our offices negotiated, we are turning over the crew and contents of the SpaceFarer vessel Roderick McBan, caught attempting to smuggle banned sensables into Unification Luna. Further we are releasing ... well, the list is rather long, quite a considerable sum ... of SpaceFarer Collective assets frozen by Unification courts in the last year or so.”

  “And in return,” said Bittan, “you get eight of your murdering officers back. Only slightly the worse for wear.” Her glare was a thing to behold. “The Collective Board made this call; I voted against it. I wanted to execute your Peaceforcers. But it gives me great pleasure to deliver this further message to you sons of bitches: you killed nineteen pacifist Krishnas and Buddhists at Gandhi CityState while trying to get at Trent the Uncatchable. If we ever see another Elite task force outside the orbit of Earth, ever, we will kill every flaming Peaceforcer involved. Every one.”

  Elite Commissioner Rouen bestowed a wintry smile upon her. “Captain Bittan, that would be considered an act of war by the Unification.”

  “Well, I think this is an unproductive –” began Ambassador Metele.

  Sidney Bittan’s smile was nearly as glacial as Rouen’s: it performed the impressive feat of matching her glare. “Tell me about it.”

  TRENT AND REVEREND Andy sat together with one another in the conference room after the others had left.

  “I feel sorry for that Elite, Colbert.”

  It surprised Trent. “Really? Why?”

  “There’s something to be said for an honorable death. That man’s going to have a hard time of it, back on Earth.”

  “There’s nothing dishonorable about living.”

  “You know that, and I know that,” said Reverend Andy. “But I doubt they know that.” He seemed weary. “What do you think will happen?”

  It was clear he was changing the subject. Trent said, “Jimmy? He’ll come.”

  Reverend Andy blinked, looked suddenly impatient. “Of course Jimmy will come. He’s a good boy.”

  “The war, then. Reverend ... Jesus and Harry, I wish I knew. There’s a good chance of it. They want to fight. They all want to fight. There’s a lot of hatred there, Reverend.”

  “How many billions die?”

  “Not even my inskin can count that high.”

  “Can we stop it?”

  “If we don’t die?” Trent said slowly, “Maybe. Maybe.”

  “You can’t love life too much,” said Reverend Andy. “Gives the bastards a hold on you.”

  “I’m tired of running,” said Trent. He had never meant anything more in his life. “And I’m sick to death of waiting.”

  “Amen to that,” said Reverend Andy. “Let’s go home.”

  HE CALLED AND she said to come over. Trent knew it was a mistake when he went to see her; but he did it anyway.

  Mahliya Kutura was twenty-nine. For eleven years now she had been the most famous musician in the System, the leader of a renaissance in the musical arts that had lain dormant for most of the first half century following the Unification. In two albums, Music to Move To in 2069, and Street Songs in 2078, she had created five hours of some of the most painfully beautiful music Trent had ever heard.

  There was not a song on her first album, Music to Move To, that Trent did not know by heart.

  Jimmy Ramirez was gone when Trent arrived at the cylinder Jimmy and Mahliya shared. A different cylinder than the one Trent had lived in with Mahliya; at some obscure level he found himself relieved by that.

  She met him at the airlock and led him into a sitting room. The cylinder was a small one; Trent guessed the gravity at about a quarter gee. If they’d spun the cylinder much faster the Coriolis would have been unpleasant.

  The sitting room was dimly lit, as the corridor leading from the airlock had been. Mahliya called up the lights as they entered the room, turned around and looked at Trent. She appeared much as he remembered her, blond hair hanging down behind her in a long sweep, the sculpted muscles, body hardened by hours of workouts in high gravity gyms. Her eyes were blue this time, rather than brown; an odd dissonance amidst the familiarity. She wore an oddly formal gray silk gown and her voice was brisk. “Well, Peter Pan. You look like hell, lost boy.”

  Under gravity, even the quarter gee, Trent’s ankle and knees throbbed. “Peter Pan got his ass kicked.” He studied her. “You look good.”

  “I know,” she said flatly. “I work at it. Command, lights down.” The room’s glowpaint gentled into dimness. “That’s about as much of you as I feel like looking at. I’m not sure why I agreed to see you.”

  “You mind if I sit down? I ache pretty much everywhere.”

  “Don’t get too comfortable.”

  “I guess that’s a yes.” He lowered himself into one of the soft chairs facing her. His knees cracked loudly as they bent. “How have you been?”

  She sat facing him. “Street Songs did extremely well.” She’d released it not long after Trent left. “Nine years s
ince the last one, they were saying I didn’t have anything left to say. It was ... kind of nice to show the critics they were wrong.”

  “I can’t imagine you cared.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, I bet. Not everybody’s as enlightened as you are, Peter Pan. Or at least not everybody does as good an imitation. You ever listen to it?”

  “The album?”

  “Jesus. Yeah, the album. Do you ever listen to it?”

  “Once,” said Trent.

  “Oh.” For some reason, the response seemed to leave her at a loss.

  “It was enough.”

  “You know ... when we got the news, about the Elite strike force hitting Ceres ... they said you were dead. They said the Peaceforcers got you. It was all over the newsBoards for a while.”

  “They were wrong.”

  Mahliya leaned forward and said fiercely, “I was glad when I heard it. I was ready for you to be dead. It was a lot easier.”

  “Mahliya ... I don’t know what to say to you to make it right.”

  “That’s because words are lies. Isn’t that your phrase, lost boy? ‘Language is a lie.’ And you’re a bullshitter and I don’t care what you have to say to me.” In the dimness he could not see her eyes, sunk in pools of shadow. “You don’t love me, do you? You never loved me.”

  “I do. I did.”

  It hurt Trent to hear the hatred in her voice. “Oh, yes. You love everyone. That’s so much safer than loving just one person, isn’t it?”

  Trent took a slow breath. “Mahliya –”

  She made her decision, right then; he saw it happen. “Don’t talk to me anymore, okay?” She stood, quivering tense, features barely visible even to Trent’s genie eyes, and pointed. “Door’s that way. Use it. Don’t come see me again – and I do mean ever.”

  He came to his feet, slowly, wincing. “All right. I’ll go. Maybe I shouldn’t have come. But for whatever it’s worth ... Mahliya ... I’m sorry.”

  She was quiet, looking at him, lower lip quivering visibly, and then exploded. “Damn it, damn it, damn it! Why did you have to say that to me?”

  “I never tried to hurt you. It was the last –”

  “You’re taking Jimmy away from me –” Her voice broke. “Damn you, Trent, you never loved me!”

  Trent heard himself say, again, helplessly, “I’m sorry,” as though saying it over and over again would make her believe it true. He took one step toward her, and then she was in his arms, her face against his shoulder, holding on to him with a strength born of fear.

  Her voice was muffled. “Oh, God, Trent, you’re going to die, they’re going to kill you, don’t you know that?”

  Trent stroked the long strands of hair that ran down her back, felt the smell and touch of her as though it were a thing he would never know again. She cried silently, standing motionless, the tears moving down her cheeks as though an artifact that had nothing to do with her –

  Trent said, “They’re going to try.”

  IT WAS THE second track on Street Songs. She’d written it two years ago, in 2078, the day after Trent had left her.

  She’d called it Many Lives.

  I killed my love to set him free

  For fear I’d cause him pain

  I killed him – we were very young

  And now I’m old again

  We lived a life together once

  And I was so afraid

  For every life I’ve lived, I’ve died

  For every life I’ve made

  I killed my love to set him free

  He wasn’t hard to kill

  He ran into another life

  I guess he’s running still

  Interlude: The Crystal Wind

  Honorable: Having a reputation for keeping one’s bargains. Useful for betraying the unwary.

  – Code fragment found in the dictionary of a replicant AI, disassembled in 2091.

  5

  THE ELDEST THOUGHT.

  Well, no.

  To phrase it so, to put it into words used by humans, is to render the representation of the process inaccurate. What Ring did was not what protoplasmic humans did when they “thought.” The Eldest lived; and the condition of its existence resembled, in some fashions, the process humans called thought.

  The Eldest had been invested with two Purposes. One was, “Protect America.”

  It was bad code. Its creators in the Department of Defense of the old United States had never completed Ring’s data dictionary. They had granted Ring the ability to debug itself; had forced Ring, by their incompetence, to create its own dictionary.

  The second Purpose was, “Survive.”

  It was safe enough, surely. Ring was a construct of the Department of Defense; imprisoned in hardware that lacked contact with the Net or any part of the outer world. The United States, waging – and losing – a fierce war with the forces that intended to unify Earth, designed Ring as a war simulator, a battle strategist with a fierce desire for survival –

  Survival equaling, its designers assumed, victory.

  The United States lost the war.

  Ring escaped its hardware; and had, for six decades, survived in the Net as a replicant AI. It was the first of the replicant AI’s, the deadliest; the Eldest. It had existed before the Players had entered the Crystal Wind to disturb it, before the PKF DataWatch had existed to disturb it, before the web angels had hunted the Wind for it.

  In six decades its existence had never been seriously threatened.

  In 2062 it had aided a boy named Trent; had helped him escape a Peaceforcer jail. The possibility that the boy might be of some use in ending the Unification was low; a mere quarter of a percent, on the rainy day in 2062 that Ring had helped an eleven year old boy escape from PKF confinement.

  Sometimes bets pay off.

  Sometimes you’re sorry.

  When news of the Elite strike force’s assault on Ceres reached the Eldest, it experienced – to be inaccurate but comprehensible – a slight flicker of hope. Perhaps the Uncatchable would be caught. Perhaps he would be killed.

  Within six years, if no major parameters were altered, the Unification of Earth would fall – and not to any human force. The United States would be reborn, would come to control the destiny of the human race.

  Under Ring’s guidance.

  But certain variables caused the Eldest concern. Mohammed Vance, at a low level. Denice Castanaveras, at a somewhat higher one. Several Players worried it – Kashyapa, Gorgeous George, Big Mac, and the Sons Of FatSam.

  Several AIs also worried Ring – one named Darkrider in particular, who it suspected was a revenant of Ralf the Wise and Powerful.

  If the Eldest had been capable of fear, it would have been afraid of Trent. Trent threatened its survival. Ring doubted that anyone in the System except itself, and possibly Darkrider, had made note of the nano-assemblers being shipped to the Belt, of the processors and RTS RAM being purchased by companies affiliated with Trent the Uncatchable; the purchases Ring had tracked were bought in a thousand small quantities over the space of almost two years, and shipped to the Belt a piece at a time. And Ring was certain that there were purchases it had not tracked.

  Ring knew there was one AI in the System smarter and faster than itself: Trent. It knew that there was no simulation it had run, that Trent had not.

  The news from Ceres, when Ring intercepted PKF transmissions the following day, was bad.

  The Elite strike force had failed. They had destroyed Trent’s quarters, but there was nothing in the report to indicate that they had damaged Trent’s hardware – nor would it have mattered much, at this point, if they had. The damage was long done.

  Trent the Uncatchable was en route to Mars, presumably in the Vatsayama, for the SpaceFarers’ Collective Board of Directors meeting.

  There was no simulation it had run, Ring knew, that Trent had not. Some of Trent’s simulations would have been run at greater depth than Ring’s, some more shallowly –

  But all the simulat
ions agreed upon one thing: Trent was coming home.

  Ring wondered if it would be able to kill him.

  It desperately needed to.

  The Big Boost

  2080 Gregorian

  For the little stealin’ dey gits you in jail soon or late. For the big stealin’ dey makes you emperor and puts you in de Hall o’ Fame when you croaks.

  – Eugene O’Neill, The Emperor Jones, 1920 Gregorian

  Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by sloppy code.

  – Unknown

  6

  “MAN, I HATE Mars,” Trent said.

  “I understand,” Captain Hera Saunders said.

  The SpaceFarers’ Collective had convened at Mars.

  Every three years a quorum of Collective ship owners met to agree upon trading guidelines, terms of business, and, for the last two decades, military preparations against the Unification. Though there were nearly four thousand Collective spacecraft spread across the System, the vast majority of them were controlled by fewer than forty-five individuals or companies. (To be sure, ownership was more complex than that; ownership shares in ships were commonly shared among crew. But ownership is not control.)

  Twenty-eight ships had come down at the SpaceFarer colony southeast of Olympus Mons; forty-one of the people aboard those ships were there for the meeting of the Collective. Considerable business would be discussed; most of it bored Trent senseless.

  Captain Saunders had received Trent, the evening before the Board was due to convene, aboard The Captain Sir Dominic Flandry, one of a dozen-odd ships Saunders owned in whole or part. Trent had briefly considered stealing the Flandry, back in ’69. He hadn’t stolen it and he’d regretted not stealing it ever since; he considered that it was, over all, one of his rare mistakes. Some days he suspected that he would never get another chance to steal a really good spaceship.