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

by Moran, Daniel Keys

  “I’m going to go to work,” Trent said. “There’s entirely too much local color in this sauna.”

  “I’ll just have a nap in here,” Ken announced.

  SHUTTLES LEFT THE hotel for the Unity every half hour. Trent showered, dressed in sensible clothes, and took the 8:30 A.M. shuttle over.

  In his office – at Deck 35, Bulkhead 212, Cross 9, addressed as 35,212,9 – Trent sorted through his work. The computerist staff reported for duty tomorrow: fourteen individuals, fifteen counting Trent, working three rotating shifts, twenty-four hours around. They got weekends off. (In the earliest days of the project they had worked six-day weeks; that had lasted almost two years before the civilians working on the Unity had begun protesting. Midway into the second year, as the size of the project became apparent, as it became more and more clear that the Unity would never be finished by its original, late ’75 deadline, with thirty percent of the civilian staff refusing extensions to their contracts and heading back downside despite the high pay, working conditions had been improved; it had been years since the computerists had been required to work more than six days in a week.)

  Six of the programmers were PKF DataWatch, and six were civilians. Two were Space Force.

  There was one serious problem with his staff. Trent had known about the problem since deciding to take over Yovia’s position, and still was not certain how to deal with it.

  Trent had picked up a good fraction of the Reb records in the mess following the end of the ’76 rebellion; and one of the Space Forcers, Lt. Keith Daniels, was a Reb agent, stranded inside Space Force when the Rebs collapsed.

  Trent did not intend to make any overtures to Daniels. It appeared to Trent that Daniels was free of suspicion, but appearances were deceptive when dealing with the PKF. So far as Trent knew the man had not had contact with his Reb handlers since late ’76. It was not at all impossible that he’d been tagged by the PKF, and left to sit inside Space Force to see what happened, who tried to contact him. Space Force would not have kept an officer they knew had been turned; they’d have shot him as soon as they were sure, and pulled him from sensitive duty long before that. But Trent knew for a fact that the PKF were not above leaving a known agent inside Space Force; they had done it on other occasions.

  For now, no action with Daniels. Treat him no differently than any of the others.

  Three of the team members had worked with Yovia, four-plus years ago. Trent would have to be careful with them. Reserved, perhaps even depressed, over his divorce. Given the deadlines Trent intended to impose on them, no socializing would be necessary; certainly none was desirable.

  Ken was one of the nine; the others included a pair of the DataWatch officers, Eloise Legut and Jean-Paul Troileac.

  Careful and reserved should do it: four years absence could account for a lot of changes in an individual.

  Six DataWatch officers.

  TRENT SPENT THE rest of the day studying Monitor’s code, the code he had allegedly helped write. Monitor consisted of a remarkable collection of sub-systems, of improbable libraries bound together in service of the Unity.

  Trent waded into it not long after 10 A.M.

  When he became aware of the world again, it was almost midnight.

  He just made the midnight shuttle back to the hotel, and sat in the shuttle with his eyes closed, floating in the darkness, not thinking, not feeling, until the shuttle docked, and he took the elevator down to his quarters, undressed and showered and got in bed –

  “Command,” he said aloud. “Lights off.”

  He lay in bed in the darkness, listening to the gentle hum of the ventilators.

  How do you destroy the finest code you’ve ever seen in your life?

  Trent would have given a year of his life to upload that code into the Black Beast, to disassemble it with the full power of the Black Beast at his disposal.

  But the Beast was dead –

  – and though it wasn’t supposed to be, Monitor was alive.

  13

  AT 09:00 ON Monday morning, Trent said, “This won’t take long. I appreciate those of you working swing and graveyard coming in for this meeting. We shouldn’t need to do it again.”

  34,282,4 was the ship address for InfoSystems Control itself. Trent had gathered them in a conference room down the corridor from InfoSystems Control: Deck 34, Bulkhead 282, Cross 5.

  “Let me start with, I’m glad to be back. Eloise, Jean-Paul, it’s good to see you again.” Trent smiled at them both. Eloise, the sub-Chief who ran graveyard, smiled back. Jean-Paul, the coder who would probably have been promoted to sub-Chief if Eugene Yovia had not been called back to duty, didn’t. Thwarted ambition there, and not improbably a certain degree of hostility; Troileac had once dated Janice Johnson, the woman over whom Yovia had turned himself into a walking joke. And on that note –

  “A word about my face,” said Trent. “Everybody’s entitled to be a damn fool once in their lives, and I’m on my third or fourth ‘once’ at this point.” The faintest twitch of the lips from Jean-Paul on that one, Trent had no idea if it was a friendly smile or not. “I don’t expect to have time for biosculpture until this project has been seen through to completion, so what you see is what you get, and I advise you to get used to it. Feel free to make jokes about it behind my back or to my face. Brownie points will be awarded for any I haven’t heard before.

  “The schedule looks fine to me.” It looked wonderful to him; he didn’t have a single DataWatch officer in his group, though he had both of the Space Forcers, Friedman and Daniels. “We have myself, Moreno, Friedman, Daniels, and Kohl on days, Sub-Chief Wilson, Troileac, Naguchi, Nikcevich, and Redin on swing, and Sub-Chief Legut, Aucoin, Gieseler, Bouvier and Beilenson on graveyard. I’m going to make some minor changes in workflow procedures over the next few weeks, but I do expect them to be minor, at least at first. A couple days after the explosion, a couple days before she resigned, Chief Johannson promised a hundred-twenty day completion on this rework. I think that’s an insanely conservative figure. I’ll accept a completion date of sixty days; I’ll be pleased with a completion date of forty-five days. I am authorized to pay overtime, double-time for weekends, triple-time for overtime on weekends. Estimated cost on the Unity when its construction began was eight billion CU. It’s since risen to eleven billion CU. It is by any measure the single most expensive construction project in Unification history, probably in human history, and aside from some problems with the torches, which they tell me are being resolved, the Unification is at this point waiting on us.

  “I’ll finish this up with this: I know morale is in the toilet. I know you have fears for your safety, and I know there is nothing harder than redoing work you’ve done before. If I thought for an instant that we could do a better job by bringing in more people, we’d have them. But unless you’re in totally over your head, throwing more people at a late project just makes the project later, that’s basic software engineering. We are not in that state.

  “Sixty days – no, make that forty-five, period – is not a long time. You will find me in my office at six A.M. every morning. You will find me there at 11 P.M. I can’t order any of the civilians to work overtime; I could, but won’t, request orders be cut for you military people to work overtime. But I will ask you all to work as hard as you have it in you to work for the next two months. You’ll get paid for it, and I promise you all, if we make that two month deadline, I will submit every one of you for commendations and bonuses. Granting them is beyond my abilities, but I’ll make the request, en masse, for each of you. There won’t be any reprimands during this period for anyone, even if I imagined you deserved them, and when we’re done your personnel reports will be written with every superlative I can find in the dictionary. That’s the best I can offer. All I ask in return is that you work yourselves into exhaustion for me.”

  Trent shut up and sat watching them. After a moment’s silence he said, “I’m going to go down the hall and grab a cup of tea. Talk it o
ver among yourselves.”

  In the galley across the way from InfoSystems Control, he took his time with it, stirring the tea, using the eye droppers to flavor it with lemon, with sugar, then sipping from the bulb until it reached a tolerable mix – which would have taken him a while even if he hadn’t been stalling for time; he hated tea. He headed back down the corridor, his velcro walking shoes giving plenty of warning to the coders in the conference room, re-seated himself and quite deliberately locked his bulb to the table before looking around at them.

  Eloise Legut smiled at Trent. A short, petite woman, too small to have made the Peace Keeping Force in any service except DataWatch, she had blue eyes and bright red hair cut in a short bob; a slight reddening of her lips was the only makeup Trent could see.

  Trent had been speaking in English; her response was in French. It was not rudeness, not even making a point; there was not an individual on the project who was not at least bilingual in French and English, and everyone there had access via either inskin or traceset to realtime translations of any major language spoken by the human race.

  She said simply, “We are willing to work as you say.”

  “Like dogs,” said Ken loudly. “Like whipped, bleeding galley slaves.”

  Trent glanced around the table at the others, got nods in return, one oui, one hai. “Great. Then let’s get to business. Sub-Chief Wilson and I went over the work that’s been done on the Two-C and Three-C systems, and I’m impressed. I remember the state they were in when I left, and there’s no comparison.” A safe enough comment, Trent thought, there had to have been significant improvement since late ’75. “According to reports we’re allegedly four months from completion of the rework on One-C. As I’ve said, we’ll trim that down. Little actual work was lost in the explosion; most of Monitor’s library linkages were lost, the system itself was physically traumatized, and right now we’re not even close to two nine’s confidence on any of the twenty-one checkpoints established for rating Monitor as functional. We can break out areas of responsibility here, the work that lands on day, work for swing, and work for graveyard. I don’t want overlap if we can avoid it. Each of those twenty-one points goes to one of the three groups, and I’ll leave it to Ken and Eloise, and the groups themselves, to decide any further sub-divisions of responsibility. If anybody needs anything from me, just ask.”

  “I need a bus transfer,” said Ken.

  THE LIST BROKE down:

  Graveyard:

  Navigation

  Combat Systems Integration

  Tactical Support

  Slipship Remote Management

  Slipship Launch and Support

  Troop Carrier Launch and Support

  Laser Cannon

  Missiles

  Day:

  Intership Communications

  Remote Instrumentation

  Ship Security

  Personnel Interaction

  Library Management

  InfoSystems Redundancy

  Swing:

  Lifesystems

  Ship farm

  Damage Control

  Systems Repair & Trauma center

  Surgery and Sick Bay

  Water Cracker

  Torches

  Trent hammered it out, giving way where it mattered, cutting off discussion where it suited him. He caught Ken, Eloise, and Jean-Paul all exchanging glances at various points, but that was fine; if they wanted to conclude that Eugene Yovia had developed a swelled ego during his time downside, it wasn’t Trent’s problem as long as it didn’t affect their work.

  It would certainly never really be Eugene Yovia’s problem – the man could never return to Unification space unless he or the Unification had died.

  Trent let graveyard – consisting of five of the six DataWatch officers, with only Jean-Paul assigned to swing – have the weapons work, and gave swing most of the maintenance work. He hardly cared about either of them: if he did his job correctly, his real job, neither of those areas would ever have an opportunity to matter to anyone.

  When they were done he had gotten the four jobs he wanted: ship security, personnel interaction, library management, and infosystems redundancy – Monitor itself.

  He had only one real argument, from Ken. Ken had done most of the original work implementing ship security, and felt, not unreasonably, that he could do a better job recoding it than anyone else. “It’ll take you years! Years!”

  “I won’t have any argument on this one,” said Trent. “The new Chief of Security for Halfway is a sharp woman, an Elite. Melissa du Bois.” He nodded at the six Peaceforcers gathered around the table. “Perhaps some of you officers know her. This is the major area where I’ll have to coordinate with her, and I need to know what’s going on. I’ll be happy to take any advice you’ve got for me, Ken, but I need to be on top of this one personally.”

  “I suppose,” drawled Keith Daniels, sitting at the far end of the table in his Space Force fatigues, “that it wouldn’t make a great deal of sense to have a Space Force officer in charge of security aboard a Space Force vehicle.”

  Trent smiled at the man. Daniels was young for a Lieutenant in Space Force, twenty-three, with fair blond hair and gray-blue eyes; he reminded Trent a little of himself, a decade ago, before the endless rounds of biosculpture had begun. Daniels had been a teenage computerist in Space Force OCS when the Rebs had turned him. It must have seemed terribly exciting at the time, back in early ’76 – before watching dozens of Space Forcers go up against the wall, two of his handlers among them, watching them die under PKF lasers, and knowing that he was likely to be next at any moment. Doubtless that had aged the boy some. Trent rather admired his bravery, making the comment: it was in character for a good, partisan Space Force officer, even if it did bring up the very subject Daniels had to want to avoid.

  “That,” said Trent, “is a policy decision, Lt. Daniels. So far as I know somewhere around eighty Space Forcers got turned by either the Johnny Rebs or the Erisian Claw. At least, the PKF executed that many.” Daniels’ handsome young features took on an extraordinary blankness. “Again, so far as I know, not a single Peaceforcer was turned, unless you count the Elite Commander, Christine Mirabeau, and –” Trent shook his head. “Who knows for sure why Commander Vance had her executed? Might have been pure internal politics, as far as any of us on the outside know.” He didn’t look at any of the Peaceforcers sitting at the table, kept his gaze fixed on young Daniels. Daniels stared straight forward, expressionless. “In any event, if I were you, Lieutenant, I believe I’d leave security arrangements to the people who have shown themselves extraordinarily competent at it.” Now he glanced around the table, in time to catch two of the DataWatch officers nodding to themselves. “Is there any further comment?”

  There was none.

  Trent nodded. “Meeting over. Let’s get to work.”

  THE NEXT WEEK passed in a blur.

  Trent awoke each morning, worked out in the hotel gym, sometimes with Ken but usually alone, showered and dressed and caught the 5:30 A.M. shuttle to the Unity. As promised, he was in his office every day by six. As promised, he did not leave until at least ten P.M.

  He had been designed, three decades prior, by the greatest genegineer of her era, Suzanne Montignet. There was a flaw in him; of the 227 “Project Superman” genies born between 2048 and 2051, 226 had been telepaths, designs based on Carl Castanaveras. The exact nature of the error that had produced Trent was never determined; but the nature of the flaw was in no doubt. He was not a telepath. Unlike the Castanaveras telepaths, he had been born with blue eyes. Unlike them, he had reached adulthood without suffering the murderous rages that Carl Castanaveras and his children appeared born to.

  And unlike all of them except Denice Castanaveras, he was still alive.

  He was a true genie. He had never required much sleep; he got by easily enough on a few hours a night. He was naturally faster and stronger and more resistant to disease than most humans, was measurably smarter t
han most humans. For most of his life he had gotten into shape easily, and stayed there easily.

  But the human body, even a finely designed one, is a mechanism, and even with modern medical technology, Trent’s machine had been subjected to grievous damage both recently and frequently over the course of the years. His right knee was sore most of the time. He didn’t let it stop him from working out; he just made sure that his workouts were in the gyms in low gee, and tried to keep from straining the knee. Occasional twinges from his ribs reminded him how recently they’d been broken.

  He was careful in the gym. He did not dare seek medical help while he was at Halfway. He was not Eugene Yovia, and could not pass as him in a medical examination. He had internal scars the man did not have, knitted bones where Yovia’s had never broken; his blood type was an AB positive variant, where Yovia’s was type A.

  Trent’s immune system was the finest that Credit could buy. It was supplemented by a nanoprocessor controlled immune booster that had been developed by Mitsubishi during the ’76 rebellion; a blood sample would show the boosters, too. Fully two thirds of the commonest prescription drugs would have no effect on Trent; they tended to be prescribed to attack problems that Trent’s immune boosters handled better, and therefore the immune boosters, after finding the molecular signatures of the various drugs, destroyed them before they could upset Trent’s metabolic balance.

  There was relatively little a doctor could do to Trent that was likely to harm him ... but the first blood sample drawn from his veins would mark him as an imposter, a man with the wrong blood type, the wrong DNA, with an immune system Yovia could not possibly have afforded, nor had the opportunity to have installed.

  He worked out and tried to be careful, and tried not to worry about it, about a body that was growing increasingly difficult with the passage of the years.

  It wasn’t hard. He had other things to worry about that were more pressing ... and things that did not require worry, exactly, that were more fascinating.