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

by Moran, Daniel Keys

  “By which you mean that Basque isn’t installed by default in Elite autotranslation software. But the first deep analysis pointed your way is going to pick it out as fast as I did.”

  She shrugged. “I’ll be out of here by then. You want to talk business?”

  “When I fled Earth,” Trent said, “I bought a ticket using Mohammed Vance’s name.”

  “Right, and Mohammed Vance knew immediately it wasn’t him buying that ticket, and he chased you and chased you and chased you and you wish you’d never done it, so I should take this as a lesson. You want to talk about business instead of olden times?”

  “A normal human wouldn’t be barefoot in here.”

  She frowned. “Yeah, I know. But by the time I realized how unusual it was, people had started commenting on it. I’m sort of stuck with it now, it’s a bit of the character.”

  “Why is it so cold?”

  “Some really clever attempts at attention are putting a strain on the gear.” Michelle looked pleased. “Pretty sure it’s Ring. I think we’ve attracted its scrutiny.”

  Trent laughed. “Jocko Singer is petty, predictable, and completely ruined with spite. There aren’t many more useful people in the System.”

  “I helped.”

  “And a good job. I could kiss you.”

  “I’d enjoy kissing you,” she agreed, “except for that face.” She raised her voice. “I can’t be kissing Bad Jack. Sorry, dude.”

  Trent had heard Ken’s approach as well. Ken stuck his head into the cold room, said, “Kiss him anyway, introducing you two was part of my clever plan bringing him out here this morning, he can always get that face taken off. The eggs and toast are ready. Should I save some for you, Gene?”

  Trent turned to face his workstation. “Cook some more,” he said absently. “I might be a bit. Don’t wait for me.”

  He was aware of Michelle going off with Ken, aware of the quiet settling in around him. He could hear the hum of the cooling system: aside from that and the sounds he made himself, the freezer and all the equipment within it was silent.

  An unaccustomed excitement was stirring in Trent. He felt the muscles in his stomach tensing.

  “Hello,” he said.

  A polite, gender-neutral voice said, “Hello, M. Yovia.”

  Trent felt himself smiling, muscles in his cheeks moving.

  He spoke without the English accent. “Man the is this. Pays Crime. Clothes mother’s his wears General Secretary the.” He waited five seconds, said with the English accent, “I wear a Stetson now” – and waited two more seconds and said softly, “Wake up.”

  There was a pause so short it might have been only in Trent’s imagination.

  The InfoNet Relay station said, “Hello, Boss.”

  17

  TRENT RAN EVERY other morning, in a big circle inside Gym 16.

  Gym 16 was about 200 meters aft of the bridge. It was one of four gyms, positioned in roughly equal distances along the length of the ship, which spun up to provide gravity for running. The other gyms were all under gravity as well, but they were smaller and were used mostly for exercise or training that required smaller areas: resistance training, yoga, various martial disciplines. The resistance training and yoga were designed to insure that bones, tendons and muscles did not atrophy during extended stays in free fall.

  Most of the gyms aboard ship were self-segregated: PKF practiced in their own gyms, Space Force in theirs, and civilians in theirs. The eight or nine Elite aboard ship had their own gym not far off the bridge, which turned under higher gravity than the other gyms.

  There was no rule as such to prevent a civilian from exercising with the PKF, or with Space Force, but not many did after their first chilly reception in the wrong gym. Space Force and PKF personnel, Trent knew, were advised upon arrival at the Unity which gyms to use, and almost never made the mistake civilians sometimes did.

  But there were only four running gyms along the length of the ship. Of necessity, they were shared. Not happily, most of the time, in Trent’s experience: he’d seen Space Force and PKF square off after brushing into one another on the circular track, and though he had not seen it come to blows yet, he remained hopeful.

  Trent’s first two weeks after arrival, he exercised at the hotel before taking the shuttle to Unity. Then Keith Daniels, the Space Force lieutenant, told him about the running tracks, and after that Trent alternated workouts, one day at the hotel, the next day running.

  His first session on the track, shortly after arriving at the Unity, left him sore and winded. But his wind came back quickly enough: after the first two weeks he was running five kilometers every morning, with only a little discomfort in his right knee.

  Occasionally Keith Daniels ran with him. Trent didn’t mind: Daniels was one of the few people on staff whom Yovia hadn’t worked with, four years previously – Daniels at least wasn’t going to attempt to resume a conversation from the past.

  Trent arrived at the gym just before 05:00 on Wednesday morning, March 27; the Space Force Lieutenant was already in the gym when Trent arrived, standing to the side of the track, one foot hooked underneath a hold while he waited for the gym to spin up to speed.

  Trent joined him. “Keith.”

  “Chief.”

  Trent stretched while waiting. The gym rotated around the ship’s Z axis; when not rotating the gym locked in place and four doors, hatches, appeared in the floors. One door pointed up, one down; one to starboard, one to port. While they waited, half a dozen people appeared at the various doors, pulled themselves through and onto the track. One minute before five, a warning bell sounded; sixty seconds later, the four doors sealed shut and became a part of the gym’s track.

  The gym was large and it took a while to rotate up to speed; the first half rotation was so slow that Trent barely noticed the tug of the hold he’d hooked his foot through. By the second complete rotation Trent began to feel weight, pushing him gently against the floor. After several minutes there was enough weight to run; about five minutes in, they were running under Earth-normal gravity.

  There were five lanes: they ran together in the #2 and #3 lanes. The #1 lane was for sprinters, and every now and again a PKF Elite would show up and use it, running at two or three times the speed of an unaugmented human.

  Trent didn’t think it was intended to intimidate, but it certainly had that effect. Running in the number two or three lanes, you could feel the wind of the Elite passing by.

  After they’d been running for a while and had fallen into a rhythm, Keith said, “We’re pretty near a wrap on IC and RI.” Intership Communications and Remote Instrumentation. “I hear you and Kenny got pulled off to go look at the Relay Station.”

  “Not pulled, exactly. There aren’t that many coders floating around with clearances to permit them to look into a problem over there, so Kenny did a favor for a friend. We went out on Saturday.”

  “If it happens again, I’d like to come. I’m doing similar work with Monitor – I’d like to see some of that old gear.”

  Trent glanced sideways at him. “OK. We couldn’t figure out what was going on – interrupted logs. Maybe new eyes would be useful.”

  “OK.” They ran together in silence. “You going to go take a look at the torches?”

  “I haven’t been asked,” Trent said.

  “You won’t be. Chief Thorvald is a sad little balloon of a human being. Whatever’s screwed up over there, he’s not going to ask for help.”

  “Is it his fault?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Is it?” Trent asked again.

  Daniels grinned at him. “If I had to bet. That bomb did him a hell of a favor – the rocket jocks were running so far behind they’d have been hung out to dry if Monitor hadn’t gone down. They looked bad. They still look bad – I don’t think there’s been a test fire of a single rocket yet at full load. But they’ve got a few weeks to fix it. They don’t like you at all – they had months to get things together bef
ore you came in and moved all the 3C timelines up.”

  “They don’t know me,” Trent assured Daniels. “They’d like me if they knew me.”

  “You going to give them a chance to?”

  Trent needed the rockets working. Absolutely had to have them.

  “Yeah,” he said finally. “I guess I am.”

  18

  ACCORDING TO HER father Ernest du Bois, Melissa had been born a soldier. He admitted that he did not understand why God had blessed him – that was always his phrase, even when presented with intransigence that would have undone a lesser man – with a child so stern and unyielding. But Ernest was himself gifted with patience, if not understanding.

  When she was four Melissa’s older brother Vincent died. Vincent was two years older than Melissa, and later in life her memories of him were just flashes, images and impressions; but her memories of her parents’ grief were clearer, sharper, altogether more lasting. Her Mama, Rebecca, withdrew from the world so severely that, looking back years later, Melissa suspected she had been suicidal, though Rebecca did not kill herself.

  When Melissa began school that fall, it was not Mama who took her to St. Margaret’s: her father walked with her, every morning, holding her hand all the way there. It was her first strong memory: her hand, in Papa’s, on the way to school, morning after morning. When he picked her up in the afternoon, he wouldn’t hold her hand unless she asked him to, and she rarely did. They walked home together discussing what had happened that day, in school or work. But in the mornings she would take his hand, stepping out their front door, and not release it until she had stepped through the front gate of the school.

  It was all right, Papa assured her, to want to hold his hand in the morning, because she was just a little soldier.

  MELISSA WAS BORN on August 4, 2046, in Narbonne, a small town near the Gulf of Lyon, in the Mediterranean. The town had only some forty thousand residents, the year Melissa was born. It was not quite a beachside town, though Melissa and her parents lived inland only ten kilometers.

  After her brother’s death, for most of two years, her mother did not work much. It made no real difference in their lives; there was enough Credit, new clothes, food, medical care. The essentials of Melissa’s life were secure, and would have remained so barring a disaster depriving her of both parents. Fortunately no such disaster occurred: her mother, with the passage of time, resumed an interest in the day to day details of their lives together, though by then the cast of Melissa’s relationship with her mother was set; Melissa would rarely seek Papa’s approval before deciding upon a course of action, and never Mama’s.

  SHE GREW TO adulthood in Narbonne. Her father, a Peaceforcer himself, traveled occasionally on business; they never traveled for pleasure. Melissa had never left Narbonne until, at thirteen, her school had arranged a field trip to the Louvre. It was 630 kilometers to Paris, not an unreasonable distance on one of the bullet trains that networked France; except that Narbonne was too small to have a stop. The nearest stop was in Beziers, a nearby town about twice the size of Narbonne.

  That morning they caught a bus to Beziers, then boarded the 6:15 A.M. Express to Paris. The Bullet rode through an evacuated tunnel just barely wide enough for it. It scared some of her classmates: at its top speed the Bullet traveled through the vacuum at nearly 600 kilometers per hour. It wasn’t so bad in the underground portions of the tunnel, when you couldn’t see anything, but during the portions where the Bullet rose above ground, the sense of speed was frightening, and some of Melissa’s friends had to close their eyes.

  Melissa wasn’t worried about the speed as such; the rapidly passing landscape did not frighten her. She was thinking, though, about an incident six years ago, when she’d been seven: a Bullet in New York had been destroyed in a terrorist attack. Terrorists had left a bowling ball in the tunnel. The Bullet had vaporized the bowling ball, but it had also made contact with the side of the tunnel. In the resulting crash everyone aboard the Bullet, over eight hundred people, had died.

  No one claimed credit. Melissa, at seven, had been baffled by that. She was clear that the ideologs who had committed the attack were wicked – “wicked all the way through,” she had informed her parents – but she had been baffled by the intent. If the terrorists did not claim credit, who would take them seriously when they made demands? Clearly they wanted to scare people – not that she was afraid, she assured her parents, because France was safe, not like Occupied America … but it made no sense to her.

  But even while telling her parents that she wasn’t afraid, she wondered if she was really. She’d never been on the Bullet – maybe if she were riding it, knowing what might happen, she might feel differently?

  Six years later she found that no, she wasn’t frightened, not even a little. But, riding the train, she had flashes of what she would recognize later as anger, thinking about the sort of people who would destroy something like the Bullet, take all those innocent lives, and not at least accept responsibility for their actions. It was, she concluded, that they were afraid – afraid to stand and fight, because they knew they would lose. So they used the tools of cowards, and struck at the weak rather than the strong.

  It was the first consciously political thought she’d ever had.

  THE LOUVRE MADE no real impression on her. She saw Voleur’s masterpiece, Je Suis Le Fleuve, while she was there, and found it not to her liking: a red monochrome, a river flowing through a darker, redder jungle. “I Follow The River,” or “I Am The River,” the painting’s name meant: Melissa was sure she was not a river and equally certain she didn’t want to follow what looked a river of blood.

  The Mona Lisa left her cold. The Venus de Milo was broken and in Melissa’s opinion wanted fixing. She despised The Oath of the Horatii; weeping women to one side, men playing with swords to the other.

  Their tour guide took note of her lack of interest at one point, and told the joke that many visitors to the Louvre hear at some point: “A woman visiting the Louvre,” the tour guide said patiently, “said, ‘I don’t think much of it.’ And a guide, overhearing, said: ‘Madame, one does not judge the Louvre; one is judged by it.’”

  “The Palais du Louvre,” Melissa responded, “is a collection of buildings, and surely incapable of judgment.”

  The tour guide, who seemed a pleasant young man, was taken aback. He stuttered slightly. “Since 1793, f-for generations, very wise men and women have chosen –”

  Melissa interrupted him. Had her Mama been there she would have scolded Melissa for it; even Papa might have, for manners were important in their house. But she interrupted anyway. “I think my judgment better than theirs,” she said firmly, “in choosing what I like. De gustibus non est disputandum,” she added, displaying one of the benefits of a rigorous Catholic education: she could not really speak Latin, but she read it adequately and at thirteen she could quote in Latin as well as anyone.

  Their tour guide ignored her after that, which suited her.

  They had an early dinner in Paris before heading back, and that dinner stayed with Melissa in later years. The restaurant they ate in was not very good – the school’s budget was limited – but it was as good as her mother’s cooking and a little better than her father’s, and quite a bit better than what she ate in school. She did not realize they’d been taken to one of the cheaper restaurants available, and had she known, would not have cared.

  They ended up sitting outside, watching the sun set while the City of Light came alive around them. The pedestrian traffic picked up as people came out for the evening. Melissa drank an after-dinner hot chocolate, watching the sophisticated crowds swirl about her, the young couples in the first bloom of love, old men and women cautiously navigating the traffic, still holding hands, some of them, as if they were still middle school sweethearts, and in the first and clearest of her life’s goals, knew she wanted to live in Paris forever.

  IN 2064 HER half-brother Andre died. He was her father’s child by a previous marr
iage, and he was also a Peaceforcer. He was stationed on Luna when the Fizzle War broke out. Space Force shot down a SpaceFarer ship over Free Luna – several hundred SpaceFarers died, but only a few Space Force troops, and only one PKF officer – her brother.

  It did not affect Melissa much; she had only rarely seen Andre, growing up. But her father, never an outgoing man, grew even more distant.

  SHE GRADUATED FROM high school first in her class, at the age of fifteen, more than two years earlier than most of her childhood friends. She was accepted, as everyone had known she would be, into the PKF Academy at Marseille. They wouldn’t accept students under sixteen, but Melissa would turn sixteen in August, just in time to attend the start of classes in September.

  Marseille was 180 kilometers away from home in a straight line – 250 kilometers following the curve of the French coast around the Mediterranean, if one traveled by land. As no Bullet train connected the two cities, and her parents could not afford a car capable of flying directly across the sea, she had to travel by older rail, at a travel time of four and a half hours – which meant that she would have to live in the dorms in Marseille, and not see her parents except on weekends.

  It bothered her parents more than it bothered Melissa. They were proud of her, of course – they were French and they were patriots and a career in the Peace Keeping Force, for a girl of her talents and inclinations, was an obvious path. But they were not ready to let go yet, particularly Rebecca. No one brought up her brother Vincent, but no one had to – the shadow of the dead child hung over all of them, more lightly in recent years, but never forgotten.

  Melissa would not miss her classmates; the girls were older than she was and disliked her; the boys older and intimidated by her. She had already said good-bye to her few remaining childhood friends from before she had jumped grades.

  She had a last summer together with Mama and Papa before classes started. They spent a lot of it at the beach. Ernest was lighter-skinned than either Melissa or Rebecca, and had never handled the heat well. Melissa had inherited Rebecca’s skin: she quickly turned brown in the sun and could stay out in the sunlight through the heat of the day without burning or becoming overheated.