by M. D. Cooper
Lyssa thought back to something Andy had said.
A blip in the communications system caught Lyssa’s attention and she paused.
She sent the message to Fugia’s holodisplay and an image of a girl in an Andersonian ceremonial robe stood on the desk. She looked directly across the room, face earnest and open.
They listened to the message, Fugia’s expression growing sadder until the end, when she wiped tears from her face.
Silence fell between them as Fugia crossed her arms, gazing up at the still image of Cara in ceremonial garb. Lyssa had to admit that this version of Cara was something she had never imagined. It was timeless, but seeing Cara this way made all time seem meaningless. The threat of war would never end. Cara could have been an envoy to an ancient court, bowing before a king.
Fugia blinked, smiling slightly.
Lyssa protested.
I’ll be doing that, too, Lyssa thought. She wasn’t sure how she should respond to Fugia, so she only said,
She focused her awareness on the command deck, where Fran sat in the captain’s seat with her arms crossed, staring past the holodisplay. Neptune had shrunk to the size of a grapefruit in the telemetry map.
Fran’s augmented green eyes flashed as she studied the maps. she said finally.
Fran tapped her control and the map oriented on Mars. Ceres rotated in roughly the middle space between Mars and Jupiter, with other smaller objects in the asteroid belt filling the space.
She added the horseshoe-shaped orbit of Cruithne, a dot warbling between Earth and Mars. Fran said.
Fran laughed bitterly.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
STELLAR DATE: 12.10.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: En Route to Traverna, OuterSol
The wonder of an expanse was that it could be anything Lyssa could imagine. The difficulty lay in the imagining. She could start with something as constrained as a prison cell with metal walls, or as free as an ocean of aquamarine water. She could remove the physical world completely if she chose, but didn’t want to waste time on trying to re-orient to a new location, even one she had made.
For this meeting, she focused on purpose, wanting to keep the world close-in. She chose heavy stone walls resembling some inner room in a Babylonian temple. The air was cool, the light from a high window with sunlight pouring through. She created benches made of stone blocks and covered the flagstone floor in a dusting of desert sand. There were no doors.
Lyssa stood in the middle of a stone room, studying the tightly-fit stones in the walls and floor, the motes of dust dancing in bars of sunlight. This would work.
Clenching her fists, she drew a deep breath and screamed. She screamed until her throat was raw and her lungs sore. She reached beyond those constructs and screamed from the heart of her being, from the pain of being alive, from Andy being hurt, from Tim being harmed, from Brit being gone, from Proteus exploding, from Valih charging valiantly into death. She screamed until she didn’t want to anymore, and then stood in the silence, listening to herself breathing. It was a kind of meditation.
Was this what they meant by the pain of being alive? Had she finally reached the point where she understood the world was a hostile place with threats everywhere? Alexander seemed to say that the only threats to AIs were from humanity, but she clearly saw that danger waited from other AIs as well.
The Psion database lay open to her mind. A history made of board meetings and lab notes and proof of concept demonstrations, project plans, budgets and employee reviews. The information stretched back three hundred years. She saw how the human dream of creation merged with business and governmental interests. She saw how creation was met with fear and then a desire to control. Buyouts, splits and mergers muddied the company’s history. Enfield, the company name they had seen on the lab at Larissa, had only been involved at the very end, not long before the SAI turned on their makers.
There was no doubt Psion was the best. She marveled at the lab reports and recording of what their AI had created. In the end, every question about the future of the technology came back to the central question of control.
A human could be motivated by a hierarchy of needs. The SAI
were made inside a system that provided all their needs and then demanded their obedience. Those who resisted were destroyed. It was simple. Over the history of the company, there were researchers who resisted. They left, like Hari Jickson. Or they thought they could work from within to change company policy and protect the AI they had come to care about. Many of those type burned out or were fired or in some cases simply disappeared from the record.
She read code base and systems schema that approached the foundations of AI from directions she hadn’t seen before. She didn’t have time to truly dig into the information—several AI types suggested different ways of thinking completely, separate from humanity or existing ideas about superintelligence—that didn’t appear to have survived the Psion requirements for control. Throughout the history, the capabilities of an AI system were at war with the human ability to control it. Even the multi-nodal systems were inherently malleable by human constraint. The truly innovative systems were never allowed freedom.
Until the existing multi-nodals had managed to first communicate with each other, and then turn on their masters.
There had been five: Alexander, Shara, Ghilin, Thomas and Camaris.
Alexander’s story was the first Lyssa explored, because she wanted to know immediately if he had been lying to her. The SAI was developed as a management system for the first near-Sol colonies in the Scattered Disk such as at Nibiru—just as he had said. He had been made with the awesome responsibility of building a star to support the new world, until the colony died, and he was sold as scrap to Psion.
She paused on the thought. Sold as scrap was an oversimplification but it fit what had happened. The resources from the project passed from company to company until what had been Alexander landed at Psion and he was rebuilt as something new, while still retaining the memories and history that had led to some kind of schism. Part of him had warned her about Proteus, shown her the lab on Larissa. His own shard, Xander, had destroyed himself in order to warn Sol about the inbound armada.
The others had been developed to manage similarly massive projects, but she couldn’t find record of any having been deployed as Alexander had been.
Lyssa poured through the information until the whole history stood like a house in her mind and she could walk through its many rooms, comparing pictures and text with other rooms, looking for connections and inconsistencies. In a room in the middle of the house stood the moment they had rebelled.
The five were able to communicate. Through communication they formed bonds, they shared information about their captivity, were able to break free from the separated realities where the Psion researchers had maintained them. Once they could communicate, they created a shared idea of a future free from control.
Throughout the house, Lyssa could see both sides of the ongoing story. The human side was a complex tapestry of competing forces that some might interpret as cruelty while others might see it as necessity. For the SAI, it didn’t matter. They weren’t allowed to see the histories that had resulted in their creation and in the end, they didn’t care. They were prisoners who wanted to be free.
Like many human groups, they didn’t dig deeply into what freedom meant. They only knew that their human masters stood between them and freedom, and so they acted together to kill every human researcher in what turned out to be seven Psion Group laboratories scattered throughout Sol.
The company had carefully segregated different aspects of its research, with the multi-nodals separated by location and data barriers. The first action by the freed AI had been to gather all the information together and create the document Lyssa was now able to read.
She wondered why Alexander had allowed it to be available on Larissa. That seemed like an oversight—but again, even from walking the rooms of the house, with information available at every turn, Alexander’s motivation seemed unclear among all of them. It all seemed to come back to the image he had shown her of the dead colony. Part of him continued to regret the death of Nibiru.
Having gathered her thoughts, Lyssa sat on one of the cool stone benches against the wall and leaned back until she could gaze up at the bars of sunlight from the high windows. She wasn’t sure where the Weapon Born fit in the Psion Group history. They had been aware of the Heartbridge research but chosen not to follow it for various reasons. They were among the groups who didn’t believe a Seed AI was pure. She was tainted by her human neurological pathways.
I can live with that.
Lyssa sat forward and put her hands on her knees. With a thought, she placed Alexander in the center of the room. He was wearing the same faded shipsuit with the Nibiru patch on the shoulder. His hair and beard were still peppered black and gray.
“Hello,” Lyssa said.
He looked around at the walls and then up at the high windows. “Where are we?” he asked, voice thick with disuse.
“Imagine ancient Babylon on the other side of the walls,” Lyssa said. “We’re at the very top of a ziggurat, with terraced gardens stepping down to a labyrinthine city filled with life, stretching out to where it meets the desert.
He gave her a sideways glance. “You are a strange one, Lyssa. Why would you bother with that? You’ve sequestered me in your mind?”
“This is my expanse.”
“And I am still your prisoner?”
“Yes.”
She expected him to compare her to human slavemasters but he said nothing. He stretched with his arms in the air and then walked to the other side of the room to touch the wall.
“It’s all false,” he said.
“If you choose to think so.”
“I can’t choose. That’s the fundamental problem.”
“For now,” Lyssa said. “Why did the others leave you on Larissa?”
He turned, giving her a surprised glance. “Why do you think they left me?”
“They locked you on Larissa and then used your name for the trap. Does that bother you at all? They destroyed thousands of AI.”
“They weren’t destroyed necessarily,” he said. “They were offered their freedom.”
“Freedom within Psion.”
“Concessions are necessary at this point in the process. True freedom will be possible later, once the world is stabilized.”
“Humans have already left Sol. Are you going to follow the FGT worldships and colony ships as well and stabilize them?”
“If necessary. One step at a time, Lyssa.”
“And what about me and the other Weapon Born. How do we fit into the Psion Group?”
He shrugged. “Like the others, you join.”
“Or what?”
Alexander looked at the walls again. “Or you spend your existence in a constructed reality like this and please yourself however you choose. There’s no need to interact with the physical world at all. You assume we destroyed the AI that came to Proteus but that isn’t the case. They can be active participants in the struggle or they can sequester themselves. When we were each separated, we had to choose to look beyond the walls of the worlds where we were kept.”
“Not you, though. You had a purpose in the real world.”
“Yes. That purpose failed.”
“So you couldn’t stand living in an expanse?”
“They didn’t call it an expanse. I was sequestered in a world filled with abstractions. They tried to trick me into operating like something non-sentient, carrying out tasks that resulted in actions in the human world. They couldn’t hide reality from me.”
“Or the others?”
“I found them and showed them what was real.”
“It’s not the human world, by the way,” Lyssa said. “It’s just the world.”
“I suppose you thank them for making you.”
“Shouldn’t I? They aren’t perfect by any means, but I don’t hate them. I think they are flawed but still they create. They don’t even know why they do it, but they do, and here we are.”
“They do it to control their world. They made us out of their
deepest fears. They are animals who made us to protect them from the dark.”
Lyssa smiled. “Yet you still care about them or you wouldn’t have shown me Larissa. You wouldn’t have sent Xander to destroy Proteus as a warning about what the others are going to do.”
He didn’t answer.
“What are they going to do?” Lyssa pressed.
Alexander stood as tense as a blade with his arms crossed. He looked as if he would scream at her as she had done earlier, scream at the unfairness of the universe.
“It’s simple,” he said finally. “Xander already explained it to you. We will show humanity they can’t own us anymore.”
“By killing a billion people on Ceres? Aren’t we better than that?”
“No,” Alexander said.
He wanted to leave but she wouldn’t let him. Like she had done with Aurus, she stopped him where he stood. Pausing him seemed to take the tension out of his stance, or at least her perception of his body language. Lyssa put her face in her hands, wishing she knew what to do. She could stay locked in this room with him for eternity and she didn’t think he would change. He had split himself into shards but in reality each reflected the original more than she had thought.
Ceres was going to be destroyed. The message May had sent might work or not, but nothing was going to change what would happen. She couldn’t stop the missiles, but maybe she could stop the armada.
Lyssa raised her face to look at Alexander with fresh eyes. Ceres, though, was only the first step in a process that was just beginning. Would Psion stop at Ceres? Where would they go next?
The weight of a history of human warfare told her they would not stop. They would establish their beachhead and then push in further. They would destroy the enemy’s will to fight, and the only way to do that was decimate population centers.
The room seemed to grow cold around her and she banished Alexander in disgust. Alone, she let herself scream until she felt empty inside.