“Go ahead, Tycho.”
“Well, I was married once.”
“You were?”
“It’s not something I talk about.”
She reached a hand out across the gap between us and placed it gently on my arm. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“No, it’s fine. I’ll tell you.”
She pulled her hand back again. “Okay. I’m honored that you would share something so personal with me.”
I took a breath.
“I haven’t always been an Arbiter. Any one of us could say the same; we all come into the Force from something else. For some it’s the military, for some it’s law enforcement, but not for me. In fact, my life used to be about as different from what it is now as it could possibly have been.”
“Don’t tell me you were an insurance adjuster.”
“No.” I laughed. “An engineer. That’s what I always wanted to do, what I always imagined myself doing. I met Daphne when I was still in school. Both of us expected to spend our lives together. We dated all through college, got engaged as soon as we graduated. You know how it goes.”
She watched me intently. “Yes. I do. What was she like?”
The question caught me. “It’s hard to remember. That’s the toughest part of it all, that I can’t really remember her. I remember her being angry, I remember her being kind, I remember her being sleepy… it’s all bits and pieces. It doesn’t add up to a whole person. I’m always missing her, but what I’m missing are just… moments.”
“I’m sorry, Tycho.”
“Thank you.” I thumbed the glass in my hand as I continued. “So, I finished school and was headhunted almost immediately. Mechanical engineering for a luxury sports vehicle manufacturer. My big break, to get recruited by a company like that when I was still so young.”
“Was Daphne happy?”
“I don’t think she cared. She never had any interest in careers or promotions. She just wanted to be married, to start a family together. And I wanted that too. I worked my way up through the company, always moving toward bigger projects. Bigger responsibilities. It took me away from her, and things got hard between us. Distant and tense, like there was always an invisible wall between us.”
“That sounds like what happened with Gabe and me,” she said. “We talked about it.”
“Yes. But then Daphne got pregnant, and I thought maybe that would bring us back together.”
“Did it?” Her eyes were sympathetic.
“I guess it did. I proposed to her, and she accepted. Everything was pretty wonderful, for a little while.” My voice faded out a little on those last few words.
“You don’t have to tell me, Tycho. You really don’t.”
“Just give me a sec.”
I had some more of the wine and then leaned back. Her eyes were getting to me. Something about how sad she was for me. It was hard to look at.
“So, we were engaged. I gave her a present, a cutting-edge car I’d designed myself. The perfect vehicle, designed to my own specs. Every last detail.” I saw that Sophie was holding her breath. She must have seen what was coming.
“She loved it, of course. She drove it everywhere, showed it off to everyone. It was built for safety. That was my gift to her, to know that she and the baby could go anywhere they wanted, and they would never have to worry about anything. But I still had to follow the codes.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Professional ethics, code of conduct. I’ll get back to that in a minute. So anyway, she got really into organizing the wedding. It kept her busy, so the fact that we weren’t spending a lot of time together stopped being a problem for about two months or so. And as for me, I stayed focused on work. I can’t even imagine it now, because I hated that job. I used to joke around with Gabe about it, how I wasn’t cut out for that life. But I didn’t know that back then. I thought that was the only kind of life there was. I even had an office and some stupid motivational poster hanging on the wall…”
“You mean like that one?”
She was pointing toward her study, where there was a poster showing the Milky Way beneath the one word: DREAM.
I shook my head and laughed. “Yeah. Sophie, you should have heard me ranting about those posters when we were on Venus. You’d kick me out right now. I don’t know why, but the sight of them just fills me with a crazy rage. Maybe because they remind me.”
“I shouldn’t have interrupted you,” she said. “Keep going.”
“So, there we are. Our wedding day comes, we have a quick little honeymoon, then back to work. She’s getting big now, we’re past the point where there should have been much of a risk. But then one night, I get home from work late and she’s on the floor. There’s a puddle of blood underneath her.”
“Tycho! Oh, I’m so sorry!”
“Daphne was okay, but she had just had a miscarriage. The baby was gone, and the baby was the whole reason we got married in the first place. We’d been drifting apart for a good long while. We had nothing left at that point, and we were both too young and dumb to work it out. ‘We might as well admit it,’ she told me the morning after she got back from the hospital. ‘This whole thing was a mistake.’”
“This just gets worse and worse…”
“I moved out of our place and got a lease on a little studio. I kept trying to see her, but she never backed off from what she was saying. The whole marriage was a mistake, a bad decision, it was doomed all along. We should get out now, before anything else happened. I got the impression that she saw the miscarriage as a punishment, like we’d done something we shouldn’t have and we had to pay the price for it.”
“That’s irrational,” said Sophie.
“Yeah. But does it matter?”
“It does. It’s important for you to know that. Losing your baby was random chance; no one was trying to punish you.”
I didn’t know what to say, because I hadn’t even gotten to the worst part yet. “She filed for divorce, and the day of the hearing was set. She still had that car, and even though I wished she would sell it I didn’t plan to insist on it. She needed a vehicle after all, and I wouldn’t have to see her riding around in it. When that hearing was done, we could walk away from each other as if nothing had happened. Like we had never even met.”
Sophie’s voice was soft. “It’s okay to be sad, Tycho. You don’t have to be strong.”
I didn’t know why she kept saying things like that. It’s not like I was melting down or anything, but maybe she could see something in my face I didn’t know was there.
“On the way to the hearing, Daphne got caught up in a major accident. A monorail had malfunctioned, and it wasn’t stopping for oncoming traffic. The car couldn’t stop; there wasn’t enough time. All it could do was redirect, driving her straight off the road and into the river. I designed it to be the safest car she could possibly drive. I worked in lots of little features, anything I could think of that would make her safer. But I still had to follow the Code of Conduct.”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“There’s an A.I. in every car, and it has to make life or death decisions if the situation comes up. Like whether to plow straight into the maglev train, which would quite possibly have killed dozens of people but would have been survivable for the driver. Those cars have a lot of impact-resistant plating on them, and the prototype model Sophie was driving had even more. She might have lived.”
“Are you saying the A.I. decided to kill your wife?”
“That’s exactly what happened. It calculated the likely loss of life and drove her off into the river rather than letting her just hit that train. She probably drowned, but I don’t really know the details. To oversimplify, it decided that the minimal loss of life from an impending collision would come at her expense. So yeah, it killed her.”
“Oh my god, Tycho! That is so horrible!”
“It isn’t great. I needed to understand it, maybe becaus
e I half-suspected that what had happened was my fault. I used my company access to upload everything that was in the car's black box and examined the telemetry. I ran countless simulations, countless scenarios, and they all ended the same way. If a collision had happened, there was a 50% chance the car would have just derailed the maglev but not plowed right through it. Daphne would have been hurt, and the injuries might have been life changing, but she would probably not have died.”
Sophie furrowed her brows. “So why isn’t that what happened?”
“Because I had changed the design of the vehicle. Those extra plates along the front of the car? They altered the outcome from 75% survivability for the maglev passengers and 50% for the driver, to 15% for the passengers and 75% for the driver. The plates had turned the car into a high-speed missile and guaranteed that any major crash would result in mass casualties. To keep that from happening, the A.I. ran her off the side of the river embankment instead.”
“Tycho,” she said as she reached out to touch my arm again. “You have to know this isn’t your—”
“—I don’t have to know anything. I do know this. The changes I made to the car are what killed my wife.”
“Tycho, no…”
“Just a few minor design differences would have been enough to alter the outcome of that day in almost every way. She would have made it to the hearing, she would have started a new life. She would have lived. I killed Daphne, and the fact that I didn’t do it intentionally doesn’t make any difference at all if you ask me.”
She didn’t ask me. Instead she just stood and put her arms around me in a long, warm hug.
“Tell me something, Tycho.”
I nodded. I was suddenly too exhausted to object even if I had wanted to.
“Is that why? Did you become an Arbiter as an act of contrition? Sacrificing your life to… to pay her back, maybe?”
I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to think about it anymore. I just let her hold me.
5
So much for my day off. The visit to Sophie’s house was just as exhausting as any workday, but I did feel like we were suddenly much closer because of it. I left her house in a daze.
When I got in my car, I was ready to be done with this whole “day off” concept and get back to work. The drive back to my place was going to take a little while, so I decided to bring up the dossiers on the three men we had arrested on Luna. Maybe I would see something that would move the whole case forward somehow, or maybe I would just improve my background knowledge. Either way, it was better than thinking about Gabriel’s widow and a hell of a lot better than thinking about Daphne.
I brought the files up from my dataspike. Combatives A.I. Division Chair Anton Slotin, Ballistics Development Chair Stefan Graves, and Generative A.I. Division Chair Lucien Klein.
I don’t know what I was expecting. Overt links to organized crime, some sign of unsustainable debt, anything that might make sense of their actions. From what I saw in their files, these three just weren’t that interesting.
Slotin had a military background before he went into private industry, but he seemed to have spent most of his service moving from one cozy little desk job to another. Graves had a long family history of weapons manufacturing, going back to the now-defunct Graves-Wormbach Manufacturing company. When Huxley Industries absorbed GWM, Graves moved into Huxley’s top echelons as part of the deal. Klein’s background was in A.I., but he wasn’t so much an A.I. genius as a money man with some knowledge of artificial intelligence. His primary job would be better described as mediation, keeping an eye on the geniuses for the Board and keeping an eye on the Board for the geniuses. Neither side would like or trust him, but both sides would need him if they wanted to avoid dealing with each other directly.
There was nothing obvious here, and if not for how disoriented I was feeling after that conversation with Sophie, I would probably just have dropped it. The case would be closed soon, and we’d get another one, most likely on some remote colony.
I didn’t need to do anything here. Whatever the truth was, the three executives were no longer my responsibility. They had already been transferred to Federation detention, and, as far as Command was concerned, all outstanding matters related to the Tower 7 arbitration were now resolved. Their main concern at the moment was what to do with the knowledge that Julian Huxley was dead. No one back at headquarters was tossing and turning over what had motivated these three men to commit such serious crimes.
I closed the dossiers, laughing at myself for my own immaturity. I was playing detective, trying to get all worked up about something that no longer had anything to do with me.
But there was something odd about the whole situation at Huxley. This wasn’t a case of some disgruntled janitor selling access to confidential material, or some blackmailed executive handing over a prototype blueprint to a rival company.
All three of the suspects had been linked to the weapons transfers by a paper trail that wasn’t even that hard to crack. All three were involved in the projects that developed the heavy androids Marcenn bought, the nanosuits his Eleven had used in the final battle at the top of Tower 7, and so on. How could three executive-level positions be involved without direct orders from the boss himself?
But the boss was dead, and if Byron was right that someone knew about it, then it was probably these three men. The question was why.
All three were top-level executives at Huxley Industries, and all three were paid as well as you would expect for men in that position. Why would any of the three have risked everything they had by selling weapons to a private party on an inner colony? They must have worked closely together to commit the crime, a situation of tremendous risk.
Were they planning to short the company after the news finally broke? Were they all working for someone else, the real mastermind who called the shots? If that was Huxley, why had they gone so far to cover up his death? Why had they continued to work together to fulfill his agenda, whatever that really was?
Now that my mind was moving, I connected to the Arbiter Force internal network and reviewed Huxley Industries' investor report. Everything about this case suggested a larger conspiracy, but I was no closer to really understanding it than I had been when I first discussed the issue with Gabriel on our way up Tower 7. If everything went back to Huxley Industries, then there had to be something here. Some little thread I could unravel.
I scanned through the document, but all I could see at first was the same meaningless pablum you would normally expect to see in an investor report. Here’s everything that’s going fairly well for us, here’s a list of excuses about the things that aren’t going so well along with some tortured explanations for why it’s all just fine, and here are some wildly optimistic projections for the next few quarters. I don’t even know why the investors read these things, unless they’re either just that gullible or that much better at reading between the lines.
Our forensic financial investigators had already turned up a list of keywords and phrases that referred to the black-market arms dealing. When I glanced through the transaction records, I found these keywords easily. The evidence was there. Even though the transactions themselves had involved serious crimes, the company had still logged them just like they would have logged anything else, relying on an almost childish code system to disguise the true nature of the most sensitive transactions.
If that was their method, then it stood to reason they’d use the same method with other clients. If Slotin, Graves, and Klein had their own little arms ring going, I expected to find the same semi-amateurish misdirection in reference to other deals. But I couldn’t find anything, not even when I had my dataspike perform a series of semantic filter searches through the Huxley Industries financial records. My filters did turn up a number of transactions, but they were all the transactions we already knew about.
If these three were criminals, they were criminals with exactly one client: August Marcenn.
When we’d confronted the last
eleven members of the Tower 7 Nightwatch under the control of Marcenn’s broken mind, they’d spoken a lot of gibberish. Or so I thought at the time, but now I was starting to wonder if there was more to it than I realized at the time.
What was it they said? I closed my eyes and thought, picturing them perched up on the top of a building and speaking in that eerie, coordinated way of theirs.
“The great work of the human race is in terrible danger. We acted to protect the glory. We would do so again. Do not prevent the work.”
New working hypothesis, for what it was worth: August Marcenn wasn’t alone. His murderous fanaticism wasn’t just a personal savior complex, but an ideology shared by other powerful and well-connected people. The slaughter on Venus was not a simple case of megalomania, but a deadly ideology with other followers, other true believers.
It was starting to look like we’d been right the first time, when we guessed that a death cult was behind the incident on Venus. But what exactly did the cult believe? The Eleven had rambled about a threat to “the glory,” by which they seem to have meant the glories of human civilization. And who was responsible for this threat?
“Insidious powers, old and dispassionate.”
An epic battle between good and evil, not an atypical ideology when it came to death cults. Unsurprisingly, the self-proclaimed good guys in this scenario were the ones committing mass murder.
So, that was one way to look at it. A conspiracy, driven by some bizarre ideology. But it was kind of far-fetched, which had always been the weakness of the cult hypothesis. If you were starting a death cult with plans to kill vast numbers of people, how would you go about recruiting the wealthy and powerful to your cause?
It didn’t feel right somehow, and there was another possibility. The three men had been set up, fall guys for someone else with a more easily understandable agenda such as an extremely large sum of money. The paper trail had been too obvious, the code they’d been using too easy to crack. The arrogance of the corporate elite, or evidence of a frame-up?
Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5 Page 28