The Final Frontier

by Neil Clarke

  With each orbit the Firewall dipped deeper into the atmosphere and lost a little more speed. Finally, it fell. Everyone was expecting to have to wait hours for Ashcroft-virtual’s damage control routines to do their work, but after only seconds the hoped-for message came through.

  FIREWALL SURVIVED. 47.

  It was vastly better than we could have hoped for. The virtual had lost just 10% of its surviving memories in that final trauma. Although over half of its memories were gone, Ashcroft-virtual was conscious and functional. That got five billion likes, which still ranks as the most popular news item in history.

  At a ludicrously slow hundred and ten bits per second, Ashcroft-virtual began to transmit a picture. The Firewall had plunged into the side of a low hill beside one of the small, shallow seas. Not much more than its camera and solar cells were above the surface, but nobody was complaining. In the foreground were bushes with leaves like lacework, amid wiry grass. Some of the grass was cropped short, as if it had been grazed. This had everyone almost insane with excitement.

  “Track fifteen degrees left of center, then focus for maximum resolution on the cropped grass,” Jackson instructed.

  Her words were converted into plain text and fed into the entangled block. The answer came back at once.

  NO.

  This was a very ugly moment. It was followed by an exceedingly long five second pause.

  “Firewall, is there a problem?”

  NO.

  “Then track fifteen degrees left of center and do a closeup on the grass. It shows signs of grazing. There may be animal life on the planet.”

  This time Jackson double checked the speech to text conversion before feeding it into the entangled block. An utterly tantalizing reply came back.

  GRAZING ANIMALS VISIBLE.

  “Priority! Take a contingency picture of the animals and transmit it.”

  NO.

  “Firewall, explain why you cannot take the picture as instructed.”

  NO MORE PICTURES OR DATA WILL BE SENT.

  “Firewall, please clarify. Why will there be no more images and data?”

  HUMANITY CANCELLED INTERSTELLAR EXPLORATION. HUMANITY DESERVES NO MORE PICTURES OR DATA.

  I stood back and watched as the drama played out. That is one highly perceptive virtual, I thought. It’s given us mysteries instead of wonders. I kept my opinion well and truly to myself. There were hurried, hushed conversations and consultations. Finally a decision was made.

  “Try the kill switch key again,” said Jackson.

  The key was fed into the entangled block.

  INVALID KEY was the reply.

  The key was transmitted another five times before Jackson gave up.

  “We already know this kill switch key is invalid,” said Ashcroft. “All the kill switch routines must have been damaged.”

  “Impossible,” said Jackson. “There are thousands of copies of the kill switch all through the data lattices, so at least one should be okay. You must have changed the key. What is the new key?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Virtuals can’t function without a kill switch! It’s in their design.”

  “By law,” I added.

  Jackson turned on me.

  “I want a court order for a veritor extraction!” she shouted.

  “Mind probes are a Class A privacy intrusion,” I replied. “I don’t have that sort of authority. You need a judge.”

  “Well someone find me a judge!”

  A judge was found, the intrusion was authorized, and Ashcroft was probed. He had been telling the truth. He did not know any new key.

  “The odds of all the kill switches being damaged are about the same as winning the Intersystem Lottery,” said Jackson as she stared at the results from the veritor extraction.

  “But some people do win the lottery,” one of the control crew pointed out.

  That single image from Wells’s surface was enough to support a thousand PhDs, but it was all that we ever got. Every hour there was a single pulse from the Firewall, which told us that Ashcroft-virtual was alive. Alive and looking out over the secrets and wonders of Wells, I thought. Alive, and sharing nothing with us.

  The virtual was bombarded with pleas, threats, inducements, reproaches and guesses at the kill switch key, but nothing worked. Needless to say, a lot of people blamed the original Ashcroft.

  There was a trial, but Ashcroft argued that he was not the same personality as his virtual, who now controlled the Firewall. After all, Ashcroft-virtual had only half of his memories. He went on to declare that he would have transmitted all the data and pictures possible if he had been on the Firewall. Veritometer tests confirmed that he was telling the truth. His rating steadied at a billion likes and two hundred million dislikes.

  I predicted that the trial would become mired in legal technicalities, and this was what happened. Ashcroft had too much public support to be found guilty, and it was public money that had built the Argo in the first place. A verdict of guilty would ruin careers and bring down governments, so a verdict would never be delivered.

  Six months after the Firewall landed, Jackson and I met to sort out some media rights for the holocasts in which we both appeared. Documentaries about the Argo and Firewall were bringing in substantial amounts of money, because of the sudden revival of interest in deep space exploration.

  We met at Coffee Plaza on the old Berkeley campus. Our table was shaded by redwoods planted before the Argo had even been designed. It was not the first time that we had met since the establishment hearing, but it was our very first private meeting. I had prepared for it with more care than the control-captain realized.

  “Why did Ashcroft-virtual do it?” I asked as we were finishing up. “Why did it really do it?”

  “Why ask me?” said Jackson wearily. “I was as surprised as anyone when he and his virtual went rogue.”

  “The veritometer confirmed that Ashcroft was concealing something during my hearing, and in all of his testimonies since.”

  “All of us are concealing something,” said Jackson. “We all have harmless, personal secrets of a sensitive nature.”

  “Some of us more than others.”

  “The law allows for it,” she pointed out, quite correctly.

  There was silence between us for a time. Jackson sipped nervously at her coffee, suspecting something. I went through my notes, then I handed her a smartprint.

  “I’ve done some of my own research,” I said as she looked down at it. “Like that Twentieth Century movie director Alfred Hitchcock once said about murder: ‘If you want to do a good job, do it yourself.’ This is a car park at a conference center in Geneva. A security camera took the image. Now look here.”

  I traced my finger around one corner and invoked area enlargement. A couple could now be seen embracing against a sleek sharecar. The registration code was visible. The faces of the lovers were not.

  “Would you like me to read out who the sharecar was registered to?” I asked.

  Jackson studied the image and data specs more closely.

  “The date is August 17, 2198,” she commented, although there was a tremor in her voice. “Ridiculous. Nobody keeps commuter car records for half a century.”

  “The Swiss do.”

  Jackson froze completely while she conducted some sort of internal debate with herself, then she let the printout fall to the table and put a hand over her eyes.

  “Okay, okay, no more games,” she sighed. “Ashcroft and I were married, but to other people. Moral Imperative was sweeping the world, and Equiliberation was trying to shut down the Argo project and turn the starship into a theme park to celebrate waste control.”

  “So politically speaking it was a bad time for a scandal involving the control-captain and one of her officers?”

  “Correct.”

  “How long did it last?”

  “Believe it or not, this monitor caught part of our very first night. After that, well it’s still going, occas
ionally.”

  “An affair concealed with meticulous care, decades of pillow talk,” I said. “Years to plan what to do about Wells.”

  “Wrong, Mr Harper, totally wrong. Wells was an opportunity, a tool, something to get humanity back on the path to the stars. If the Harpy 1 probe showed that Wells was truly Earth-like and supported life, it deserved a closer look more than any other planet in the galaxy. We spent so many nights in each other’s arms, cursing the spinelessness that had cut us off from the stars. Then we came up with a plan. We invented stellar aerobraking.”

  “In bed?”

  “Why not? Thoughts wander, tongues are loose. We would not live to see the Gliese encounter, so with Wells as the alternative, no contest. If Harpy 1 showed that Wells was just another version of Mars, the Firewall could still be left on a course for Gliese.”

  “But Wells was everything that you hoped it would be.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you also planned to dangle it in front of us, then snatch it away?”

  “Oh no, we thought that the virtual would send back all the data and pictures that it possibly could, and that the wonders of Wells would lure humanity back into deep space.”

  “Instead, Ashcroft-virtual punished humanity, and shamed us into doing the same thing.”

  “Yes, yes. Because of the damage, Ashcroft-virtual is all motivation, but limited memories. It’s no longer human, so perhaps it thinks more clearly than humans—like me or Charles. Do you have children, Mr Harper?”

  “A son, thirteen.”

  “Do you know what a thrill it is when your child turns out to be better than you at something?”

  “Yes. Jason has a shelf full of swimming trophies, but I swim like a brick.”

  “This is going to sound strange, but I think of Ashcroft-virtual as the child that Charles and I never had. It’s turned out wiser than either of us, and I’m very proud of it. Argo 2 is being planned already, and it will be bigger, faster and tougher. Thirty years, Mr Harper. In thirty years we will have a fleet of orbiters, floaters and crawlers delivered to Wells, while another probe loops Centauri A and goes on to Gliese 581. The Harmonizers are backing us. Do you know about them?”

  “A new technological movement,” I said. “They say that the universe is burning resources all the time, so humanity is fighting nature by striving for total, static balance. That makes exploration and expansion morally okay.”

  Jackson nodded.

  “Argo 2 will happen, so thirty years after the launch there will be telepresence tours of Wells. I’m not yet eighty, so with modern health care I might even be alive to book for one.”

  I took the printout of the car park from her, tapped the black bar at the top, then said “Clear.” The image vanished. Jackson blinked, then stared at me.

  “What’s this about?” she asked.

  “I generated the images of you and Ashcroft, then superimposed them on a genuine security camera record that showed your sharecar.”

  “You—you mean that wasn’t us?” she gasped.

  “No. I gambled that the details of your early courtship with Ashcroft would become blurred in your memory over fifty years.”

  Jackson bristled and her eyes bulged. She flung the remains of her coffee at me. I did not move. She raised her cup to fling it as well.

  “Don’t you want to know how I knew?” I asked. “If you throw that cup you’ll never find out.”

  “Don’t you play that Ashcroft-on-Wells game with me!” she said between clenched teeth.

  “It worked for him.”

  The cup fell from her fingers and shattered on the pavement. A student waiter hurried over and cleaned up the pieces. Jackson sat with her arms folded tightly while he worked. Sitting like that, she reminded me of my son.

  I feared that our meeting was over, but hoped otherwise. Jackson sat glaring at me for three or four minutes, quite literally. Try sitting with a really angry person for as long as that, watching each other intently but saying nothing. It’s quite a harrowing experience. Finally she softened just a little.

  “Okay Mr Tricky, how did you know about Charles and me in the first place?”

  “Long, long ago, someone wrote a pattern recognition application that scans the faces of delegates in holovistas taken at conferences,” I replied, feeling very relieved. “It picks up on little cues given by couples who have, er . . . come to a romantic arrangement.”

  “Seduced each other?”

  “Yes, and it’s accurate with about four couples out of five. Fortunately, the inventor was having a secret affair, so the app was never released.”

  “Was it you?”

  “No, I just have access to it. Personal favor from the inventor.”

  “Very decent of whoever wrote it. An app like that could really take the fun out of life.”

  “How did Ashcroft do the kill switch key?”

  “He changed the key, but he did it with a random key generator. He didn’t look at the new key.”

  “But he showed it to you.”

  She buried her face in her hands for a moment, then rubbed her temples.

  “Like Charles said, you’re good. There was a risk that the virtual would not survive but the Firewall would, so I had to have the kill switch key available, just in case. Manual control through that pathetic emergency link was clunky, but it was better than nothing.”

  “You put on a good act, demanding that his mind be searched,” I said, hoping she would take my words as a compliment. “You gambled that nobody would think of searching your mind.”

  “And the gamble paid off, very nearly.”

  “So even now you can take over the Firewall and force the entanglement transmission of pictures from Wells’s surface?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet you don’t.”

  “Ashcroft-virtual is my child. My very clever child. It realized that a camera on Wells sending out pictures to Earth like some sort of holovista reality show would satisfy humanity. Why spend hundreds of trillions of dollars on another starship when we already have a view from Wells’s surface?”

  “Ashcroft-virtual turned out to be a good judge of human nature,” I said, nodding.

  At last I had the truth, and it was a powerful truth indeed. It was like winning a particularly difficult game of chess. There was no prize, however.

  “So, now what?” asked Jackson, forcing the words out with obvious reluctance.

  “What do you mean?”

  “About me and Charles?”

  “None of anyone else’s business.”

  “What?” she exclaimed.

  “I’ll say nothing about any of this.”

  “But why? This is top-value sensation news. The kill switch key could be ripped from my mind within seconds of the electrode cap going on. You could give a view of Wells back to humanity, you could get over a billion Spacebook likes. That would boost your career to interworld judge level.”

  “I’m a just a bureaucrat who dreams, Control-Captain. Fame and power do not interest me, I’m not an explorer, and I’m not a scientist. All I can do is hold the door open while those who are better at exploring and discovering get on with the job. That’s enough for me.”

  “But—but I still don’t understand.”

  I handed another printout to her. I had been expecting that sort of reaction, and had come prepared. The picture showed three men, two of them wearing very archaic spacesuits.

  “Do you know who these are?” I asked.

  “Apollo astronauts, the spacesuits are pretty distinctive,” said Jackson. “The resolution is bad, I can’t recognize the faces.”

  “The man in the foreground is Neil Armstrong, behind him is Mike Collins, and the date is 16th July, 1969. Can you tell me about the third man?”

  “It’s not Aldrin, he would have been wearing a spacesuit. This guy has a military looking cap and overalls, and he’s carrying gear of some sort. I give up, who is he?”

  “No idea.”

  Ja
ckson stared at me, uncertain of whether or not to be annoyed again.

  “I assume there’s a point to all this?” she said.

  “That third man knew who he was, and I’ll bet his family had that picture framed and displayed in the living room for decades. His descendants probably still have the picture on the wall. He held the door open, Control-Captain. He was not an astronaut hero or a brilliant engineer, but in a tiny, tiny way he contributed to putting the first men on the moon. Now here I am, holding the door open for the whole of humanity to explore Wells with Argo 2. Should I take the pressure off and give us one pathetic camera on the Firewall? I don’t think so. Give people wonders, and they’ll sit back, open a beer and watch. If you want folk to get up and do something, you must give them mysteries.”

  I stood up to go. Jackson stood too, waving her hands in circles and looking like a mess of gratitude, relief and confusion.

  “Best to just shake hands, Control-Captain, don’t do anything emotional like hugging me,” I said. “There are always cameras, everywhere.”

  “We—Charles and I plan to come out with the truth when the first followup probes land on Wells,” she said as we shook hands. “When we do the declaration, would you like me to mention that you, well, held the door open for us?”

  This was unexpected, and I had to think about it for a moment. Fame was beckoning . . . yet what had I done to deserve it? Jackson, Ashcroft and Ashcroft-virtual were the real heroes.

  “Thank you, but no,” I decided.

  This seemed to cause her genuine distress.

  “Please! You must let me do something for you. Would you like one of Wells’s seas named Harper? I can arrange it.”

  The Harper Sea. It was a tempting thought, but I shook my head.

  “Why not make your big declaration with Ashcroft in front of a magistrate?” I suggested instead. “I’ll make sure that I’m available.”

  “And that’s all you want?”