* * *
Filled with a sense of vital urgency, Kir hurried to her berth. The Needlers didn’t trust her: maybe because of Bill, maybe because she was “teacher’s pet.” It didn’t matter, either way. It was Altair who’d been trying to tell her something. Talking in riddles, asking strange questions; and the Needlers were hivizens, they were scared of quaai personhood. They’d’ve been horrified if Kir had told them the name of her informant or even hinted at what she meant to do. But when Altair had given her that list of documents—from which she’d gleaned the Proof of Concept news—he’d also told her that she could break into his workspace. (I can’t tell you what’s in the locked box, but here’s the key. I’m leaving it where you can reach it.) He’d even given her a route in: that mysterious list, with metadata that had to be linked to the actual, hidden content—
The DC skullcaps were not supposed to leave the labs. They were supposed to be used only with full Neuro Emergency kit in immediate reach: there was a small chance someone could start fitting during DC. But it had never happened; the cabinet generally wasn’t locked, and Kir had had no trouble sneaking her own cap out of the lab with her. She shut herself into her coffin and swiftly disabled all the fusspot features, finessing them so they wouldn’t report faults. . . . I know you can do it, the quaai had said, but I’m sure you won’t try.
Kir paused for thought, the cap in her hands. Her three a.m. panic had quickly faded (maybe being reconciled with Bill had made everything feel better). But could she trust Altair? One more time, what were the issues? He was upset about Sergey’s upload. Why shouldn’t he be? He knew he’d still lost a friend, because an upload isn’t a person. He’d been concerned about the other seniors. He’d (indirectly) told her about Proof of Concept. Right both times. He’d talked about food containers. . . . Kir could not explain the food containers. All she’d been able to discover from the Frame’s manifest (without risking unwelcome attention) was that the contents of those units didn’t weigh much. They almost might be full of air. She frowned over this wrinkle for a moment, and gave up. Altair knows what’s going on. Obviously. He can’t tell me except in riddles, obviously. Why don’t I just get in there and find out? He won’t harm me. He can’t. Margrethe promised me he can’t.
When she was first trained in using Direct Cognitive, Kir had spotted at once that she could use the cap to hack her own self-generated firewalls. That was how she’d found out that Linda (probably) really was her mother, and also how and why Linda had (probably) killed the bastard who was their father. . . . She didn’t like to think about the learning experience, but the method had definitely worked. After that incident Margrethe had explained why personal recall can’t be completely trusted, and she’d made Kir promise never, ever again to use DC on the dark net of her own mind. But promises had to have expiration dates, even promises to Margrethe.
Was Altair’s workspace as reachable as a suppressed memory? You never knew until you tried.
She tucked a tongue protector into her mouth, donned the cap, felt it connect with the sensors under her scalp, and lay down. The bed was a better option than her uncomfortable foldaway chair and desk thing; safer, too. Eyes closed, she recalled the first item on Altair’s list. The cover of a printed book stood in her field of view: all green leaves. She visualized turning to the specified page and immediately her field went blank, in exactly the irritating way she remembered. So far so good. Onward: focusing on the image, the metadata, the associations that came to her. Following every vagrant thought that arose. When she began to feel sick and scared she knew she was on the right track. This is a wall.
Onward again, into a haunted maze, full of the sense of prowling monsters. Losing all feeling of her body; losing proprioception. The panic, the sweats: Ah, this is why Margrethe said don’t do it! Resistance shook her, all her little limbs trembled, awful feeling of weight, stink and pain, and—and she was through. She lay with her eyes still closed, watching as the pages in her field of view filled up with clear, English print.
The “green leaves” article was a paper written in the twenty-first century, proposing that the Little Ice Age in Europe (seventeenth century) was triggered by a globally significant population crash in South America, after the conquistador invasion. There were graphs. There were pie charts. The whole thing was well reasoned, mildly interesting, and either utterly irrelevant or Altair hadn’t given her the full story. The firewall was only half of it. There must be another major barrier of encryption—
Kir, frustrated and impatient, suddenly realized she was going about this all wrong.
She sat bolt upright, yanking the cap off her head. She had to talk to Altair himself! Right now!
She’d had a nosebleed, she’d vomited a little bile, and her vision was shaky: nothing worse. She washed her face, changed her tunic, set the bed to clean itself, and grabbed her headset. If the Needlers were really waiting for her to come back, then too bad, because whatever the offline documents meant, she had a strong feeling that Altair would only talk to her about what was going on out in the Abyss.
She was halfway to her exit, walking fast and trying to look casual, when all hell broke loose. Sirens burst out. Emergency lights flashed. A huge red-letter tag leapt up, blocking the passage ahead: “DANGER DO NOT PASS FOLLOW GUIDANCE TO MUSTER POINT DANGER EMERGENCY DO NOT PASS DO NOT RETURN TO YOUR ACCOMMODATION.”
Kir spun around, urgency flung into reverse, chasing the vivid green arrows that darted ahead of her. She reached the canteen, their muster point, and ran into a wall of bodies: a crowd, as if all the sleepers had awoken. Everyone was staring at the big screen, where another crowd of people, wearing clay-red or rust-gray uniforms—seen by small Kir in fragments—grappled crazily with one another, shouting at the tops of their voices. Kir stood bewildered. What was this? This was not the emergency she’d been racing to beat! She’d come out of DC too fast. Her head was full of images, rifled like a pack of cards, too swift for normal consciousness to follow. Somewhere a calm voice, painfully calm, constantly overlaid by wails of panic, was speaking: “This is Marshab, we’re in trouble XXXXXX If you’re receiving, please respond. XXXXXX This is Marshab, we’re in trouble. Please respond XXXX We are intact, but we’re NOT self-sufficient—”
Kir had been almost the last to arrive, followed only by two crewbies who must have been in a games room; they were rubbing gel out of their hair. “What’s going on?” asked one of them cheerfully. “Have the aliens landed?”
“It’s Marshab,” said Kir, her brain still a flicker show. “I think it’s Marshab. How could they be on our screen?”
“It’ll be a movie. What’s the emergency about, do you know?”
The LDMs liked watching movies together. They used the canteen as a venue, and sometimes Needlers joined them. Not Kir, she didn’t like Hivizen entertainment, the colors made her eyes hurt. But if this was a movie, why was it in such degraded format? Why did it seem so lifelike? The scarlet letters were fading, falling from the air in bright shards. The sirens had finally stopped, but the cries and yells of the people on the screen only shot up in volume. “This is Marshab, XXXX we’re in trouble. We don’t know XXXX who we’re talking to, all we XXXX we’ve lost all contact. XXXX overdue for a supply drop. We are NOT self-sufficient. We XXXXX FOR GOD’S SAKE XXXXXX We NEED stuff—”
“It can’t be real!” muttered someone close to Kir. “The cables were withdrawn! No way Marshab could reach us—”
“I think we all know they are self-sufficient!” complained a different voice. “Why are they lying?”
The storm in Kir’s head eased. She recognized the first voice as Karim’s. The person who thought Marshab was self-sufficient was a crewbie. She realized the LDMs were sitting together, just watching the movie. The crowd she’d run into was the Needlers, still on their feet, in a tight huddle, their backs to Kir.
“If this is a joke, I personally don’t get it!” shouted Jo. “This is totally irresponsible!”
“Is anyone
tracing the source?” demanded Liwang. “Where is it coming from? Who’s doing this to us?”
The possessor of the calm, steady voice had managed to claim the screen. She was staring intently, but clearly seeing nothing: grim-lipped, with desperate eyes. “We don’t know who you are. We can’t hear you, can’t see you. We only know you’re out there. I was a senior agriculturalist, but it’s chaos. We can’t raise anyone on Earth. We can’t raise Zvezda, Chang’e, or Moonhab. Who are you? What’s happened?”
One of the crewbies went to fetch herself a coffee.
“It’s getting beyond bad. What happened to our support? Is there any way you can respond? Do you know anything?”
“Hey, you guys!” shouted Karim. “Where are the directors, if this is a drill? Are you sure you know what’s going on?”
First Officer Ben turned in his chair, affecting to notice the Needlers for the first time. “Hey, relax, crewmates! It’s not the end of the world. It’s just Dan, messing with us.”
Bill looked around too, equally amused. “Come on,” he called out. “You’re the scientists. Tell me how that could be real.”
“I don’t know,” snapped Lilija. “I have no idea. We have a Needle experiment going on. It isn’t live, but anything’s possible.”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” said Bill with a quick, sly grin. “People say crazy things when they’re rattled.”
“Lilija,” said Communications Officer Foxy, exasperated, “Karim, all of you. Think about it. Say that was real. If Marshab was collapsing, what could we do for them, locked up down here? Nothing. This is VLDMT training. We have to live with the possibilities.”
LDMs nodded and murmured in agreement. Someone in the fake Marshab had started screaming.
“PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE! MY CHILDREN! THEY’RE DYING!”
“You can’t help them.” Medical Officer Eke calmly raised their voice to be heard. “Think. If there was a terrible epidemic in the next Hive we still couldn’t help most of them. That’s the way it is. We go on, that’s all. That’s what these UDs, ‘unscheduled disruptions,’ teach us.”
Slowly, suspiciously, the Needlers moved to an empty table and sat down. Bill and Lilija were still having a staring match. The sobs, shouts, and pleas from “Marshab” continued, grating on the Needlers’ nerves. The LDMs remained totally unaffected, until at last the cries fell silent and the screen went blank. They then broke into ironic cheers and applause, because Dan and Margrethe had walked into the canteen, smiling. The codirectors mounted the stage. The LDMs raised a louder cheer. Dan laughed, and winked at them.
“Well done, everyone,” said Margrethe. “And I’m sorry we had to spring that on you, my team. You have to be on equal terms.”
“Well done, my guys,” said Dan. “Never in doubt! Needlers, full marks for compassion, not so good on the joined-up thinking!”
There was laughter: the Needlers saving face, the LDMs pleased with themselves, but some of them (Kir thought) also a little relieved.
“So it was just a test?” Terry did not seem entirely satisfied.
“Yes,” said Margrethe. “It was a fake. As far as I’m aware, Marshab is not in trouble and the lunar colonies are operating normally. It’s an LDM tradition, as you’d know if you followed the programs; and you all came through splendidly.”
5
The rotation change at the end of the fourth month, coming so soon after the deaths of the two seniors, happened very quietly. So quietly that Kir thought Bill had gone off to cold sleep without saying good-bye. She’d forgotten the officers’ “rote” still had two months to run: then there he was in the canteen, saving a place for her at dinner. The unexpected reprieve was emotional for Kir, and Bill seemed really touched. They went to playtime together, which they hadn’t done since their quarrel, and things were genuinely good between them again. Having great sex, with someone she cared about but didn’t entirely trust, made Kir feel very grown-up. The lab meeting interrupted by the fake Marshab emergency was not reconvened, and Kir didn’t return to the Abyss. There was no point: nobody seemed to want answers anymore. There were eight months to go, the directors were still confident, and everyone just wanted to survive this. Have no more bad news stories, and get away with declaring the Needle Voyage a success.
* * *
Kir had told Margrethe what the LDM officers said about “cushy-life” scientists, and computers doing all the work. The codirectors’ response was a program of get-to-know-your-neighbors sessions. Margrethe had also come up with some smart new signs for the labs.
DO NOT ENTER WHEN YOU SEE THE RED LIGHT
DO NOT REMOVE DC CAPS FROM HAZARD CABINET
Direct Cognition Procedure can be highly hazardous.
Interruption is dangerous for the practitioners, and to you.
Please observe safety procedures strictly.
The red light, previously thought to be enough warning and frequently ignored, was not lit, so Kir walked straight into IS, where Lilija was giving a demonstration. She went to her usual place: at the workbench where Sergey’s paybot still presided, curled up nose to tail. Lilija stood inside the big VR display, with three tanks in front of her, spread out along a VR workbench. In the left-hand tank a human head lay faceup: eyes closed, the skull smooth-shaven and cut off at the neck by a band of white, as if the patient were asleep in bed. In the middle tank a similar-size, irregular grayish spheroid hung suspended in nothing. The right-hand tank seemed empty, except for a few very bright sparks that appeared, traversed it randomly, and vanished.
“Exhibit One. Here we have a DBD patient. She’s in a permanent minimal response state. You know what that means?”
The crewbies (there were no officers present) nodded, or said yeah. The virus that had struck Sergey Pillement down, a hundred and fifty years ago, killed fewer people now than on its first rampages, but “permanent minimal response” was still the typical outcome for survivors.
“We need to know if there’s anybody home, and as you know, it’s not easy with DBD. Luckily there’s a solution. A medical AI will take a live scan of her brain, and apply the phi integration test.” Lilija expanded the tank, removed the woman’s skull, wiped away soft tissue, and popped a glittering globule of false-colored neural connections out into the audience—so everyone could see how the mass was getting sliced, this way and that, at astonishing speed. “Don’t worry, it only happens to the scan, not the patient. The AI is looking for the ‘cruelest’ cut, where there are the fewest connections between two parts. If that ‘fewest connections’ figure is zero, she’s gone. . . . I’ve slowed it down. In real time the procedure takes less than a second. If we had to test every connection individually, establishing consciousness this way would take ‘longer than the age of the universe.’ . . . Or, as we scientists might say, a fantastically huge, useless, impossible-to-imagine long time.”
Lilija brought the tank back to home position. “We have a high phi value. This patient is fully aware. She can be contacted, and rehabilitated, if she chooses to live. Be a fantastic PSM scientist, possibly. Isn’t that great?” She moved on. “In my second tank I have the Needle Volume.”
The front row of crewbies recoiled, causing some disruption. Lilija smiled sweetly. “No, no, not the real hot core! That stays in the isolation chamber; this is a mock-up. Here we have the opposite problem. We know the connections in our lump of practically nothing are working fine, because our ‘isolated’ sample is still part of Space-Time, and you guys aren’t sprouting Dalek heads. The sun hasn’t fallen from the sky; the walls of this lab haven’t turned into currant jelly. What we need to do is to observe the integration state of this bundle of ‘IS units,’ also known as qubits; the ‘atoms’ of Space-Time. Including their instantaneous connections with the farthest distant quarters of the universe, of course. (By the way, if the idea that we have to observe the integration to make anything happen is too weird for you, better give up the idea of a career in PSM physics.) Well, that’s a lot of connec
tions. Fantastically huge doesn’t come near it. But we have DC—which is a phenomenal means of releasing the potential of the human mind. We have the most advanced quantum computer in the world at our service. Off we go!” The second tank expanded, and expanded. The gray spheroid could now be seen as a dense mass of interpenetrating points and lines.
“We call our observations ‘refractions.’ They’re not very stable, unfortunately. Now watch.”
Nothing happened. Minutes passed, then a tiny bright constellation sprang into existence in the depths. It disappeared again. “That was five years’ work, at full stretch, and I’m not joking. Remember what I said about phi integration testing and the age of the universe? Double that figure! Go on doubling. Oh no! This is impossible. This is utterly beyond our powers . . . ! But keep watching, because every time we fail, the bundle remembers our attempts, and when we’ve failed again, and failed again, and failed again, for however many thousands of exacting and finicky tries, the theory says there comes a point where it, I mean the bundle, ‘knows’ that given all the time we need, we would succeed.”
The tiny constellations arose, reached fingerlings into the matrix, and collapsed, over and over; over and over; over and over. It was mesmeric, it was intolerable. The crewbies stared in frustration, willing the trick to work. Lilija stood back like a stage magician, milking it. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a whole city of netted points sparked together; sparks raced from it through the whole mass: and stayed alight. “There. We have ignition! Information Space, where time is no object, has taken over and done the work. That’s the transition we call ‘Proof of Concept.’” Lilija shrank the tank back to home position, and smiled benignly on the false-colored whirligig that sparkled inside it. “And that, my friends, the pretty bauble that results, is, potentially, further down the line, the heart of your starship!”
Kir had just sent Lilija a private message. Are you sure you should be telling them all this?
Proof of Concept Page 7