by Jeff Carlson
“Did you think you could sneak in and steal your AI?”
“No, sir.”
“Nothing happens on our grid without my knowing it.”
“No, sir.”
“All right.” Koebsch gestured for them to go left toward data/comm, not to the lab. Vonnie hesitated, but she wouldn’t get another chance to prove she wasn’t a head case. She dutifully followed him into data/comm.
The cramped room had two chairs. Koebsch leaned back in his seat as Vonnie perched on the edge of hers. Ash stayed at the hatch with her arms folded.
“You want to go back into the ice,” Koebsch said.
He tapped the radio in my pressure suit, Vonnie thought, feeling irate. But she didn’t show it. “I think we should mount another expedition this week,” she said.
“It’s not going to happen. Not yet.”
“I don’t mean people at first. We should send in mecha. The best choice would be probes that are the same size and shape as the sunfish.”
“We’re building them now.”
Vonnie flared at his imperturbable calm. “Then we can program some of those probes with my AI! Lam will have more success than anything new.”
Koebsch shook his head. “You have to realize, there are people on Earth who’ve proposed sealing off the ice.”
Vonnie’s heart stopped. “We can’t do that.”
“Yes, we can. A few explosive charges—”
“We’ve discovered intelligent life.”
“I believe you. I want to believe you. Everyone involved with the agency has wanted to find something like this since we were kids, right?”
Vonnie stared in surprise. Koebsch was a government appointee. She’d thought the ESA was just a job to him.
“We’re not sure the sunfish are intelligent,” he said.
“They use language and engineering.”
“They seem to, yes. There’s good evidence. But their intelligence hasn’t been so well demonstrated that no one is questioning it. If we send in your AI and he’s glitchy, we’ll be giving the wrong people more ammunition.”
“Let me talk to him.”
“You’re acting a little glitchy, too,” Koebsch said, leaning forward and patting Vonnie’s arm. “Do you know what the Stockholm syndrome is? Sometimes a hostage will begin to defend the people who grabbed her.”
“That’s bullshit. The sunfish are amazing. Hell, there’s no question they’ll be profitable, too,” Vonnie said, stewing with contempt. “The military and pharmaceutical lobbies must be screaming for DNA samples.”
“Yes.”
“We need to help whatever’s left of the sunfish empire.”
“How? Are you proposing an evacuation? To where?”
“I don’t know. We should send down food and oxygen. We could lead them to safer areas. They don’t have radar. They might not know the best places to hide. That would be an easy way to demonstrate our goodwill.”
“It might come to that, but there are only eleven of us. My first responsibility is to make sure we’re safe. That includes maintaining our food and air supplies for the duration of our mission.”
“There will be supply ships.”
“Vonnie, the sunfish look like they’ve been down there for thirty thousand years. They’re as old as the last existing populations of Neanderthal Man, maybe older. A little more time won’t matter.”
“They’re telling each other about us right now. They’re telling each other I killed dozens of them!”
“You acted in self-defense.”
“They must think we’re the monsters. The longer we wait, the worse it will be. They’ll build more defenses. They’ll prepare for war. We need to try again before they get too entrenched.”
“We will. Vonnie, we will, but not before we’re ready. Meanwhile, you need to help me. Let us use what we can from your AI’s mem files and delete its personality.”
“I…”
“If the next stages of our operation don’t go right, everything we’ve planned will be in jeopardy.”
Vonnie looked away from him. She didn’t want Ash to see her expression either, because if they were going to work together, Ash needed to believe that Vonnie would always put the team first. In space, a crew was family.
Now she had to let them erase Lam forever. If she needed to choose between her AI or the sunfish, there wasn’t a choice at all.
“Okay,” she whispered. “Take him apart.”
24.
During the next few days, they began to settle in for the long haul. Even if there was no further contact with the sunfish, Vonnie had gathered enough data to occupy thousands of experts for years. Instead, they had eleven people. Datastreams let them back-and-forth with universities, laboratories, and government agencies on Earth and Luna, where other programs were underway, but the eleven of them were the front line.
The pressure might have been overwhelming, except Koebsch was right. The ESA crew were elite volunteers. Every one of them had dreamed of adventure since they were children.
Metzler, the lead biologist, went a hundred hours without rest until he was incoherent with stims and caffeine, and Koebsch ordered him to take the same sedatives Vonnie used to sleep.
She’d been allowed to field ten interviews in which prominent newsmen and commentators gushed over her survival while she tried to cast the sunfish in a sympathetic light. “I smashed through their homes like some kind of giant,” she said. “To them, I was the alien.” But the newsmen were baffled by this point of view, and their feeds tended to play clips of her speaking well of Bauman and Lam, as if her friends had died during her encounters with the sunfish.
It was infuriating. Vonnie recorded her own interviews and asked permission to put them on the net, haggling with Koebsch, yelling at an assistant director on Earth, finally setting the matter aside because she believed the truth would come out as soon as they contacted the sunfish again.
Everybody experienced some level of mania except Ash, who remained cool. Ash seemed to have taken it upon herself to be the vigilant one — the grown-up. At the same time, Koebsch became more and more of a toucher, punching shoulders, whacking backs, participating in their excitement.
Ash had a nice smile, especially when the men were around, but she was intense for someone in her early twenties. As a wunderkind, she’d probably spent her brief adulthood fighting people’s assumptions that she was a child. Vonnie supposed that was why she insisted on Ash, not Ashley, because her abbreviated name was sharp while the longer version sounded soft. The chip on her shoulder was as big as a sword.
Vonnie liked her. She liked all of them. They were honest, dedicated people who embraced their work.
One piece of business took priority. Vonnie had encountered bugs, bacterial mats, and fungi in addition to the warring breeds of sunfish. There were bacteria in the bugs, a parasitic growth on the fungi, and what appeared to be viral infections in the smaller sunfish.
For several days, the biologists were given the lion’s share of lab time and computing power. It was critical to know if Europan microorganisms were harmful to human beings.
Mecha had removed Vonnie’s armor in a clean lab after injecting her suit with plastic, encasing her in a protective film. Then they’d transferred her half-conscious body to another isolation chamber where they’d inundated her with UV, nanotech, antibiotics, antivirals, and gene sweeps. It might have made sense to quarantine her from everyone else, but she hadn’t been exposed outside her suit. Nor could they allocate an entire hab module to one person for weeks or months or however long it took Earth to decide she wasn’t infectious.
Coming to Europa was a prison sentence with additional sacrifices. All of them were given the same regimen of meds. The gene sweeps made Pärnits sick, yet he used his chills and nausea to joke with Vonnie instead of blaming her. “I need the meds anyway if I don’t want to glow,” he said, because Jupiter bathed its moons with radiation.
If a person could stand on Europa’s s
urface unprotected, she would absorb 500 rems every twenty-four hours. One day would make her ill. Two days would be a lethal dose.
Their electromagnetic shields, suits, and hab modules could minimize their exposure but not totally deflect the most lethal hazards such as gamma rays. Each crew member had an Earth-monitored AI calculating his or her individual risk. Merely driving across camp reduced their life expectancies. They would pay for their time here with pills and nanotech in addition to likely surgeries for bone cancer and melanomas — and they were ecstatic.
Everything they did felt significant. Even dinner was cause for celebration. Despite objections, Koebsch required everyone to gather for one meal each day. Otherwise they tended to divide into small groups, communicating across the camp by showphone or by radio if at all.
Dinner was a chance to brag and shout, posing questions, discussing theories, and flirting with other healthy geniuses caught up in the same jubilation.
They teased her about being a media star, although Vonnie sensed that two or three people were truly jealous.
The worst case of envy belonged to William Dawson, a gene smith, an Englishman in his seventies who was the oldest member of their crew. “Do try to leave us some of the limelight,” he said, pretending a smile that didn’t touch the papery wrinkles around his eyes.
Like Ash, Dawson was sensitive about his name. He permitted a certain level of informality. “Among colleagues, it’s not necessary to address me as ’Dr. Dawson,’” he said magnanimously, but he expected to be greeted as William, not Bill or Will.
Privately, Vonnie decided he was a stuffy old royal prick, which was fitting, since he’d mentioned in his official crew bio that he’d been christened after the English kings.
Dawson’s conceit wasn’t unusual. In the mid twenty-first century, many parents had turned to the past. Most people never left Earth, but humankind had begun to ascend into space in real numbers for the first time. They forgot their religions and their holidays, which hastened the decline of same beliefs back home. Babies were born in orbit and on the moon.
Children were given names to remember a heritage they’d never experience. The Americans called their kids silly, showy things like Christmas, Pacific, Birch, or Spring. In Europe, the trend was more elegant. Both cultures honored their ships and stations by celebrating famous historical figures like Washington or Robespierre, but the ESA org chart was littered with traditional names like Dublin O’Neal and Henri Frerotte. There was also an engineer they called Triple O because his full legal name eased off the tongue like Italian music — Antonio Leonardo Gravino.
Vonnie worked with Ash, Metzler, O’Neal, and Frerotte to forge their new sunfish-shaped probes. She joined their team immediately, although Koebsch predicted the job would unsettle her. He was correct that whenever Vonnie entered the machine shop, she cringed.
The eight-armed framework on their work bench looked like it had crawled out of her mind. Every night, despite the drugs, she dreamed of screeching monsters.
Their prototype was a muscular alumalloy sunfish 1.2 meters wide, identical to the smaller breed except for its guts and its missing skin. In real sunfish, the brain massed almost as much as it did in human beings. That was a lot of room to jam with processors and mem cards. Vonnie estimated they could give each probe a Level IV intelligence, but they wanted better. They wanted to surpass the threshold required in quantum computing to create Level III or II intelligences.
They needed more room. Their probes wouldn’t breathe or eat, so they gained space where a sunfish had its gills, lungs, hearts, and digestive and reproductive systems. Unfortunately, their probes required power plants, data/comm, and sonar. Radar and X-ray would also be ideal. Their design was overtaxed, but mounting external components on the probe would defeat its purpose of appearing like a sunfish.
One night over coffee, Ash took Vonnie aside. “Tell me about your AI,” Ash said.
“What do you mean? You deleted him.”
“Me and Koebsch. Yeah, I… What I mean is you did a great job doubling him up with your suit’s systems.”
“That was all I had.”
“I know. He was erratic, but integrating him with basic functions was a nice trick. Maybe we should try the same thing if we can overcome the instability.”
As an apology, it was lacking. Like many people who were too smart for their own good, Ash could be blunt, even graceless, and yet Vonnie appreciated the young woman’s attempt to show curiosity and respect.
“We can look into it,” Vonnie said. “First let’s see how much capacity Pärnits wants.”
Rauno Pärnits, the linguist, also served as an engineering assistant. He consulted with them in developing the prototype’s ability to wriggle and bend, running cables, servos, and flexors throughout its body and arms.
Generating movements like the sunfish would demand a huge amount of memory and computing power — maybe too much. Pärnits wanted to store most of his programs externally. Linking their probes remotely to an AI was the easy answer. They could use relays to maintain their signals, but Vonnie didn’t like it. What if the probes were cut off?
Pärnits was thirty-one, almost Vonnie’s age, lean and hawk-faced. He let her know his bed was open to her. So did Metzler and Frerotte. Vonnie might have paired with one of them if she wasn’t so confused emotionally. It was too soon. Physical comfort would be sweet, but she mourned for Lam even if the two of them hadn’t been lovers.
The compulsive behavior she’d experienced after being rescued had faded. Too much of her fixation had been a defense mechanism, blinding herself to her pain.
She didn’t trust herself anymore. Maybe she hadn’t been broken, but she’d come close. Now she wasn’t sure if the pieces still fit. Her superiors on Earth had told her to attend regular therapy sessions with an AI, which was humbling. She occupied herself with work and cooking and music. In fact, most days she was able to combine her two hobbies, listening to Beethoven while organizing hors d’oeuvres and soup for everybody in Module 02, which was dedicated to living space, exercise machines, and their tiny kitchen. She was a topsider again, which was probably where she was meant to be.
It was Day 16 when Koebsch sounded a Class 2 alert, overriding every data/comm line in camp.
“The Brazilians are going into the ice,” he said.
25.
Koebsch turned beet-red as he played the satellite footage again. “We can’t stop them,” he said. “They’re not answering our signals.”
“What about emergency protocols?” Metzler asked.
“They’re blocking everything,” Koebsch said. “They knew we’d yell as soon as they breached the ice.”
“How long until we hear from Earth?”
“Nine minutes.”
Vonnie grimaced at her showphone. She was in Lander 04 with Ash and Frerotte, but everyone had linked to their group feed, which arranged their faces in miniature around a larger holo display. The display showed fourteen mecha dropping into a rift in the ice, followed by five armored men, then six more mecha.
Five of the machines had been adapted with additional arms — short arms lined with pedicellaria. The Brazilians apparently planned to communicate with the sunfish, but it was a rushed effort. Their other mecha were crawlers, diggers, sentries, and gun platforms.
“There’s no way they’re set,” Metzler said.
Most of the ESA crew wore expressions of exasperation or disbelief. Metzler was pissed off.
In his forties, squat and ugly — so ugly he was cute, like a bulldog — Ben Metzler was a hothead and a wise-ass. In some ways, his biting opinion of people reminded her of Lam.
“The Chinese will go next,” he said. “You watch. They’ll go next and then we’ll be ordered in, too, just to show everyone who’s got the biggest dick. We’re going to contaminate this whole area.”
“I thought the Brazilians agreed to the A.N. resolutions,” Vonnie said.
Koebsch nodded. “They did.”
; All sides had declared an intent to coordinate their actions and share information freely. When the time was right, the Allied Nations planned for a unified expedition. The goal was to establish a single party of translators and diplomats, but humankind was as divided as the sunfish.
The ESA wasn’t alone in running spy sats over Europa to watch their human counterparts. Some of their mecha were self-defense units, equipped mostly with electronic warfare systems. Many of their AI were committed to the same game of stealing each others’ datastreams while encrypting their own.
NASA and the ESA were old partners, often pairing with Japan, but China maintained its distance, and the Brazilians were the most recent addition to Earth’s spacefaring groups. They’d cultivated a national spirit as upstarts and underdogs.
Vonnie understood their eagerness. She identified with their need to prove themselves. She’d felt the same emotions when she’d first landed on Europa.
Why hadn’t they learned from her disaster?
As much as Vonnie wanted to contact the sunfish again, it wasn’t envy that made her want to stop the Brazilians. Until they’d run a sufficient number of probes, fully decoded the carvings and mastered the sunfish language, blundering into the ice would only make things worse.
The Brazilians’ swagger was an insult.
“Sir, they’re going in with guns,” Vonnie said to Koebsch. “They’re either hunting specimens or looking for a fight.”
“Brazil’s in trouble,” Metzler said. “They need money to upgrade everything they’ve got — ships, suits, you name it. If they’re the first ones in and they start capturing native lifeforms, they’ll have buyers lined up out the door with cash in hand. It doesn’t matter if they kill a few sunfish. A circus is exactly what they want.”
“We can’t wait for a decision back home,” Vonnie said.
Earth was a quarter of the way around the sun from Jupiter. Each radio burst took eleven minutes to travel from the ESA camp to Berlin, the European Union capital, plus eleven minutes back again. It was a tedious way to have a conversation.