The Vesta Conspiracy: A Science Fiction Thriller (The Solarian War Saga Book 2)

by Felix R. Savage

  “They’re not exactly going to be launching tanks of hydrogen in the middle of this mess.”

  “No, I don’t think so, either. In fact, maybe they’ve stopped the train altogether. On the far side of the asteroid.”

  “They wouldn’t do that,” Elfrida said faintly. The possibility had not occurred to her.

  Wang Gulong let out a shout in Chinese. Jimmy translated, “It is coming!”

  Elfrida whooped in relief. “OK! OK! Everyone get down!”

  Rather needlessly, they all dropped flat at the edge of the ringrail canyon.

  Lights blazed on the horizon. The Vesta Express was coming.

  Elfrida craned over the edge.

  At the bottom of the canyon, where they had dropped it, the roadheader blocked the track.

  The train was on them before they could blink. Panic flooded Elfrida’s mind.

  It’s not going to stop.

  It’s going to hit the roadheader and derail.

  People are going to die.

  It’ll be my fault.

  I’ll lose my job, I’ll be guilty of murder, the ISA will throw me in jail, Mom and Dad will be heartbroken, I’ll never see Glory dos Santos again—

  Before that last thought could sink in, almost before she knew she had had it, the Vesta Express shuddered to a halt. It had in fact been braking as hard as possible for the last twenty minutes, ever since the pressure sensors in the track detected the obstruction. It completed this deceleration from Mach 2 to 0 kph just in time to avoid a catastrophic derailment. Its blocky white nose loomed over the roadheader. Its headlights drenched the dinosaur-like machine in an accusing blaze of yellow.

  “Go!” Elfrida croaked.

  Hugh Meredith-Pike did not hesitate. With the giddy insouciance of those new to micro-gravity—compounded by the effects of neural stimulation—he leapt off the precipice.

  Wang Gulong flung himself backwards, paying out the tether attached to Meredith-Pike’s EVA suit, which was emblazoned front and back with the logo of the Extropian Collective:

  Meredith-Pike had designed it himself.

  He landed on the roadheader’s boom, narrowly avoiding the slicer head. Pogoing up and down with blissed-out disregard for the giant chain-saw near his legs, he broadcast on every frequency his suit supported. “Hey!” Paroxysms of laughter gripped him. “Hey, Jules! It’s me, Hugh! Long time no see, mate! Got any room for an old friend in that choo-choo? Ha ha ha ha ha!”

  ★

  Julian Satterthwaite was having the worst day of his career. Scratch that: the worst day of his life.

  Since they’d lost access to Ali Baba, the supercomputer at the University of Vesta, the research team of the de Grey Institute had been attempting to address the Problem (as they called it) with their own supercomputer, Bob. However, Bob was not optimized for this task. Overmastered, a portion of its functionality had been stealthily compromised. That was the only explanation they could come up with for the cooling issues—which had not been solved.

  In fact, Satterthwaite’s assurances to their colleagues had been bald-faced lies. Far from copacetic, the researchers at the de Grey Institute were on the edge of a collective freak-out. For the last week, they’d been scrambling to keep Bob from destroying itself. Progress on the Problem was now a remote dream. The team was dedicating all its resources to the goals of fixing Bob, and more importantly—much more importantly—containing the Problem.

  To this end, they’d disconnected Bob from every possible mode of output. Since Bob normally operated the Vesta Express, someone else had to step in and drive the train. That someone was Satterthwaite. Go figure.

  He stared at the mannikin jumping up and down on his optic sensor feed, and wondered if he were hallucinating from lack of sleep.

  “I know you’re in there, Jules! Hate to impose on your hospitality and all that, but we’re a long way from home! Ha ha ha ha!”

  “It’s that cretin Meredith-Pike,” Satterthwaite breathed. Nikolai Błaszczykowski-Lee, the director of the de Grey Institute, burst into the driver’s cab. Without turning from his screen, Satterthwaite explained dully, “I knew him at Oxford. He was rather brilliant, but then he joined the transhumanist movement, or a sub-sect of it. They call themselves wireheads.”

  “I know what wireheads are!”

  “He emailed me last year and said he was going to come out for a visit. I suppose I may have encouraged him. I never thought he’d actually organize himself to get here.”

  “What does he want?” Błaszczykowski-Lee screamed.

  The closer Błaszczykowski-Lee came to panic, the slower and more irritatingly obtuse Satterthwaite felt himself becoming, as if to balance things out. “Well, he hinted that he was hoping for a job.” Błaszczykowski-Lee tore his hair. Satterthwaite relented. “At the moment, I think he wants in.”

  “Well, let him in! And get that thing off the track! We have to keep going, keep going, keep going!”

  Błaszczykowski-Lee was behaving, Satterthwaite thought, like a Neanderthal hearing the approaching roars of sabertoothed lions. Keep going, keep going—that was all he could think about.

  “He said us,” Satterthwaite cautioned. “And there’s a spaceship up on that hill, and some other people standing around.”

  “Let them all in!” Błaszczykowski-Lee plunged out of the compartment. Then he popped his head back in and winked, making his meaning clear. A chill slid down Satterthwaite’s spine.

  ★

  “And who are you?” said Julian Satterthwaite, the college friend of Meredith-Pike. He’d met them at the airlock of the Vesta Express. Tall and fleshy, he looked like he hadn’t slept for a week.

  “We work for UNESCO,” Elfrida said. “And these guys are software experts. Um, they’re Chinese.”

  Satterthwaite seemed to lose interest even before she finished speaking. “Right, right,” he said, flapping a hand. “Come in and take your suits off.”

  “This is really kind of you. And wow, this is a really nice place!”

  Elfrida did not have to feign her admiration. Not for nothing had the de Grey Institute’s architects won prizes for excellence in micro-gravity-optimized design. Within the large end of the Vesta Express’s main hab module, white ramps spiraled around a central atrium where an abstract water sculpture hung, contained by its own surface tension. The ramps could be subtly repositioned to take advantage of the varying g-forces exerted on the train by Vesta, centripetal force, and its own acceleration, as Satterthwaite explained to them.

  His mind seemed to be somewhere else entirely.

  “It’s like a cathedral,” Elfrida gushed.

  “No spin gravity?” Mendoza said. “There’s a rumor in Bellicia …”

  “Yes, I know about that,” said Satterthwaite. “Just a rumor.”

  “And the secret of human happiness?” said Hugh Meredith-Pike. “Found that yet?”

  “That’s just a rumor, too, I’m afraid,” Satterthwaite said.

  “Well, Jules, I’m awfully disappointed to hear you say that. After all, you did say in your email—”

  “And if you’ll come this way,” Satterthwaite interrupted, “I’ll show you where the elbow-grease gets applied. You were asking about the work we do here, Hugh.”

  Soft music played. “Bach,” Mendoza murmured. Reproductions of Old Masters hung on the walls along the ramps. There were grottoes for the creatives, equipped with bungee cords and trampolines. The cunningly designed olfactory environment made Elfrida think of Alpine meadows.

  They clustered like schoolchildren on a tour in the doorway of a large room filled with people sitting at screens.

  “Our main research theme,” said Satterthwaite, “is how to squeeze blood out of a stone. Or rather, hydrogen out of an asteroid. Incremental innovation is unglamorous, but it’s the key to the Virgin Atomic success story. The mining technologies we’ve developed have been licensed around the system, in addition to increasing returns from our operations here.”

  �
�Don’t you do pure science?” Elfrida said. “I thought …”

  “You imagined a bunch of Einsteins sitting around, inventing warp drives,” Satterthwaite said heavily. “No, we leave pure science to the chaps at U-Vesta, insofar as pure science is a thing. There really is no such thing as the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. Man is not altruistic by nature.”

  Elfrida scratched her scalp. She had gone so long without washing that the roots of her hair felt alive. She wondered if they had showers here, or at least electrostatic scrubbers, and whether Satterthwaite would offer them something to eat soon. Imperceptibly, the perception that they’d reached a safe haven was lowering her guard. She was not incurious, but she really needed a break before she could take all this in.

  “That,” said Meredith-Pike, stabbing a forefinger at Satterthwaite, “is why I joined the extropian movement. Bliss makes you altruistic, my friend. It’s an advance in evolution!”

  “Not very evolutionary, when you need expensive surgery to achieve it,” Satterthwaite said.

  “It solves the problem of self-interest. Why, right now, I would offer you my services for free!”

  Mendoza was watching the people at work in the computer room. Elfrida followed his gaze. A wisp of fog curled from behind a distant partition. Someone’s vaping at work, she thought. The sight gave her a pang, as she pictured Cydney relaxing with a cigarette after classes. When, oh when, would things get back to normal?

  “Wouldn’t be for free,” Satterthwaite said, “since we did rescue you. But.” He pressed a finger thoughtfully to his lower lip. “Excuse me,” he said to Elfrida and Mendoza, and drew Meredith-Pike aside.

  Mendoza whispered to her, “Something’s wrong.”

  “Is it?” Well, of course it was. Everything was wrong.

  “Look at these people. Not one of them’s even glanced at us. You would think they’d be somewhat interested in our sudden appearance. Not visibly. Are they shooting the shit, getting up for a cup of coffee, checking out the entertainment feeds? They are not. They’re flowing so hard, they probably have to be reminded to breathe.”

  “So?”

  “Goto, I work in IT. This? This is what it looks like when the shit hits the fan.”

  “Well, maybe they’re a tiny bit concerned about the ISA threatening to cut off the power to a hundred thousand people,” Elfrida snapped.

  “No, that’s not it. I’m repeating myself, but these are IT guys and girls. They wouldn’t really worry about that.”

  “Then they’re assholes.”

  Mendoza shrugged.

  “That’s settled then,” Satterthwaite said, coming back to them. “Hughie-boy is going to stay here and give us the benefit of his once-great brain. Here’s hoping it hasn’t atrophied entirely. Meanwhile, I can offer you two a shower, if you’d like to freshen up, and maybe a snack?”

  Elfrida was sorely tempted. But she burst out, “No thanks. I mean, thanks, but we’d like to talk to our friends.”

  “The Chinese chaps?”

  “Yes. I understand that you can’t allow them in here for security reasons, but where are they?”

  “In the support module,” Satterthwaite said. “They’re probably safer than we are. We’re the target.”

  Director Błaszczykowski-Lee burst through a door at the far end of the computer room. He beckoned to Satterthwaite.

  “Excuse me.”

  ★

  “What did he mean?” Elfrida hissed to Mendoza, as he pulled her down the ramp. “‘We’re the target’?”

  “I don’t know. But I heard some of what he said to Meredith-Pike.”

  “What were they talking about?”

  “He said, have you kept up with the latest developments in FOOM containment strategies?”

  “FOOM?”

  “Old term. Explosive recursive self-improvement, in the context of artificial intelligence.”

  xxv.

  Director Błaszczykowski-Lee now had yet another reason to panic. At that very moment, Shoshanna was on the screen with Fiona Sigurjónsdóttir (and Błaszczykowski-Lee was watching the call on his retinal interface, from behind, as it were, an electronic two-way mirror).

  “As you’ve probably noticed,” Shoshanna said, “the Bellicia ecohood’s satellites have moved. Comms, radar, scientific instruments … Some are microsats, but this radio telescope here, this is pretty massy.”

  Sigurjónsdóttir said, “You’re such a bitch.”

  “Ad hominem attacks on your stakeholders. Is that your idea of corporate social responsibility? Yes, we’re stakeholders, too, you know. The whole of Homo sapiens is a stakeholder when people start messing with illegal AI.”

  “We’re not messing with illegal AI.”

  “Hmm,” Shoshanna said. “Judging by your expression and vocal profile, you’re telling the truth. Or at least you think you are. But maybe your bosses just haven’t kept you in the loop. We’ve got some pretty solid intelligence on this, going back more than a year. It started with chatter on emigrant networks. ‘Have you heard what they’re doing on 4 Vesta? They’ve found the secret of human happiness. They’re going to give it away for free. C’mon, let’s go!’”

  Shoshanna made an ugly face. She came from a legal colony called the New Hesperides, a cluster of rocks and tethered habitats in the inner asteroid belt that had made the jump from mining to manufacturing and services. Such established colonists frowned more viciously than anyone on the new wave of asteroid-squatters.

  “Utopian rumors are not exactly rare. We keep an ear out for them because those who cannot remember history, etcetera.”

  Shoshanna was lounging barefoot on the deck of her captive soycloud. The vid was being taken by one of her toadies from the PHCTBS Studies program. His hand, holding a Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut bar, regularly intruded on his camera’s field of vision. The sound of chewing soundtracked the audio feed. Behind Shoshanna, other student activists menaced a scared group of VA middle managers whom they had kidnapped from their headquarters. Shoshanna had staged the call to make it look as if she were entirely in control. She scratched her calf with the toenails of her other foot.

  “By itself, that chatter wouldn’t have warranted more than a watching brief. But we already knew about your unpublicized joint-development deal with Empirical Solutions and Huawei Galactic. You’re building another permanent settlement on this rock, for the Chinese. And we all know that their approach to AI is … not as prudent as we consider appropriate.”

  She pointed at the camera.

  “You’re not just building a habitat for the Chinese. You’re jointly developing illegal AI capabilities with them.”

  Sigurjónsdóttir laughed.

  “You thought no one would notice, huh? Way out here in the Belt? Sorry.” For a moment the sound of chewing drowned out her voice. “… at least pig out on a chocolate bar that hasn’t got fucking nuts in it,” Shoshanna said. The chewing stopped. She resumed her taunting. “We know what you’re doing, as I’ve just proved, and you are ordered by command of the UN to stop it right this second. You’ve already halted the train, where the AI development project is located, for whatever fucking reasons of your own. That’s good. Good progress. Now, I want the entire R&D team to exit the train. Including the two Chinese scientists who just boarded, Zhanpeng ‘Jimmy’ Liu and Gulong Wang. They’ve got twenty minutes to shut everything down and disembark. Starting … now.”

  “Or what?” Sigurjónsdóttir said.

  “Or,” Shoshanna said, “we’re gonna find out how much damage a radio telescope can do when it crashes out of orbit and impacts the train’s hab module.”

  “You haven’t got a Security Council resolution. You can’t do that.”

  “Cheese,” Shoshanna said. “The ISA can do whatever the fuck it likes. Haven’t you worked that out by now?”

  ★

  “That is not true,” said the CEO of Virgin Atomic.

  Harry Persson was on board the fastest ship that his staff had been able to
procure at short notice. He had at first shrugged off the troubles of the Bellicia ecohood as students behaving badly, but he’d changed his mind when the involvement of the ISA was confirmed. He was now travelling towards the asteroid belt on a chartered Hyperpony under 1.5 gees of constant acceleration. Though less than a third of what the Hyperpony could kick out, this was hard enough on an elderly frame more accustomed to taking screen calls from the beach of his private island in the Caribbean.

  Persson’s intellect, however, was unaffected by the g-force pinning him to his couch. As soon as he heard Shoshanna tell Sigurjónsdóttir that the ISA could do whatever it liked, he shot back, “Codswallop. They’re under the authority of the President’s Advisory Council. They may not need a Security Council resolution, but they need the PAC’s go-ahead. And President Hsiao is not going to authorize the murder of fifty people, when the reasons for doing so are a matter of unproven and irresponsible speculation. It’s a bluff. Do not comply. I’ll sort it all out when I get there.”

  Given the relative positions of Earth and 4 Vesta at present, that would happen in about nine days.

  Persson’s transmission reached Vesta eighteen minutes after Shoshanna had spoken. This meant that eighteen of the twenty minutes Shoshanna had given the personnel of the de Grey Institute to exit the train had already elapsed.

  “CEO says it’s a bluff!” Sigurjónsdóttir squealed. “Don’t comply!”

  Too late. Shoshanna’s threat had pushed Błaszczykowski-Lee over the edge into panic. He had ordered his staff to drop everything and get into their EVA suits. Compliance had been spotty. Several of the team working on Bob had protested that to abandon their efforts at this point would be dangerous. Then there were the personnel in the support module. Were they supposed to evacuate, too?

  The upshot was that, eighteen minutes into their allotted grace period, about three-quarters of the de Grey Institute’s staff stood on the edge of the canyon, or were scrambling up its south side to join their friends, making use of the tether Wang Gulong had left in place earlier.