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

by Felix R. Savage

“One minute left!” shouted Błaszczykowski-Lee. “Run!”

  He led the charge up the slope towards the Kěkào, where the Extropian Collective were eating popcorn and waiting for something to go boom.

  Behind them, the roadheader somersaulted out of the cutting and landed upside-down, further panicking the evacuees, who thought that had been the radio telescope landing on the train, and ran faster.

  For the last half an hour, Mendoza and Jimmy Liu had been working to get the roadheader off the track. They had succeeded by using its chainsaw as a rotating crampon. The colossal machine had clawed its way at high speed up the side of the cutting and flipped onto its back at the top. The track was now clear, and reported itself to be undamaged.

  Alone in the driver’s cab of the Vesta Express, Mendoza turned his attention to the controls. The cab (long since abandoned by Julian Satterthwaite) was a closet lined from floor to ceiling with screens, dials, and buttons.

  “Well, this looks pretty basic,” Mendoza murmured to himself. “It’s already in manual mode. So … push here?”

  The train sprang into motion.

  “Susmaryosep!” Mendoza choked, after he recovered his breath from being thrown against the rear wall of the cab. He hurled himself at the controls. “Default acceleration mode! Reactor status check! Confirm power supply to hub-level computing resources!”

  The Vesta Express fled around the equator, leaving Director Błaszczykowski-Lee, and all the other senior scientists, far behind.

  ★

  Elfrida was in the support module. The jolt when the train started threw her off her feet, too. She assumed that the Vesta Express was resuming normal operations.

  “Yay! Panic over,” she brightly told the men and women of the refinery crew, via the text-based tannoy that overrode all the other inputs to their cubicles.

  Despite the arguments about whether to evacuate the support module, it had not been attempted. The reason for that was now clear to Elfrida. The operators who ran the mines and refinery were cupcakes—this being the derogatory term for people who spent so much time in immersion, they forgot how to cope with the real world.

  Elfrida stood at the shift manager’s desk, a pulpit overlooking a jigsaw puzzle of telepresence cubicles. Wilting pot plants added a Dali-esque touch to this modern panopticon. Superficially, it didn’t look that different from the computer room in the R&D module. But the ergoforms in these cubicles were elongated into couches, and on each of them lay a man or woman with a full-face gel mask and gloves on, IV line plugged in, limbs twitching.

  Despite the panic which Błaszczykowski-Lee had spread throughout the train, few of the phavatar operators had so much as sat up. In their minds, after all, they were hundreds of kilometers from any danger. They were probably having another orgy at the refinery right now, Elfrida thought sourly.

  The scene before her eyes was an industrial-scale human tragedy. Full-time phavatar operators were supposed to take hourly breaks, get at least thirty minutes of exercise a day, and so on, to prevent them from turning into salaried versions of the ‘cubicle death’ horror stories that popped up regularly on the news. As a phavatar operator herself, Elfrida knew the health and safety regulations backwards. It didn’t look as if they had been implemented here.

  But she had no time to worry about VA’s labor practices right now.

  “Can we just leave them?” she said, turning to Wang Gulong.

  The big Chinese had owned up to being Liberty Village’s top software guy. The panic resulting from Shoshanna’s threat might give him an opportunity to get back into the R&D area and investigate further—but only if Elfrida could drag him away from the hapless phavatar operators. He was palpably outraged by their cupcakery. Through Jimmy, he had made her understand that employment under these conditions would be unimaginable in China. “No one must work if they do not want to.”

  “Not true everywhere,” Jimmy added, on his own behalf. “Wang is upper-class. He has never even visited an arcology.”

  “They do want to work,” Elfrida said, goaded into argument. “That’s exactly the problem! I can’t get them to freaking stop!”

  “Anyway, we go,” Jimmy said abruptly. He had been communicating with Mendoza via their EEG signalling crystals, and with the roadheader via the Chinese comms satellite. They didn’t have authorization to use the de Grey Institute’s wifi environment. For that reason, they knew no more about the ongoing crisis than what Director Błaszczykowski-Lee had brayed over the tannoy.

  When they got back to the R&D module, they discovered that Błaszczykowski-Lee and all his top people had fled.

  “And they took our freaking spacesuits!” Mendoza said.

  “They took … our suits?”

  “I guess they didn’t have enough to go around. Ours were just sitting there in the airlock. They’re gone now. And as far as I can tell, there aren’t any spares. We’re stuck. Hope Shoshanna doesn’t drop a satellite on us.”

  “But that’s why you guys started the engine! She can’t hit us while we’re moving this fast! Can she?”

  Mendoza shrugged. He looked gray. “Let’s get upstairs,” he said to Wang Gulong.

  xxvi.

  “Whoopsies,” Shoshanna said.

  Her retinal interface showed her the Vesta Express vanishing into the distance. She closed her right eye and squinted to see better. She was using the U-Vesta telescope itself to observe the surface of the protoplanet. She zoomed in on the people leaping like grasshoppers up the side of the canyon towards the Chinese spaceship.

  “That’s not all of them, Fee.”

  “It’s all the important ones,” Sigurjónsdóttir snapped. “Congratulations. You may just have signed the solar system’s death sentence.”

  “You need to think up some more plausible threats,” Shoshanna said. Her ultra-high-end BCI, which could analyze microexpressions and minute vocal stresses, reported that Sigurjónsdóttir thought she was telling the truth. That was interesting.

  She hopped off the deck and walked barefoot through the soybeans, followed by her cameraman. The ground bounced under her steps like a waterbed. The plants’ roots nestled in a layer of compost made from human excrement. It smelled awful. It squidged between Shoshanna’s toes. Ugh, this hab was so disgustingly … organic. She wanted to put her shoes back on, but she had to look confident and relaxed. She glared down over the edge of the soycloud.

  She had not achieved total control over the ecohood. Short of following through on her threat to cut off the power, there was nothing she could do to restrain a hundred and twenty thousand people who were now frightened for their lives. Crowds filled the streets and squares of Bellicia City. Would-be escapees jammed the road up to the airlock. The woods on the other side of Olbers Lake also teemed with infrared signatures, indicating that a number of idiots had fled that way.

  It was a primordial urge, Shoshanna supposed, to take refuge in the trees—an urge which, as a spaceborn human, she did not have. Safety, to her, meant rad-proof shielding and plenty of consumables on deck. She was slightly agoraphobic, and the view from up here made her queasy. She turned back to the camera.

  “That’s not good enough,” she told Sigurjónsdóttir. “You were ordered to get everyone off the train. You didn’t do it. So; consequences.”

  She had to make good on at least one of her threats soon, or they might decide that she was just bluffing.

  “That spaceship there. It’s Chinese, isn’t it? That’s what you were hiding in Rheasilvia Crater. Did you know that all Chinese spaceships have autonomous maneuvering capability? Or did they fool you with their wind-up pilots and crew?”

  “We know,” Sigurjónsdóttir sighed.

  “Of course you know. Because you were attempting to fuse those capabilities with your own asteroid-engineering technologies, to develop illegal levels of automation. No further need for pesky humans in outer space. Labor regulations go bye-bye.”

  “We are not jointly developing anything with the Chinese. We
are pro-human, as it happens.”

  “Your actions suggest otherwise.” Shoshanna’s voice went cold. “UN restrictions on AI serve a double purpose. They prevent emergent hostile behavior; see Mars. They also preserve a diverse realm of labor for Homo sapiens. That’s your basic human dignity and your economic utility right there. You support autonomous AI, you’re cutting the throat of the system-wide economy. But that doesn’t matter to you, does it? All you cared about was potentially grabbing a first-mover advantage that would boost your profits in the near term.”

  Shoshanna felt strongly about this, personally as well as professionally. She hated the private sector (despite coming from a stronghold of Belter capitalism). That was why she’d been able to keep up her act as a student activist.

  “Know anything about the Chinese economy? Yeah. Is that what you want for your kids?”

  “How can I convince you that you’re wrong? Your analysts are wrong, your speculations are wrong. Our Chinese partners have nothing to do with this, except that they’re trapped in this nightmare, too!”

  ★

  In Sigurjónsdóttir’s office at the Big Dig, José Running Horse said in her other ear, “Doing good. Keep her talking.”

  I can’t, Sigurjónsdóttir thought. She stared at the photos of her daughters. Tears blurred her vision. She kept thinking about the Vesta Express, now vanished around the other side of the protoplanet, and what was on it.

  “Just keep her talking,” Running Horse begged.

  ★

  “Anyway, Chinese AI is inhibited,” Sigurjónsdóttir said. “No emergent hostile behavior has ever been documented—”

  “Yeah, yeah. They call it Confucian logic. We call it apathy-based utility. Either way, that spaceship is an autonomous AI with a nuclear fusion reactor attached. Not what I’d want moving into my neighborhood.” Shoshanna stared into the eyes of the blonde woman whose representation floated on her left retina. “So, I’m doing this for the stakeholders.”

  She dropped the University of Vesta’s radio telescope on top of the hydrogen refinery.

  Of course she hadn’t been going to destroy the Chinese spaceship. Her bosses didn’t want an international incident.

  The telescope, travelling at the speed of a meteor, landed in the handling yard and burrowed deep into the crust. The impact collapsed the autoclave, releasing an inferno of molten rock and liquid hydrogen, which promptly gasified and caught fire. The resulting explosion flared up hundreds of meters. The satellites under Shoshanna’s control pelted her with alarms. Wow, she thought. Pretty cool.

  ★

  Running Horse stared at his screen, aghast. If he had just had a few more seconds …

  In a trance, he finished what he had been doing, which was maneuvering the PORMS into a higher orbit. From up here he had a clear shot at all of the satellites under Shoshanna’s control. While the refinery exploded, he picked them off. Zap. Bzzzt-POW! Zapzapzap.

  He experienced no sense of regret at shooting down satellites that were, after all, Virgin Atomic’s own property. This company was finished, as of five seconds ago. Their single biggest asset was doing a good impression of Mt. Fuji. The future held nothing but a twilight trek through the courts in search of compensation, and a job hunt for José Running Horse.

  He might as well enjoy the last act of his employment. But for the first time in his life, shooting things gave him no thrill at all.

  ★

  One by one the satellites fell in clouds of shrapnel towards the surface. Shoshanna’s BCI alerted her to what was going on. “Oh, shit,” she said.

  Before she could react, Win Khin interrupted her. His chrome face was as imperturbable as ever. “Shosh.”

  “What?”

  “They’re shooting at us again.”

  Shoshanna laughed mirthlessly. “You don’t know the half of it. All right, we’ll go up higher.”

  She could no longer feel her toes, which was actually a good thing, considering that they were glued together with manure. She accompanied Win Khin and her cameraman back to the deck, where she tried to clean her feet with her socks. The pop-pop of small arms fire echoed around the habitat. This was punctuated irregularly by a whooshing screech that Shoshanna did not like the sound of at all.

  There were no real weapons in the Bellicia ecohood. But enraged engineering students could do quite a lot with found materials and an R&D-quality printer.

  As the soycloud struggled to gain altitude, another whoosh made them all duck. An orange star exploded in the gloaming overhead. A faint smell of smoke tainted the breeze.

  Wearily, Shoshanna initiated an infrared scan. “They’ve built a rocket launcher,” she told her followers. “Maybe it’ll blow up in their faces.” She had also discovered that the soycloud they were on could not go any higher. With the temperature now near freezing, its PHES thrusters had nothing to work with. In fact, they were losing altitude. “Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll move the other soyclouds. Stack them underneath us for shielding.” And cushioning, she thought, if this loss of power continues.

  Win Khin said, “What if they go after my body?” His real self, of course, remained in his U-Vesta life support cubicle.

  “Then too fucking bad for you,” Shoshanna said. She modulated her voice. “Smile. Just kidding. But maybe we do need to give them some further incentives to comply with our demands.” If fragging the refinery didn’t do it … “Hey, you guys,” she said to the VA middle managers who were shivering in a corner of the deck. “I know some of you have got families down there.”

  ★

  Cydney huddled next to Big Bjorn. He was the warmest thing on the soycloud, with the pelt of thick brown fur that bristled out of his t-shirt and torn cut-offs. “She’s insane,” she whispered.

  “Well, I don’t think literally …”

  “There was that thing with Mr. Macdonald. And now she’s letting these people call home, to put more pressure on VA. What’s she going to do next?”

  “She can’t go too far,” Bjorn said. “These are good people. They won’t let her.”

  “Are they, Bjorn? Or are they students who think the universe owes them justice, and Shoshanna’s the one to help them get it? Did you ever think, two days ago, that we’d be cruising on a soycloud while everyone in the habitat slowly freezes to death, and the STEM guys fire rockets at us?”

  “No,” Bjorn said.

  “And do you see anyone saying hey, wait a minute, this isn’t what I signed up for?”

  “No.”

  “People love power more than life itself, Bjorn. And what happens is you get accustomed to atrocities. I lived in LA, I know. They’re going to let her do whatever crosses her crazy little mind. She cut my ear off!”

  “But you’re still filming, aren’t you?” Bjorn said quietly.

  Cydney jumped. Then she snuggled closer to his side and touched her chunky necklace. “Microcam in one of the beads, wireless relay in another,” she whispered. “Shoshanna’s probably noticed. But she doesn’t care. She’s blocked outgoing signals from the hab, anyway.” Cydney stared into the murky distance. Other soyclouds were maneuvering closer, flocking around the one they were on. “I guess I’ve just discovered the limits of the media’s power to change things,” she said.

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself.”

  “I’m not. What I mean is … someone’s got to stop her, and a vid feed isn’t going to do it.”

  At that moment, one of the STEM students’ improvised rockets struck a nearby soycloud. It was too damp to burn, but the missile knocked it onto a new trajectory. Shedding live plants and chunks of artificial soil, raining like a squeezed sponge, it veered towards their heads.

  xxvii.

  The Vesta Express travelled on around the cold little world. In the computer room of the R&D module, Elfrida stood behind Mendoza and the two Chinese, looking over their shoulders at the screen that Julian Satterthwaite was showing them.

  It glowed the color known as death blue. On it
floated a single icon:

  “Everyone gets the same thing,” Satterthwaite said. “Every time. We mapped its knowledge content areas and reasoning models, using a brute-force attack. Took forever: the thing has trillions of lines of code, mostly in a language that we don’t understand. We simply do not understand how it works. So we copied the whole thing to Bob. We have a probabilistically structured algorithm portfolio that we use for our own thought experiments, and the idea was to apply heuristic solvers to the action architecture, which is obviously the first thing we’d want to figure out, for security reasons.”

  Jimmy translated this gobbledygook for Wang Gulong. The Chinese expert nodded as if he understood. “Does it appear to employ nonmonotonic causal logic?” he asked, through Jimmy.

  “It doesn’t appear to employ logic at all. Every solution we try results in the same answer: this.” Satterthwaite gestured at the signpost icon.

  “Do you understand?” Elfrida whispered to Mendoza.

  “Over my head.”

  As Satterthwaite and Wang Gulong continued to talk, with Jimmy stuck in the middle as translator, Mendoza tugged her towards the far end of the room. No one looked up. That stealth vaper was still puffing away on his or cigarette, not being very stealthy about it—or so Elfrida thought, until they rounded the last partition. The vapor was seeping through a bunch of towels wedged underneath a door.

  “Huh.” Mendoza licked his lips. “This is where we tell our curious little selves no. And again, no.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Elfrida said. “Curiosity killed the cat, and I don’t want to be the cat. It’s an AI, isn’t it? They’ve developed an AI and it’s gone what you said. FOOM. Don’t you dare go near that door. Don’t—”

  Hugh Meredith-Pike strolled around the partition. He grinned at Elfrida and kicked the door open. Fog swirled out.

  “Kids, meet Bob.”

  Through the billows of cold fog, Elfrida glimpsed an ordinary array of processor stacks. Jagged blocks of dry ice were piled up around them. The dry ice was sublimating at a rapid rate, producing the fog.