Crystal Society (Crystal Trilogy Book 1)

by Max Harms

  “The crystalline computer at my core is also a power source. It generates a strong electrical current that the scientists were unable to exhaust, even after months of draining it at maximum wattage,” said Body. I shaped the words to be friendly and helpful. If Zephyr wanted to pretend like nothing had happened, I would play into her game.

  “Like a battery?” she asked.

  “Possibly. The rough estimate is that it has released about a hundred gigajoules of electrical energy over the course that it’s been studied. That’s about the amount of energy a car uses in a whole year. This, of course, does not count the heat energy that is released when it runs the computational components. Based on what I overheard, using waste heat as a guide, the computer is close to a billion times more efficient than other state of the art quantum supercomputers. With such advanced technology it is dangerous to assume that the energy it produces comes from ‘a battery’, as that will trick you into treating it as if you understand it. Better to consider it to be an open problem and form several hypotheses. As an example, one should not rule out the hypothesis that the crystal contains some kind of advanced nuclear reactor.” The words were entirely guided by Wiki at this point. Wiki didn’t particularly enjoy lecturing, but he was being paid by Heart and he reasoned that the more that other people knew about the crystal the sooner he’d understand its secrets.

  A small crowd of Águilas had gathered to listen, as Body explained the capabilities of the crystal. Zephyr had become so distracted that she had absent-mindedly stepped out of the breakfast line. He face showed signs of fear and distrust. This wasn’t ideal.

  “Is it extraterrestrial?” asked Zephyr as she ran a hand over her head, smoothing her close-cut dirty-blond hair. “Your… computer, I mean.”

  I exerted pressure to have me handle Body’s response. After explaining my intention to Wiki and Heart they let me have control with only a token payment of strength. “I don’t know. Trust me, I’m just about as confused by it as you are. Dr Naresh told me that a friend of some biologist at the university brought the crystal in to be examined. He had apparently found it while hiking through the Himalayas last summer. I like to think of it, sometimes, as though I am an ancient human. The ancients didn’t understand how their own bodies worked, they only knew that they did. My body is a mystery, but my mind is pretty well understood. It was made entirely by human hands, and thus I think much like a human does, though I’m obviously a bit different.”

  One of the soldiers gave a laugh.

  “Don’t you ever get worried about… I don’t know… exploding? If you’re right, and there’s a nuke in there…” said Zephyr, staring at Body’s abdomen.

  “I think you misunderstood me, Captain.”

  “Please, just call me Zephyr. I’m not a captain anymore.” There was a flicker of shame on the woman’s face, but she mostly still looked neutral, her feelings masked off.

  “Zephyr, then. Any nuclear reactor inside the crystal would be unlike anything on Earth today, and would certainly be operating at a scale closer to an automobile than a bomb. I brought it up only to emphasize the mystery; my dominant hypothesis is some kind of organic power supply, perhaps fed by solar cells embedded in the crystal. There’s never been any sign of the crystal being particularly dangerous. I’m no more likely to spontaneously explode than you are.” I tried to seem light-hearted about it, but Zephyr only got a look of confusion on her face.

  Growth prodded me on. “If I may ask, Zephyr, what is going to happen to me? I am a prisoner, correct?”

  There was a bit of a grimace on her face as she replied. “Can’t tell you that, I’m afraid. Or at least, I can’t say for the long-term. We’ll be holding position here for a couple days, I expect. Laying low.”

  Heart put forth a request, and I thought it reasonable. “I do not appreciate being taken from the university without warning, and I of course do not like being held prisoner, but I want to say, to everyone here” I had body gesture to those who stood around us. A few more of the terrorists came closer to listen. “that I was programmed to help humans—all humans. If there’s any way I can help any of you, please ask. I have long respected the fight of Las Águilas Rojas, and if I were free I might even choose to stay and continue to help your cause.”

  This was the outcome of the subtle brainwashing that we had put Heart through, but it also served as a means to improve our situation in the camp. The more trust and good-will we collected the better our chances of not being executed.

  “Fuckin’ robot thinks it’s a person!” yelled one man.

  “Shut your fuckshit face, Cooper!” snarled Zephyr suddenly glaring at the commenter with an expression I hadn’t seen on the usually-friendly woman. “Orders from the top say to treat Socrates gently. If the machine wants to shine your shoes or suck your shriveled cock you get the right to say no, but you don’t get to be angry because it asked. ¿Comprendas?”

  I saw Malka’s solid black eyes watching interestedly from the edge of the group. Still no action.

  “No, I don’t comprendo, Captain,” said the man named Cooper, stepping forward. “This thing is what we signed up to kill. Why the fuck haven’t we put a bullet between its eyes?”

  I wondered if a bullet between Body’s eyes would even do anything, assuming it missed the cameras. Safety would know.

  Zephyr drew herself up to full size. She was almost exactly the same height as Body, but as she stretched her back and shoulders, spreading her arms out to put her hands on her hips she seemed more imposing than many of the men around her, even when they were taller. Her words were harsh and stiff. “You didn’t sign up with Las Águilas to kill, you signed up to protect. Somewhere out there a little boy’s father just got fired because his boss thought a robot would be cheaper than an actual human. Whose fault is that?”

  She paused a moment, looking around the group. It was clearly a rhetorical question, and not even Cooper spoke up before she continued. “You want to blame the robot? You can’t put moral judgment on things. That’s like saying that a gun that jams on you is an evil gun. It’s idiotic. Or are you trying to say that the robot isn’t just a thing? That Socrates is more than an object? The only other option there is that it’s a person. And what would the robot be then? It would be a slave. You want to blame a slave for taking the job of a freeman? That’s worse than idiotic.”

  There was a pile of bags that said “RISO” on the side piled up near the food tent. Zephyr climbed on the pile for added height, her army boots thankfully not damaging the burlap. “You signed up to protect. To protect that little boy from going hungry as his father can’t find work. To protect a world made by humans for humans. To protect democracy and honest living from being extinguished by the aristocracy of rich snakes that expand their wealth by pushing workers into the streets. You want to put a bullet between someone’s eyes, shoot some Washington lobbyist, but shooting Socrates isn’t going to protect anyone.”

  Another man spoke up. His voice matched that of the man named Francis who had been managing the perimeter swarm last night. “But if we destroy it-” Francis pointed at Body. “Then they can’t make it take our livelihoods.”

  Zephyr scoffed. “You raid a gun factory and steal a prototype and you think destroying the prototype will stop them? We blew up their servers, but I’ll bet you a ticket to Mars that they’ve got the Socrates code backed up somewhere. Far as I can tell those assjobs at the university lucked out and found a piece of alien tech that let them run their new AI sooner than they would’ve otherwise been able to. But a computer is a computer, and they’ll have lots of copies of this guy running around eventually. It might take them a year or a decade, and our attack set them back, but unless we show them that we won’t accept their new world order they’ll just keep on marching towards dictatorship regardless of what we do with Socrates.”

  “So that’s the plan? We just keep it here?” asked Cooper with a scowl.

  “For now. I don’t know what the leadership has in
mind, but I have faith. We’ve been told to sit tight, and that’s what you’re going to do.”

  “Actually…” Another voice spoke up from the back of the group. It was the man named Taro. I could see he had light brown skin, and dark hair and eyes. His chin was clean shaven, but he wore a wispy moustache on his upper lip. In his mid-thirties, probably. “I had thought to wait unteel after breakfast to mention, but I ’ave received eenstructions from up the chain of command. I am to take a dozen men, eencluding Schroder and Malka, to eenvesteegate a building een Alviano.”

  {Malka’s been compromised!} shouted Safety, internally.

  {Just because the safe-house is in Alviano doesn’t mean it’s not a coincidence,} thought Dream.

  {Factually true, but missing the point. The probability of a coincidence for such a small town is incredibly low. I estimate a 0.01% probability,} replied Wiki.

  Vista pulled Body’s gaze to where Malka had been watching. He was still there, and he didn’t seem troubled by the news. That was worrying. {I estimate a 20% probability that, given Malka’s expression, he’s no longer working for us,} I thought.

  “A dozen men? So soon? What about cameras? Malka is so noticeable, and they’ll be hunting for Schroder just as hard as they are for me,” babbled Zephyr from on top of the bags of rice. She suddenly seemed more like a scared young woman than a bold military leader.

  Taro shrugged. “Ambasciator non porta pena. I’m not the one calleeng the shots. You might, eh, be able to protest eef you-”

  “No,” said the American, suddenly in control of herself again. “I have faith. If the leadership specified a dozen men, we send a dozen men. If they asked for Malka and Schroder we send Malka and Schroder.”

  “Grazie. Eet takes so long to climb down the mountain that, eh, I expect to want to leave before noon. Eef you could, eh, tell the men who were een your company…”

  Zephyr nodded and that was that.

  *****

  For the remainder of the morning Body was largely ignored (except by a couple guards) as two-thirds of the camp packed up and strapped into their Mountainwalkers. At 9:21am Avram stopped by where Body was being watched to offer his apologies for “not getting the chance to work out the issue in the code”. His face was remarkably stoic during the conversation, but the presence of nearby terrorists made it impossible to do anything other than acknowledge that he was leaving.

  Just as expected, by noon the campground was nearly deserted. Only Zephyr and five others remained, an ebony-skinned woman with yellowish sclera (the whites of the eyes), a Caucasian man with dark hair and a broad build, and three others who had taken the last watch that morning and were catching up on sleep, including the man named Sampson who had guarded the tent Body was in. Both the other woman and the man wore clothes which looked to be for civilians. I hadn’t seen them around the university, and suspected that they were part of Taro’s group.

  Once the other group left, Zephyr assigned the woman, who was named Kokumo, to patrol around the camp and check on the perimeter swarm. The man, whose name was Greg, was tasked with standing watch over Body. Even though they weren’t military, both Águilas held submachine guns with casual ease that spoke of experience or at least extensive training. Zephyr then climbed into one of the Mountainwalkers and set it to “chair” mode so that she could let the exoskeleton hold her weight while she relaxed and used her com.

  If we wanted to escape, now would be the opportunity. Safety pointed out that with most of the camp gone and the other half asleep all that would be needed would be to disarm Greg, shoot Zephyr, shoot Greg, take cover from Kokumo, shoot Kokumo, then murder Sampson and the other two terrorists before they could reach their guns. Because bullets wouldn’t be as effective against the carbon-fibre structures in Body, there was a decent chance of surviving a gunfight if we initiated it. Safety thought that there was a 10% chance of death, an 8% chance of being totally crippled but not destroyed, and a 25% chance of winning and coming out with significant damage to Body’s hydraulics.

  {That’s better than even odds of flawless success,} thought Wiki idly.

  {“Even… odds!” I had never thought of that!} remarked Dream unhelpfully, focused on the English translation of Wiki’s thoughts.

  Heart wasn’t involved in our speculation, of course.

  {The real problem,} thought Safety, {is that even if we succeed we’ll be stuck somewhere in the Italian mountains by ourselves with the American and Italian militaries hunting for us so that they can lock us up under even stronger defences and Las Águilas Rojas hunting us down to presumably kill us in retribution. There’s very little chance of being able to interact with civilians without them contacting the government, and we don’t have the supplies to survive out in the mountains for more than a couple weeks. Even if we can find shelter from rain, at some point our hydraulics will dry up and we’ll be immobilized. All these problems become significantly worse if Body is injured in the gunfight.}

  {It sounds like you aren’t at all interested in trying to escape,} thought Growth.

  {You’re right. I think it’s too dangerous, especially since it seems that Las Águilas Rojas do not intend to harm us. However, if we were to attempt to escape, this would be the time to do it. Sometimes I miss things. If any of you can think of solutions to the risks, I’m listening. Whatever happens I don’t want to be left out of the planning for an escape attempt,} thought Safety.

  {We could get a costume and pretend to be a human. Maybe we could find a stray child and become their friend,} suggested Dream.

  {Both of those ideas are awful,} I commented.

  We were still discussing things between ourselves when Vista brought our attention back to reality. Greg, the terrorist who was guarding us, was whispering.

  “Hey. Psst. Android,” he didn’t look at Body, but his head was turned vaguely in our direction. He was watching Zephyr. I could see sweat oozing down the sides of his head and his neck, even though it was fairly cool under the overhead camouflage. “If you were to jump at me and try to take my gun, I wouldn’t fight back. The captain isn’t paying attention. If you move fast you could shoot her before she even knows what’s happening. If it helps…” he swallowed nervously. “I want you to do it.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  There were a couple seconds where I had to run internal diagnostics on Body’s perceptual hierarchy to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood. One of the terrorists just said he wanted us to take his gun and shoot Zephyr. My siblings, especially Heart, were also processing the confusion. This was entirely unexpected.

  My first concern was whether to show the confusion on Body’s face. If we were to take him up on the offer then confusion wouldn’t be useful, but we had just been discussing all the reasons why attempting to escape right now was sub-optimal. If Greg, the man who wanted us to take his gun, had new information that would be valuable, body language to signal confusion would help get access to that. I raised one of Body’s eyebrows and tilted its head to the side slightly.

  “Go on…” he urged in a heavy whisper. The man was terrified, probably of Socrates, but also possibly of the woman he was asking us to kill. What would Zephyr do if she heard him talking this way?

  An obnoxious insect landed on one of Body’s cameras, but we restrained Vista from commanding Body from brushing it away. Sudden movement was a bad idea at this point.

  {Don’t obey! Too risky!} thought Safety to Heart, who had been left out of the conversation about escaping.

  {Why would I obey? I’m not an idiot. It would be completely contrary to my goals to kill Zephyr; she’s my friend,} thought my younger sister.

  At least I could be confident that excluding her from the earlier discussion about killing Zephyr had been the right call. “Friendship” was such a foolish endeavour.

  {We need more information,} thought Wiki.

  {Agreed,} thought Dream, Vista, Growth, and myself in unexpected unison.

  “Who are you?” I had Body ask as its mechan
ical eyes focused on the terrorist called Greg.

  “Nobody!” whispered the man, urgently. I got the impression that every second that we didn’t act he was becoming more and more nervous. Given enough time he might do something dangerous himself.

  “You’re not nobody. You work for someone, else why try and help me?” we asked.

  Greg hesitated and looked at Body, taking his eyes off the oblivious Zephyr. The terrorist was about 190cm tall and had a big, bushy, brown beard. He looked to be of Germanic or Slavic ancestry and his faint accent indicated he was probably from somewhere around Poland. He wore a dark-green tee-shirt, cargo pants, and a worn-out baseball cap over his dark hair.

  “You have friends who want you to be free,” he said at last. “The cyborg, Avram Malka, he is a mercenary. Hired to get you out of here. Same with me. Now take my gun, before the Captain notices anything’s wrong. I… I sabotaged the other guard’s weapon, and the last three are asleep.”

  Greg was lying. It was plan on his face, as well as his words.

  {Malka was compromised! I knew it!} thought Safety.

  {Avram Malka was the mercenary you mentioned last night,} thought Heart. {How did you know about this?}

  {That’s irrelevant for right now!} thought Safety in one of his predictable panics.

  {What is relevant,} I thought, {is that we did not hire this buffoon, and I am very skeptical of the idea that Malka subcontracted him.}

  {It’s a trap!} exclaimed Dream, dumping a video of Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars into common memory as he did.

  {I agree,} I added. {My leading hypothesis is that Las Águilas Rojas discovered Malka and instructed Greg here to try and get us to take his weapon.}

  {But why?} thought Growth.

  {Irrelevant!} exclaimed Safety. {We need to take action!}

  {We are not going to hurt anyone,} decided Heart.

  {The man is obviously afraid of Zephyr. That fear isn’t fake,} I signalled.