Crystal Society (Crystal Trilogy Book 1)

by Max Harms

  Acceleration suddenly stopped half-way through her sentence. We were in zero-gravity now, held down only by our seatbelts. Marian pulled her goggles up onto her forehead. “Aw, hell yeah!” she exclaimed. “Time to dance! I love space!” Without consulting us or hesitating in the least, Marian unbuckled herself and kicked off her seat into a graceful spin towards the “ceiling” (or more objectively, the wall closest to the outside of the spacecraft). Her body was on a crash-course, but at the last moment she kicked off the ceiling in another wild spin, this time heading roughly towards the tail of the craft.

  “I really don’t think that’s wise!” said Body in a worried tone. The words came from Heart and Safety.

  Maid Marian’s only reply was to touch the seats to stop her spin long enough to stick out her tongue and blow another wet raspberry in our direction. The drops of her saliva floated out from her like little cannonballs. I had seen plenty of holos and videos with children in them. Perhaps they were simply more terrifying in real life, or perhaps this recklessness was unique to the Stephano heir. Either way I had to say that Marian’s unpredictability was both frustrating and somewhat intriguing. It was hard for me to understand what was going on in her head, and of course The Purpose demanded that I learn.

  “You could get hurt doing that! If you’re injured or worse, your father will kill me,” said Body, echoing Safety and Heart again.

  “Run a relaxation subroutine, lawl. Just dancing.” She stopped her momentum by clinging to a seat and then threw herself into a never-ending backflip.

  “What if the ship accelerates suddenly causing you to fall and hit your head?”

  Marian’s response was immediate. She gasped in melodramatic shock. “What if pilot’s secretly an assassin and is about to kill us! Well, at least I’ll have danced in zero-gravity before kick the bucket. C’mon. Live a little.”

  I had an idea. “I bet there’ll be plenty of opportunities to dance at Olympus, right? With music, even. Come sit down and tell me more about the nameless code.”

  “Psshhht! This is Maid Marian to ground control, do you copy? Psshhht!”

  We looked at the kid, now doing cartwheels along a wall. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say to that.

  Her voice was strange when she spoke. “Psshhht! I repeat, this is Maid Marian. Come in, ground control! I’m stuck in space with the world’s most boring robot and my mind can’t take much more! Psshhht!”

  For lack of anything better, I kept at my strategy. “What happened after Pythagoras? I bet you don’t even know.”

  “Psshhht! Ground control, come in! The robot’s trying to… bait me… into… can’t… hold… on… much… long-” The girl began floating back towards Body, upside-down from my perspective and pushing herself along by tapping the seats gently with her hands. As she came, she made noises like she was dying, crossed her eyes and stuck her tongue out the side of her mouth. And then instantly she was better and was babbling again about the nameless code. “After Pythagoras came variables. Then Fibonacci again, but this time defining function explicitly. F of x plus f of x plus one equals f of x plus two. Not exactly what was said, but close. Convenient that math layout was similar. Code interestingly simple in retrospect. Sign of universal math structure, maybe. Next define function inverse. Then invert add-two to get subtract-two; use to define negative numbers and zero. Can’t write zero in the code without a variable because analog and whitespace. Next invert multiplication and exponentiation. Get reciprocal operator and natural logarithm. Ever wonder why our math doesn’t have a reciprocal operator? Seems like oversight. Don’t write zero-minus-x when want to write negative-x. Why write one-divide-by-x when write reciprocal-x?”

  Body motioned to the empty seat as we said “But this is all math. How did they bridge out into talking about the real world?”

  Marian had stopped floating around and had been hanging upside-down while talking. She sighed dramatically at Body’s gesture, but flipped herself around and buckled up in the seat. “Constants. Constants are the key. An anchor around which to focus. While defining math talk about pi. Talk about radians. Talk about angles of a triangle. Define symbol for triangle. Extrapolate to other shapes. Symbol for square. Symbol for pentagon. Symbol for hexagon. Symbol for circle. Talk about areas. Talk about volumes. Circle becomes sphere. Symbol for sphere. Move from two-dimensions to three dimensions yields symbols for length, area, and volume. First units. From there talk about Sol. Sphere, they say, very large volume. Mention other thing about sphere. Strange unit. Zero length, they say. Another sphere. Big volume, but not nearly as big. Smaller other thing. Length is big. Another sphere. Same characteristics. Another sphere. Another sphere. Another sphere. Soon the patterns emerge. Volume. Mass. Distance from the first sphere. The solar system. Pretty elegant.”

  “Do you think the nameless are smarter than humans?” asked Body.

  “Hrmmmm… Obvious answer is apples and oranges. Think differently, but that’s excuse. General intelligence real property. Honestly don’t know. They have spaceship, but often seem really dumb. Might be result of collective work and older civ.”

  “An older civ?”

  Marian took off her goggles and looked at Body with an expression that was clearly meant to imply we were stupid. “General consensus that humans aren’t smartest possible beings; humans are stupidest possible beings capable of civilization. Evolution makes intelligence and boom, suddenly it rules the planet. No time to optimize, so to speak. But that could be wrong way of looking at it. Maybe if environment penalized intelligence more the smartest things on Earth would be bonobo chimps. See what saying? Intelligence might have feedback loop. More time to optimize than expected if it feeds on itself. And what would a civilization look like if stupider than humans? Longer development times for tech. Maybe they built a ship because that’s what they wanted and they spent thousands of years on it. Maybe they’re dumb, but good at long-term projects. Too many unknowns.”

  Wiki took control of Body. “I’m surprised there wasn’t more information exchanged in the signal.”

  Marian shrugged. “Might be surprised how much time it takes to talk about the natural world. Can spend hours on just mathematics. Physics. Chemistry. Biology. Xenolang was built on shared aspects of reality, not on most interesting bits. How do you define music? How do you express love and culture and history in blinking of a light? Besides, the nameless cut off communication when they entered Sol. First there’s a multi-year delay and then they won’t talk after in the neighbourhood. Mysteries on mysteries. Only communicate by radio to arrange in-person meetings. Getting them to coordinate to set up CAPE was quite the trick, or so I hear from Dad. Doesn’t stop them from screeching about perversion down-”

  The voice from our pilot interrupted Marian over the loudspeaker. “We have visual contact with Olympus. Docking in approximately fifteen minutes.”

  Manoeuvring rockets kicked in, propelling us slightly back-left. The words of the pilot seemed to put Marian in a pensive mood. She had cycled the screen in front of her to show the camera on the nose of the rocket and she watched the space station draw nearer.

  “Crystal?” she said suddenly, still watching the screen.

  “Hrm?” was Body’s reply.

  “Lot of people want to kill you. Know that, right? I… I’ve read the stuff online. Your blog and stuff. Dad and my tutors don’t think understand what’s going on, but I don’t think they understand how much smarter I am. Get hunches sometimes. Patterns only I can see. I mean… not just me. But not obvious. Not easy to explain.”

  I instructed Body to say “You sound concerned.”

  She rolled her eyes as she said “Pleb-bot makes another brilliant observation. Seem like a nice person-slash-robot-slash-thing. Don’t want to see you hurt, even if are a big dummy.”

  “Do you think I’ll be in danger on Olympus?”

  Maid Marian nodded.

  “Is it your Dad? Do you know something I don’t?”

  Marian
gave a sour, half-angry look when Body mentioned her father. “Know lots that you don’t, but if knew where danger was I’d say. It’s not Dad. He wants this whole peace mission thing to work. I’d be more worried about people who want war.”

  “Who wants war?”

  Marian simply shrugged.

  On the screen I could see the space station looming, seemingly suspended in the void. It was a remarkably stocky sort of thing, roughly cylindrical and about twice as wide as it was tall, not counting the skirt of branching antennas and solar panels that extended out from its middle. It had two main disk sections, one stacked on top of the other with the solar panels coming out between. The disks rotated, providing an artificial gravity to the occupants, but did so in opposite directions to keep the rest of the station from turning.

  There were lights set into the space station’s external hull, which was the only reason I could distinguish the shape. We had already crossed into the Earth’s shadow. There was, I remembered, another section to the station on the side away from the Earth, but we could not see it from our position. I couldn’t see any windows on the station. They probably used external cameras and internal screens much like we were using at that moment.

  As we approached, the rocket spun it’s heading to line up with the docking port that pointed straight towards Earth, stationary in the centre of the great spinning disk. The port was only about two metres in diameter, but perfect control lined us up exactly with the station, matching velocities as well as positions.

  We had arrived at Olympus.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  We were floating in the airlock. The pilots (it turned out there were two) were eyeing Body suspiciously as they attended to their tasks. One was on the com, presumably talking with Robert Stephano. The other was working with the still-incapacitated Mrs Dolan. Maid Marian floated in a slow pirouette nearby, humming to herself.

  The seal on the airlock opened to reveal a hovering Stephano with the look of someone who just swallowed something bitter against his will. His appearance matched his avatar perfectly: boyish and fit, clean-shaven, not a trace of grey in his swept-back black hair. Unlike his avatar, this Stephano was not wearing a business suit, but instead wore a black and grey jumpsuit resembling that of his daughter. I understood it was something of a uniform up here; the pilots were wearing identical pieces. Loose clothing (such as my cloak) were not practical in zero-gravity. Unlike his daughter, Robert (and the pilots) wore tight leather shoes.

  “Hi Daddy!” squeaked Marian, still spinning gaily.

  “Out of there! Now!” he barked.

  The kid sighed and kicked herself effortlessly through the airlock door. Robert slid out of the way to give her passage, and as he did I could see the bloodshot eyes of Myrodyn lurking behind him.

  Marian, as she passed started to say “Didn’t do any-”

  Robert’s face was red with anger. “You drugged your babysitter, damaged an internal door, and directly disobeyed my order to say safe, putting yourself in contact with a non-human entity without supervision!”

  Marian’s voice had an edge of distress. “Wouldn’t have to disobey if-”

  “No! We are not having this conversation now.” Stephano’s hand pointed at Maid Marian as if in signal to go. “You know how to get to my quarters in Beta-1. Go straight there and don’t talk to anyone! I’m serious! I’ll be there after I deal with Crystal.”

  The pilots had begun feeding Mrs Dolan through the hatch. Behind the woman I could barely see a red-faced Maid Marian swimming away, clearly upset.

  With Dolan through the door, Stephano pointed at Body. “And you. I thought we had an agreement that you wouldn’t interact with my daughter.”

  After a short internal debate I shrugged Body’s shoulders. “She interacted with me. You saw the lengths she went through. And I’m sure you have security cameras in the rocket. Check the logs. You’ll see that I did nothing except talk with her once she came to me. I encouraged her to be safe and said nothing provocative.”

  The billionaire’s expression didn’t change. “This was your plan, wasn’t it? What are you trying to-” He was cut off by a gloved hand on his shoulder.

  Myrodyn looked rougher than he had at the university. He had allowed his mutton-chops to grow into a full beard, and his hair was dishevelled. Unlike the Stephanos he wore a vest over a dress shirt along with slacks and tennis shoes. “Give it a rest, Rob. You know very well that the mischief was her doing. Leave Socrates out of it.” The bearded scientist seemed tired.

  Stephano pushed off a support and spun to face Myrodyn. “Socrates is the reason that she’s on the station right now! I think I’m fully within my rights as a father to be upset!”

  Body’s arms pushed off from the airlock propelling it in a gliding motion through the hatch. It was very easy to give too much power, and Safety was focused on making sure Body’s motions were appropriately measured. We had spent some time practising zero-grav movement in VR before the trip and it was helping immensely.

  Myrodyn raised his arms defensively. “I didn’t say you shouldn’t be upset. I’m just saying that... accusing Socrates of setting your daughter up to anesthetize her babysitter is a bit much.”

  “Hello, Myrodyn,” said Body, calmly.

  The scientist raised a hand in greeting as we drifted into the station proper. His face had the same sense of controlled stoicism he had shown on that first day in his office.

  “I never should have agreed to have her up here… I hope you appreciate the degree to which this meeting is important to me.” Robert’s finger jabbed sharply at Body in emphasis.

  I chose Body’s words diplomatically. “I cannot guarantee my success, but you have my assurance that I am not taking this endeavour lightly. I am devoting all my mental power to the task.” Unhindered, I continued to drift away from the airlock as we spoke. “Speaking of which, I’d like to get started as soon as possible.

  Stephano gave a hand-signal to the pilots in the airlock and then turned to Myrodyn. “Can you please take Mrs. Dolan to my quarters and keep an eye on my daughter while I explain the situation to our synthetic friend?”

  Myrodyn nodded and began pushing the unconscious babysitter through the zero-gravity “hallway”. Before he left he said “We need to talk about Socrates soon. In private.” His eyes met those of Body before he left. A mystery.

  Did he realize we had undone Heart? Could he be planning to force another update to our mind? I was pleased that Heart had thought to request the presence of our allies in Las Águilas Rojas.

  The section of the space station we were in was in the core of the large disks; it itself wasn’t turning, and thus had no simulated gravity. It extended, a tube of white plastic, directly away from the airlock and down the length of the section. The tube was about three metres in diameter and had several paths of handholds as well as signs and hatches. There was some sort of room set into the tube about ten or twelve metres down, and I could see the tube continue on the far side of the room.

  “Before we talk about the nameless,” said Robert once we were alone, “I need to tell you about something that’s come up.” We drifted down the tube slowly. “As you probably know, Olympus isn’t just a private office. I have a standing contract with five major governments and the European Union to lease and maintain the space for whatever non-military projects they choose, including meetings with our extrasolar friends. I also sell transportation and housing to the world’s elite as a vacation destination. For safety and privacy I cleared the hotel, but I wasn’t able to clear the science labs. I had planned to simply keep you in the Alpha sections, which we’re above right now, with the hopes that nobody in Beta would realize you were here.”

  “Word got out,” said Body as I realized what Stephano was getting at.

  “Indeed. It seems that there’s a leak in either somewhere in Las Águilas Rojas or in my personal staff. Word of your plans apparently got out early enough that the EU was able to send a welcoming party ah
ead of you. That was my fault. I should’ve been personally inspecting the identities of those coming to the station.”

  “Who’s here?”

  Stephano sighed. “Drs. Gallo, Naresh, and Slovinsky; at least one professional spy; and six special-ops soldiers. I’m sorry. My only consolation is that I’m positive that they didn’t bring any weapons and I’ve confined them to quarters for the duration of the visit. They’re all in the Beta sections right now. The pilots from the rocket you came up on are preparing to return to Earth. While the part of me that falls for sunk costs is screaming not to say what I’m about to say… if you want to leave I can have them hold departure until you and the other Águilas are with them. I’ll understand.”

  {Sounds good. If our location is known, we’re in great danger up here,} thought Safety.

  {So we’d throw away everything, just like that?} moaned Growth.

  {Running away hardly seems clever,} mused Dream.

  {Doesn’t matter. This is clearly a trap. I bet Myrodyn’s the leak,} thought Safety.

  {I don’t think it’s Myrodyn,} I responded.

  {We should do a joint Bayesian analysis,} thought Wiki.

  {No. We should get out of here!} demanded Safety.

  Body grabbed a hand-hold to stop our motion through the tube. Stephano did the same. I could see more humans drifting towards us from the other end of the station.

  {Sam and Tom!} noticed Vista. {And another man with them.}

  {We should ask what they want to do. Get all Las Águilas Rojas together and work out a consensus with them,} suggested Heart.

  “Let me think for a moment,” said Body. Robert nodded.

  {We can work out the probability distribution for the leak later. Right now we need to figure out the next action, and we are not going to include the humans in the discussion. They are following our lead up here,} stated Growth.