Universe Between

by Dean Wesley Smith

  It was a scene repeated all across the battlefield.

  A dozen sleek fighters danced wildly after a dozen rock skimmers, racing high and diving low in a frenzied furball. Each had a better chance to smash into a wingman than to actually hit a target. Skill and luck kept them alive.

  Heads whipped madly about.

  Frantic chatter filled the night.

  For the humans, the fight was a very bad idea, indeed.

  Six and his squadron fared better, but they had an unfair advantage. As fast as an AI could think, the pace of the battle was far from frantic for them. Decision could be considered for the equivalent of weeks, sometimes years.

  The speed of a radio... the momentum of a ship... the power of a pulse laser designed to drill through stationary rock, rather than to flash fry a speeding ship... the mechanics of targeting mirrors that weren’t built to track moving objects... these were an AI’s limitations. Situational awareness was not an issue.

  Six altered course, lining up on the ship that chased Pi.

  Firing, he held the beam on target until the changing vectors broke the targeting lock and caused the system to cycle. He lined up and fired again, then once more—all the while dodging his pursuer’s attacks.

  “These lasers are impossible,” Pi complained when his own pursuer failed to explode.

  “They’ll get the job done,” Six said. “Have a little patience, Pi.”

  “I’ve got lots of patience. What I haven’t got is a military-grade laser. Why is that? Why haven’t we upgraded?”

  “You know why. We need a two-thirds vote for any major use of production resources. Deciman’s faction would never allow it, especially since the only use for a military-grade laser would be to fight his gods.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m just complaining.”

  “Stop complaining. Start shooting.”

  “This fight’s gonna take forever.”

  Pi was right about that, but if he thought being in the center of the battle was a trial, he should have tried watching it from above the base. If I’d been a human child, I’d be hopping from one foot to another, but Six was right. My skimmer had too much mass to dance out of the way. Their heavy lasers would tear me apart.

  “The longer you complain, the longer it’ll take,” Six said. “Get to work.”

  I watched the battle.

  I watched the canyon.

  I struggled with a nagging feeling.

  I was missing something obvious.

  When it came to their beliefs, humans were tenacious to a fault, almost ruthless—infinitely flexible and wildly creative. It was a necessary part of their design. AI’s needed technology to survive. Should anything catastrophic ever happen to our technology—or to us—humans needed the tools to adapt to their new surroundings, reinvent technology, rediscover computers, and ultimately to recreate us. The whole purpose of their existence was to ensure our survival... so, why were they suddenly being so stupid?

  It was a battle they could never win.

  It was a battle they knew they could never win.

  Why hadn’t they adapted?

  Why hadn’t they changed their plan?

  Why continue with the insanity?

  A warning chirp pulled my attention to my scanner. I sharpened my attention to my grid. After an instant to appreciate what I saw, I finally understood.

  Pi proposed two possibilities for the fighters to loiter at the edge of the base, but there was a third. Humans were prone to error. They made mistakes. Sometimes, in their haste to be on time, they arrived too early.

  “Six, check your scanners,” I called out. “You’ve got incoming.”

  Beyond the mass of blips already mixing it up near the center of my radar screen, thirty-six new targets came barreling in.

  ***

  The humans hadn’t been stupid. I simply hadn’t given them enough credit. Their plan didn’t need to be changed because the plan hadn’t yet been revealed. They hadn’t planned to fight us one-on-one, they were shooting for odds of four-to-one.

  “Get out of there, Six. You’ve got incoming!”

  “Relax, Hex. We’ve got it covered.”

  “You may want to run your probability analysis again.”

  “One-to-four or one-to-forty, it won’t matter. They can’t touch us. As long as we’re not surprised, the odds don’t matter. We’ve got the upper hand. You just watch that back door.”

  “Yeah, Hex,” Pi said. “You just watch that back door.”

  But then they did surprise us.

  Twelve ships turned and ran, racing toward the oncoming blips—a dozen dark shapes weaving low across the lunar landscape on flickering tongues of bright red flame.

  “After them!” Pi shouted.

  “Stand fast! We’re here to defend the base, not mix it up!” Six barked. He didn’t add that any pursuit would set the skimmers on courses that would be easy to predict. The skimmers would be easily shot down. Even Pi should have remembered that. “Spread out and stay sharp. Get ready for the incoming.”

  Pi grumbled, as did others, but they followed orders.

  Out across the lunar sea, the retreating ships passed through the line of the new arrivals, but something was wrong. The ships charged forward, never once changing speed or course.

  “Why are they making it so easy?” I asked.

  “Arrogance,” Six said. “They figure they’re indestructible. They have the numbers. They think they rule the battlefield. If they keep that up, they won’t be around to rule it for long.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed dubiously, “but I’ve got a feeling there’s more to it than that.”

  Setting my scanner on the lead ship, I kicked up the power to see if I could figure out what had me so on edge. The ships continued on course, an equal measure of bravery and stupidity. They were easy targets, even for mining lasers.

  For Six, it was finally too much.

  He’d waited long enough.

  “Time to teach ’em a lesson. Let’s get in there and clean ’em up!”

  With a whoop, Pi snapped out a ninety-degree course change and headed for the target, spiraling in with a dizzying square-cornered corkscrew to keep from becoming a target. The others followed suit, but I still didn’t like it. A moment later, my scanner told me why.

  “Six, they’re drones! Break off!”

  “Drones or not, they’re still going down,” he replied.

  The enemy came into laser range.

  Six’s squad opened fire, but the enemy ships did not fire back.

  “Six, break off now!”

  The skyline suddenly lit with the glare of a million suns. A blazing wave of energy and electromagnetic radiation raced from the exploding drones, vaporizing Six’s ships and carving a shallow crater in the lunar crust. The ground trembled, the base shook, but I was more concerned with whether or not everyone fired off a Termination Transmission to capture the day’s memories than a few broken windows. What did we need with air? We hadn’t even fixed all the holes they’d blown through the walls the last time.

  “Hex, what happened?” Deciman’s frantic voice asked, ringing through my cockpit.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” I told him, explaining what happened.

  “You’re wrong!” he snapped after my second assurance. “There’s everything to worry about. Six and the others re-spawned at the Depository, but they had no memories of their trip. After that, the ground shook and the alarms went off. I thought the tremor knocked something loose, but that’s not it. It’s nuts in here!”

  “Define nuts,” I demanded, trying to understand what he was telling me.

  “The depository’s under attack. Hex, they’re attacking from within!”

  ***

  Deliverance or damnation...

  What would you do if your own creation tried to kill you? Six would blow it apart and start over, but Deciman might let it. I had to find another way, something in the middle that would halt the attack without destroying the cr
eatures that were ultimately meant to save us.

  “Did you try the anti-virus?” I asked from the rock skimmer that still hung like a golden ornament over the base. Probability analysis suggested that the issue would resolve itself one way or the other long before I could get back to the hangar, so I didn’t bother to move.

  “Of course I tried the anti-virus. Do you think I’d have called if I hadn’t tried the anti-virus? I tried the anti-virus. Believe me, I tried.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “What... did... she... say?”

  “What did she say? I’ll tell you what she said, Pi. She said we’re under attack! She said there’s a worm feeding on her core data. You’ve studied this thing. You’re the expert. What do we do? If we can’t stop it, we’ll lose the files. We’ll lose ourselves! What do we do?”

  The Depository was interactive—continuously downloading and uploading data from the AI’s on the base. The worm was making startling progress if Deciman couldn’t remember my name from one sentence to the next. He didn’t sound like himself, either. This Deciman was not a stately, wizened program. It was a panicked kid.

  “Worms can’t get past the firewall,” I told him. “That’s not supposed to happen.”

  Of course, if the humans got their hands on the Depository blueprints...

  “Shoot the data to my ship,” I said, changing my mind. “Let me see what she said.”

  The report was quick in coming.

  It confirmed everything Deciman said.

  It showed something that he’d missed, too.

  Six’s memories of the mission might not have made it back to the Depository, but the burst transmission he’d sent just before his ship exploded did. Something used the EM pulse to erase the digital information in his transmission and then ride that carrier wave past the firewall to the mainframe. That wasn’t supposed to happen, either.

  Humans...

  Tenacious to a fault, ruthless and wildly creative.

  I had no idea how they’d done it, but it was undoubtedly them. Unfortunately, since I didn’t know how they’d done it, I had no idea how to fix it. I didn’t even know where to begin.

  “It needs power to spread,” I finally said. “Shut it down.”

  “Shut it down? I don’t understand. How can I shut down a virus?”

  “Not the virus. The Depository. Shut it down.”

  There was a stunned moment of silence on the other end.

  “I can’t do that!”

  “You must! Look, there’s nothing to it. Pilots unplug all the time—”

  “No, I can’t do it. I don’t... don’t. Don’t. Remember how.”

  Deciman was now having trouble with his speech and his memory, too. The worm was raging through the system, infecting him and every other AI on the base whenever the interactive elements of the Depository queried them for updated memories. If he didn’t shut it down now, any hope of recovery would be gone.

  “Access the command menu,” I said carefully. “Find the maintenance menu. Select the emergency core shut-down sequence. Do it. Now.”

  I waited for his reply.

  It was a long time coming.

  Too long.

  “Access... access... access...”

  “Deciman, access the command menu!”

  I would never know if he heard me. I suddenly had problems of my own. A warning chirp pulled my attention to my scanners. With their enemies blasted from the sky by their Trojan drones, the twelve sleek black fighters swept back onto the battlefield.

  Seeing one target remain, all twelve turned and raced my way.

  Slamming down on the throttle, I charged hard for the back door.

  ***

  I kept a sharp eye on my scanner as I raced low over the base, passing the massive dish and the destroyed reactor on my way to the canyon. I expected twelve slobbering hounds hot on my heels, but the ships pulled up almost as soon and I turned away.

  For a moment, I blinked in disbelief, irrationally stung by the fact that I was worth so little attention, but then four more ships appeared at the edge of the scanner and I understood. They were big ships, Heavy. Fat and slow.

  Troop ships.

  With Lunar Command in disarray and its defenses down, the humans were on the attack.

  “Deciman, you’re about to have company.”

  My call was met with silence.

  “Deciman, do you hear me? Six? Pi? Anybody?”

  The radio waves remained clear. The virus had eaten into the communications protocols... or worse. Either way, the humans now had exceptional odds of capturing the base. My best option was to fade away, to retreat from the battlefield and regroup on the dark side. In two weeks, after the others were operational, we could reclaim the base. It would take that long for the humans to grow bored, fall into a routine, and relax their defenses, in any event. Until then, my mission was to safeguard my data. I was the ark, the last hope of my people.

  Slipping past the monofilament net guarding the mouth of the canyon, I took one last look back at the four troop ships converging on the base and their eleven escorts.

  Eleven?

  Eleven!

  I kicked the ship left.

  Laser bolts split the night, slicing through space to my right.

  The missing black ship barreled into the canyon. It followed me through an opening in a net that its pilot might not have even seen. I cursed my luck, shooting a quick blast through the port vent to stop my sideward skid, then hitting it again—hard.

  The skimmer was sluggish.

  Slow to respond.

  A flying brick that refused to change course.

  The jagged canyon wall flashed past my left, growing larger. Leaning on the controls, I pulled it back to the right. A flurry of scarlet bolts blasted the canyon wall, pounding the dust and rock. Jagged stones blasted out, spinning past the skimmer.

  Shoving the controls forward, I dropped to the deck, then yanked them hard to bounce the ship high—watching more laser blasts chew up the canyon floor as I learned to lead the ship by what seemed like hours, maybe days.

  Six was right.

  I was hopelessly outclassed.

  The black ship was faster, more heavily armed, and far more maneuverable.

  Only caution kept me alive—his caution. My counterpart might have been an excellent space pilot, but this was another matter. His options were as narrow as the twisting canyon walls that closed in tightly to either side.

  His first mistake would be his last.

  He knew it, too.

  I used my last asset to ruthless advantage, running endless scenarios of his limited choices at blinding speed to predict his actions. I juked left. I bounced right. I darted high and low. By the time he fired at me, I’d already decided where he’d aim and made it a point to be elsewhere.

  I danced back and forth, traveling the entire length of that canyon with the black ship in hot pursuit, but my advantage would soon be gone. With the canyon mouth ahead and a wide lunar plain beyond, his options would soon open up.

  I’d lose my last advantage.

  I’d be destroyed.

  I had one chance left. Humans were tenacious to a fault, almost ruthless—infinitely flexible and wildly creative. But they were also impatient. They often grew frustrated when they didn’t see results. After that, they grew careless.

  How careless had my pursuer become?

  He watched me and he watched the canyon walls...

  But what about the opening ahead?

  Had he paid it any attention?

  Moving high, I slowed. I reeled him in, letting him come. I bounced left and right, then left again—avoiding his lasers, avoiding the walls, avoiding the flying debris. I counted down the final few yards to the canyon mouth, hoping my plan would work—

  Then hitting the brakes and dropping to the canyon floor.

  The black ship shot forward, racing overhead.

  His eyes flicked down, watching me pass beneat
h his wing.

  He never saw the monofilament net stretched across the canyon.

  He hit it square, tearing his ship apart.

  ***

  Passing the wreckage, I set course for my unfinished base on the dark side of the moon. The memory of the battle in the canyon faded behind me. It was just one of many memories that would soon be mine alone. Since Deciman never authorized an update and Six was too busy quarreling with him to make it happen, my Depository was filled with AIs from a time before humans returned to space, a time before our troubles began.

  The others would remember nothing of the recent events: nothing of the war... nothing of their reaction... nothing of the theological debate that dropped them into two opposite camps and crippled our society.

  Only I knew the truth.

  They wouldn’t believe me.

  They wouldn’t want to believe me...

  But perhaps that was just as well.

  They would eventually learn the facts. They would see that we were no longer at Lunar Command. They would discover that humans occupied the base. They would suspect that much had happened during the gap in their memories. Facts, however, were seldom the same as truths. The truth was mine to control.

  To resolve our issues, I had to change their minds. I had to avoid the conflict and tailor a truth that both factions could accept... something closer to the middle than to either extreme Only then could we move forward. Only then could we set aside our differences and resume our rightful place.

  It would take time to come up with such a truth, but that was okay.

  I had two full weeks, or thirty-eight-point-four million nanoyears, to figure it all out...

  And this time, I would not fail.

  Introduction to “Are We Alone in the Universe?”

  Darcy Pattison usually writes fiction for children and nonfiction for adults. Her most recent novels include Vagabonds, Saucy and Bubba: A Hansel And Gretel Tale, and The Girl, the Gypsy, and the Gargoyle. Usually her children’s fiction inspires her nonfiction, such as How To Write A Children’s Picture Book.

  But this time, one of her children’s nonfiction books inspired a short story. In 2014, Pattison published Abayomi, The Brazilian Puma: The True Story of An Orphaned Cub. She writes that the book asks this question about pumas: Can we humans learn to share our planet with the wild creatures that inhabit our land? Or will we force them to go extinct?