Eugene kept talking, pitilessly, about long-term problems. “After the cloud has passed the air will be full of carbon-14, because of neutron capture by nitrogen nuclei. Very radioactive. And even when the farms start working again all that stuff is bound to get into the food chain. Ocean stocks would be least affected, until the die-off in the seas cuts in…”
Bud got the message. The disaster would continue to unfold, as far ahead as could be seen. Shit, he thought. And it was going to start in an hour, just an hour.
Impulsively Bud tapped his softscreen, and flicked at random through images of Earth.
Here were the last forests of South America, so doggedly preserved, and the soybean fields that had crowded them out, burning together. Here were the almost clichéd landmarks of the human world collapsing in flames: the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Here were great ports laid waste by the monstrous storms, spaceplanes crushed like moths, the bridges of Japan and Gibraltar and across the English Channel left smashed and twisted by massive lightning strikes. Even so, everybody thought the worst was over; everywhere people toiled in the rubble of their homes seeking survivors, sifting debris, already trying to make a new start. And now, this. And what about the shield? With no protection at all, surely it would be destroyed, a leaf in a gale.
After all they had been through it seemed unfair, as if some grown-up was changing the rules of the game, just when they had been about to win. But maybe, Bud thought uneasily, if that nutty soldier from Britain was right about her “Firstborn,” that was exactly what had happened.
Suddenly he longed to be with Siobhan. If she were here with him it wouldn’t seem so bad, he thought. But that was a selfish thing to wish for; on Earth, wherever she was, she was safer than she would be up here.
He faced the softscreens, Mikhail’s grave face. He was aware of his people watching him; even now he had to think about morale. “So,” he said. “What options do we have?”
Mikhail only shook his head. Eugene, his eyes flickering nervously, looked away.
Unexpectedly, Athena spoke up. “I have one.”
Bud looked up, bemused. On the softscreen, Mikhail’s jaw had dropped.
“Don’t worry, Bud. I felt just as bad about this when I first figured it out. But we’ll get through this, you’ll see.”
Bud snapped, “What are you talking about, Athena? How will we get through this?”
“I’ve already taken the liberty of warning the authorities,” Athena said evenly. “I have made contact with the offices of the Presidents of Eurasia and America, and the leadership units in China. I began this process when the sunstorm was still under way. Bud, I didn’t want to disturb you. You were rather busy.”
Bud said, “Athena—”
“Just a minute,” Mikhail said. “Athena, let me get this straight. You sent your warning messages before we came online. So you figured all this out before Eugene and I reported our observations of the mass ejection to Colonel Tooke.”
“Oh, yes,” Athena said brightly. “I didn’t make my warnings on the basis of your observations. They just confirmed my theoretical predictions.”
Eugene said, “What theoretical predictions?”
Bud growled, “Mikhail, tell me what’s going on here.”
“She seems to have figured out the particle storm,” Mikhail said, wondering. “Athena evidently ran her own models—and they were better than ours—and she saw the particle storm coming, where we couldn’t. That was how she was able to make her warnings to the authorities even while we were still struggling with the sunstorm itself.”
“I am rather bright, you know,” Athena said without a trace of irony. “Remember that I am the most densely interconnected and processor-rich entity in the solar system. The failure of Eugene’s model, pushed to its extremes, was quite predictable. Not that any blame accrues. You did your best.”
Eugene bridled visibly.
“But my modeling—”
Bud said, “Athena. No bullshit. How long before us did you figure this out?”
“Oh, I’ve known since January.”
Bud thought back. “Which was when you were switched on.”
“I didn’t work it out immediately. It took me a while to process the data you had stored in me, and to come to a conclusion. But the implications were clear.”
“How long did it take?—No, don’t answer that.” For an entity as smart as Athena it was quite possible that the answer would be mere microseconds after boot-up. “So,” he said heavily, “if you knew about this danger back then—why didn’t you tell us about it?”
Athena sighed, as if he was being silly. “Why, Bud—what good would it have done?”
The newborn Athena, suddenly knowing far more about the future than the humans who had created her, had immediately been faced with a dilemma.
“In January the shield was already all but completed,” she said. “And its design had been, rightly, focused on protecting Earth from the visible light peak energy of the sunstorm. To protect against the particle storm as well would have required a totally different design. There simply wouldn’t have been time to make the changes. And if I had told you that you’d got it all wrong, there was a danger you would give up altogether on the shield, which really would have been disastrous.”
“And even today you didn’t give us the warning until so late. Why?”
“Again there was no point,” Athena said. “Twenty-four hours ago nobody could be sure if the shield would work at all. Not even me! It was only when it was clear that the shield was going to save the bulk of humanity that the particle storm became worth worrying about…”
Gradually Bud began to understand. AIs, even Athena, while they could be far smarter than humans in many ways, were still sometimes rather primitive ethically. Athena had picked her way through the impossible moral maze that confronted her with the delicacy of an elephant trampling through a flower bed.
And she had been forced to lie. She wasn’t sophisticated enough, perhaps, to be able to express her inner confusion openly, but that turmoil had shown up in other ways. Bud’s instincts had been right: Athena, faced with conflicts arising from deep-buried ethical parameters, had been a troubled creation.
“I have always tried to protect you, Bud,” Athena said gravely. “Everybody, of course, but you especially.”
“I know,” he said carefully. The most important thing now was to get through this, to find a solution to this new problem if there was one, not to disturb whatever fragile equilibrium Athena had reached. “I know, Athena.”
Mikhail, frowning, leaned forward. He said carefully, “Listen to me, Athena. You said you had an option. You told Bud we would get through this. You know a way to beat the particle storm, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she admitted miserably. “I couldn’t tell you, Bud. I just couldn’t!”
“Why not?”
“Because you might have stopped me.”
It took a couple of minutes to extract the principle of Athena’s solution. It was simple enough. Indeed, both Mikhail and Eugene knew all about the method long before the fateful stirring of the sun.
Earth’s “van Allen radiation belts” reach from a thousand kilometers above the equator out to sixty thousand kilometers from Earth. There, charged particles from the solar wind, mass ejections, and other events are trapped by the magnetosphere. This has practical consequences: satellites anywhere in the zone are continually prone to a degradation of their electrical components from the steady wind of charged particles.
But, it had been learned, it was possible to “drain” the particles out of the van Allen belts. The idea was to use very low-frequency radio waves to push aside the particles. At the magnetic poles they would leak out of the van Allen trap into the upper atmosphere. This principle had been exploited since 2015, when a suite of protective satellites had been set up in orbit around the belts. It didn’t take much power, Bud learned now: an output of just a few watts per satellite cou
ld halve the time an electron spent in the van Allen belts.
“These cleansers are kept mostly dormant,” Mikhail said. “But they are switched on after the most severe solar storms—oh, and after 2020, when the nuclear destruction of Lahore threw a lot of high-energy particles into the upper atmosphere.”
Eugene said, “It’s interesting that we’ve never actually observed the van Allen belts in their natural state. Just after their discovery in 1958 the United States detonated two big nukes over the Atlantic, swamping the belts with charged particles. And since then, everyday radio transmissions have been affecting the speed at which the charged particles drain away—”
Bud held up his hand. “Enough. Athena, is this how you are planning to deflect the particle storm?”
“Yes,” Athena said, a bit too brightly. “After all, the shield is like one big antenna, and it is laced with electronic components.”
“Ah.” Mikhail turned away, murmuring to Eugene, and punched at a softscreen. “Colonel, it could work. The shield’s electronic components are light and low-powered. But with some smart coordination by Athena, they could be used to produce pulses of very long-wavelength radio waves—as long as the shield’s diameter, if we wish. The particle storm is so wide we can’t reach it all. But Athena could punch a hole in it, an Earth-sized hole.” He checked his numbers and shrugged. “It won’t be perfect. But it will be pretty good, I think.”
Eugene put in, “Of course it’s the thinness of this cloud that has saved the day.”
Bud didn’t understand. “What has the thinness got to do with it?”
“That means the cloud will pass quickly. And that’s important. Because the shield won’t survive long.” Eugene said this in his usual cold, unemotional way. “Do you see?”
Mikhail studied Bud. “Colonel Tooke, the shield was not designed for this. The power loads—the components will be overloaded, burned out, quite quickly.”
Bud saw it. “And Athena?”
Mikhail said bleakly, “Athena won’t survive.”
Bud rubbed his face. “Oh, girl.”
Her voice was small. “Did I do something wrong, Bud?”
“No. No, you didn’t do anything wrong. But that’s why you couldn’t tell me, wasn’t it?”
When she realized she could save the Earth by throwing herself into the fire, Athena had known her duty immediately. But she had been afraid that Bud might stop her—and then the Earth would be forfeit—and that she couldn’t allow.
She had known all this, been faced with this tangled dilemma, from the moment she had been booted up.
“No wonder you’ve been confused,” Bud said. “You should have talked to us about it. You should have talked to me.”
“I couldn’t.” She hesitated. “I meant too much to you.”
“Of course you mean a lot to me, Athena—”
“I’m here with you, while your son is stuck on Earth. Here in space, I’m your family. Like your daughter. I do understand, you see, Bud. That’s why you might have been tempted to save me, despite everything else.”
“And you thought I would stop you because of this.”
“I was afraid you would, yes.”
On the softscreens Mikhail and Eugene wore carefully grave expressions. Athena’s grasp of human psychology was as weak as her sense of ethics, if she thought that she could ever be some kind of recompense for Bud’s isolation from his son. But now wasn’t the time to tell her.
Bud felt his battered heart tear a little more. Poor Athena, he thought. “Girl, I would never stop you doing your duty.”
There was a long pause. “Thank you, Bud.”
Mikhail said gently, “Athena, just remember that there is a copy of you, encoded into the Extirpator’s blast. You might live forever, whatever happens today.”
“It might,” Athena said. “The copy. But it isn’t me, Doctor Martynov. Less than thirty minutes to go,” she said calmly.
“Athena—”
“I’m properly positioned and ready to go to work, Bud. By the way, I have sent distributed commands to my local processors. The shield will continue to function even after my central cognitive functions have broken down. That will give you a few more minutes’ protection.”
“Thank you,” Mikhail said gravely.
Athena said, “Bud, am I one of the team now?”
“Yes. You’re one of the team. You always have been.”
“I have always had the greatest enthusiasm for the mission.”
“I know, girl. You always did your best. Is there anything you want?”
She paused for more than a second, an eternity for her. “Just talk to me, Bud. You know I always enjoy that. Tell me about yourself.”
Bud rubbed his grimy face and sat back. “But you know a lot of it already.”
“Tell me anyhow.”
“All right. I was born on a farm. You know that. I was always a dreamy sort of kid—not that you’d have known it to look at me…”
It was the longest twenty-eight minutes of his life.
48: CERENKOV RADIATION
Bisesa and Myra followed the crowd to the river.
They arrived at the Thames not far from Hammersmith Bridge. The river was high, swollen with rain runoff. They were lucky not to be flooded, in fact. They sat side by side on a low wall and waited silently.
Pubs and tony restaurants crowded the riverbank here, and in summer you could drink cold beer, and watch pleasure boats and rowers in their eights sliding along the water. Now the pubs were boarded up or burned out, but in their riverside gardens a crude tent city had been set up, and the flag of the Red Cross hung limply on a pole. Bisesa was impressed by even this much organization.
It was deepest night now. To the west, outer London still burned, and plumes of smoke and sparks towered into the air. And to the east, flames licked fitfully at the great shoulder of the London Dome. Even the river wasn’t immune. Its surface was a carpet of debris, some of it glowing. Perhaps there were bodies in there, slowly drifting toward the final graveyard of the sea; Bisesa didn’t want to look too closely.
She was vaguely amazed that she was still alive. But mostly she felt nothing at all. It was a wrung-out sensation that she recognized from her military training: delayed shock.
“Oh,” Myra said. “Thank you.”
Bisesa turned. A woman laden with a tray of polystyrene mugs was working her way through the listless crowd.
Myra took a sip and pulled a face. “Chicken soup. Made from powder too. Yuck.”
Bisesa drank some of the soup. “It’s a miracle they’re this organized so quickly. But—yes, yuck.”
She turned back to the battered city. She wasn’t really used to cities, and had never much liked London life. She had grown up on that Cheshire farm. Her military training had taken her to the wastes of Afghanistan—and then her jaunt to Mir had dumped her in an all-but-empty world. Her Chelsea flat had been a legacy from a fond aunt, too valuable to turn down, too convenient a home for herself and Myra; she’d always meant to sell it someday.
But since returning home she had rarely left London. After the emptiness of Mir she had enjoyed the sense of people around her, the millions of them comfortingly arrayed in their offices and flats, in the parks and the roads, and crammed into Underground tunnels. And when the threat of the sunstorm had been raised, she had become even more deeply attached to London, for suddenly the city and the human civilization it represented was under threat.
But this was a deep-rooted place, where the bones of the dead lay crowded a hundred generations deep in the ground. Against that perspective, even the sunstorm’s wrath was nothing. Londoners would rebuild, as they always had before. And archaeologists of the future, digging into the ground, would find a band of ash and flood debris, pressed between centuries-thick layers of history, like the bands of ash left by Boudicca and the Great Fire and the Blitz, others who had tried and failed to burn London down.
She was distracted by a faint blue glow in t
he air above the Dome. It was so faint it was difficult to see through all the smoke, and she wasn’t even sure it was real. She said to Myra, “Do you see that? There—there it is again. That blue shining. Can you see?”
Myra looked up and squinted. “I think so.”
“What do you think it is?”
“A Cerenkov glow, probably,” Myra said.
After years of public education about the sunstorm, everybody was an expert on this kind of thing. You’d encounter Cerenkov radiation around a nuclear reactor. The visible light was a secondary effect, a kind of optical shock wave given off by charged particles forcing their way through a medium such as air, faster than the local speed of light.
But in the sunstorm’s elaborate physical sequence, this wasn’t supposed to happen, not now.
Bisesa said, “What do you think it means?”
Myra shrugged. “The sun’s up to something, I suppose. But there’s nothing we can do about it, is there? I think I’m all worried out, Mum.”
Bisesa took her daughter’s hand. Myra was right. There was nothing they could do but wait, under the unnatural sky, in air glowing faintly blue, to see what happened next.
Myra drained her mug. “I wonder if they have any more soup.”
PART 6
A TIME ODYSSEY
49: PACIFIC
The platform in the sea, some two hundred kilometers west of Perth, was unprepossessing. To Bisesa, looking down from the chopper, it looked like an oil rig, and a small one at that.
It was impossible to believe that if all went well today, this place would become Earth’s first true spaceport.
The chopper landed, a bit bumpily, and Bisesa and Myra clambered out. Bisesa flinched as the full force of the Pacific sun hit her, despite the broad hat strapped to her head. Five years after the sunstorm, though fleets of aircraft day and night patrolled the skies towing electrically charged grids and pumping out chemicals, the ozone layer had still not fully recovered.
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