The Vesta Conspiracy

by Felix R. Savage

  They entered the airlock of the closest Your Home! and took off their EVA suits. The inner lock irised. A thin, sad-faced man stood at the head of a goggling crowd. He was holding a Jack Russell on a leash, so Elfrida knew who he was before he said, “Hi! Jimmy. Welcome to Liberty Rock.”

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” Elfrida shouted. The not-advertising continued down the hall, strobing and flashing, now with noisy sound effects. No wonder this kind of thing was illegal.

  “Thanks! Your Homes exclamation mark are an innovative type of building for lower-gee environments. They’re mostly made of aerographite, the lightest rigid construction material in the solar system, and can be flexibly styled to meet customer needs. Your Homes exclamation mark are currently in use in many asteroid settlements throughout the Belt.”

  None I’ve ever been to, Elfrida thought. Jimmy still sounded like a robot, but he was obviously human. The sheen of sweat on his face, and the dots of scum at the corners of his mouth, proved it. He was nervous as hell. What gives?

  They were steered around the inside of Liberty Rock. It seemed like a typical corporate dormitory, apart from the advertising everywhere. There was a pervasive smell of Chinese food. They peeked into rooms where people were working, napping, and eating pouch noodles. In a big common room, a dozen people jumped about, roaring support at Hong Kong FC, who were playing Bahrain on a 3D wallscreen. When Elfrida and Mendoza came in, the football fans quieted.

  Thus, Elfrida clearly heard the one voice that had not fallen silent.

  “Mama? Mama, zěnmeliǎo?”

  A little boy of five or so peeked out from behind an ergoform. A girl a year or two younger joined him. She met Elfrida’s eyes and shrieked with laughter.

  Elfrida turned to Jimmy and Sigurjónsdóttir. “Well,” she said. “Aren’t they a bit young to be studying asteroid engineering?”

  “It’s unusual, I agree,” Sigurjónsdóttir said gamely.

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  Elfrida could no longer refrain from connecting the dots that had been staring her in the face ever since they got here. She had worked for the Space Corps too long to fall for a deception this flimsy.

  “You aren’t digging a hole to the center of Vesta at all, are you?” she said. “You’re building an illegal settlement.”

  ★

  “Not illegal,” Sigurjónsdóttir said emphatically. They were in Jimmy’s office. Here, instead of advertisements, the walls were covered with a display of bookcases. “4 Vesta is an asset of Virgin Atomic. We have the legal and moral right to develop the asteroid in any way that aligns with our corporate policy and long-term objectives.”

  Correction: 4 Vesta is the only asset of Virgin Atomic, Elfrida thought. Compared to the supermajors, VA was a shrimp. It had had the luck to get to Vesta first, and that was all. Recalling what Mendoza had said about the company’s declining profits, she figured that its long-term objectives could be summed up as making a buck any way possible.

  “If everything’s above-board, why disguise it as an apprenticeship program?” she said.

  Jimmy seemed about to say something, but Sigurjónsdóttir spoke first. “Technically, it is an apprenticeship program. Jimmy and his people are learning the ropes, learning about micro-gee agriculture—” she gestured at the farm-in-a-bottle, visible outside the window— “and observing the construction process. Sometimes they even drive the machines themselves!” Her smile was as bright and hard as a knife.

  She despises them, Elfrida thought. “Hang on,” she said. “Construction process, of what?”

  “The settlement,” Mendoza guessed, glancing at Sigurjónsdóttir for confirmation. She nodded. “This is just a pilot installation, am I correct? A prototype. The actual settlement’s going to be at the bottom of that hole.”

  “How many people are you expecting to come live here?” Elfrida said.

  “Not yet determined,” Sigurjónsdóttir said.

  “Mmm.”

  Sigurjónsdóttir dropped her voice confidentially. “We would ask you not to divulge this information to our other stakeholders.”

  “Meaning the University of Vesta.”

  “Principally, yes. It’s so easy for misperceptions to take hold.”

  “But if you aren’t doing anything illegal, why would they object? This is a big asteroid, and they’re all the way up in the northern hemisphere.”

  Sigurjónsdóttir appeared to be at a loss.

  “Unless,” Elfrida said, “you’re planning to evict them, and sell the Bellicia ecohood, too?”

  “Of course not!” Sigurjónsdóttir cried. She seemed relieved. Elfrida realized she was barking up the wrong tree. “The University of Vesta is our flagship achievement. It’s not just a prestige project, but a living community that makes immense contributions to the sum of human knowledge.”

  “And is probably a net drain on your coffers,” Elfrida hazarded.

  “We are absolutely not considering any reduction of our support for the university.”

  Pursing her lips, Elfrida wandered over to the bookcases. Actually smart wallpaper, they appeared to groan with ancient tomes. All the titles were in Chinese. She touched one at random. It worked its way out of the shelf and spread its virtual pages before her. Diagrams separated dense blocks of characters.

  “You’ve got a lot of books here,” she said to Jimmy.

  He came to stand beside her, cradling Amy the Jack Russell in his arms. He put that book back and pulled out others. He flipped pages to show her embedded vid of a garden city, layered like a sandwich. Mustard-squiggle UV lights bathed strata of hydroponic paddies and surburban-looking homes and gardens. The artist had dotted the scene with families picnicking, children playing, and commuters swooping around on gliders.

  “This is how Liberty Rock will be in the future. It is a very capacious and delightful prospect, certain to provide a healthy environment for families to live in harmony. Most importantly, Earth-level security is guaranteed by the advantageous location.”

  “It looks like the Bellicia ecohood.”

  “Yes, yes, that is our inspiration.”

  “Several Bellicia ecohoods, stacked up vertically,” said Mendoza, looking over their shoulders.

  “No advertising in these vids,” Elfrida observed.

  Jimmy grinned shyly.

  xvi.

  Shoshanna Doyle strolled up the road towards Facilities Management. A sprawling green building, it stood in an isolated location on the slope overlooking the town. It housed the IT hub that controlled the weather, the air circulation, and most important of all, the power grid.

  ~Feed, Shoshanna subvocalized, and accessed Cydney Blaisze’s live vid of Dr. James’s bail hearing.

  Following the non-appearance of Elfrida Goto, the defense lawyer had resorted to calling character witnesses. Someone from the astrophysics lab was testifying that Dr. James was an upstanding individual who would never dream of jumping bail. Shoshanna tongue-clicked the feed off.

  She pushed open the door of Facilities Management. The lights in reception were dimmed. The customer service engineers were home in bed, or at the hearing.

  “Excuse me?” Shoshanna called out. “I need some help here.”

  Smart posters advertised soycloud tours, and declared this to be Bellicia’s ‘Year of Soil.’ They cycled through instructions for making soil at home with polymer pellets and your own feces.

  “I thought this place was open around the clock?”

  “Technically, yes,” said a speaker in the ceiling. Shoshanna’s BCI—which contained some rather advanced processing tools—identified it as the female-styled voice of the hub itself. “I was just trying to work out why you’re carrying a gun.”

  Bother, thought Shoshanna. She resisted the urge to touch the home-printed revolver concealed under her baggy top. “Self-defense,” she said. “You might have noticed that things are pretty tense in the ecohood these days.”

  “Tell me about it,” sighe
d the hub. “What can I help you with tonight?”

  “I’d like to sign up for a soycloud tour. Are you still doing those?”

  “Absolutely! I’m so glad you’re interested! Let me show you a brochure.” The nearest smart poster displayed one.

  “Looks great,” Shoshanna said. “Can I sign up right now?”

  “Sure thing,” the hub gushed. It sent her a sign-up form. Instead of her name and ID, Shoshanna filled the form in with a string of zipped code containing a virus based on a self-learning algorithm. She was pretty sure that the hub was just stalling her while it summoned the peacekeepers, but also that its customer service goals would compel it to go through with the charade of accepting the sign-up form. Security in the Bellicia ecohood was shitty. These people were in denial, acting like they were still living on Earth. You had to be spaceborn to truly understand that the universe was out to get you.

  She was right about the hub’s fallibility. Eighty-two milliseconds after she sent the form back, it stuttered, “Invalid data entry. Invalid data entry. Invalid …”

  Back at the community hall, Dr. James’s lawyer had finally called off his blitz of character witnesses. They were wrapping up the procedural loose ends.

  “Invalid.” There was a momentary pause, and then the hub’s voice returned to normal. “Thank you for signing up for a soycloud tour, Ms. Doyle! Is there anything else I can help you with tonight?”

  Shoshanna’s virus had exploited a zero-day vulnerability to convince the hub that it was a native .exe process. It was now propagating itself through the machine’s subsystems.

  “Well,” Shoshanna said. Now it was her turn to stall, one eye on Cydney’s feed.. “I’d really like it if you would walk me through that home soil manufacturing method.”

  Tense silence gripped the community hall as everyone awaited Dean Garcia’s verdict. Garcia spoke three words. Her voice trembled noticeably. “Bail is denied.”

  The hall erupted.

  ~Whoa! Cydney broadcast. ~That’s a surprise! Guess money can’t buy freedom, after all!

  Shoshanna, as astonished as anyone else, texted Cydney. “Srsly? She just denied him bail?”

  “Y,” came the response. “BTW, where is everyone?”

  Shoshanna did not bother to answer. She fired off a group text to ‘everyone,’ a.k.a. the other core members of Justice For David Reid. They were lurking in the undeveloped rocky terrain around Facilities Management. “Well, that kind of destroys our pretext for being here. What do you guys want to do?”

  They conferred in an excited cacophony of texts. They had assumed—the whole ecohood had assumed—that Dr. James’s expensive defense lawyer, in combination with behind-the-scenes pressure from Virgin Atomic, would secure bail for him. They had prepared by refilling their propellant guns, donning masks and throwaway black coveralls, and surrounding Facilities Management, while Shoshanna scoped out the joint. The prospect of celebrating held little allure. They did not want to just trickle off home.

  Nor did Shoshanna, to be honest. Having inserted her virus into the hub, she’d already achieved her own goal for the night, but she reminded herself that optics were just as important as information.

  She performed a swift self-interrogation, to make sure she wasn’t merely indulging her violent streak, and then cut through the babble of texts. “OK. What the hell, let’s do this!”

  The Friends of David Reid streamed across the road, screaming “Yaaaah!” and firing their guns. By a miracle, none of them hit each other. As they burst into the building, Shoshanna was vaulting the symbolic barrier that separated reception from the staff offices, firing her revolver for effect.

  They spread through the building. Of course, no one was there. To forestall any sense of a letdown, Shoshanna commandeered the services manager’s office and logged into his workstation, whose security protection her virus had already dismantled. Her troops gathered around her. “Here we go,” she said, accessing the emergency tannoy system. “I’m going to announce that we’ve taken over, and then I’m going to present our demands. If anyone wants to add anything, now’s your chance.”

  “Wow!” said an M.A. candidate in Transhuman Studies. “How’d you get into the hub?”

  “Tell you later,” Shoshanna said with a grin. She switched the tannoy on. “People of Bellicia! We greet you in the spirit of justice, equality, and tolerance …”

  ★

  Elfrida couldn’t get to sleep, tired as she was. Her thoughts drifted from the Liberty Rock project to memories she wanted to forget: flash-frozen corpses drifting in freefall, tangling with uprooted trees. The colonists of 11073 Galapagos had thought they were safe, too …

  She sat up, pushing her hair off her clammy forehead. Maybe she should’ve accepted those meds her therapist tried to give her for flashbacks. It was hot in the VA administration hab, where she and Mendoza had been invited to spend the night. Sweat prickled her skin.

  She was about to fish out her tablet and watch a vid, when she heard a commotion outside. Mendoza’s voice broke through. “Can’t a guy go to the jakes without tripping the security alarm? I’ve done enough pissing into suction tubes the last few days.”

  Elfrida giggled quietly in the dark. She knew what he meant. Going to the bathroom in the rover had been a repeated ordeal of back-turning and pretending that you couldn’t hear each other using the suction toilet.

  Two minutes later, the side of her capsule concertinaed open and Mendoza crawled in on top of her legs.

  “What are you doing here? Get out!”

  He waved the door closed. Elfrida frantically hitched her blanket up over her chest. She was sleeping in her underwear.

  “Sorry,” Mendoza whispered. In the glow of the nightlight that had come on when the door opened, Elfrida saw that he looked scared. “They’ve kept us apart so we can’t compare notes. But we have to talk, just in case.”

  “You’re sitting on my legs.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Just in case of what?”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t trust this setup. They’re definitely breaking the law, even if we haven’t figured out how. And—”

  “I knew it was a mistake to come here,” Elfrida rattled out, giving way to the temptation to blame Mendoza for this whole trip. “We should’ve stayed focused on the Vesta Express. That’s where the suspicious signal came from, and we already know that the left hand doesn’t talk to the right hand in this company.”

  “And,” Mendoza overrode her, “have you noticed something else?”

  “What?”

  “All the prospective settlers look Chinese.”

  “Well, now that you mention it, I guess they do.” Elfrida suddenly felt uncomfortable, and not because Mendoza was still sitting on her legs. He only weighed about 1.5 kilos, after all. “They speak Mandarin, too. They’re probably from Africa.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Or Europe, or maybe Canada. There are Chinese people everywhere.”

  “You think I don’t know that? I’m from Manila, Goto. It’s a freaking Chinatown.”

  “When I was a kid, I used to get confused for a half-Chinese person. The Chinese kids would talk to me, all friendly, and send me invites to their social networks. When I had to explain that I’m actually half-Japanese, it would be like, instant one-eighty. Exiled to Pallas. I wouldn’t even exist for them anymore. I ended up avoiding all East Asian-looking people so that wouldn’t keep happening.”

  “I didn’t know you were half-Japanese.”

  Elfrida shrugged, glad the light was so dim. She knew she was red in the face with recollected humiliation. “There aren’t many of us around. You can understand why they would make that mistake.”

  After a moment, Mendoza said, “But diaspora Chinese don’t talk like bots. They speak English, or whatever.”

  “Yeah! The way Jimmy talked, that was seriously weird. What do you think is up with that?”

  “I think he’s a pureblood Chinese nationa
l, using translation software and a prompter. Did you notice how he never looked you in the eye when he was talking to you? That’s because he was reading off the prompter in the HUD display of his retinal interface.”

  “Oh my God, Mendoza.” Elfrida shook his head. “Are you OK? That’s just … impossible.”

  “Chinese translation programs always suck. It’s like impossible to develop a seamless one. And that’s not all. Didn’t you wonder why that rubble hauler nearly ran us off the ramp? It should have reacted faster … if Sigurjónsdóttir’s people were operating it. I don’t think they were. I think it was a Chinese machine, operating on Chinese protocols, and those don’t include getting out of the way for a rover with two humans on board.”

  Elfrida pulled up her knees and laced her arms around them. They were sitting at opposite ends of the capsule. She could see the whites of Mendoza’s eyes. “Come on, that’s just absurd.”

  “Is it? Do you know what they call the Philippines in Chinese?”

  “What?”

  “A tributary state.”

  “Oh. But …”

  “I’m not kidding. We have to pay tribute. Of course, our bureaucrooks call it interest. But my point is, to the Han, if you’re not Chinese, you’re nothing. You just told me you experienced that yourself when you were a kid.”

  Elfrida’s heart thumped. She said firmly, “Well, Jimmy seems nice. I haven’t talked to any of the others, but my take is that even if they are Chinese nationals, they’re still just typical, dumb colonists. But, Mendoza, they can’t be Chinese! It’s impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Chinese don’t come into space. You know that. They invest, and they mine resources and stuff, but they don’t settle. They’re one hundred percent purebloods. They’re scared of the PLAN.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Mendoza said. “The PLAN is Chinese. They created the toilet rolls in the first place to drive the Americans off Mars. When they’ve driven the rest of us out of space, they’ll have it all to themselves.”