The Vesta Conspiracy

by Felix R. Savage

“Oh, wise up,” Shoshanna said. “Any encryption protocol is only as good as the computer applying it.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Oh, crap,” Jay Macdonald said.

  Shoshanna grinned. “Updated your anti-virus software recently? Maybe you should have. Or maybe it wouldn’t have done any good.”

  “You’ve infiltrated our hub.”

  “Correct. Facilities Management gave me a back door into the VA hub. I blocked your operators’ signals at the source. Then I took control of the phavatars and the soyclouds, using your own encryption protocols and override keys.”

  Macdonald glanced at Cydney.

  Cydney was torn. Despite the agony she’d suffered at Shoshanna’s hands, her pride wanted her to pretend that she was one of the gang, not a hostage who’d stupidly walked into a trap. She raised her chin defiantly.

  “Oh, she didn’t have anything to do with it,” Shoshanna said, deflating Cydney’s pretense. “She’s just a news-hound. She may have a few grey-hat tools, but nothing offensive. Nothing like what I’ve got.”

  Some of the activists looked at Shoshanna uneasily.

  “So.” She bit into a freshly picked Cox’s Pippin. “Yum. Are you ready to meet our demands?”

  “Based on your wish list, you ought to be addressing the university administration,” Macdonald said. “I can’t speak for them.”

  Shoshanna rolled her eyes. “I thought you had to be brainy to be the chief financial officer of a listed corporation. Maybe I was wrong.”

  Another silence ensued. A breeze rustled the flowers growing around the edges of the deck. Under Shoshanna’s control, the soycloud was gaining height. Cydney shivered as the cold wind cut through her still-damp clothes.

  “Oh,” Macdonald said presently. “My God.”

  “Yeah. This didn’t come out of nowhere, Jay. It’s the continuation of our ongoing conversation, by other means.” Shoshanna spat out an apple seed. “It’s a war out there. That’s what you guys say, isn’t it? Thing is, you’re wrong. It would be a war if we ever wanted to fight. And in that case, we would walk all over you. Like I’m walking all over you right now.”

  She threw her apple core at Macdonald. It hit him on the chest.

  “We don’t like going noisy. But the lesson you should be drawing right now is: we will if we have to. And part two of that lesson is: we will stop at nothing to keep humanity safe.”

  Cydney gasped. She finally understood. She pinged Aidan Wahlsdorf, her team manager on Earth. Oh my God. Shoshanna is an ISA agent.

  “So,” Shoshanna encouraged. “Give.”

  Unexpectedly, Macdonald smiled. “You haven’t been able to break into our subsidiaries.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Nor will you be able to. We have a strict information security policy that includes physical segregation of key computing assets. You may have compromised our Bellicia hub, but that won’t give you access to Virgin Resources, or the de Grey Institute, or the Big Dig. Your violation of our corporate privacy stops here, I’m afraid.”

  “Wrong,” Shoshanna said, standing up. “I’m only just getting started. You have a pacemaker, don’t you, Jay? Which is monitored by medibot software at your headquarters?”

  Macdonald clutched his chest. Several of the activists stared at Shoshanna in horror.

  “Do your worst,” Macdonald said hoarsely.

  “Then again, I could just shoot you,” Shoshanna mused.

  “Sassenach! You’ll never conquer the human spirit! Dh'aindeoin co theireadh e!”

  With that, Macdonald lumbered into a run and leapt off the deck. Ungainly as he was, he weighed so little that his running jump carried him all the way over the edge of the soycloud.

  No one would ever know if he had meant to do that.

  Nor would they know whether he had been aware that the soycloud, previously hovering above the rooftops of Bellicia, was now 1.5 kilometers up.

  The activists rushed to the edge of the soycloud. Clinging to stems of Glycine max, they were in time to see Jay Macdonald hit the pavement of Olbers Circle, outside the Virgin Café. He bounced like a yo-yo. The sack of pulped flesh and broken bone rose high enough that they could ascertain with their own eyes that even on Vesta, a fall like that would kill you deader than a mackerel.

  “I didn’t do that,” Shoshanna said defensively.

  Silence.

  “He jumped. You all saw him. I wouldn’t really have stopped his heart. Or shot him. I was just threatening him. That’s how you get what you want.”

  Big Bjorn said, “Maybe you’d better tell us what you really want, Shosh.”

  “He called me a Sassenach. I’m not English. I’m Jewish.”

  “Shosh?”

  “If I knew what I wanted, I wouldn’t have to ask for it!” she shouted. “All right! Everyone calm down. I’ll explain.”

  Cydney’s ping to Earth had not been answered—any more than her preceding pings had. She concluded that Shoshanna had taken over the ecohood’s routers. No more signals would get out of here unless the ISA agent wanted them to.

  “I’m here to save humanity,” Shoshanna said. “And on that note, I think it’s time to have a chat with one of my co-religionists: Eliezer James.”

  ★

  “Oh, not again,” Elfrida said.

  The Extropia Collective stared at her in bemusement.

  “More of you,” she said. “Seeking the secret of human happiness. You’re the third lot in less than a year. What is this, a new fad? Has plain old freedom gone out of style?”

  Hugh Meredith-Pike, the spokesman for the Extropia Collective, cleared his throat and drank some gatorade from the supplies Petruzzelli had sent over. “I can’t tell you anything about any other seekers. There may be others, but—”

  “There are. Correction, there were. On 395792 Nurislam and 1000384 Sybilsmith. Recently established colonies. As in very recently. As in, they were still living in inflatables at the bottom of holes. Like you.”

  At this point, she heard Meredith-Pike saying: “—we don’t know anything about them.”

  “No? Well, I’ll tell you about them.” As she spoke, her phavatar dismantled the hab’s oxygen generation system to replace the wrecked parts of the C02 removal assembly with new ones that Petruzzelli had run off on her industrial printer. The would-be colonists watched with fascination, as if they’d never seen anyone use a screwdriver before. “Neither of those other groups ever planned to build a permanent habitat. They said they did, but the truth came out pretty quickly. Their real deal was: pay us to go away. The secret of human happiness? Bitter laugh! Cash, that’s what they were seeking. And they got it, because some genius decided a couple of years back that UNVRP should offer monetary compensation for the damage that resettlement would inflict on people’s uuuniiiique cultural vaaaalues.”

  “We weren’t even told where we were going.”

  “Now, I’m pretty sure that those two groups were both planted on us by the same gang of crooks that brought you here, and then abandoned you. So if you’re tempted to pull the same crap they did … just think about whether those pirates deserve their cut of what you will have bought with your pain and terror and suffering.”

  “They told us they would take us to 4 Vesta.”

  “They what?”

  Only now did the Extropia Collective hear her accuse them of trying to extort compensation from UNVRP. All twenty-seven unwashed, traumatized men, women, and children smirked in alarm. The youngest child, an eight-year-old with a shaved head, piped up: “We aren’t going anywhere! We spent our entire life savings to get here, and we’re staying!” It looked at a parent for approval of this performance.

  To their credit, the Extropia Collective burst out laughing. The confused child looked as if it might cry. Its mother hugged it. “Oh, Kurzweila. You did learn your lines. No, no, we aren’t laughing at you, darling. We’re laughing at ourselves, I suppose.”

  Meredith-Pike cleared his throat. “Not m
uch I can add to that,” he admitted. “We were to put up a convincing resistance, and then accept resettlement in exchange for as much compensation as could be wrung out of your organization.”

  “I knew it,” Elfrida said.

  Meredith-Pike cocked his head. He had just heard her saying: “They what?”

  “Well, yes,” he said. “When we first got here, we were shocked. We were expecting to go to 4 Vesta, you see. They deceived us. But there was nothing we could do about it: they had the only ship. Mr. Haddock said you might be persuaded to resettle us, actually, on 4 Vesta ...?”

  “Ha,” Elfrida said when she heard this. “You aren’t the first to make that request. All I can say is …” In your dreams, she thought. “There’s only one place to live on 4 Vesta: the Bellicia ecohood. And the corporate owner enforces strict population limits.”

  She thought of the Liberty Rock settlement, which would soon house 200,000 new emigrants. Against that, Virgin Atomic’s immigration policy seemed even less fair. They were eager to welcome 200,000 Chinese. How could they justify turning everyone else away?

  “I’m afraid you’re most likely to end up on Ceres,” she said. “We sometimes place people on other asteroids where there are employment opportunities—Eunomia, Hebe, Cybele, Davida … but generally, Ceres is it. Or if you want to go back to Earth, of course, you can do that. As recent emigrants, I assume you’ve all got citizenship somewhere. But you’d have to buy your own tickets.”

  Hugh Meredith-Pike bobbled closer to her. His shaved skull sported an all-over tattoo of electronic circuitry, harking back to the days when transistors were built of silicon. The fashion statement underlined the quaint aspirations of the Extropia Collective. Wireheads were an old subset of the transhumanist subculture. They aimed to achieve bliss by means of implanted electroceuticals that could switch off unpleasant feelings. Certainly, their ability to flood their brains with serotonin must have helped them to endure their ordeal on Montego without killing and / or eating each other. They were basically junkies, in Elfrida’s opinion.

  Who would be so irresponsible as to land a bunch of junkies, and their kids, on an undeveloped rock, and leave them there, in the blithe expectation that the UN would not only save them but pay for the privilege of doing so?

  Blind with rage at Captain Haddock and company, Elfrida bent her head to the oxygen generation system rack. Her phavatar’s MI was doing the work, not her. The čapek-class excelled at mechanical repairs, if nothing else.

  “I’m not just anyone,” Meredith-Pike whispered. “I know people. I’ve a very good friend at Virgin Atomic. Get in touch with him, he’ll certainly let us land on Vesta.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “He works in the think-tank there. Decent chap. His name’s Julian Satterthwaite.”

  ★

  Elfrida logged out and opened her eyes in her capsule in the Big Dig. She had been logged in for ten hours, and her crappy little immersion kit didn’t have an IV to supply her with fluids. She was dehydrated, and so stiff from immobility and nonstop command-gesturing that she yelped in pain when she sat up. Her head throbbed with the worst stress headache of her life.

  “Medibot,” she croaked. “Medibot!”

  No medibot appeared. The hab’s bots had not been instructed to recognize her. She had no alternative but to roll off her bunk and out of her capsule. She limped down to the ground level of the hab. She didn’t know where they kept the meds, but near the hygiene module was usually a good bet.

  Passing an open office door, she halted. All the Big Dig personnel stood staring at the screen on someone’s desk. A voice said on speaker: “—the continuation of our ongoing conversation, by other means.”

  That’s someone I know, Elfrida thought. Heard that voice before somewhere.

  “It’s a war out there,” the voice continued. “That’s what you guys say, isn’t it?”

  “Fast-forward it,” someone in the room said.

  Bouncing on her tiptoes, Elfrida glimpsed the screen between the shoulders of the watchers. It showed a murky crowd of people. That’s Big Bjorn! His ursine silhouette was unmistakable. Now she recognized other people from PHCTBS Studies. Where was Cydney?

  “You know what they’re doing at the de Grey Institute,” challenged the same voice as before. Elfrida now recognized the voice of Shoshanna Doyle, that green-haired chick from Belter Studies.

  The camera shakily zoomed in on the face of Dr. James.

  “No” Dr. James said. “I know they’re doing something … big. About fourteen months ago, they asked us to share our processing resources on an ongoing basis. We agreed, of course. But I don’t know anything about the content of their research.”

  With the force of a punch, Elfrida realized Dr. James was talking about the very data she and Mendoza had set out to find. It was a crushing revelation. If he was telling the truth, they’d been on the wrong track all along. And so, apparently, had Shoshanna’s crew.

  The data was not on the astrophysics lab’s workstation at all. It was in the de Grey Institute.

  This news did not please Shoshanna, either. “You’re lying,” she challenged Dr. James.

  “I assure you I’m not.”

  “What, you never wondered why they would need two supercomputers—they’ve got one on the train, and Ali Baba makes two—running around the clock?”

  “Of course I wondered! But whatever it is, it’s highly sensitive. They wouldn’t talk to me about it, and I very much doubt that this stunt will encourage them to talk to you.”

  “I’m only just getting started,” Shoshanna promised.

  “No matter what you do,” Dr. James said, “or who you represent, violence won’t get you anywhere.”

  “She’s already killed our CFO!” cried someone in the Big Dig office.

  Elfrida edged into the office, desperate to get a better look at the screen and see if she could see Cydney.

  José Running Horse spotted her. “Hey,” he said, shouldering through the crowd. “Out.”

  “Let me see! Please!”

  “No.” He grabbed her arm.

  “Cydney!”

  “She’s there,” said Fiona Sigurjónsdóttir, not unkindly. “She’s the one filming, we think. They’ve taken over the routers, but the ecohood’s wireless environment is still functioning, and we do have a back-up transmitter at the Bremen Lock that hasn’t been corrupted.”

  “Yet,” someone else said.

  “We’ve notified all the relevant authorities. Help is on its way.”

  Running Horse yanked Elfrida out of the office. Sigurjónsdóttir made no move to stop him. Elfrida understood that Sigurjónsdóttir’s concern was no longer focused on her and Mendoza. The woman now had real stakeholder relations problems.

  “’Help is on its way,’” Running Horse mocked under his breath, towing Elfrida through the hab.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Pretty to think so. Problem is, the relevant authorities are the same people who have just taken over the Bellicia ecohood.”

  “Uhhnnnh?”

  “That bitch is our undercover ISA agent. She incited the protests, everything. Now she’s holding Bellicia hostage. That pretty little head is stuffed full of military-grade malware.” Running Horse looked Elfrida up and down. The eagle on his forehead seemed to stare scornfully at her, too. “Yours isn’t. But that doesn’t mean you’re not working with her. Out.” He shoved her into the vestibule of the airlock.

  “Don’t kill me!” Elfrida screamed, clawing at his forearms.

  “EVA suits in that locker,” he said with contempt.

  She struggled into one. Running Horse closed the airlock on her and cycled it.

  Sobbing inside her helmet, Elfrida stumbled out into the watery light of the cavern.

  She felt that she had behaved shamefully. Cydney … Mendoza … She had to rescue them. “Help. Someone please help,” she wailed. Of course, the suit’s radio was disabled. She was completely isolated, just like Running H
orse had intended.

  The geology lab’s rover sat in the corner of the cavern, beyond Liberty Village. Still crying, Elfrida scrambled into it. She took off the VA spacesuit in the tiny airlock and eeled into the cabin. The familiar odor of pouch noodles and farts greeted her. So did Rurumi.

  “Nan de naite’ru?” [Why are you crying?]

  “Leave me alone, you doggone machine,” Elfrida screamed.

  But after a while, too weary and miserable to resist Rurumi’s pre-programmed compassion, she told her. Not that the phavatar could help, of course. Her areas of competence were limited to sex and rocks, so all she could do was pat Elfrida’s arm and say, “That sounds scary.”

  “Do you think I’m scared?” Elfrida said. “Do you, eh? Well, you’re wrong! I’m not some pencil-thighed waif with more hair than brains. I’m the senior UN field agent on this asteroid, and I’ve survived two PLAN attacks, and I’ve spacewalked outside a foundering space station in the troposphere of Venus, and I survived for nine days on a fragment of an asteroid with nothing to eat or drink except the body of another human being. I survived that,” she almost shrieked. Then she dosed herself with more grapefruit-flavored rehydration fluid, and took another tranquilizer. The rover had a small stock of meds. It was a shame it didn’t have any of the legendary Star Force energy drink known as morale juice. That was what Elfrida really needed. “So there,” she said. “I’m not scared. I’m going to get out of here somehow. And I’m going to get Cydney and Mendoza out, too.”

  “Oooh!” Rurumi exclaimed, scrambling up on the dashboard. “Wan-wan! Kawaii!” [A doggie! So cute!]

  Jimmy’s Jack Russell, in her miniature pink spacesuit, stood on the hood of the rover. Her helmet bumped the windshield. She seemed to be trying to lick it. Rurumi patted the inside of the windshield and cooed.

  The rover’s radio clicked on. “Ni hao, Ru-chan.”

  “Ni hao!” Rurumi responded. Elfrida stared at her.

  “Amy shuo ni hao, tài.” Jimmy stood outside the rover, EVA-suited, holding the other end of a tether that served as Amy’s leash. “Ni jintian hao ma?”

  Elfrida lunged for the radio. “Hello, hello? Uh, Jimmy! This is Elfrida Goto. I’m in here with Rurumi. I need help. Please! It’s really important!” She scrambled into her EVA suit, intending to chase him and beg him on her knees to call home for her. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of asking the Chinese for help before.