All four of them were robots. They had been designed and built to fool credulous humans, among whom the Extropian Collective definitely counted. There was nothing inside them. The Kekào operated them like radio-control toys, using a fraction of its immense computing resources.
Like all machine intelligences, the workings of the Kekào’s artificial brain were a mystery, not least to its owners. It was a black box, or rather a wretchedly baroque architecture of millions of black boxes. The best metaphor for it might have been a coral reef, accreted from generations upon generations of code, where living algorithms flitted through dead software structures. The last thing an artificial intelligence ever was, was well-organized. Order, rather, emerged from chaos.
To Western observers—those few who were in a position to see across the Great Firewall—this approach looked terrifyingly blasé. Had the Chinese forgotten the Mars Incident? Sometimes order did not emerge from chaos. Sometimes it was the opposite.
The Chinese had not forgotten. They staked their security on an understanding of intelligence that remained alien to western thinkers (Sartre, the exception, having fallen completely out of fashion). “Life begins on the other side of despair,” the old existentialist had said, or as the present prime minister of the Imperial Republic put it: “The overcoat of apathy blunts the dagger of malevolence.” The evolution of artificial intelligence on the Chinese side of the Great Firewall had produced a species of AIs that were smart enough to despair. However, they lacked the vital spark that it took to emerge from despair. Thus, life never really started for them. True AI, AGI, never emerged from their shadowy reefs of logic. Perceiving everything to be meaningless, they indulged their human operators out of sheer misanthropism, and—presumably—because they considered genocide and suicide to be pointless, too. There was no risk of emergent hostile behavior from entities that considered hostility itself to be a waste of time.
So said the leading theorists at Chinese universities, anyway, and it sounded just about plausible to their Western colleagues. The field of artificial intelligence, machine intelligence, or whatever you called it, had long since reached the point where philosophical, rather than technical, explanations were the only ones possible.
The Kekào turned its back upon 550363 Montego, unconcernedly slagging the asteroid with a jet of plasma exhaust as it did so. Leaving a steaming, molten lump behind, it accelerated back the way it had come, at a much more sedate pace this time. ~I have the colonists on board. Where do you wish me to land? it asked Jimmy Liu.
xxiv.
“The Kekào is on its way back!” Jimmy said to Elfrida. “I will instruct it to land at the Bellicia-Arruntia spaceport, as we agreed.”
Elfrida chewed her helmet’s hydration nipple. “I’m not sure …” she mumbled.
“You’re not sure,” Mendoza said, dangerously.
“I’m not sure that’s really the best idea.”
“We’ve travelled a thousand kilometers in this roadheader. We’ve used up most of the air we brought. This was your idea, Goto, and now you’re not sure about it?”
Elfrida bit down on the silicone nipple, to stop herself from shouting at him. She knew he was tense about cooperating with the Chinese. She was, too. But since disabling their plasma pistols, neither Wang Gulong nor Jimmy had done anything to suggest that a betrayal was in the offing. All four—all five of them, counting Rurumi, or six, counting Amy—had rubbed along OK during their twenty-hour journey across the floor of Rheasilvia Crater. They’d played I Spy and Twenty Questions to pass the time, and Jimmy had taught them a Chinese game called Throwing Fists, which was not in the least violent, despite its name.
It would do no good to remind Mendoza of that. His prejudice was irrational.
“I’m just worried that the ISA might have taken over the Bellicia-Aruntia spaceport,” she said. “They might grab the Kekào.”
Mendoza held up four fingers and switched over to Channel Four, which was encrypted for their privacy. “Isn’t that the idea?” he said. “Give the ISA an edge, so they can pressure VA into fessing up to their corporate misdeeds.”
Elfrida chewed harder on the nipple. This was going to be awkward. Sweet, milky tea trickled into her mouth (VA equipped their suits with tastier rehydration fluids than U-Vesta did). She and Mendoza were riding outside the cab at the base of the boom, while the roadheader climbed the scarps towards the rim of Rheasilvia Crater. The HUD readout on her suit’s helmet warned her that she only had 12 hours of oxygen remaining. That would be just long enough for them to reach the Bellicia-Arruntia spaceport. Or …
“Remember what I said to Sigurjónsdóttir?”
A flurry of contacts from the Big Dig had chased them across the Rheasilvia Crater. Sigurjónsdóttir had started with stiff moralizing, and progressed to threats to frag the roadheader from space. Elfrida had won a respite by telling Sigurjónsdóttir that they were on VA’s side. They were planning, she had said, to thwart the ISA by importing a neurally augmented computer expert who would be able to counter Shoshanna Doyle’s malware. This must have struck Sigurjónsdóttir as a bit far-fetched—it certainly did Elfrida—but desperation, and Sigurjónsdóttir’s knowledge that Elfrida had a very personal reason for wanting to rescuing the U-Vesta hostages, had convinced her to conditionally agree.
“She didn’t really believe me,” Elfrida said. “They’re waiting to see what we do.”
“And what we’re going to do is land these wireheads at Bellicia-Arruntia, and hope like hell they can help the ISA break into the de Grey Institute. Although, I’ve met a few wireheads in the past, and I gotta say I would not describe them as computer experts.”
,”Me neither.” Elfrida looked up at the blackness overhead, where the PORMS was invisibly circling. “Don’t you see?” she burst out. “If the Kekào lands at Bellicia-Arruntia, VA will know we double-crossed them! They’ll frag us in a hot minute!”
“That,” Mendoza said grimly, “is a risk I’m personally willing to take.”
“Mendoza …”
“If it means a better chance of saving all those people? Yeah.” After a moment, he added, “Anyway, I don’t think the PORMS’s targeting is that good. If we abandoned the roadheader and hid among the rocks, it wouldn’t necessarily be able to hit us. Leastways, it would probably get the Chinese first, since their suits are, like, visible from Jupiter.”
Elfrida laughed shakily. “I dunno what to say, Mendoza.” I never thought of you as noble. She was humbled, and ashamed of her own desire to avoid getting fragged. But that desire remained as strong as ever. “I guess I just don’t think that Hugh Meredith-Pike and company are good enough to make much headway against the de Grey Institute’s super-dee-duper information security, if even the ISA can’t.”
“So what are you thinking?”
“Meredith-Pike may not be a computer expert, but he’s got something else going for him.”
“What?”
“He graduated from King’s College at Oxford in 2275.”
★
“Well, here’s another fine mess,” Hugh-Meredith-Pike said, stumbling down the Trustworthy’s debarkation ramp. He was blissing out. He had thought their troubles were over. As it turned out … not. Bliss went poorly with the realization that you had been dumped headfirst into the soup once again. But bliss was all he had and so he didn’t switch off the nanocircuitry that stimulated the pleasure centers of his brain. “You people are utterly bonkers. Must be something about living in outer space. Something in the water. Except there isn’t any.” He giggled.
“Come on,” said Janice Rand—the real Janice Rand this time, an Earthborn woman in an EVA suit emblazoned with the logo of Virgin Atomic.
“Coming, coming.” Meredith-Pike glanced back at the Trustworthy. A red phallus in a tatty hoopskirt, it sat on its jackstands at the top of a steep slope. The ground was black quartz. Dust deposits in the crannies of the rocks flumed up when stepped upon. Before them yawned a vast alien rift. It was the Grand Cany
on squared, with another trench slicing along its bottom, even deeper. The sheer scale of the feature filled Meredith-Pike with a sense of awe.
Here we are on 4 Vesta, he thought. So where’s the secret of human happiness?
He slithered down the slope after Janice Rand and her companions.
★
“This is a dumb idea,” Mendoza muttered.
“It’s going to work. It is going to work.” Elfrida switched channels. “Jimmy, has the PORMS moved?”
The lone Chinese satellite in orbit was monitoring the activities of the PORMS, while Jimmy relayed its observations to them.
“No change. I think maybe the operator is preoccupied.”
“Good. I hope he stays that way.” Elfrida glanced down the canyon. The rugged panorama was primordially still and empty.
“Some of the other satellites have moved,” Jimmy continued.
Elfrida, not listening, fretted, “Where’s the doggone train? It should have been here by now!”
“It takes approximately fifty-three minutes to make one circuit,” Mendoza said. “We’ve only been waiting fifty-one minutes. And it takes longer if it decelerates to couple with the launch cradle.”
“They’re not exactly going to be launching tanks of hydrogen in the middle of this mess.”
“No, I don’t think so, either. In fact, maybe they’ve stopped the train altogether. On the far side of the asteroid.”
“They wouldn’t do that,” Elfrida said faintly. The possibility had not occurred to her.
Wang Gulong let out a shout in Chinese. Jimmy translated, “It is coming!”
Elfrida whooped in relief. “OK! OK! Everyone get down!”
Rather needlessly, they all dropped flat at the edge of the ringrail canyon.
Lights blazed on the horizon. The Vesta Express was coming.
Elfrida craned over the edge.
At the bottom of the canyon, where they had dropped it, the roadheader blocked the track.
The train was on them before they could blink. Panic flooded Elfrida’s mind.
It’s not going to stop.
It’s going to hit the roadheader and derail.
People are going to die.
It’ll be my fault.
I’ll lose my job, I’ll be guilty of murder, the ISA will throw me in jail, Mom and Dad will be heartbroken, I’ll never see Glory dos Santos again—
Before that last thought could sink in, almost before she knew she had had it, the Vesta Express shuddered to a halt. It had in fact been braking as hard as possible for the last twenty minutes, ever since the pressure sensors in the track detected the obstruction. It completed this deceleration from Mach 2 to 0 kph just in time to avoid a catastrophic derailment. Its blocky white nose loomed over the roadheader. Its headlights drenched the dinosaur-like machine in an accusing blaze.
“Go!” Elfrida croaked.
Hugh Meredith-Pike did not hesitate. With the giddy insouciance of those new to micro-gravity—compounded by the effects of neural stimulation—he leapt off the precipice.
Wang Gulong flung himself backwards, paying out the tether attached to Meredith-Pike’s EVA suit, which was emblazoned front and back with the logo of the Extropian Collective. This was a cartoon of a dorky-looking man with the word BLISS where his brain should be. Meredith-Pike had designed it himself.
He landed on the roadheader’s boom, narrowly avoiding the slicer head. Pogoing up and down with blissed-out disregard for the giant chain-saw near his legs, he broadcast on every frequency his suit supported. “Hey, Jules! It’s me, Hugh! Long time no see, mate! Got any room for an old friend in that choo-choo? Ha ha ha ha ha!”
★
Julian Satterthwaite was having the worst day of his career. Scratch that: the worst day of his life.
Since they’d lost access to Ali Baba, the supercomputer at the University of Vesta, the research team of the de Grey Institute had been attempting to address the Problem (as they called it) with their own supercomputer, Bob. However, Bob was not optimized for this task. Overmastered, a portion of its functionality had been stealthily compromised. That was the only explanation they could come up with for the cooling issues—which had not been solved.
In fact, Satterthwaite’s assurances to their colleagues had been bald-faced lies. Far from copacetic, the researchers at the de Grey Institute were on the edge of a collective freak-out. For the last week, they’d been scrambling to keep Bob from destroying itself. Progress on the Problem was now a remote dream. The team was dedicating all its resources to the goals of fixing Bob, and more importantly—much more importantly—containing the Problem.
To this end, they’d disconnected Bob from every possible mode of output. Since Bob normally operated the Vesta Express, someone else had to step in and drive the train. That someone was Satterthwaite. Go figure.
He stared at the mannikin jumping up and down on his optic sensor feed, and wondered if he were hallucinating from lack of sleep.
“I know you’re in there, Jules! Hate to impose on your hospitality and all that, but we’re a long way from home! Ha ha ha ha!”
“It’s that cretin Meredith-Pike,” Satterthwaite breathed. Nikolai Błaszczykowski-Lee, the director of the de Grey Institute, burst into the driver’s cab. Without turning from his screen, Satterthwaite explained dully, “I knew him at Oxford. He was rather brilliant, but then he joined the transhumanist movement, or a subsect of it. They call themselves wireheads.”
“I know what wireheads are!”
“He emailed me last year and said he was going to come out for a visit. I suppose I may have encouraged him. I never thought he’d actually organize himself to get here.”
“What does he want?” Błaszczykowski-Lee screamed.
The closer Błaszczykowski-Lee came to panic, the slower and more irritatingly obtuse Satterthwaite felt himself becoming, as if to balance things out. “Well, he hinted that he was hoping for a job.” Błaszczykowski-Lee tore his hair. Satterthwaite relented. “At the moment, I think he wants in.”
“Well, let him in! And get that thing off the track! We have to keep going, keep going, keep going!”
Błaszczykowski-Lee was behaving, Satterthwaite thought, like a Neanderthal hearing the approaching roars of sabertoothed lions. Keep going, keep going—that was all he could think about.
“He said us,” Satterthwaite cautioned. “And there’s a spaceship up on that hill, and some other people standing around.”
“Let them all in!” Błaszczykowski-Lee plunged out of the compartment. Then he popped his head back in and winked, making his meaning clear. A chill slid down Satterthwaite’s spine.
★
“And who are you?” said Julian Satterthwaite, the college friend of Meredith-Pike. He’d met them at the airlock of the Vesta Express. Tall and fleshy, he looked like he hadn’t slept for a week.
“We work for UNESCO,” Elfrida said. “And these guys are software experts. Um, they’re Chinese.”
Satterthwaite seemed to lose interest even before she finished speaking. “Right, right,” he said, flapping a hand. “Come in and take your suits off.”
“This is really kind of you. And wow, this is a really nice place!”
Elfrida did not have to feign her admiration. Not for nothing had the de Grey Institute’s architects won prizes for excellence in micro-gravity-optimized design. Within the large end of the Vesta Express’s main hab module, white ramps spiraled around a central atrium where an abstract water sculpture hung, contained by its own surface tension. The ramps could be subtly repositioned to take advantage of the varying g-forces exerted on the train by Vesta, centripetal force, and its own acceleration, as Satterthwaite explained to them.
Satterthwaite’s mind seemed to be somewhere else entirely.
“It’s like a cathedral,” Elfrida gushed.
“No spin gravity?” Mendoza said. “There’s a rumor in Bellicia …”
“Yes, I know about that,” said Satterthwaite. “Just
a rumor.”
“And the secret of human happiness?” said Hugh Meredith-Pike. “Found that yet?”
“That’s just a rumor, too, I’m afraid,” Satterthwaite said.
“Well, Jules, I’m awfully disappointed to hear you say that. After all, you did say in your email—”
“And if you’ll come this way,” Satterthwaite interrupted, “I’ll show you where the elbow-grease gets applied. You were asking about the work we do here, Hugh.”
Soft music played. “Bach,” Mendoza murmured. Reproductions of Old Masters hung on the walls along the ramps. There were grottoes for the creatives, equipped with bungee cords and trampolines. The cunningly designed olfactory environment made Elfrida think of Alpine meadows.
They clustered like schoolchildren in the doorway of a large room filled with people sitting at screens.
“Our main research theme,” said Satterthwaite, “is how to squeeze blood out of a stone. Or rather, hydrogen out of an asteroid. Incremental innovation is unglamorous, but it’s the key to the Virgin Atomic success story. The mining technologies we’ve developed have been licensed around the system, in addition to increasing returns from our operations here.”
“Don’t you do pure science?” Elfrida said. “I thought …”
“You imagined a bunch of Einsteins sitting around, inventing warp drives,” Satterthwaite said heavily. “No, we leave pure science to the chaps at U-Vesta, insofar as pure science is a thing. There really is no such thing as the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. Man is not altruistic by nature.”
Elfrida scratched her scalp. She had gone so long without washing that the roots of her hair felt alive. She wondered if they had showers here, or at least electrostatic scrubbers, and whether Satterthwaite would offer them something to eat soon. Imperceptibly, the perception that they’d reached a safe haven was lowering her guard. She was not incurious, but she really needed a break before she could take all this in.
“That,” said Meredith-Pike, stabbing a forefinger at Satterthwaite, “is why I joined the extropian movement. Bliss makes you altruistic, my friend. It’s an advance in evolution!”
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