“Not very evolutionary, when you need expensive surgery to achieve it,” Satterthwaite said.
“It solves the problem of self-interest. Why, right now, I would offer you my services for free!”
Mendoza was watching the people at work in the computer room. Elfrida followed his gaze. A wisp of fog curled from behind a distant partition. Someone’s vaping at work, she thought. The sight gave her a pang, as she pictured Cydney relaxing with a cigarette after classes. When, oh when, would things get back to normal?
“Wouldn’t be for free,” Satterthwaite said, “since we did rescue you. But.” He pressed a finger thoughtfully to his lower lip. “Excuse me,” he said to Elfrida and Mendoza, and drew Meredith-Pike aside.
Mendoza whispered to her, “Something’s wrong.”
“Is it?” Well, of course it was. Everything was wrong.
“Look at these people. Not one of them’s even glanced at us. You would think they’d be somewhat interested in our sudden appearance. Not visibly. Are they shooting the shit, getting up for a cup of coffee, checking out the entertainment feeds? They are not. They’re flowing so hard, they probably have to be reminded to breathe.”
“So?”
“Goto, I work in IT. This? This is what it looks like when the shit hits the fan.”
“Well, maybe they’re a tiny bit concerned about the ISA threatening to cut off the power to a hundred thousand people,” Elfrida snapped.
“No, that’s not it. I’m repeating myself, but these are IT guys and girls. They wouldn’t really worry about that.”
“Then they’re assholes.”
Mendoza shrugged.
“That’s settled then,” Satterthwaite said, coming back to them. “Hughie-boy is going to stay here and give us the benefit of his once-great brain. Here’s hoping it hasn’t atrophied entirely. Meanwhile, I can offer you two a shower, if you’d like to freshen up, and maybe a snack?”
Elfrida was sorely tempted. But she burst out, “No thanks. I mean, thanks, but we’d like to talk to our friends.”
“The Chinese chaps?”
“Yes. I understand that you can’t allow them in here for security reasons, but where are they?”
“In the support module,” Satterthwaite said. “They’re probably safer than we are. We’re the target.”
Director Błaszczykowski-Lee burst through a door at the far end of the computer room. He beckoned to Satterthwaite.
“Excuse me.”
★
“What did he mean?” Elfrida hissed to Mendoza, as he pulled her down the ramp. “‘We’re the target’?”
“I don’t know. But I heard some of what he said to Meredith-Pike.”
“What were they talking about?”
“He said, have you kept up with the latest developments in FOOM containment strategies?”
“FOOM?”
“Old term. Explosive recursive self-improvement, in the context of artificial intelligence.”
xxv.
Director Błaszczykowski-Lee now had yet another reason to panic. At that very moment, Shoshanna was on the phone with Fiona Sigurjónsdóttir (and Błaszczykowski-Lee was watching the call on his retinal interface, from behind, as it were, an electronic two-way mirror).
“As you’ve probably noticed,” Shoshanna said, “the Bellicia ecohood’s satellites have moved. Comms, radar, scientific instruments … Some are microsats, but this radio telescope here, this is pretty massy.”
Sigurjónsdóttir said, “You’re such a bitch.”
“Ad hominem attacks on your stakeholders. Is that your idea of corporate social responsibility? Yes, we’re stakeholders, too, you know. The whole of Homo sapiens is a stakeholder when people start messing with illegal AI.”
“We’re not messing with illegal AI.”
“Hmm,” Shoshanna said. “Judging by your expression and vocal profile, you’re telling the truth. Or at least you think you are. But maybe your bosses just haven’t kept you in the loop. We’ve got some pretty solid intelligence on this, going back more than a year. It started with chatter on emigrant networks. ‘Have you heard what they’re doing on 4 Vesta? They’ve found the secret of human happiness. They’re going to give it away for free. C’mon, let’s go!’”
Shoshanna made an ugly face. She came from a legal colony called the New Hesperides, a cluster of rocks and tethered habitats in the inner asteroid belt that had made the jump from mining to manufacturing and services. Such established colonists frowned more viciously than anyone on the new wave of asteroid-squatters.
“Utopian rumors are not exactly rare. We keep an ear out for them because those who cannot remember history, etcetera.”
Shoshanna was lounging barefoot on the deck of her captive soycloud. The vid was being taken by one of her toadies from the PHCTBS Studies program. His hand, holding a Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut bar, regularly intruded on his camera’s field of vision. The sound of chewing soundtracked the audio feed. Behind Shoshanna, other student activists menaced a scared group of VA middle managers whom they had kidnapped from their headquarters. Shoshanna had staged the call to make it look as if she were entirely in control. She scratched her calf with the toenails of her other foot.
“By itself, that chatter wouldn’t have warranted more than a watching brief. But we already knew about your unpublicized joint-development deal with Empirical Solutions and Huawei Galactic. You’re building another permanent settlement on this rock, for the Chinese. And we all know that their approach to AI is … not as prudent as we consider appropriate.”
She pointed at the camera.
“You’re not just building a habitat for the Chinese. You’re jointly developing illegal AI capabilities with them.”
Sigurjónsdóttir laughed.
“You thought no one would notice, huh? Way out here in the Belt? Sorry.” For a moment the sound of chewing drowned out her voice. “… at least pig out on a chocolate bar that hasn’t got fucking nuts in it,” Shoshanna said. The chewing stopped. She resumed her taunting. “We know what you’re doing, as I’ve just proved, and you are ordered by command of the UN to stop it right this second. You’ve already halted the train, where the AI development project is located, for whatever fucking reasons of your own. That’s good. That’s progress. Now, I want the entire R&D team to exit the train. Including the two Chinese scientists who just boarded, Zhanpeng ‘Jimmy’ Liu and Gulong Wang. They’ve got twenty minutes to shut everything down and disembark. Starting … now.”
“Or what?” Sigurjónsdóttir said.
“Or,” Shoshanna said, “we’re gonna find out how much damage a radio telescope can do when it crashes out of orbit and impacts the train’s hab module.”
“You haven’t got a Security Council resolution. You can’t do that.”
“The ISA can do whatever the fuck it likes. Haven’t you worked that out by now?”
★
“That is not true,” said the CEO of Virgin Atomic.
Harry Persson was on board the fastest ship that his staff had been able to procure at short notice. He had at first shrugged off the troubles of the Bellicia ecohood as students behaving badly, but he’d changed his mind when the involvement of the ISA was confirmed. He was now travelling towards the asteroid belt on a chartered Hyperpony under 1.5 gees of constant acceleration. Though less than a quarter of what the Hyperpony could kick out, this was hard enough on an elderly frame more accustomed to taking screen calls from the beach of his private island in the Caribbean.
Persson’s intellect, however, was unaffected by the g-force pinning him to his couch. As soon as he heard Shoshanna tell Sigurjónsdóttir that the ISA could do whatever it liked, he shot back, “Codswallop. They’re under the authority of the President’s Advisory Council. They may not need a Security Council resolution, but they need the PAC’s go-ahead. And President Hsiao is not going to authorize the murder of fifty people, when the reasons for doing so are a matter of unproven and irresponsible speculation. It’s a bluff.
Do not comply. I’ll sort it all out when I get there.”
Given the relative positions of Earth and 4 Vesta at present, that would happen in about nine days.
Persson’s transmission reached Vesta eighteen minutes after Shoshanna had spoken. This meant that eighteen of the twenty minutes Shoshanna had given the personnel of the de Grey Institute to exit the train had already elapsed.
“CEO says it’s a bluff!” Sigurjónsdóttir squealed. “Don’t comply!”
Too late. Shoshanna’s threat had pushed Błaszczykowski-Lee over the edge into panic. He had ordered his staff to drop everything and get into their EVA suits. Compliance had been spotty. Several of the team working on Bob had protested that to abandon their efforts at this point would be dangerous. Then there were the personnel in the support module. Were they supposed to evacuate, too?
The upshot was that, eighteen minutes into their allotted grace period, about three-quarters of the de Grey Institute’s staff stood on the edge of the canyon, or were scrambling up its south side to join their friends, using the tether Wang Gulong had left in place earlier.
“One minute left!” shouted Błaszczykowski-Lee. “Run!”
He led the charge up the slope towards the Kekào, where the Extropian Collective were eating popcorn and waiting for something to go boom.
Behind them, the roadheader somersaulted out of the cutting and landed upside-down, further panicking the evacuees. They thought that had been the radio telescope landing on the train. They ran faster.
For the last half an hour, Mendoza and Jimmy Liu had been working to get the roadheader off the track. They had succeeded by using its chainsaw as a rotating crampon. The colossal machine had clawed its way at high speed up the side of the cutting and flipped onto its back at the top. The track was now clear, and reported itself to be undamaged.
Alone in the driver’s cab of the Vesta Express, Mendoza turned his attention to the controls. The cab (long since abandoned by Julian Satterthwaite) was a closet lined from floor to ceiling with screens, dials, and buttons.
“Well, this looks pretty basic,” Mendoza murmured to himself. “It’s already in manual mode. So … push here?”
The train sprang into motion.
“Susmaryosep!” Mendoza choked, after he recovered his breath from being thrown against the rear wall of the cab. He hurled himself at the controls. “Default acceleration mode! Reactor status check! Confirm power supply to hub-level computing resources!”
The Vesta Express fled around the equator, leaving Director Błaszczykowski-Lee, and all the other senior scientists, far behind.
★
Elfrida was in the support module. The jolt when the train started threw her off her feet, too. She assumed that the Vesta Express was resuming normal operations.
“Yay! Panic over,” she brightly told the men and women of the refinery crew, via the text-based tannoy that overrode all the other inputs to their cubicles.
Despite the arguments about whether to evacuate the support module, it had not been attempted. The reason for that was now clear to Elfrida. The operators who ran the mines and refinery were cupcakes—this being the derogatory term for people who spent so much time in immersion, they forgot how to cope with the real world.
Elfrida stood at the shift manager’s desk, a pulpit overlooking a jigsaw puzzle of telepresence cubicles. Wilting pot plants added a Dali-esque touch to this modern panopticon. Superficially, it didn’t look that different from the computer room in the R&D module. But the ergoforms in these cubicles were elongated into couches, and on each of them lay a man or woman with a full-face gel mask and gloves on, IV line plugged in, limbs twitching.
Despite the panic which Błaszczykowski-Lee had spread throughout the train, few of the phavatar operators had so much as sat up. In their minds, after all, they were hundreds of kilometers from any danger. They were probably having another orgy at the refinery right now, Elfrida thought sourly.
The scene before her eyes was an industrial-scale human tragedy. Full-time phavatar operators were supposed to take hourly breaks, get at least thirty minutes of exercise a day, and so on, to prevent them from turning into salaried versions of the ‘cubicle death’ horror stories that popped up regularly on the news. As a phavatar operator herself, Elfrida knew the health and safety regulations backwards. It didn’t look as if they had been implemented here.
But she had no time to worry about VA’s labor practices right now.
“Can we just leave them?” she said, turning to Wang Gulong.
The big Chinese had owned up to being Liberty Village’s top software guy. The panic resulting from Shoshanna’s threat might give him an opportunity to get back into the R&D area and investigate further—but only if Elfrida could drag him away from the hapless phavatar operators. He was palpably outraged by their cupcakery. Through Jimmy, he had made her understand that employment under these conditions would be unimaginable in China. “No one must work if they do not want to.”
“Not true everywhere,” Jimmy added, on his own behalf. “Wang is upper-class. He has never even visited an arcology.”
“They do want to work,” Elfrida said, goaded into argument. “That’s exactly the problem! I can’t get them to freaking stop!”
“Anyway, we go,” Jimmy said abruptly. He had been communicating with Mendoza via their EEG signalling crystals, and with the roadheader via the Chinese comms satellite. They didn’t have authorization to use the de Grey Institute’s wifi environment. For that reason, they knew no more about the ongoing crisis than what Director Błaszczykowski-Lee had brayed over the tannoy.
When they got back to the R&D module, they discovered that Błaszczykowski-Lee and all his top people had fled.
“And they took our freaking spacesuits!” Mendoza said.
“They took … our suits?”
“I guess they didn’t have enough to go around. Ours were just sitting there in the airlock. They’re gone now. And as far as I can tell, there aren’t any spares. We’re stuck. I hope Shoshanna doesn’t drop a satellite on us.”
“But that’s why you guys started the engine! She can’t hit us while we’re moving this fast! Can she?”
Mendoza shrugged. He looked gray. “Let’s get upstairs,” he said to Wang Gulong.
xxvi.
“Whoopsies,” Shoshanna said.
Her retinal interface showed her the Vesta Express vanishing into the distance. She closed her right eye and squinted to see better. She was using the U-Vesta telescope itself to observe the surface of the protoplanet. She zoomed in on the people leaping like grasshoppers up the side of the canyon towards the Chinese spaceship.
“That’s not all of them, Fee.”
“It’s all the important ones,” Sigurjónsdóttir snapped. “Congratulations. You may just have signed the solar system’s death sentence.”
“You need to think up some more plausible threats,” Shoshanna said. Her ultra-high-end BCI, which could analyze microexpressions and minute vocal stresses, reported that Sigurjónsdóttir thought she was telling the truth. That was interesting.
She hopped off the deck and walked barefoot through the soybeans, followed by her cameraman. The ground bounced under her steps like a waterbed. The plants’ roots nestled in a layer of compost made from human excrement. It smelled awful. It squidged between Shoshanna’s toes. Ugh, this hab was so disgustingly … organic. She wanted to put her shoes back on, but she had to look confident and relaxed. She glared down over the edge of the soycloud.
She had not achieved total control over the ecohood. Short of following through on her threat to cut off the power, there was nothing she could do to restrain a hundred and twenty thousand people who were now frightened for their lives. Crowds filled the streets and squares of Bellicia City. Would-be escapees jammed the road up to the airlock. The woods on the other side of Olbers Lake also teemed with infrared signatures, indicating that a number of idiots had fled that way.
Shoshanna figured it was a p
rimordial urge to take refuge in the trees. Being spaceborn, she didn’t share it. Safety, to her, meant rad-proof shielding and plenty of consumables on deck. She was slightly agoraphobic, and the view from up here made her queasy. She turned back to the camera.
“That’s not good enough,” she told Sigurjónsdóttir. “You were ordered to get everyone off the train. You didn’t do it. So; consequences.”
She had to make good on at least one of her threats soon, or they might decide she was just bluffing.
“That spaceship there. It’s Chinese, isn’t it? That’s what you were hiding in Rheasilvia Crater. Did you know that all Chinese spaceships have autonomous maneuvering capability? Or did they fool you with their wind-up pilots and crew?”
“We know,” Sigurjónsdóttir sighed.
“Of course you know. Because you were attempting to fuse those capabilities with your own asteroid-engineering technologies, to develop illegal levels of automation. No further need for pesky humans in outer space. Labor regulations go bye-bye.”
“We are not jointly developing anything with the Chinese. We are pro-human, as it happens.”
“Your actions suggest otherwise.” Shoshanna’s voice went cold. “UN restrictions on AI serve a double purpose. They prevent emergent hostile behavior. See: Mars. They also preserve a diverse realm of labor for Homo sapiens. That’s your basic human dignity and your economic utility right there. You support autonomous AI, you’re cutting the throat of the system-wide economy. But that doesn’t matter to you, does it? All you cared about was potentially grabbing a first-mover advantage that would boost your profits in the near term.”
Shoshanna felt strongly about this, personally as well as professionally. She hated the private sector (despite coming from a stronghold of Belter capitalism). That was why she’d been able to keep up her act as a student activist.
“Know anything about the Chinese economy? Yeah. Is that what you want for your kids?”
The Vesta Conspiracy Page 22