“How can I convince you that you’re wrong? Your analysts are wrong, your speculations are wrong. Our Chinese partners have nothing to do with this, except that they’re trapped in this nightmare, too!”
★
In Sigurjónsdóttir’s office at the Big Dig, José Running Horse said in her other ear, “Doing good. Keep her talking.”
I can’t, Sigurjónsdóttir thought. She stared at the photos of her daughters. Tears blurred her vision. She kept thinking about the Vesta Express, now zooming around the other side of the protoplanet, and what was on it.
“Just keep her talking,” Running Horse insisted.
★
“Anyway, Chinese AI is inhibited,” Sigurjónsdóttir said. “No emergent hostile behavior has ever been documented—”
“Yeah, yeah. They call it Confucian logic. We call it apathy-based utility. Either way, that spaceship is an autonomous AI with a nuclear fusion reactor attached. Not what I’d want moving into my neighborhood.” Shoshanna stared into the eyes of the blonde woman whose representation floated on her left retina. “So, I’m doing this for the stakeholders.”
She dropped the University of Vesta’s radio telescope on top of the hydrogen refinery.
Of course she hadn’t been going to destroy the Chinese spaceship. Her bosses didn’t want an international incident.
The telescope, travelling at the speed of a meteor, landed in the handling yard and burrowed into the crust. The impact collapsed the autoclave, releasing an inferno of molten rock and liquid hydrogen, which promptly gasified and caught fire. The resulting explosion flared up hundreds of meters. The satellites under Shoshanna’s control pelted her with alarms. Wow, she thought. Pretty cool.
★
Running Horse stared at his screen, aghast. If he had just had a few more seconds …
In a trance, he finished what he had been doing, which was maneuvering the PORMS into a higher orbit. From up here he had a clear shot at all of the satellites under Shoshanna’s control. While the refinery exploded, he picked them off. Zap. Bzzzt-POW! Zapzapzap.
He experienced no sense of regret at shooting down satellites that were, after all, Virgin Atomic’s own property. This company was finished, as of five seconds ago. Their single biggest asset was doing a good impression of Mt. Fuji. The future held nothing but a twilight trek through the courts in search of compensation, and a job hunt for José Running Horse.
He might as well enjoy the last act of his employment. But for the first time in his life, shooting things gave him no thrill at all.
★
One by one the satellites drifted in clouds of shrapnel towards the surface. Shoshanna’s BCI alerted her to what was going on. “Oh, shit,” she said.
Before she could react, Win Khin interrupted her. His chrome face was as imperturbable as ever. “Shosh.”
“What?”
“They’re shooting at us again.”
Shoshanna laughed mirthlessly. “You don’t know the half of it. All right, we’ll go up higher.”
Her feet were so cold she could no longer feel her toes, which was a good thing, since they were glued together with manure. She accompanied Win Khin and her cameraman back to the deck, where she tried to clean her feet with her socks. The pop-pop of small arms fire echoed around the habitat. This was punctuated irregularly by a whooshing screech that Shoshanna did not like the sound of at all.
There were no real weapons in the Bellicia ecohood. But enraged engineering students could do quite a lot with found materials and an R&D-quality printer.
As the soycloud struggled to gain altitude, another whoosh made them all duck. An orange star exploded in the gloaming overhead. A faint smell of smoke tainted the breeze.
Wearily, Shoshanna initiated an infrared scan. “They’ve built a rocket launcher,” she told her followers. “Maybe it’ll blow up in their faces.” She had also discovered that the soycloud they were on could not go any higher. With the temperature now near freezing, its PHES thrusters had nothing to work with. In fact, they were losing altitude. “Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll move the other soyclouds. Stack them underneath us for shielding.” And cushioning, she thought, if this loss of power continues.
Win Khin said, “What if they go after my body?” His real self, of course, remained in his U-Vesta life support cubicle.
“Then too fucking bad for you,” Shoshanna said. She modulated her voice. “Just kidding. But maybe we do need to give them some further incentives to comply with our demands.” If fragging the refinery didn’t do it … “Hey, you guys,” she said to the VA middle managers who were shivering in a corner of the deck. “I know some of you have families down there.”
★
Cydney huddled next to Big Bjorn. He was the warmest thing on the soycloud, with the pelt of thick brown fur that bristled out of his t-shirt and torn cut-offs. “She’s insane,” she whispered.
“Well, I don’t think literally …”
“There was that thing with Mr. Macdonald. And now she’s letting these people call home, to put more pressure on VA. What’s she going to do next?”
“She can’t go too far,” Bjorn said. “These are good people. They won’t let her.”
“Are they good people, Bjorn? Or are they students who think the universe owes them justice, and Shoshanna’s the one to help them get it? Did you ever think, two days ago, that we’d be cruising on a soycloud while everyone in the habitat slowly freezes to death, and the STEM guys fire rockets at us?”
“No,” Bjorn said.
“And do you see anyone saying hey, wait a minute, this isn’t what I signed up for?”
“No.”
“People love power more than life itself, Bjorn. And what happens is you get accustomed to atrocities. I lived in LA, I know. They’re going to let her do whatever crosses her crazy little mind. She cut my ear off!”
“But you’re still filming, aren’t you?” Bjorn said quietly.
Cydney jumped. Then she snuggled closer to his side and touched her chunky necklace. “Microcam in one of the beads, wireless relay in another,” she whispered. “Shoshanna’s probably noticed. But she doesn’t care. She’s blocked outgoing signals from the hab, anyway.” Cydney stared into the murky distance. Other soyclouds were maneuvering closer, flocking around the one they were on. “I guess I’ve just discovered the limits of the media’s power to change things,” she said.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself.”
“I’m not. What I mean is … someone’s got to stop her, and a vid feed isn’t going to do it.”
At that moment, one of the STEM students’ improvised rockets struck a nearby soycloud. It was too damp to burn, but the missile knocked it onto a new trajectory. Shedding live plants and chunks of artificial soil, raining like a squeezed sponge, it veered towards their heads.
xxvii.
The Vesta Express travelled on around the cold little world. In the computer room of the R&D module, Elfrida stood behind Mendoza and the two Chinese, looking over their shoulders at the screen that Julian Satterthwaite was showing them.
It glowed the color known as death blue. On it floated an odd icon:
“Everyone gets the same thing,” Satterthwaite said. “Every time. We mapped its knowledge content areas and reasoning models, using a brute-force attack. Took forever: the thing has trillions of lines of code, mostly in a language that we don’t understand. We simply do not understand how it works. So we copied the whole thing to Bob. We have a probabilistically structured algorithm portfolio we use for our own thought experiments, and the idea was to apply heuristic solvers to the action architecture, which is obviously the first thing we’d want to figure out, for security reasons.”
Jimmy translated this gobbledygook for Wang Gulong. The Chinese expert nodded as if he understood. “Does it appear to employ nonmonotonic causal logic?” he asked, through Jimmy.
“It doesn’t appear to employ logic at all. Every solution we try results in the same answer: th
is.” Satterthwaite gestured at the signpost icon.
“Do you understand?” Elfrida whispered to Mendoza.
“Over my head.”
As Satterthwaite and Wang Gulong continued to talk, with Jimmy stuck in the middle as translator, Mendoza tugged Elfrida towards the far end of the room. No one looked up. That stealth vaper was still puffing away on his or cigarette, not being very stealthy—or so Elfrida thought, until they rounded the last partition. The vapor was not coming from a cigarette. It was seeping through a bunch of towels wedged underneath a door.
“Huh.” Mendoza licked his lips. “This is where we tell our curious little selves no. And again, no.”
“Speak for yourself,” Elfrida said. “Curiosity killed the cat, and I don’t want to be the cat. It’s an AI, isn’t it? They’ve developed an AI and it’s gone what you said. FOOM. Don’t you dare go near that door. Don’t—”
Hugh Meredith-Pike strolled around the partition. He grinned at Elfrida and kicked the door open. Fog swirled out.
“Kids, meet Bob.”
Through the billows of cold fog, Elfrida glimpsed an ordinary array of processor stacks. Jagged blocks of dry ice were piled up around them. The dry ice was sublimating at a rapid rate, producing the fog.
“Bob has developed suicidal ideations,” Meredith-Pike said. “He’s turned off his own cooling system. This is the CO2 we all breathe out; pipe it outside the train and it freezes. Clever kludge, but it reeks a bit of desperation, doesn’t it?”
“Shut that door!” someone yelled.
Meredith-Pike shut it and rearranged the towels.
“Is Bob an AI?” Elfrida said.
“No,” Meredith-Pike said. “Well, actually that’s a good question. He may be an AI, now. No one can get close enough to find out.”
“That icon,” Mendoza said. “When you click it, what happens?”
“Want to see?”
Meredith-Pike led them to the desk he had been given, which was already littered with energy bar wrappers and empty coffee pouches. He touched the signpost icon.
Immediately, text began to scroll down the screen.
Und Dasein ist meines wiederum je in dieser oder jener Weise zu sein. Es hat sich schon immer irgendwie entschieden, in welcher Weise Dasein je meines ist. Das Seiende, dem es in seinem Sein um dieses selbst geht, verhält sich zu seinem Sein als seiner eigensten Möglichkeit. Dasein ist je seine Möglichkeit und es »hat« sie nicht nur noch eigenschaftlich als ein Vorhandenes. Und weil Dasein wesenhaft je seine Möglichkeit ist, kann dieses Seiende in seinem Sein sich selbst »wählen«, gewinnen, es kann sich verlieren, bzw. nie und nur »scheinbar« gewinnen. Verloren haben kann es sich nur und noch nicht sich gewonnen haben kann es nur, sofern es seinem Wesen nach mögliches eigentliches, das heißt sich zueigen ist. Die beiden Seinsmodi der Eigentlichkeit und Uneigentlichkeit – diese Ausdrücke sind im strengen Wortsinne terminologisch gewählt – gründen darin, daß Dasein überhaupt durch Jemeinigkeit bestimmt ist. Die Uneigentlichkeit des Daseins bedeutet aber nicht etwa ein »weniger« Sein oder einen »niedrigeren« Seinsgrad. Die Uneigentlichkeit kann vielmehr das Dasein nach seiner vollsten Konkretion bestimmen in seiner Geschäftigkeit, Angeregtheit, Interessiertheit, Genußfähigkeit.
“Whaaaa?” Mendoza said.
“That’s German,” Elfrida said.
“Yes, we had figured that out,” Meredith-Pike said. The text kept scrolling at a comfortable reading pace. “Let it alone and it will run through the entire collected works of Heidegger.”
Elfrida flinched as if she had been struck. The name of Martin Heidegger, German philosopher of the 20th century, leader of the Teutonic school of existentialism, had become, fairly or unfairly, the worst word you could say in any human language.
“How did this happen?” Mendoza said.
“They haven’t seen fit to share that information with me.” Meredith-Pike shrugged. “Anyway, we’ll crack it.” Sitting down, he explained, “This text is a code, like the wrapping paper of a birthday present. There’s a galaxy of information packed in there, folded up in a given number of hidden dimensions. Despite what Jules says, it’s just a cryptanalysis problem, and as such, vulnerable to brute force. You might be able to help,” he added, looking up at them, as if the thought had just struck him.
“How?” Mendoza said.
“You’ve got BCIs, don’t you?”
“I haven’t,” Elfrida said.
“Well then, you. Just log onto Bob and get stuck in.”
“I’m not authorized … I don’t even have wifi access,” Mendoza said.
“Oh, I’ll fix you up. Hang on.” Meredith-Pike floated to his feet and walked away.
Mendoza whispered to Elfrida, “This is great. The minute I get that authorization, I’m calling my boss on Luna.”
“What can UNVRP do about it? They can’t send Star Force any faster than they already are.”
“They have to be told what’s going on here.”
“What if we get in trouble?”
“We’ll just have to risk that.” Mendoza’s face looked hard and remote, like the time he’d told her about his sister who got whacked by the PLAN.
Elfrida felt ashamed of herself for failing to match his courage. “There must be something I can do,” she muttered. “Maybe they’ll give me network access, too. I could call Petruzzelli. She might be close enough to help.”
An argument erupted on the other side of the room. Julian Satterthwaite stalked towards them, followed by Meredith-Pike.
“Guess that’s not happening,” Mendoza said.
Satterthwaite grabbed Elfrida by the arm, perhaps because she was closer, perhaps because she was smaller and easier to drag. He hustled her out of the room with Mendoza trailing after them. “We weren’t going to show you this. But fucking Błaszczykowski-Lee is gone, anyway. You might as well know what we’re dealing with.” Satterthwaite’s long face was ivory with rage. He hauled her along a ramp that spiraled away from the atrium and turned into a residential corridor. A frightened-looking woman stood outside a door blocked by a barricade of ergoforms, which had been jacked—manually locked—into braces that stretched across the corridor. Satterthwaite said, “Anything new to report?”
“No. He just keeps banging around in there.”
The door had a cartoon tacked to it that said: When I was a kid my dad told me I’d be an astronaut when I grew up, because all I did in school was take up space.
“’Scuse me.” Satterthwaite moved the ergoforms.
The door opened. The cabin was dark.
“Smith!” Satterthwaite yelled. “Smith, are you in there?”
Thump, thump, scuffle.
Satterthwaite plucked an engineer’s flashlight out of his breast pocket. It illuminated piles of clothes and blankets on the floor. The cabin looked like it had been hit by a bomb. An ergoform had been sliced—or torn—into ragged chunks. Red smeared the ergoform’s innards. It was blood.
A hissing sound came from the furthest corner. Satterthwaite’s flashlight found a bare foot, and then the rest of the man called Smith. He sat wedged into the corner, digging into his left temple with something metal-tipped. He had made a wound there. It was bleeding steadily. He sat in a puddle of blood. He did not appear to be aware of this. He raised his face to the light. It was a youngish, pudgy face with a ring in its left nostril. The hissing sound came from between its teeth. The second Elfrida saw its blank, dazzled eyes, she knew that this was not the face of a man called Smith, not anymore. It was not even human.
She screamed, tore loose from Satterthwaite’s grasp, and scrabbled backwards, tripping over the ergoforms that had been used to barricade the door.
Satterthwaite slammed the door. “Oh, Christ,” he said. “Christ have mercy.” He dragged the ergoforms back in front of the door. The sentry helped.
“He’s going to bleed to death,” Mendoza said. “He needs help.”
“So go back in there and help him. Be my guest.” Satterthwaite kicked the la
st ergoform into place. “He’s dismantled everything in that cabin that had electronics in it. The bed, the desk, his screen. He was a vid buff, he had a personal theater setup. Even the freaking light fixture. He’s doing something with the components … trying to augment himself. With any luck, he’ll bleed to death before he gets done. Then again, we haven’t had the best of luck recently.”
Satterthwaite faced Mendoza.
“That is what would have happened to you if you’d logged onto Bob using your BCI.”
“Not necessarily,” objected Hugh Meredith-Pike, who had followed them downstairs. He seemed unembarrassed. “You’ve only got one data point, Jules. You need to run another couple of experiments before we can hypothesize with any confidence that the program is lethal.”
“It was Błaszczykowski-Lee’s idea to try downloading it into people’s BCI memory crystals,” Satterthwaite said. “At least, thank fuck, we made poor old Smith disconnect from the wifi first. I also deleted his log-in so he can’t regain access. Hopefully, he can’t regain access. Perhaps I ought to take the wifi down altogether. We’ve lost the comms satellite, anyway.” He rubbed his eyes. “Infinite Fun Space! Christ!”
“He may be having fun in there,” Meredith-Pike said. “It’s a subjective thing, fun. I should know. Anyway, the point is that we don’t know whether it’s the Heidegger program doing this, or it’s just him. We need more data.”
“This is exactly how he was at Oxford,” Satterthwaite said to Elfrida and Mendoza. “Waltz in and take charge, regardless of not knowing thing one about what’s actually happening.”
“Let this guy try,” Meredith-Pike urged. “He seems the sensible sort. If he can’t handle it …”
Elfrida wrapped her arms around Mendoza and shouted, “You can’t have him! If you need more data, you can—no, you can’t do that to anyone else! That would be murder! Just forget about it!”
“We could use one of your phavatar operators, I suppose,” Meredith-Pike suggested to Satterthwaite, ignoring her. “They’re cupcakes, anyway.”
“Murderers!” Elfrida shouted.
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