The Vesta Conspiracy
Page 25
Jun was sitting by the ColdfireTM, a product placement that helped to pay the development costs of Homestead Venus. It was an air conditioner that looked like holographic blue flames flickering in a stone hearth. Jun sipped orange juice, patted the bench facing him. “Come here,” he said to Elfrida in Japanese.
She sat down.
“We’re going to ask you to do something. Something big. That’s why my brother is in a bad mood. He doesn’t think we should ask this of anybody. But I have faith in you.”
“Why?”
“You’re brave.”
Unexpectedly, Elfrida’s eyes filled with tears. This was really happening, not just in the sim. “I wish you were right,” she gulped. “But I’m scared out of my skull.”
“That’s what courage is. Being scared out of your skull, and doing it anyway.”
“What—what do you need me to do?”
Jun did not answer immediately. He said, “I don’t have all the memories that … that I should have. I wasn’t augmented. I didn’t have implants recording everything I ever did. So I don’t know … all I know is what other people have told me.”
Elfrida understood that he was referring to the last hours of his own life, and what had happened afterwards. “I can tell you everything I remember,” she said. A few minutes ago, she wouldn’t even have thought herself capable of talking about it. But he had called her brave. She couldn’t wimp out now. “I even have data. I was wearing a borrowed Star Force Marine’s suit. It automatically recorded everything that … everything. They gave me the data dump. I was supposed to review it as part of my therapy. I’ve never actually looked at it. But I could give you a copy, absolutely!”
“That would be great,” Jun said. He smiled, and it transformed his heavy-browed face the way she remembered.
“You’re not going to love what’s in the data, though,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I ate you.” It spurted out, a raw confession. “The suit did it. I mean, it wasn’t like I was gnawing on chunks of flesh. It processed the, your proteins and liquids into a form I could consume. I would have died otherwise. I was drifting for nine days. I didn’t want to do it. But the suit just … no, I’m making excuses. I had to authorize it, and the suit used my hands to … to … oh, I can’t bear to remember,” she almost shrieked.
She stared at the floor. Unshed tears blurred the slaty sheen of the flags. Jun touched her shoulder. “It’s OK. No, really, it’s OK. I believe that God is capable of reassembling our atoms on the Day of Judgement, regardless of where they may have ended up in the meantime.”
“Father Hirayanagi told me it was a grave sin. He said I had to repent.”
“Well, it looks to me like you have repented. But he was right, of course. Cannibalism is not justifiable.”
“My suit said …”
“It was a Star Force Marine’s suit. Not exactly a theological authority. No, I think you ought to find a priest, make a real confession, and get absolution. Otherwise, this is going to be on your conscience as long as you live.”
Elfrida was silent.
Kiyoshi stood watching, arms folded.
“I’m sorry,” Jun said.
“You’re sorry?”
“That I put you in this position.”
“Crap on that! I owe my life to you. Literally.”
“Not to me,” Jun said in a whisper. “To him. To who I was.”
Outside, the olive trees rustled in the breeze that filtered past Elfrida’s windbreaks. One of the goats wandered indoors, chewing its cud.
“May I?” Elfrida whispered, reaching out to Jun.
He gave her his hand. She stroked its tawny back with her thumbs. Frustratingly, her home immersion kit’s gloves provided only basic feedback: warmth, firmness, resilience. She couldn’t feel the texture of his skin.
“May I?”
The taste function worked better. Receiving a nod from him, she bowed her face over his hand. She touched her lips to it and then tentatively put out her tongue. She tasted the gritty dust that stuck to everything here. The sweetness of orange juice. The salty tang of living skin.
Kiyoshi said, “I feel like I should tell you two to get a room.”
Elfrida sat up, cheeks blazing. Jun laughed. “I may be dead, but I’m still celibate.”
“You feel real. You taste real,” Elfrida cried. “But you’re not real. This is so confusing for me.”
“For me, too,” Jun said, and his eyes went dark, not a human darkness, but the darkness of the star-filled vacuum. She realized he was deliberately doing this to remind her that he was not a human being, but the avatar of a machine intelligence. She swallowed and straightened up, primly crossing her legs.
“You actually don’t look like I expected, Elfrida,” Kiyoshi said. “I’m assuming this isn’t realistic?” He gestured at her avatar.
For reasons of cheapness, as well as cussed individualism, Elfrida still used the avatar she had built when she was in her early twenties. It was a pimply-faced East Asian teenager, even plumper than she was in real life, with black-and-white pinwheels for irises, and a tattoo of all five members of Las Nerditas on one thigh. At least her kaftan hid that. “No, genius, it isn’t realistic,” she said. “I’m just a baseline human. No augments, nothing. What about you?”
“What you see is what you get.”
“That could be really important, actually,” Jun said.
“What could?” Elfrida said.
“The fact that you’re not augmented. No BCI? That’s very good news. It means you’re probably immune to the Heidegger program.”
“Oh my God, that brain-jacking thing? I told you about that? It’s terrible. That poor guy. He was, like, trying to augment himself with dismantled ergoforms.”
“He wasn’t connected to the internet?” Jun said.
“No, they—”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Kiyoshi interrupted. “The apocalypse will not arrive in a tsunami of spam.”
“Actually, that sounds pretty plausible to me,” Elfrida said, sniggering nervously.
“It might work more like a virus, attacking selectively. Either way, we don’t want to risk it,” Jun said. “The thing has to be destroyed, along with any computers—and people—that it’s infected. We wouldn’t be killing them: they’re already dead.” He grimaced.
“I’m all for that.” Elfrida felt the pressure of time ticking away. “So what’s your big idea?”
Kiyoshi said, “The thing is on the Vesta Express. Seems like a pretty odd place to store something that dangerous, doesn’t it? But actually, they had a good reason for putting it there.”
“Is this just speculation? Or …”
“It’s on the Vesta Express,” Kiyoshi continued, “because the Vesta Express is a rail launcher. They figured that if their research went sideways, they would be able to shoot the whole mess into space. So it was actually a safety precaution. Your guess is as good as mine why they haven’t implemented it yet.”
“Two reasons, off the top of my head. All the senior guys bugged out. And the supercomputer’s down. So maybe there’s no one who can initiate the launch procedure, let alone hack it so that the de Grey Institute itself would be launched into space, which I guess you would have to do.”
“Not a major challenge. Accelerate to launch speed, and then kill the magnetic field that keeps the train on the track. There might be some hacking involved to get past the security checks. I’ll walk you through it.”
So now she knew what they were going to ask of her. But it didn’t matter whether she could do it, or whether they were crazy to even imagine that she, a non-techie, could launch the Vesta Express into outer space. “It won’t work.”
“Yes, it will, “ Kiyoshi said. He knelt in front of her and took her hands, gazing intensely into her eyes. “Listen to me. It will work. You can do it.”
“I can’t. Because the train’s decelerating as we speak. We can’t go anywhere. There’s an
obstruction on the track!”
★
“Who were you talking to?” Mendoza said.
“A couple of guys from 11073 Galapagos. One’s a smuggler, the other one’s a ghost.”
Mendoza stared at her. He raised both hands and took an exaggerated pace backwards.
Elfrida laughed. “It’s OK. We’ve got a plan.” She told him about it.
His reaction—astonished, then thoughtful—went a long way towards convincing her that the Yonezawa brothers were not crazy. This just might work.
xxix.
On the bridge of the St. Francis, Kiyoshi sat at the pilot’s workstation, a raised throne of titanium and gold. Screensavers of Japanese dragons coiled over the displays at his knees. It was a far cry from the nest of rags he actually was reclining in on the bridge of the Unicorn. He watched Jun flitting from officer to officer, pretending to be instructing them in their duties.
Having opposed Kiyoshi earlier, the MI was now trying to please. But Kiyoshi was still pissed off, and determined to keep his options open.
He raised one hand and chopped it down in a sweeping motion.
The St. Francis vanished. His limbs seemed to rearrange themselves into the sprawled posture he had, in reality, been in all along. He floated upright in his nest and pulled his eyemask off.
Jun sat on one of the dusty consoles on the far side of the bridge, knees drawn up, doing his gargoyle impersonation.
Kiyoshi froze. His voice came out as a croak.
“What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you to wake up.”
“I switched the sim off. You shouldn’t be able to do this.”
“Sometimes,” Jun said, “I’m not sure myself what I can and can’t do. It’s probabilistic. I’m the sum of a bunch of bootstrapped processing clusters. My head is a coil gun, my feet are radiator fins, and my heart is a vacuum.”
“We need to get you a real body soon.”
Jun had said to Elfrida that Kiyoshi was too cheap to buy him a body, but he’d been kidding. The truth was that Kiyoshi didn’t want to settle for anything less than the best, and he didn’t have the money for the best, yet. That’s why he’d sold the thing to the University of Vesta in the first place. It had netted him S50,000, which he’d been pleased with until the boss-man had told him he’d been ripped off.
“When this is over,” he began.
“Yeah, yeah,” Jun said. “Right now, you need to know that we’re dangerously close to maxing out our waste heat radiation capacity. I’ve reduced thrust just enough so the tokamak doesn’t melt. We’re past the flip point, decelerating towards 4 Vesta. ETA five thirty-eight six from now, 14:25.40 Greenwich time. I’m running a full readiness check on the Wetblanket system. I’ll deploy the hull maintenance bots to fix any mechanical issues. Meanwhile, the passengers are freaking out. You should go and reassure them. That’s the one thing I can’t do.”
Kiyoshi uncoiled into the stale air. His IV line brought him up short. He unplugged it. Drops of fluid drifted towards the rubberized floor. Under maximum thrust, the apparent gravity aboard the Unicorn was about 0.3 gees. Since the Unicorn had not thrust this hard since 2280, the bridge was now strewn with objects Kiyoshi had lost track of years ago, from empty food pouches to a hand-sculpted scale model of Notre Dame that a passenger had given him. He remembered the Pietà in Elfrida Goto’s sim—life-size, staggeringly detailed, dominating the end of the room opposite the fireplace. How did she live with that thing?
He rolled his sleeve down over his cubital port. “It’s weird seeing you here, that’s all.”
Jun was tidying up the mess. “You can switch me off if you like. Just log out of the hub.”
Kiyoshi logged out, and it was the housekeeper bot tidying up, scurrying around on gecko treads. Log in, and Jun was back. Of course, Jun wasn’t really there. He was a phantom, projected on Kiyoshi’s retinal interface by the hub.
Kiyoshi felt stupidly relieved, and at the same time, disappointed. There were no miracles. There never had been. The universe was a dumb agglomeration of matter.
“I just have one question,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Are you still an MI? Or …” He was really asking: Do you still have to obey me?
“As far as I know, yeah,” Jun said.
Words sprang to the tip of Kiyoshi’s tongue: So, prove it by performing readiness checks on the coil gun and the missile battery.
At the last moment, he decided not to force the issue. I’ll do it myself, later.
He left the bridge and braced himself to confront 63 frightened Neu Ordnung Amish.
★
Elfrida jogged back through the de Grey Institute. It was eerily quiet. In the atrium, the water sculpture had changed shape. Taller and thinner, it leaned the other way. It was reacting to the train’s deceleration, which Elfrida could also feel.
She avoided the residential corridor where the thing formerly known as Smith was incarcerated. It felt like skirting the tiger habitat at the zoo. She had the same feeling, redoubled, as she manually searched the computer at the shift manager’s desk in the support module. The Heidegger program’s icon stayed anchored in the corner of the screen, no matter what program she opened.
Aha, this must be it.
“Sharlene?”she typed.
The phavatar operators lay immobile on their scattered couches. At the same time, the screen displayed a lounge area where a bunch of people were standing around, talking in nervous bursts of chatter that showed up as subtitles. This was a 2D representation of the Virgin Resources back office, the virtual space where the refinery crew coordinated their operations.
“Sharlene?”
They stared up at the ceiling. In their sim, her voice would seem to have come from the tannoy. A slender, beautiful blonde touched her chest.
“Hi. I’m Elfrida. Remember, we met at the refinery? You, uh, threw a party for us. That was very kind. Do you guys still have access to your phavatars?”
“Yes,” Sharlene said. “The missile, or whatever it was, landed in the handler yard. The impact wrecked the autoclave, but we weren’t directly hit, so we were able to escape. Right now we’re up on the hill behind the refinery, watching the flames. We haven’t heard from corporate at all. Do you have any further information or instructions for us?”
“When you say flames, are we talking a house fire? Or …”
“We’re talking Mount Fuji. Have you ever looked into the business end of a fusion drive?”
“Uh, no.”
“Nor have I. It would be the last thing you ever saw. But just to give you an idea, what we manufacture here is liquid hydrogen. Also known as spaceship propellant. Fire doesn’t need oxygen to burn. It just needs an oxidizer, and unfortunately, several of the chemicals we use at the refinery fall into that category. So, what we’re looking at is a chemical fire that is almost as hot as spaceship exhaust. About 3,000 degrees Celsius.”
“Is it radioactive?”
“Maybe that explanation was misleading. There is no fusion occurring. No radioactivity.”
Elfrida leaned against the shift manager’s desk. “Can you guys get down there? I’m informed that there’s an obstruction on the ringrail. We need to clear the track.”
The phavatar operators conferred. “What’s the timeframe?” Sharlene asked.
“As soon as possible. Because actually, the train is coming.” She stared at the unmoving operators’ bodies. “We’re coming.” What was the relationship between these lively people and their mortal carcasses? They had to care about them, surely?
“We’ll give it a try,” Sharlene said. “By the way, what are you doing on the V-Express?”
“Trying to stop your colleagues from destroying the solar system,” Elfrida said.
On the far side of the room, a bloated whale of a woman raised both arms and gave Elfrida the thumbs-up. “Go get ‘em,” Sharlene said. “And if you get the chance, punch Satterthwaite in the kisser for me. I hat
e that smug bastard. He’s just the type to destroy the solar system because he’s having a bad day.”
★
Cydney slithered hand over hand down a ribbed hose that pulsated and jerked. Rain fell on her in ropy splashes, making the hose slippery. The person above her kept kicking her in the head and shouting at her to move faster. Clods of artificial soil pattered down on them.
The hose was the irrigation pipe of the soycloud they had been riding. In normal times, it was used to suck water up from Lake Olbers. Now they were using it as an emergency escape route.
When the STEM guys hit one of the other soyclouds with a rocket, it had crashed into theirs. The combined weight of two soyclouds was too much for one set of PHES thrusters to hold up, especially since the PHES had already been failing: thermal updrafts had been few and far between since Shoshanna switched off the sun.
The grotesquely mated soyclouds had lurched into an uncontrolled descent, from a height of 2,000 meters.
Shoshanna had kept her head. Cydney had to give the bitch that. Before they were hit, she’d already been maneuvering the other soyclouds underneath theirs, to shield them from the rockets. She had completed that maneuver while they fell. Now, their soycloud was the top layer in a swaying stack of green pancakes. Resting on each other’s treetops, they continued to sink, but more slowly, thrusting in unison for all they were worth. The idea was to slow down their descent enough that they would land on the ground, rather than crash. It might have been smarter to stay on the top soycloud and wait, but someone had panicked and dashed for the irrigation pipe, and a stampede ensued.
It was nearly dark in the shadow of the soycloud overhead, so Cydney didn’t see the ground until she touched it. Of course, it wasn’t the ground. It was the next soycloud down. People scurried for the maintenance access hatch that led to the next irrigation pipe. She stumbled after them, her legs rubbery. Overhead, branches cracked. Twigs fell, and more rain. Their soycloud was settling lower, gradually impaling itself on the trees of the one below.
The thought of being crushed between two soyclouds galvanized her. She shoved people out of the way to reach the next pipe. The Friends of David Reid had disintegrated into a bunch of terrified individuals. It was everyone for him-, her-, or zirself.