Jun’s voice held a mocking edge. Kiyoshi ignored him—always the best way to deal with insubordinate little brothers. He composed an email and sent it, not feeling very optimistic. When he was done, he retrieved the spectrum analyzer from his workbelt. Holding his breath, he checked the sighting apparatus again.
It responded normally.
Kiyoshi let out his breath. Maybe Jun had finally accepted that blowing the thing away might be their only choice, no matter what—or who—else got blown away, too.
★
The Vesta Express lay at rest. A few kilometers ahead, small explosions continued to pop, as if someone were holding a fireworks show at the refinery. All the liquid hydrogen had burnt up, but the superheated wreckage of the autoclave glowed yellow-white against the black horizon.
Dangerously close to that inferno, tiny figures swarmed around the obstruction on the track.
It wasn’t as bad as they’d feared. Elfrida had been expecting a Biblical flood of molten metal covering the tracks, but all that had happened was that one of the handler bots had been hurled into the canyon when the autoclave ruptured. Now it lay head down on the track like a dead dinosaur. The refinery crew thought they could move it, given leverage and time. Leverage would come from a gantry, one of those that had positioned the hydrogen tanks for transfer into the launch cradle. The phavatars were cutting the gantry up with lasers to make, in effect, the solar system’s biggest tyre iron.
The second essential commodity—time—they also had, Elfrida thought hopefully.
She was monitoring the shift manager’s display. She had also been making little mouse-like trips to peek through the pressure-seal door into the R&D module. The silence was ominous, but nothing seemed to have changed.
She was steeling herself to take another peek when her HUD flashed. A new email from Kiyoshi Yonezawa. The lying bastard. Was he going to explain why he’d made all those trips to 99984 Ravilious?
She read the email.
Seconds later she was flying along the ramps of the de Grey Institute, screaming, “Turn off the comms! Turn off the comms!”
Satterthwaite jumped from the ramp above and landed in front of her. “What’s going on?”
His eyes were red, his lips bitten. She blurted, without stopping to wonder whether this might be the final straw for him, “You have a Ku-band transmitter. The thing’s got it. The Heidegger program. It’s using it to send itself around the solar system. It’s phishing. Turn it off! You have to turn it off!”
“That’s not possible,” Satterthwaite said.
“Why? Can’t you operate the transmitter without Bob?”
“The Heidegger program can’t be doing that. We’ve isolated Bob from every imaginable output, sandboxed the analysis software, blocked wireless signals from the computer room. Do you understand the concept of an air gap? It’s not physically possible …” Satterthwaite stopped. “Smith. He was a film buff. He used to swap vid files with his friends on Triton. And we locked him in there with his home theater setup.”
Satterthwaite started to run, shouting, “Anil! Clark! Udo! Get down here!”
Three men hurtled past Elfrida. She huddled into the curve of the ramp, hugging herself.
Bangs and crashes echoed from below, as if furniture were being violently moved.
A man started to scream in German. Elfrida did not know the voice. It had to be Smith. There was another bang, and Smith switched into English. “Squabbling monkeys! Factionalists! Squatters! Crony capitalists! Public-sector employees! Demagogues! Philistines! Cultural chauvinists! Polyglots! Religious fanatics! Environmentalists! Utopians! Purebloods!”
Abruptly, Smith’s voice fell silent. Elfrida’s nerve broke. She fled up the ramp to the computer room.
Jimmy Liu and Wang Gulong were sitting in a vacant cubicle, eating pouch noodles.
“We’re finished,” Elfrida said, collapsing against a partition. “Everything’s finished. The solar system, everything. You guys might as well go home.”
They couldn’t very easily do that, of course. She just felt like saying it.
“What happened?” Jimmy demanded.
She told them. “So it’s been broadcasting its source code on the Ku-band. It’s probably duplicated itself inside a million other computers by now. This is it. The apocalypse. We’re all going to die.” She wiped her eyes. “I was baptized a while back. I wonder if it really makes any difference.”
Wang Gulong turned to his screen and started typing. Jimmy slurped another mouthful of pouch noodles. “We are all going to die, but not today, I hope. Luckily, we are on the dark side of Vesta, so the transmitter is oriented to the outer solar system. Smith can’t be broadcasting for more than one hour, maximum. Worst-case scenario, some spaceships will get infected. Maybe the signal reaches Triton, if we are very unlucky. What’s out there? A few corporate R&D facilities and some extreme snowboarders. That is the most we can lose.”
“Oh,” Elfrida said, feeling a bit more hopeful.
“Even if the Heidegger program got access to internet, I am thinking no big deal.”
“No big deal?” Elfrida echoed. “No big deal?”
Jimmy never got a chance to respond. Satterthwaite and his friends tottered into the room. Elfrida stared. And stared.
Bright red droplets of blood spattered all four men from head to foot, as if they’d been fighting with a high-powered firehose of the stuff.
Satterthwaite seemed to be vaguely aware of his gore-splattered appearance. He wiped an arm across his face. “We had to kill him,” he explained.
“The Infinite Fun show is hereby cancelled,” said one of the other men. “Ha, ha.”
“Anil, notify corporate,” Satterthwaite said. “Tell them to warn people. It’ll ruin what’s left of our reputation, but oh well. If the thing’s escaped, we ought to provide a public service announcement, at least.“
“The ISA will intercept it,” said the man named Anil.
“Try using the Ku-band,” Satterthwaite said with a hollow snigger. “Of course, you’ll have to wait until we rotate back to the dayside.” He sat down. “This is a nightmare. An utter, bloody nightmare. That—thing. What it had done to him. The pain … dear God, the pain it must have inflicted on him … He had mutilated himself. One can’t imagine … Perhaps he was fighting it. Perhaps he was actually trying to counter its influence. Perhaps he could have recovered, if he’d had the right treatment … But I killed him. I killed him.”
Jimmy cleared his throat. Elfrida made a shut up! gesture at him. Couldn’t he see this was not the time to expound his theory that the Heidegger program was no big deal? It clearly was a big deal. The biggest deal the solar system had had to face since … since Mars.
With that thought, she came close to acknowledging what no one had yet said out loud.
The Heidegger program was an agent of the PLAN.
Satterthwaite looked up tiredly. “By the way, where’s Meredith-Pike got to?”
★
Hugh Meredith-Pike was not far away. He’d gotten tired of Satterthwaite’s evasions, and of getting nowhere with his cryptanalysis. He wanted to know what they were really dealing with.
Satterthwaite had dropped a number of hints that convinced Meredith-Pike ‘the thing’ was actually a thing, not an abstract software-based problem. That made sense to Meredith-Pike. There was a strong argument that AI could not become AGI, much less ASI, in the absence of a physical vessel that provided it with, well, the same sensory inputs as a human being. Evidence from the field of practical robotics broadly substantiated this notion. The smarter an MI you wanted, the better a body you had to build for it.
So the odds were that the Heidegger program had come to the de Grey Institute in a human-like vessel.
Acting on this premise, Meredith-Pike had called up a schematic of the de Grey Institute and identified several likely places where ‘the thing’ might be concealed. Then he slipped out of the computer room and went hunting. He was looking for a p
havatar, or one of the geminoid-class bots coyly known as ‘companions,’ that would have been misguidedly upgraded here, or imported from an envelope-pushing startup on Luna, only to be (somehow) infected with the Heidegger program. Hadn’t there been a similar outbreak of trouble a couple of years ago? (Meredith-Pike was remembering the Galapagos Incident all wrong. To be fair, the news reports had been garbled.)
The first place he looked was Błaszczykowski-Lee’s sumptuous cabin. Not under the bed, not in the wardrobe, not in the spherical bath complete with snorkel attachment.
The second place he looked was the walk-in freezer, where the de Grey Institute’s gourmet chef had squirreled away a cornucopia of imported ingredients. There he found it.
Meredith-Pike swore out loud and took a step backwards.
He knew this had to be ‘the thing.’ But he had not expected to find himself staring at the naked body of a young girl.
xxxi.
Shoshanna’s malware had already captured the Bellicia-Arruntia spaceport’s hub, so it didn’t take her and Dr. James long to steal a Flyingsaucer.
In service all over the solar system, the Flyingsaucer boosted cargoes and passengers from micro-gravity environments to larger ships in orbit. Functionally a lighter version of the industrial-use Superlifter, it was officially called the Flyingsaucer because the manufacturers had long ago thrown up their hands and admitted that people were right: it did look like one. The toroidal form factor was simply practical, but folk humor trumped logic. The company had even changed its name to LGM Industries and adopted an eponymous mascot of a little green man, which bowed and grinned annoyingly in the corner of Shoshanna’s screen until she overrode the autopilot.
“What was LGM Industries originally called?” said Dr. James, talking to break the silence. He had gone a bit green himself, as the Flyingsaucer soared around the curve of Vesta in a steep ballistic trajectory.
“Toyota,” Shoshanna said. “It was a Japanese company.”
“Ah; so that’s why they changed their name.”
“Probably.”
“Some people say that the Japanese are the new Jews. Homeless exiles, condemned to wander in time and space.”
“That’s bullshit. The Jews are the new Jews. Always have been, always will be.”
“Are you religious?”
“What do you think?”
“No.”
“Right.”
“And yet your name—Shoshanna, rose of Judah; your parents must have wanted to pay tribute to their heritage.”
“Oh, c’mon, Professor. You can be a Jew without believing in God. I don’t know what your personal beliefs are, but you must’ve met plenty of Jewish atheists. That’s what my parents are.”
Carrying on the conversation with half her brain, while she piloted the Flyingsaucer, she was aware that she was telling him too much about herself, and would have to eliminate him as a result. She wondered if she was doing this because she wanted to eliminate him anyway, and just needed a reason. Then she reflected that this kind of self-doubt was a very Jewish reaction to have.
“Anyway, it’s not the twenty-second century anymore,” she said. “People aren’t as scared of sounding ethnic.”
“True. There’s a greater acceptance of diversity. We’ve come full circle, in a manner of speaking.”
“Still got a long way to go. That’s why the Friends of David Reid agitated for the establishment of a literature course.”
The optic feed screen displayed the refinery. She smiled at the destruction her DIY missile had wrought. Better yet, the train was right there, halted by an obstruction on the track. Perfect.
“Literature is the key to understanding who we are and where we come from,” she said. “Like, I’ll never forget the first time I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. It was like the author was talking to me, telling me that it was OK to be different. But you can’t find those books anywhere, because they’re too pureblood-y. Whatever. That’s just stupid.”
Dr. James looked at her with a half-smile. “Do you really believe that? Wasn’t your wish list of demands just dezinformatsiya?”
“Yes and no.” Shoshanna calculated the Flyingsaucer’s angle of descent and then gave the professor her full attention for the first time. “I’ll be clear. What we’re fighting for? Is this. Precisely this. A podunk university in an asteroid crater 250 million kilometers from earth, complete with student activists, a lake that’s too full of algae to swim in, and a really good Goan restaurant. I could go on. We’re fighting for Zen gardeners on the moon, the Semi-Professional League of Kabaddi in the Inner Belt, fish farming on Europa, Wagner performed by nudists in the Andalusian desert, the electroceuticals industry, the hunter-gatherer movement, Oktoberfest, chess clubs, the re-wilding of the Congo, the opening ceremonies at the G30, Sufi dancers, homeschoolers, the perfect espresso drunk on a foggy afternoon on a bench overlooking the Seine, and even that crazy bunch of ultra-expansionists who want to splart an engine onto Pluto and drive it to Alpha Centauri. I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface. Human beings are crazy, amazing, creative, stupid, anachronistic, quarrelsome, and just generally the best thing that has ever happened to this solar system; possibly to this galaxy; possibly to the entire fucking universe, because as far as we know, there is no other life out there, let alone intelligent life. And yet the whole dang show hangs by a thread. The ISA is that thread. Am I getting my point across? We’re fighting for you.”
Dr James said, “Then why treat the private sector as an adversary?”
“Because,” Shoshanna snarled, “the private sector accomplishes a lot, but when they fuck up, it’s everyone else who pays. See below.”
At the moment, below was a literal term, as the FlyingSaucer descended towards the Vesta Express on a trajectory not that much different from that of the satellite that had come this way a few hours ago. “Urk,” Dr. James said, covering his mouth with his hand and his claw. So Shoshanna got the last word, but it did not compensate her for the sight she saw as the resolution of her optic feed improved. A bunch of people—no, phavatars—were dashing for cover. They left behind a jerry-rigged arrangement on the south side of the cutting, which was obviously intended to lever the obstruction off the track.
The metalfuckers just never stopped trying to run away from their own misdeeds.
Well, she’d stop them.
The Flyingsaucer landed as lightly as a sycamore seed on the higher ground south of the canyon. Its jackstands skidded on a patch of regolith scoured down to glass by its thruster exhaust. Shoshanna hurried to the airlock. Dr. James came with her. They sprinted towards the Vesta Express. Dr. James easily kept up, bouncing along like some kind of bizarre two-legged insect in his custom spacesuit.
“Help!” Shoshanna cried over every available comms channel as she ran. “Help, help!”
It had worked for the Chinese.
But answer came there none.
★
Meredith-Pike backed out of the freezer. Then he went in again. Shivering, he bent over the body of the girl. She lay curled in the fetal position behind some boxes of salmon filets. She had been zipped up in a sleeping bag, which Meredith-Pike now opened far enough to see that she was, indeed, naked as the day she was born. “Sleeping Beauty,” Meredith-Pike murmured, inappositely.
The girl had a lumpen, flat-nosed face with a bulgy forehead. Her skin was the exact café au lait shade of ‘flesh-tone’ in a box of crayons, just a bit lighter than Meredith-Pike’s own. Her hair, a shade or two darker, stood out in a three-centimeter nimbus. She looked about fourteen.
“Need a kiss?” he whispered.
In a loud voice, the freezer observed that its door was open. Meredith-Pike jumped out of his skin.
Tension singing down his nerves, he dragged the girl’s corpse out of the freezer. He assumed she was a corpse, but watched her carefully, taking nothing for granted. There were researchers working on mtDNA tweaks that would allow humans to function better in extrem
e cold—useful for colonists on the Jovian moons, say, whose habitats could then be kept at arctic temperatures, lowering their energy bills. It was -10° in the freezer.
“Where did you come from?” Meredith-Pike asked the girl, laying her on the kitchen floor.
The kitchen was a mess. Presumably the researchers had programmed the housekeeping bots to stay out so they wouldn’t find the girl. Flour and chocolate chips dusted the floor from someone’s cookie-baking session.
“Why did they put you in there?”
She was definitely cold-adapted. Chunky-bodied, flat-faced, with a narrow little nose. Was that a blush of pink returning to her cheeks? Could she be alive?
“Here’s my theory,” Meredith-Pike said. “You’re a Martian.” He chuckled. “This is huge. Huge.” His intracranial implants worked harder, pumping out endorphins and serotonin to compensate for his instinctive urge, which was to run away screaming. “No one was even sure that you existed. To catch one of you, dead or alive … this is huge,” he repeated. “You ought to be in a cutting-edge government research facility. Not hidden behind the frozen fishfingers in a train on a bloody asteroid.” He leaned forward. “Are you breathing?”
The girl sat up. She winced and rubbed her neck. Her eyes fastened on his; they were unnaturally reflective, clearly augmented. Her bosom heaved.
“Oh my God,” Meredith-Pike said.
She made a mewling sound. Pointed at her mouth, shook her head, and mewled again.
“Can’t you talk?”
“Oooahnhhh.” She pointed at his head and then her own.
“Oh, I see! You want to text.” Meredith-Pike blinked up his comms program. Then he hesitated. Distantly, as it were from beyond the waves of bliss and upon-a-peak-in-Darien excitement pulsing through him, came the thought that this might not be a very good idea.
“I don’t have your ID,” he stalled.
The girl seemed to understand. She leaned over and wrote with one finger in the flour that dusted the floor.
★
Standing on the roof of the de Grey Institute, Shoshanna inspected the module’s airlock. It was a standard valve-type. To hack it, she’d need a route into the Vesta Express’s hub, and they still hadn’t taken the bait of her cries for help.
The Vesta Conspiracy Page 27