Cydney then staged a more muscular intervention. Big Bjorn had rounded up the surviving Friends of David Reid (including David Reid himself, sprung from hospital) and a few other students who did not have BCIs. They fought hand to hand with the PLAN’s meat puppets (as everyone in the system was now calling those infected by the Heidegger program), as well as anyone who refused to wait in line. Cydney’s unthinking phrase, “This is some Cro-Magnon shit,” echoed around the solar system, as images emerged of students, professors, and baristas clubbing each other with homemade guns that had run out of ammo. It went on for hour after bloody hour, while people escaped in small groups.
The true test of the Friends of David Reid came when the PLAN’s phavatars attacked them. For a whole sol, the phavatars had simply ignored the evacuation and continued processing people through the university’s Francis Galton Biomedicine Research Center. Perhaps the surgery ran out of kit, leaving Marmaduke, Butto, Lotta, and the rest at loose ends. Or perhaps it dawned on the AI animating them, as it emerged from its purloined computing resources like a womb-wet cyclops, that no self-respecting supervillain would let people get away.
The phavatars charged up the hill and plowed into the crowds waiting at the Bremen Lock. They ripped off limbs, twisted off heads, and hurled them into the air. Pandemonium rippled across the crater’s inner slope. Screams sounded like the crying of birds in the thin air.
Cydney was ready. “Do it,” she said to Elfrida.
“Do it,” Elfrida said to her new friend, Colonel Oleg Threadley of the ISA.
“Do it,” Colonel Threadley said to his crew.
A hail of missiles stormed towards Vesta and blew up the power plant that provided Bellicia with electricity.
Instantly, the grid failed.
The air stopped circulating.
The wifi went down.
And the PLAN’s phavatars, dependent as they were on wireless charging—for they had long since exhausted their onboard power reserves—slumped in place like domestic maidbots that some naughty child had nudged out of their operating area.
Cydney bent double, panting, and wiped something dark and gooey out of her eyes.
The sun mirrors, stuck at their brightest setting, bathed the battlefield in the weak but pitiless light of another Vestan day.
It took another twenty-four hours to get everyone out. The last evacuees had to be carried out, breathing supplementary oxygen. With the air circulation down, the atmosphere had decayed into a noxious haze of CO2 and particulate matter, contaminated by the fires that continued to smoulder in town. Cydney, at her own insistence, was the last person of all to be stretchered on board the Kekào.
“My daddy always said,” she gasped, “utopia is for suckers. Guess he was right.”
★
“I’m filing suit for seventeen trillion spiders in compensation,” said Sir Harry Persson, whose ship was still a week away from Vesta. “And that’s just for the rail launcher. You slebs are going to rue the day you targeted this company. I have friends on the President’s Advisory Council. ”
Over the encrypted channel connecting their ships, Colonel Oleg Threadley said, “I’m on the President’s Advisory Council. And I’m not really a colonel, either.”
He went to do some other stuff. Thirty minutes went by.
“Surprised?” Threadley sent, when he came back to find that Persson still hadn’t responded. “Well, I wouldn’t expect a mere corporate tycoon to know how the world works.”
He went for lunch. Halfway through his composed salad, he was summoned back to the secure comms room. Persson, on the screen, looked twenty years older than he had this morning.
“You win. I’ll settle for a guarantee that Virgin Atomic will not be prosecuted for our alleged role in this tragedy. Hell, after the survivors have extorted their pound of flesh, there’ll be nothing left for you to expropriate, anyway.”
Threadley informed his superiors that Persson had agreed to keep his mouth shut. He sent Persson a non-disclosure agreement to that effect.
“By the way,” Persson added when he returned the documentation, “I’m keeping my island. Separately incorporated in Nauru. The stakeholders won’t get their grubby little fingers on that. Come and visit when you’re back on Earth; we can talk about how you ended your information blackout of 4 Vesta at precisely the moment when our problems stopped being the ISA’s fault, and turned into a system-wide edumercial for the ISA itself. I expect I’ll be able to chuckle about it by that time.”
Threadley himself chuckled when he heard this. The CEO wasn’t slow—just out of touch. Aloud, he said, “Fine. You keep your island. We’re keeping Błaszczykowski-Lee, Satterthwaite, and Meredith-Pike.”
★
None of this, of course, was publicized. Judging by the news feeds, you would have thought Cydney had evacuated 100,000 people all by herself. Not a word was said about the involvement of the Chinese. That two transports had fortunately been on hand was acknowledged, but not what flag they flew. This was by agreement between the UN and Chinese governments. The former wanted the credit for itself. The latter did not want it known that the Liberty Village experiment had been sanctioned in the first place.
But in Hebei Province, in a posh arboreal bubbleburb, the grieving friends and families of Jimmy Liu and Wang Gulong vowed to try again.
Meanwhile, in Vesta orbit, and in conference rooms on Earth populated by very important and grumpy people who had not had any sleep in days, the maneuvering continued at a frenetic pace.
xxxix.
Elfrida participated in a low-level meeting in Toronto. The delegates sat around wrought iron tables pushed together on a patio wreathed with convolvulus. Across the street, a café window framed Elfrida’s reflection: an androgynous, multiracial asimov-class phavatar in a Roman-style tunic with a big sticker on its chest. The sticker said: HELLO / BONJOUR! MY NAME IS / JE M’APPELLE: ELFRIDA GOTO (SPACE CORPS).
She felt floaty and unreal, thanks to the painkillers coursing through her body. She marvelled at the round yellow sun in Earth’s sky, the sparrows snatching crumbs from the patio, and the comical bustle of waiters threading between the tables under one full gravity. This meeting had been convened at the order of the Select Security Council to produce an expert briefing that would help the politicians decide what to do about 4 Vesta.
The delegates represented various UN agencies and institutes specializing in IT, MI, and AI. For all that, it was not a high-level meeting. Elfrida knew that because she was here, and also because they were at a café. The nicer the setting, the less important the proceedings.
A man named Derek Lorna, the acting director of the UN’s Leadership in Robotics Institute on Luna, spoke about self-improvement pathways and resource-acquisition utility goals. Elfrida caught the scary syllable she’d first heard from Mendoza: FOOM.
In response, the woman from MIT rambled on about containment. The thrust of her remarks seemed to be that an isolated asteroid like 4 Vesta was a pretty good sandbox, and the Heidegger program should be kept there for observation, like a virus in a laboratory.
Wise nods greeted this patently terrible idea, which had first been had, of course, by the doomed scientists of the de Grey Institute. Elfrida realized that the further people were from the threat, the less they could grasp it. That was why she was here. She was supposed to tell them about the battle for the Bremen Lock, the murder of 5,639 purebloods by shooting or drowning in Olbers Lake, and the conversion of the Francis Galton Biomedicine Research Center into a chop-shop where phavatars, ankle-deep in blood, had rewired people’s brains to run the PLAN’s neuroware. But words eluded her.
The man from Triton (“Hello! My name is Galt Nursultan, CEO, Scooperships Inc.”) spoke up. “I knew Adrian Smith,” said his phavatar. “He was into third-wave poetic syncretism. Sweetest guy you ever met. The Heidegger program hijacked his ID and sent itself to us. It infected three hundred and forty-one people before we could stop it. Two hundred and eight of those commi
tted suicide. We figure they didn’t have the right hardware to support the program. The others went on a murderous rampage, targeting purebloods. An entire hab had to be abandoned. Sorry, make that flattened. Maybe we overreacted. But we’re 4400 million kilometers from Earth. We were this close to losing baseline life-support. Six hundred and seventy-seven people are dead. So what do I tell their friends and families when they find out the UN is keeping this thing around to study it?”
Elfrida, being closer to Triton, heard this before the others did. By the time Galt Nursultan’s words reached Earth, the physically present humans were discussing where to go for lunch. They grimaced politely. Someone said: “Well, at least you’ve got insurance, right?”
Elfrida sipped her coffee. It was probably very good, but the asimov-class’s taste receptors made it taste like bitter water. She looked up at the sun again. So close.
“You fucking assholes,” Galt Nursultan said.
Another phavatar (“Hello! My name is Helena Christakos, Senior Researcher, Industrial MI Center of Ceres”) said: “The Heidegger program has brought the Bellicia ecohood’s power grid back online, after the fusion reactors on the surface were slagged. How did it do that? Is there any guarantee it couldn’t also build itself a working transmitter and repeat the trick it played on Triton? I’ve heard the theory that it got some of its meat puppets into EVA suits before the air went bad, and sent them out to repair the reactors. But the fact is, we don’t know how it restored power to itself. We don’t know what it’s capable of. Our smartest MIs are already better at survival than we are. This thing outclasses them by several orders of magnitude. I would lay money that it’s learning, evolving, observing our reactions to its behavior, even as we observe it. Shall we allow it to conclude that our natural human inquisitiveness—the crowning virtue of our species—can be manipulated to give the PLAN an entry point into our social and informational networks? We’ve shown a united and ruthless face to Martian terror, and it’s my belief that that is the only sane response to an entity that wishes to destroy our species. Let’s not drop the ball now. Destroy it.”
They went for lunch.
“Bring on the poutine,” joked Derek Lorna “It won’t go to these hips.” He slapped the flat stomach of his phavatar. It was obviously a ‘selfie’—a phavatar customized to exactly resemble its owner. No one would choose to be skinny and balding with European coloring, even to blue eyes. Maybe Lorna was more powerful than he seemed, Elfrida thought, considering how much selfies cost.
They ate at a bistro with napkins folded into flowers on the tables. Horse carriages clip-clopped along the street. Elfrida had lost track of the seasons, and the warmth of October heightened her disorientation. She kept looking up at the sun, her gaze drawn irresistibly to its radiant orb. She was eating a salad, in obedience to protocol. It tasted of toilet paper, and would later emerge from her phavatar’s disposal hatch in the form of shrink-wrapped pellets for easy recycling.
“I’m about sixty percent persuaded by Kate’s arguments,” Lorna said, smiling at the woman from MIT. “In the light of our shared research goals, I know I shouldn’t say this, but it looks like a blessing in disguise. Our very own mini-PLAN to poke and prod! Know your enemy, as they say.”
“Thank you, Derek,” said Kate from MIT, forking up crème brulée. “As to the prudential concerns, those can easily be addressed by full-spectrum signal jamming.”
Elfrida could see which way the meeting was going. She broke off from the group on their way back to the hotel where the out-of-towners were staying. She had never been to Toronto before. Turning at random through unfamiliar streets, she came to a church and went in. Her sense of utter helplessness led her to a pew, where she lowered her phavatar onto its knees.
“Help me,” she whispered. “Help me.”
She presently became aware of someone kneeling beside her. She didn’t want to raise her forehead from her fists in case it was a regular parishioner who would be startled to find out that they’d sat down next to a phavatar. But the presence broke her mood, made her tense up. She tensed up again when she heard a hoarse male whisper: “Don’t look up. Nod twice if you copy.”
Astonished, Elfrida nodded several times.
Nothing happened for fifteen minutes after that, which meant the man beside her was physically there, kneeling in the last pew of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Toronto. Elfrida eyed his legs. They were clad in perfectly pressed summer-weight trousers. His shoes looked like real alligator.
“Ja. Now listen up. What’s your problem? You’ve been sitting there all morning like a fucking lawn ornament.”
The man paused as a priest walked past them. Then he resumed.
“This ridiculous ad-hoc committee of Lorna’s is going to factor heavily into the President’s decision-making process. Why, because none of us know what we’re dealing with. In my view, the very fact that we don’t know what we’re dealing with is reason enough to scour 4 Vesta down to the mantle. But that option is off the table. We’re already perceived as high-and-mighty authoritarians in the Belt; we don’t want to aggravate that perception. 4 Vesta isn’t just any asteroid, after all. It’s a protoplanet, a model colony, a World Heritage Site of outstanding universal value, yadda, yadda, yadda. Visuals of Star Force using it for target practice? An early Christmas present to critics of the UN’s expansion policy. Do not want.
“On the other hand: this concept of quarantining the so-called Heidegger program to study it. Are you out of your fucking minds? We already made that mistake once, so let’s make it again! Because the public sector is so much better than the private sector at information security! The arrogance of scientists never fails to amaze me. They aren’t giving a thought to the communities they’d be endangering, up to and including the entire human race. Noooo, no. It’s all about the research funding.”
“I agree two hundred percent, sir,” Elfrida said softly, knowing that her words wouldn’t reach him for fifteen minutes.
“As a rule of thumb, whatever Derek Lorna wants, do the opposite. He’s an idiot. But he’s not stupid, if you can appreciate the difference. Which is to say, he’s open to compromise. And this is the compromise you are going to propose to him in the afternoon session.”
He explained it to her. Elfrida felt hope dawning, mixed with quibbles. While he was talking, however, he heard her saying, “I agree two hundred percent, sir,” so that was that.
“Ja.” He rose and brushed off the perfect creases of his pants. “I apologize for this absurd spy caper. It’s undignified, and personally risky for me. But the fact is, I can’t be seen talking to you, and this is the only way I could get to you without going through the IS-fucking-A. Telepresence encryption will keep this conversation away from their eyes … and I hope you’re not storing your data dump in the hub of the Imagine Dragons. Take it with you, or they’ll be into it faster than you can say ‘breach of privacy.’ Got that?” He stepped past her, out of the pew.
Now, at last, Elfrida dared to look up. But it took fifteen minutes for her instruction to reach Earth. By the time her phavatar swivelled its head, Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter, director of the Space Corps and member of the President’s Advisory Council, had long since vanished into the afternoon. The bright rectangle of the doorway silhouetted an elderly couple, supported by his ‘n’ hers helper bots, arriving early for Mass.
★
When she got back to the hotel, the afternoon session was in progress. Raised voices carried into the hall. The discussion had turned acrimonious.
“I’m telling you the thing was a plant!”
Had Elfrida been there in the flesh, she would’ve paused outside the conference room to eavesdrop. Her phavatar, however, lacked canniness. It walked straight in. Faces turned briefly to her and then back to the speaker—another phavatar that had hardly said a word during the morning session. This one belonged to Dr. James of the University of Vesta.
“We’re playing into the PLAN’s hands. They wanted the
fragment to be found. They wanted us to succumb to the temptation to study it!”
“Maybe so,” said Kate from MIT. “But at this point, what difference does it make? People are dead, and we have a responsibility to learn about what killed them, so we can prevent this from happening again.”
Dr. James continued speaking over her, since his remarks had actually been made thirty minutes ago. This was the biggest drawback of multi-locational meetings: they disintegrated easily into non-sequitur.
“Dr. Lorna mentioned this morning that we need to know our enemy. But I submit that he was begging the question. Do we need to know our enemy? Why? Where would that get us? This is a mea culpa. I jumped at the opportunity to study the thing in the first place. I hoped it would help us to crack the PLAN’s stealth technology, among other things. That didn’t happen, obviously. But even if Błaszczykowski-Lee’s team had succeeded in mastering the Heidegger program? Nothing we can learn from the PLAN would outweigh the risks of learning from the PLAN.”
The man from the University of Lagos, feet on the table, said, “Yes, but let’s be realistic. What are the risks, exactly? Everyone in this room knows this isn’t the first time the PLAN has attacked us with malware. It’s been spamming us for the last eighty years. Hell, that’s how we lost the internet in the first place.”
Elfrida hadn’t known that.
“Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, the ISA and related agencies scour the servers of the solar system for the PLAN’s garbage. I’ve heard the figure of fifty trillion items deleted daily. Nevertheless, some of it gets through. So we have the so-called epidemic of BCI crashes, cubicle death, etcetera. Fortunately for humanity, the PLAN isn’t very good at cyberwarfare. It doesn’t understand us well enough to devise effective spam campaigns. But some people will click on anything. In my opinion, the PLAN is doing us a favor by removing them from the gene pool.”
The Vesta Conspiracy Page 33