The Venus Assault

by Felix R. Savage

  How could he have done that to her? How could he have saddled her with memories of a world where everything always worked out for the best, where adults were always kind and the sun always shone and everyone had dark hair and almond eyes, just like her … a world that had never existed, even in the past?

  No way had that immersion environment authentically simulated Tokyo circa 2015. Software artists always cherry-picked reality, and her father was a prime offender. Just like the religious fanatics who had built, inside this rubble pile, a simulation of a Christian Japan that had never existed, Tomoki Goto had built for his daughter a harmonious and peaceful Japan that existed only in his fantasies.

  This has to go, she thought in a blur of intense feeling. It all has to go. I’m not overcompensating. I’m right.

  ★

  “So,” Sister Emily-Francis said. “Did you enjoy the kids’ presentation?” She smiled hopefully.

  “It was really impressive.” Elfrida sought some other positive comment to make. “I was also impressed by the playing field. Yonezawa-san tells me it looks like rubber, but it’s actually human skin! Can that be true?”

  “Well, it’s made from human skin cells,” Sister Emily-Francis said. She was the girl with the rash on her face who had been part of Elfrida’s reception committee. Her hostility had melted when Elfrida praised her little charges at the school. ”We grew it using the bio-printer. We have to import stem cells anyway, and this works out cheaper than real soil and grass.”

  The old story: in space, life was literally cheaper than dirt.

  “We originally worked up that presentation for our new landlords,” Sister Emily-Francis confessed. “Kharbage. Is that how you pronounce it? But it was decided not to invite them in.”

  “If they want in, they’ll have to fight for it,” Yonezawa said. “We shouldn’t even have let you in. Bishop Okada is too trusting.” His eyes were bleary. 11073 Galapagos produced its own shochu, a liquor distilled from rice. The phavatar’s taste receptors told Elfrida that it had an alcohol content of 25%. Yonezawa’s gang had invited her to join them after vespers in their hangout at the cathedral end of the habitat. Elfrida had accepted in the hope they might turn out to be less dogmatic in an informal setting. This area, which they called the refectory, was a rocky burrow ornamented with statuettes of the Virgin Mary and various saints. Sitting around on the floor, dozens of young adults chattered about issues ranging from drill-bit maintenance to the pope’s recent pastoral visit to Luna. The hope seemed to be that the Holy Father would come here next. In this as in so much else, Elfrida thought, the Galapajin were delusional.

  But alcohol wrought a gradual transformation in Yonezawa. He became inquisitive. “So tell us about the Venus Remediation Project.”

  “Well,” Elfrida said. “What don’t you know?”

  “What it’s for.”

  “The goal is to terraform Venus. The first phase is atmospheric ablation. The second phase, which is simultaneous with the first phase, involves re-atmosphering the planet with gengineered microbes. There are two main strains that we use. One consumes CO2 and excretes oxygen, and the other consumes sulfur dioxide. That one excretes methane, which we don’t want too much of, but the asteroid impact program also addresses that issue by seeding the atmosphere with water ice. Water and methane react at high temperatures to form hydrogen, so …”

  At this point, she heard Yonezawa interrupting, “No, I asked why! What’s the point of terraforming Venus, when the solar system is full of perfectly good asteroids?”

  She broke off her spiel to respond. “Asteroid habitats can’t be self-sustaining. Even here, your oxygen recycling ratio is only what, 80 percent? You obviously import O2, at the very minimum, as well as materials you can’t manufacture, from stem cells to batteries.”

  “Why not use solettas to deflect sunlight from the planet?” broke in Ushijima, the tall, skinny one who wore a glasses-style net interface. “Deploy them at Venus’s LaGrange point. That would be a cheaper and quicker way to cool the atmosphere.”

  “Bingo!” She made the phavatar smile. “That’s Phase Four. It’s a vast manufacturing project, as you can imagine, but production is expected to start in 2310. By that time, Phase Three will also have started: large-scale hydrogen deliveries from the moons of Jupiter. ITR megahaulers will cycle between Venus and Titan, dropping off their loads. The hydrogen, of course, will react with the excess carbon dioxide to form graphite and water. Cooling the atmosphere by deflecting the sun’s light will trigger precipitation. By early next century, most of the planet will be covered in a warm sea!”

  “84 percent,” said Yonezawa, not yet having heard this. “Our oxygen recycling rate is 84 percent, and it’s still improving. We will be self-sustaining. We’re getting there.”

  “Oh, Yonezawa-san,” Ushijima said. “No, we’re not.” He broke off to listen to Elfrida’s explanation of Phases Three and Four. “But if you want to trigger a Bosch reaction to produce water, won’t you need a lot of iron aerosol? Asteroids aren’t that iron-rich.”

  “Well, that’s Phase Five. We’re going to mine Mercury for iron, and also magnesium, which will sequester the last of the excess CO2,” Elfrida said. “I told you this was big.”

  Ushijima’s hands flapped like birds. “It’s huge. It’s monumental. It’s scandalously wasteful.” His glasses reflected the constellations of glow-in-the-dark algae that mossed the ceiling. “And it’s beautiful! It’s like the Parthenon, like the Pyramids, like … like our cathedral!”

  “Exactly!” Elfrida cried, warming to this geeky lad. “It’s the biggest thing since the Moon landings. In my opinion, it’s even bigger than the clean revolution. Venus is going to be humanity’s second home. There were a bunch of scenarios thrown around at the beginning of the project that would’ve required perpetual maintenance. You’d have to keep the solettas in place forever, or something like that. But the actual plan has stability as its goal.”

  “Mars was going to be humanity’s second home,” Yonezawa said. “That went well.”

  “Even if, someday, we lose spaceflight capability—of course, that’s not going to happen. But even if we did, our descendants on Venus would survive!”

  Sister Emily-Francis had had her back to the two men, chatting with a friend sitting nearby. She broke off her conversation to listen to Elfrida’s speech. When Elfrida finished, there was a silence long enough for her to know the latency period was being observed.

  Yonezawa dropped one elbow on the low table and extended his empty palm towards her. “For ours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory,” he drawled. “All yours, for the price of one lousy asteroid.”

  viii.

  Elfrida allowed herself to hope that Yonezawa was on the wrong side of Galapajin public opinion. During the evening, she had also been recording the other conversations in the refectory, using Yumiko’s directional microphones. Back on Botticelli Station, she reviewed this data and found some support for her hopes. The asteroid’s future was being discussed intensely. Yumiko’s physical presence among them had at last made the outside world real to the Galapajin.

  “I think they might be starting to see the advantages of resettlement,” she told dos Santos.

  She had logged off at a more human hour this time: 19:00 on Botticelli Station—which kept Greenwich mean time—the middle of 11073 Galapagos’s arbitrary night. Elfrida had left Yumiko at St. Peter’s again, this time in the adjacent dormitory known as the yado, which was basically a flophouse for Galapajin who had nowhere else to live. She had implored Father Hirayanagi to padlock the door of the phavatar’s cubicle from the outside. “No one steals on 11073 Galapagos,” the old priest had said, injured, but he had agreed.

  With some peace of mind, she hurried to the Space Corps office.

  Everyone except dos Santos and Hardy had already left for the day. Hardy, finishing up some paperwork, openly eavesdropped on dos Santos’s debrief of Elfrida. When she mentioned that Ushijima had compared UNVRP
to the Pyramids, he laughed mordantly.

  “That’s not far wrong, is it? Generations in the making, and thousands of lives wasted, all for the glory of the Pharaoh.”

  This was the sort of cynical remark dos Santos usually winked at, but now she turned sharply on the Anglo agent. “Have you finished that report yet?”

  “Done and dusted, ma’am. I was just leaving.”

  “Good.”

  “The Sirens of Titan await,” Hardy said, taking himself off.

  Dos Santos rolled her eyes at his back. Elfrida thought she was going to make some reference to Hardy’s yen for off-color immersion games, but she said, “It’s just not smart to talk about the president like that. No one could be humbler than President Hsiao.” She sighed. “It’s my fault, I guess. I can be too lax with people.”

  As far as Elfrida was concerned, dos Santos had no faults. Mistaking her silence for anxiety, dos Santos laughed.

  “Not you, Goto. I know you don’t need me riding herd on you. Let’s get back to 11073 Galapagos. I assume you’ve informed them about their resettlement options?”

  Thrown off her stride by the belated realization that they were now alone in the office, Elfrida, fortunately, was able to answer this question without thinking about it. “Yes. I met their leader today. We had to wait until midnight, when he finally got done praying.”

  “Is this the bishop you’ve referred to? Okada?”

  “That’s the funny part. I thought I was going to see Okada. And he was there, gorgeously decked out in gold and white robes with a pointy hat. But so was this other spindly little guy in a coverall. Turns out he’s the official leader. His name’s Ito. Mayor Ito.”

  “So it’s not a theocracy, after all.”

  “Technically, no. But the whole time I was talking to Okada, thinking this mayor was his assistant or something, Ito just sat there like a jizo statue. I’m pretty sure when he talks, it’s Okada’s voice that comes out.”

  “Well, as they say, never assume, it makes an ass, etcetera.”

  “They prayed together all day, apparently.”

  “Whatever that means,” dos Santos murmured.

  “Ito said they would consider my proposal—this is a direct translation—and give me an answer within the week. But—”

  Dos Santos interrupted her. “Did you explain that it isn’t a proposal? That we’re the ones making the decision?”

  “Yes, of course. I told them that if UNVRP purchases the asteroid, we would resettle them on Ceres. And if we don’t, Kharbage will most likely resettle them on Ceres, anyway.”

  “Did you make the distinction clear? Resettlement by the UN entitles them to financial assistance and preferential workforce placement. Resettlement by Kharbage probably means debt slavery in the mines. So it’s in their interest to cooperate.”

  “I did. I explained. They just said ‘Oh, really?’ and ‘Of course.’ So I’m not sure how much they took in. But I explained.”

  “Well, that’s our asses covered, anyway.” That fine line between dos Santos’s brows was back. She reached for a stylus and absently tapped a rhythm on the edge of her desk.

  “Two things,” Elfrida blurted. “One, during my whole interview with Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Yonezawa was sitting behind me with his Kalashnikov on his knees and a face as black as the devil’s underwear. So I’m not sure it matters what the bishop and the mayor think. Yonezawa represents the fanatics in the shudokai, and they’ve got the guns.”

  “Ah.” The stylus tapped faster.

  “The other thing is—the phavatar.”

  “Do you think the bishop and the mayor were reticent, or pretended not to understand you, because of their distrust of humanoid robots?”

  “That’s a possibility, but I’m concerned about something else. I think the phavatar may be malfunctioning.”

  Dos Santos stopped tapping the stylus. She leant back in her ergoform and gazed at the ceiling. Elfrida held her breath. Malfunctioning was not what Yumiko was doing, but it was the only way she could think of to broach the subject without sounding like a loon.

  With a minimal nod, dos Santos directed her attention to the ceiling. Elfrida frowned at the familiar trompe l’oeuil veneer of sky glimpsed through branches and leaves, meant to impart a feeling of spaciousness to the cramped office. Then she understood.

  “We really ought to get out of here,” dos Santos said, standing up and stretching. “New York chewed me out last quarter for exceeding our oxygen budget.”

  Elfrida followed her out. The door automatically sphinctered shut behind them. Every door on Botticelli Station was airtight, a safety feature that also enabled cost savings: the hub detected when individual rooms were not in use, and stopped pumping atmosphere into them.

  The hub was the quasi-smart, widely mocked master of all their destinies. It controlled the air, the water, the recycling, the collision avoidance system, and many more systems Elfrida could not have enumerated off the top of her head. But she did know about one other function, not much discussed by a crew who saw privacy as a currency in limited circulation rather than a right. The hub surveilled the public areas of the station around the clock. Dos Santos’s glance at the ceiling had been a warning as old as humanity itself.

  The Space Corps office was in the Administration & Operations segment of the station, between the segment occupied by the scientists and their computers, and the residential segment. These three segments together occupied a third of the torus that was Botticelli Station. The rest was taken up by generators, storage, recycling facilities, and other vital but uninteresting machinery. The central hub supported the main cargo bay and docking facility.

  Shaped like a hollow bicycle wheel 240 meters in diameter, the torus featured an external mesh ‘tyre’ packed with crushed rocks, which shielded the inner torus from radiation and minor impacts. Meanwhile, the ‘inner tyre’ whizzed around at 2.4 rpm, generating robust gravity and a Coriolis effect that pushed the limit of what humans could stand on a long-term basis.

  Following dos Santos past the open airlock to the crew lounge, Elfrida experienced the familiar sensation that her head was moving faster than her feet. However, it wasn’t the Coriolis force this time. She’d assumed they were going to the lounge, and had wondered why dos Santos thought they could talk in privacy there. But if they weren’t going to the lounge … This corridor led to the residential segment.

  As a manager, dos Santos had a cabin that just about deserved the name. She ushered Elfrida in with minimal ceremony. The closet-sized space contained—barely—a bunk, a locker, and a murphy desk. Dos Santos folded away the desk. It had been bare, as was the top of her locker, offering no clues to her private life. She kicked a squashy button on the floor, and an ergoform inflated. “Have a seat, Goto. Sorry I can’t offer you anything else. They confiscated my drugs at customs on Luna.”

  “I’m OK, ma’am. Are we—is it safe in here?”

  “As far as I know.” With that little statement, dos Santos shattered Elfrida’s trust in the UN. It did not much reassure Elfrida that she immediately added, “I don’t want to give you the impression that some things are verboten. But better safe than sorry, you know? Anyway, I’ve got this private space; I might as well take advantage of it.”

  Elfrida drew a deep breath. “Shall I tell you what’s been happening with the suit?”

  “Please.”

  “Well, as you know, it’s one of the new stross-class phavatars.”

  “Yeah. I tried one of those out during production testing. Superb responses, and the operator-simulation software has improved.”

  “Well, yeah. It has. The thing is, this one has been simulating me without my permission.”

  She poured out her concerns. Yumiko’s unauthorized tergiversations, her persistent attempts to bias Elfrida against the purchase of 11073 Galapagos, and most damning of all, that remark: My professional reputation’s on the line, too.

  “Honestly, ma’am, it’s like it thinks it’s a pe
rson!”

  Dos Santos was sitting crosslegged on her bed, leaning back on locked elbows. She said, “Hmm. I don’t think we have enough evidence to accuse the designers of purposely manufacturing an AI.”

  “Oh no, ma’am, I wasn’t suggesting—”

  “But we may be seeing emergent behavior here.”

  “That was my idea.”

  “These new-generation assistants are really smart. Leave them alone for five seconds and they start analyzing things, coming to conclusions you can’t argue with, although it would have taken a meatbrain years to get there, if ever.”

  Elfrida flinched at meatbrain, a dismissive term for human grey matter used by software artists and designers, who tended to be pro-AI by the nature of their employment. It did not sound right coming from a Space Corps manager.

  “What if she’s right, Goto? Have you thought about that? That she could be right?”

  Elfrida opened her mouth to insist, reflexively, that she was keeping an open mind. Then she hesitated. Was she, really? Yumiko had accused her of pre-judging the Galapajin. Wasn’t she also pre-judging Yumiko? Assuming that the assistant had nefarious motives, whereas the simplest explanation was that she was merely trying to do her job: objectively and empirically assess the human population of 11073 Galapagos?

  It was something to think about. In the meantime, she repeated stubbornly, “She still shouldn’t have disobeyed me. I gave the DISABLE command. Several times. It didn’t work. That’s a problem.”

  “Not if she thought you were the problem,” dos Santos said. “Look, Goto, I’m not trying to imply you haven’t been doing your job, but the fact is, as we employ more sophisticated analyses of these asteroid populations, we’re finding in more and more cases that the traditional cost-benefit equation just doesn’t work. It fails to take into account the unique cultural values of these communities. They’re like closed ecosystems that have evolved in near-isolation for fifty, a hundred years. The resettlement of a group like the Galapajin would likely lead to the extinction of everything that makes them what they are.