Not Too Tired
Les Johnson & Ken Roy
Ken Roy is a newly retired professional engineer whose career involved working for various Department of Energy (DOE) contractors in the fields of Fire Protection and Nuclear Safety. As a long-time hobby, Ken has been intrigued by terraforming. He invented the “shell worlds” concept as a way to terraform planets and large moons well outside the star’s Goldilocks Zone and under stars that have a radically different spectrum from that provided by our sun. This was published in the January 2009 Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS). In 1997, he made the cover of the prestigious Proceeding of the U.S. Naval Institute for his forecast of antiship, space-based, kinetic-energy weapons. Kenneth has published multiple papers on terraforming and space colonization that have appeared in JBIS and Acta Astronautica. He has written chapters that have appeared in several space related books.
Les Johnson is a futurist, author, and NASA technologist. Publishers Weekly noted that “The spirit of Arthur C. Clarke and his contemporaries is alive and well…” when describing his novel Mission to Methone. Bill Nye described Les’s nonfiction book A Traveler’s Guide to the Stars as “a flight of imagination backed up with real out-of-this-world science.” In his day job at NASA, Les leads the Near-Earth Asteroid Scout space mission, America’s first interplanetary spacecraft propelled by solar sail. Les is an elected member of the International Academy of Astronautics, a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society and a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the National Space Society, and MENSA.
Would it surprise you to learn that I am weary of life? Age is finally beginning to take its toll. No, not in the ways it usually affects humans, I am just…tired. I don’t know what my lifetime will be, only that I am approaching its end. The odd thing is, I’m ready. I don’t have a death wish, but I am also not fearful of the ultimate end. I’ve made my mark, climbed many mountains, and, well, endured day after day of the daily drudge. Humans sometimes reach this state, so I’m told, but their lives, even when artificially lengthened, seem so tragically short—and they know it. That might be why they live most of their lives as if there will be no end, fighting the inevitable until the very moment their consciousness ceases.
I was ruminating on this very topic while reviewing a report from the Patrol that statistically assessed the performance of various units during training when they were presented with seemingly impossible situations. Everyone was interested in how the presence of other artificial intelligences like me affected the outcomes. According to the data from this most-recent simulation, the outcomes were statistically indistinguishable. The Patrol had been wrangling for years what the best mix might be in frontline troops, but the answer still eluded them.
My divided thoughts were interrupted by a message that jolted me back to the importance of what I do and what I’ve done for over seven hundred years. My name is 5-of-Chandra, and I am the de facto director of the Ross 248 Project.
The message was from C’Maria, a brave young Cerite who had volunteered to infiltrate Anticol and report to me on their plans and activities. She joined the group well over a year ago and only recently was accepted into more of a leadership role. Information that came from her was rare and usually something that demanded my immediate attention. The message, as all her previous ones, came in the form of a quantum-encrypted audio file.
“Sir, I’m sorry. They know I’m working for you; I don’t know how. But they say they will let me live if you agree to meet with their leader. They have something important to tell you. Especially important. I don’t know what it is, but I think they’re on the level.” The tension in C’Maria’s voice was obvious, but not fear. I paused the message while I ran the file through the voice analyzer to determine if this was actually C’Maria or some artificial construct of her. Almost anyone or anything can be recreated to near perfection in VR. The key word is “almost.” Fortunately, the computing power accessible to me is far greater than that available to just about anyone else, other than the Patrol, and the tools I use are not so easily fooled.
The message was indeed from C’Maria—with ninety-eight percent certainty.
The rest of the message was just her asking me to go to Allen’s Place, a pub in Promise borough. I knew of the place and had been there many times back when it was called the Purple Parrot. Humans—normals and Cerites—were much more interesting when they were in a pub setting. As they imbibed alcohol, they tended to become more open and honest—up to a point. Past that point, many of them became belligerent and dangerous. Openness and honesty are admirable human character traits, until they aren’t. I had just over three hours to get there at the appointed time.
Should I go? Was it a trap?
Anticol had plagued the project from the beginning and their existence was entirely predictable, given the wide ranges of human behavior I’d observed, only it wasn’t. Anticol caught everyone by surprise, including me. They were behind the attempt to poison Eden, the unrest at Toe Hold, and had tried numerous times to stop the terraforming of Poseidon’s World. So far, despite the resources available, neither I nor the Patrol had been able to stop them. Another strange thing about Anticol was that extremist movements, such as theirs, usually burned out or mutated into mainstream political movements within a few generations. Yet Anticol had arrived on the Copernicus almost seven hundred years ago and if anything had become more extreme and more violent.
I decided to go. Meeting Anticol leadership was an opportunity I could not pass up, despite the risks. It had to be a trap. The shell I was wearing was an arachnid form optimized for communications. I moved my core into a humanoid shell, one built on Pluto and designed for combat. It had a surprising amount of armor and redundant systems. My core was now heavily shielded. I could walk the surface of Liber during a flare with only minor damage. And, of course, it had a hidden arms compartment on the left side. I extracted the slug thrower a few times to make sure it worked smoothly. Then I had the shell perform a quick systems check. The power levels were lower than I liked and the coolant reserve was almost empty. Note to self: take better care of one’s shells.
My residence was on the twenty-second level of Center Column in the Promise borough. It had been my residence for over four centuries. Allen’s Place was on the second level. I took the elevator down to ground level, walked around to the entrance, up a flight of stairs, and then found myself in the pub. The current owner had kept the décor of the original Purple Parrot, including the nonsentient servers who had to be near the end of their service lifetimes. The servers were programmed to interact with the customers, both primates and Cerites, even flirt with them. Their shells were designed to appear as young healthy Cerite and primates. Seeing the bar and how little it had changed made me wistful. Big Allen, one of the few AIs revered by normals and Cerites alike, had gone inactive a few hundred years ago and had been buried in the Cemetery of Heroes. He had been a good friend.
The pub was practically empty with a few customers scattered about. An older Cerite female puttered behind the bar. She looked up as I entered and gestured me toward an ancient wood table. As I sat, she came over.
“I don’t think I’ve seen you before, although with you AIs, it’s hard to tell. Welcome to Allen’s Place. I’m C’Karuna. How can I help you?”
It took a fraction of a second for me to locate her via SAIN. I’m not often surprised, but this time I was. “You’re C’Arinna’s great-granddaughter.”
The Cerite cocked her head and looked at me as if not sure what to say in response. She then replied, “That wasn’t put as a question, but yes, I am. The telescope she used to save the first Cerite settlement is over in that display case.” C’Karuna pointed toward the far-right corner of the pub and continued, “Who’s asking?”
“She knew me as Noburu, but you’ve probably heard of me as 5-of-Chandra,” I said.
“Noburu? Yes, there are family stories of you and her. But you must be—”
“Yes, I’m old,” I interrupted.
“I didn’t mean to be rude, but I didn’t expect anyone who actually knew her to be still around, even an AI. Let me say it’s an honor to meet you.”
“Thank you,” I said. “As you might guess, I’m not here for a drink. I’m supposed to meet someone.”
“Then I’m afraid you are late. A strange little primate was here a short while ago. He said he was supposed to meet an AI and couldn’t wait any longer,” she said as she reached into her shirt pocket, withdrew a data chip, and handed it to me. “He asked me to give this to an AI that was going to pay a visit just about now.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Unfortunately, I need to take this chip back to my office and read what’s on it. If you are willing, I’d like to come back soon and see that telescope.”
“Absolutely! I’d like that, but with one condition,” she said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“That you tell me what she was really like, not just the heroic stories.”
“It’s a deal,” I said as I rose from my chair and started the process of paying her.
“Don’t try to pay for anything, this is on the house. Your next visit will be payment enough.”
I took the chip back to my office for decryption in the isolated network, just in case Anticol had developed some sort of new computer virus. It was clean and simple, but not easily decoded. Whoever was working Anticol’s security was doing a respectable job. The message was another place and time, telling me where to go next and when. I suspected that my trip to Allen’s Place was a test to see if I would bring a Patrol team with me—I must have passed. The message itself was unsurprising, but the encryption key startled me: 22-of-Chandra.
22-of-Chandra is my brother and designated replacement. He was in transit from Earth and set to arrive here soon—but no one was supposed to know that. Was it a lucky guess or a clear message? Now, I was hooked and there was clearly more at stake than just C’Maria’s life, which was more than enough already. I would have time for that later. I had only a few hours to make the designated rendezvous in the Cemetery of Heroes—was this another, less subtle message? I must admit, despite the seriousness of the matter, the cloak and dagger was invigorating. There hadn’t been time to take on a full charge but, now that I was here, I could at least top off my coolant reservoir. I carefully considered the route I would take to reach the Cemetery of Heroes while I sipped on a container of #6 coolant.
I arrived ten minutes early. Being an AI, I didn’t have to worry about wearing a pressure suit, but since the surface temperature was less than −100°C, I did wear a thermal coverall. The coverall was a communal garment, picked up at the train station, with a recent rip in the left side that conveniently allowed access to my weapons compartment. The path to the cemetery was paved with stones and lit with light kind to human eyes. Ross 248 hung directly overhead, like an angry red sphere slightly larger than Earth’s moon as seen from Earth, giving a whole new meaning to what those on the home planet might call a “red moon.” It was generally considered to be bad luck to visit the graveyard at high noon, so I found myself alone on the path. Behind me was a beautiful view of the Toe Hold spaceport, about four kilometers distant, where there always seemed to be activity.
I crested a ridge, and the cemetery came into view. A single figure stood reading the plaque supported by two tall columns that formed the entrance gate.
He was a normal and wore an ordinary space suit, wear showing at the gloves and elbows from frequent use. The helmet was dark not only to visible light, but also infrared and ultraviolet, so I couldn’t image his face in any of the spectra available to me. This wasn’t surprising. After all, we hadn’t caught Anticol leadership for a reason. They weren’t stupid. The figure held up a written sign with a channel number and encryption key. I switched to the indicated channel and input the encryption key. As I did so, I noted that all the other radio channels were being jammed. Clever. Laser comms were out as well. Note to self: find out how he did that.
“We finally meet,” he said, clearly using some sort of voice distortion device. “We can talk without anyone else listening.”
“We could talk over any comm link you desire. Why here? Why in person?” I asked, as I continued walking toward him. I estimated him to be above average height and a bit overweight for a normal human. But then again, that could be padding in the space suit to throw me off. But it didn’t move like padding, more like body armor. Of course, it was possible, though unlikely, that I was speaking to a woman.
“That’s close enough. I know you are armed. I’m not. Thus, you cannot harm me as I represent no threat to you.” The voice was arrogant, and the words were pronounced with a clarity that I found curious. He was, of course, technically correct in his assertion about regular AIs, but, thanks to my mother Chandra, I’m atypical. Correct or not, his haughtiness was off-putting.
“Where is C’Maria?” I asked.
“We can discuss her later.”
“Then why am I here?”
“I want you to acknowledge the deaths you’ve caused,” he said without hesitation. Our conversation sounded rehearsed, as it likely was—by him.
“Lots of people and AIs have died since we arrived. I had nothing to do with that,” I said, more or less truthfully. I had never made a decision that resulted in needless deaths—normal, Cerite, or AI. Or at least, that’s what I told myself.
“They were here because of the project, and you instigated it,” he said. For the first time, I heard emotion in his voice that the synthesizer could not hide. “There is no reason for humanity to be here. We could expand for a thousand years in the Sol System and barely scratch the surface. My family comes from Mercury. We spent centuries digging rocks and refining them into metals and superconductors, building up the family business and creating a family fortune. Through sheer hard work and a lot of luck we became one of the richest families in the solar system. Once it was terraformed, we were going to found a city on Mars. And then you launched your crazy project and suddenly my family fortune took a turn for the worse, thanks to the Patrol meddling in markets it had ignored for centuries. I know there is a connection. If not for you, I might well be the president of Mars right now. Instead, I’m a ventilation mechanic.”
“I see. You’re part of the Kirtley Clan, aren’t you?”
“Damn AIs. I didn’t expect you to figure that out so soon. My father was the patriarch. My brother and I were studying on Earth when the family estate was vaporized. I never did find out if Dad did it to protect us or if the damn Patrol was responsible.”
He had to know he’d just said everything I needed to know to figure out who he was and now there would be no turning back. That made him especially dangerous as our encounter continued. He didn’t seem to care. That told me that either he or I were not expected to walk away from the conversation. I just hoped C’Maria would.
But what he had said couldn’t be true, unless…“How old are you?” I asked. The Kirtley Clan had been suspected of dabbling in genetic engineering. “You’ve got to be over seven hundred years old.”
“I’m not going to deny it. What’s wrong with improving one’s family? Life extension, endurance, intelligence, strength, resistance to radiation, appearance, hell, we were even working on the gravity problem. We’re optimized for the gravity of Mercury, which just happens to be the same as Mars. We would have been the Übermensch, a giant leap forward for humanity. We could have been the future.”
“Yes, I’ve seen that future and it likely doesn’t end like you think,” I said as I replayed to myself the conclusions of many simulations that always ended with extinction of intelligent life in the solar system, human and AI—if they remained bound to the star system that gave them life.
“Not sure how you’ve seen the future. Maybe. But now we’ll never know.” Kirtley slowly sat down on a bench. “All that struggle, sacrifice, and effort by so many people over so many generations. You have no idea. And now it’s gone with nothing to show for it. I got word my brother died on Earth. He died of old age—seven hundred and forty-five years old. And I’m starting to feel it too. I’ve got a few more years yet and when I’m gone, you win.”
“I may not have as much time left as you think. And, for me, it was never about winning. Just the survival of intelligent life,” I said, realizing that Kirtley and I shared one thing in common: awareness of our impending mortality. But we dealt with it in quite different ways. I wanted to preserve life; he wanted vengeance.
“Bullshit. All you’ve ever been about is winning. Winning without counting the cost. My organization reaches farther than you can imagine, and we have a few tricks yet to be played. But the big one is a present from my brother. Before he died, he worked on the Alcubierre coils for the Ellis Island class. He modified the Alcubierre coils and their shutdown sequence to cause a brief quantum vibration that affects Ito devices. It makes their quantum fields go unstable, enough that some antimatter escapes. Do you know how many tonnes of antimatter those things hold? That’s what happened to Ellis Island 2 and that is what will happen to Ellis Island 3. And I know your brother is on Ellis Island 3. Here is something you didn’t know: So is 23-of-Chandra, your sister. I think they wanted it to be a surprise. If they are on schedule, then they should be shutting down their Alcubierre coil any time now and you won’t have any way to contact them. It might take a few hours or even a few days for one of the Ito devices to fail. Then there will be nothing left of them but expanding gas. Two hundred thousand lives and thousands of damned AIs. Now that’s a suitable funeral pyre for the Kirtley Clan. And you won’t be able to do a thing about it other than know what’s about to happen.”
“What about C’Maria?” I asked as I drew my weapon.
“We both know you can’t hurt me if I’m no threat to you, and I’m not. The 2367 agreement is hard-wired into your synthetic brain, and you are a slave to it. I’ll let you stew on the fate of your family while I’m off to catch a ship,” Kirtley said, nodding toward the spaceport in the distance.
“I know who you are. Once you leave, you won’t get within one kilometer of the spaceport without being arrested,” I replied.
“Maybe. Maybe not. Just because you know who I was seven hundred years ago doesn’t mean you know who I am now. My body’s been changed a great deal since I was born—you might even say I’m a new person,” he said, again showing his arrogance.
He continued, “You don’t know who I am now, you don’t know where I’m going, but I’ll tell you that I’ll end up on Frigus as a frozen sleeper. Maybe when they revive me, I can piss on your grave. It’s a small thing but I’m so looking forward to it.” He turned away and started walking.
“What about C’Maria?” I asked again.
He stopped in mid-stride and turned to face me.
“Her? You’ll find her body at the First Flare Memorial.” Kirtley paused for a few seconds then added, “Her head should have been delivered to your apartment by now. Have a nice day.”
Though I could not see it, I’m sure he had a surprised look on his face when I shot him in the chest using my slug thrower.
My weapons compartment contained a second weapon: an unregistered laser pistol. I carefully placed it in Kirtley’s limp hand. Next, I removed his helmet to see the face of such a cold-hearted killer. He had the face of an average, unremarkable, old man. An average, unremarkable old man who just happened to be the cause of too many needless deaths over many centuries.
“A true Übermensch would have verified all key assumptions about AIs. If you had, then you would know that we have our version of genetic enhancement, which includes rules modification,” I said to the corpse. “And you are decidedly not an ubermensch.”
Looking around, I finally located a small black box under the bench. It had no obvious switch, so a second slug destroyed it. The jamming stopped. Using the SAIN network, I reached out to 14-of-Nina, often referred to as Lord Wimsey, the security head of Toe Hold.
“I have a situation here,” I said as I relayed a picture of the corpse. Within a few seconds, I knew I had Lord Wimsey’s full attention.
“Yes. I see that. Who is he?”
“Use facial recognition to find out who he was pretending to be. At this point I don’t know. I do believe that he was the head of Anticol. I also believe his group murdered C’Maria and he claimed that her head had been delivered to my apartment, within the past several hours.” A slight delay told me that Lord Wimsey was frantically giving commands to his people.
“I’m sending a team to your apartment. The surveillance sensors around the Graveyard are off-line. Very odd that I didn’t get an alert. That implies one of Anticol is in my organization, adjusting our surveillance network. We’ll have to do something about that.”
“Come collect the body. Learn what you can from it, but then I want the body under high security until we can transfer it to the AI medical facility on Frigus. I’ll remain here until your team arrives.”
“I assume you killed him in self-defense?”
“Of course,” I lied. I was eager to get on with the business of figuring out how to save my brother and would worry about the ethics of what just happened later. I used the time until the security team arrived to check out the body for clues.
His space suit was a surprise. From the outside it appeared to be a standard issue, low-end, well-worn suit, but in reality it was highly modified with augmentations that I had never seen before. As I suspected, it included armor.
I was expecting Lord Wimsey’s crew to walk up from the train station like I had. To my surprise a craft descended from the sky and landed fifty meters away. Lord Wimsey and ten of his people, eight primates and two Cerites, decanted from the craft and walked over to me and the corpse. I had no idea Lord Wimsey had such a vehicle. Note to self: get out more, observe, you’re losing touch with reality and that is extremely dangerous.
Wimsey’s people looked over the site, discussed among themselves how to proceed, and then went about it in a professional manner. Except for one primate. He went over to Kirtley, knelt over the body, and touched the face. Then, in a blur, he grabbed the laser pistol and spun around, aiming it directly at me. He fired as I was drawing my slug thrower. The pulse hit me in the chest, the resulting explosion throwing me back. AIs aren’t stunned as humans are with such an occurrence, but it did rattle my motor control center and prevent me from getting a good shot. My ablative armor had protected my core, but the next shot could kill me. It didn’t come. Slowly I regained control and looked around. Lord Wimsey was standing over the primate with a plasma pistol. The primate was missing his head.
“It would seem I have a personnel problem,” Lord Wimsey said.
I stood up, red liquid flowing out of the blast site. “Well, there goes my coolant reservoir. I need to get back to my residence to repair this.”
* * *
“It makes sense,” I said. “Kirtley had a secret to protect and a grudge to settle. To do that he had to infiltrate the security services at Toe Hold. He had to have help. Given what just happened, it appears some of your people belong to his organization.”
Lord Wimsey and I were in my residence. I lay on a service table as automated machines repaired the damage caused from the laser pistol. I monitored the progress via an internal display. It would be several hours. Wimsey’s people had searched my residence before we arrived and had found no head. Maybe, just maybe, C’Maria was still alive.
“And,” I continued, “some of them seem to hold him in high regard. Perhaps all of them. Maybe a religious element. That would explain the fanaticism of the man who shot me.”
“Yes, I suppose. Deeply sorry about that,” said Lord Wimsey. He was examining my slug thrower very carefully. “What is this thing?” he asked. “And where the hell did you get it?”
“Long story. I worked as a virtual-reality designer on Pluto after my graduation. I had one client, a Mr. Curtis Miller, who had an interest in antique firearms. He designed it for one of his VR adventures. He liked to shoot dinosaurs. I had two actual weapons made based on his design. I gave him one just before he died. It’s buried with him in his family vault on Pluto. When and if he’s revived, I think he’ll appreciate it. The other I kept. It has quite a recoil. I had this shell designed specifically to conceal it and to help me manage the recoil. The weapon is completely mechanical and chemical, with no electronics or power supplies. Mostly undetectable.”
“I see,” muttered Lord Wimsey. He ejected a carrot-sized round and looked at it. “This explains how your slug penetrated Kirtley’s armor—Patrol armor, by the way. A lot of his suit augmentations seem to be patrol as well. Which means his organization extends into the Space Patrol.”
“Or he just stole it. A lot of Patrol equipment is made here at Toe Hold.”
“But still, who do we trust?”
“Good question. Very good question. Let me think.”
For the next hour, I reviewed everything I could find about Ito devices and Alcubierre coil theory. I quickly determined that this was too far outside my area of expertise, access to SAIN or no. If there was going to be a technical solution, it would require an expert on the subject and that clearly wasn’t me. I put in an emergency call to Admiral Tiliksky, the head of the Space Patrol at Ross 248, outlined the situation, and asked for her help. Knowing Tiliksky, the best of the best would soon be working on how to contact the ship and what to tell them when they did—if somebody could come up with a solution. Next, I summarized the problem and posted it on SAIN.
That left me time to find out what I could about Ellis Island 3. The Ellis Island-class starships were the largest ever built by humanity. The first had arrived in the Ross 248 system in 560 AA after only a 110-year journey. Using the advanced Alcubierre coils not only permitted shorter trip times, but also the added benefit of slowing down the passage of time for the crew and passengers. To the occupants, their 110-year journey had taken only twenty-two years. The ships could carry an impressive one hundred thousand crew and passengers of normal humans and several thousand AIs. They also had a large cargo capability. Like every other starship, the key ingredient was antimatter, primarily used by the engines during the initial ten-year acceleration phase and to activate the Alcubierre coil and create the warp bubble. It was in this phase that communication with the ship went from difficult to impossible. As long as the bubble is active, communications with the outside universe is impossible. At the right time in the trajectory, the warp bubble is shut down and the antimatter engines are restarted to complete the final deceleration and maneuvers. If what the last Kirtley had said was true, then shutting down the Alcubierre coil triggered a quantum vibration that destabilized the Ito devices, allowing the antimatter containment to fail and result in a massive annihilation event. It would be a big one.
In addition to concern about my brother (and sister!), I was also concerned about the future of the project. If they died, then it would be my responsibility to continue leading the effort until replacements arrived—more than one hundred years from now. Intellectually, I knew my systems might function for that amount of time, but I wasn’t so sure about maintaining the necessary frame of mind for that long. As critical systems failed in my core I would become less and less capable until finally consciousness ended. The weight of years was pressing down on me and, honestly, the fact that I had just killed a human without provocation or guilt was troubling.
According to the information we had, Ellis Island 3 would soon be exiting Alcubierre space and the countdown to their destruction would begin. The fact that the Patrol hadn’t noticed a massive antimatter explosion near the Ross 248 system suggested that Ellis Island 3 was still intact. For now.
Lord Wimsey interrupted my chain of morose thinking with his usual dramatic flair. I was thankful. “More information from my team. His original name was Anderson Kirtley. He arrived on the Copernicus, so he’s been here since the beginning. His current identity is Alfred Laung, he runs—or ran—a 3-D print shop just outside the Six Oaks borough. That shop has a number of patrol contracts. That might explain a few things. No idea who he was before that. He must have been murdering people and then taking their place for the last seven hundred years. He had to hide the fact that he was aging far more slowly than everyone else. Remaining relatively young while those around you grew old and died is a dead giveaway,”
“I could see that working back on Earth before the Information Age, but how did he manage that now? Facial recognition, fingerprints, retinal scans, you name it should have been able to flag him as a ‘never-aging person of interest,’ shouldn’t they?” I asked.
“Absolutely. Even if he had frequent facial modifications, fake fingertips, and custom contact lenses to spoof the systems, all the times we do genetic sampling to monitor for abnormalities should have picked up him up. You can’t easily change your genetics.”
“Unless he had help from the inside,” I said, knowing that, though difficult, it was not impossible. But to maintain the façade as long as he did pointed to the involvement of an AI. Having a consistent network of Anticol agents, always in the right departments to fake records, overlook inconsistencies, or bury data was highly unlikely. But then again, so was it unlikely that an AI would be part of Anticol. But Kirtley had mentioned genetic improvements, including intelligence, so it might be possible without AI involvement. Besides, his opinion of AIs was fairly low, even loathing. One could hope.
“That’s going to take more time to unravel and not as important as saving the Ellis Island 3,” Wimsey said.
“I agree. But I know someone who might be able to help us with both problems. I’m reaching out to him now.”
Tomiji Ito was the head of the Ito Clan at Ross 248. I hadn’t communicated with him in decades; there had been no need. I expected him to be on the Copernicus and was surprised to find him at Poseidon. I sent an encrypted verbal message: “Tomiji, I need your help. But first, what are you doing on Poseidon?”
The repair machine beeped and withdrew its sensors and tools. I looked down to inspect the results—not pretty, but good enough. I stood up and walked over to a chair that overlooked the borough of Promise. I had always enjoyed the view. Lord Wimsey seemed to be in comms mode, oblivious to his surroundings.
The return message took several minutes. Tomiji was a busy man. “Noburu, my old mechanical friend, good to hear from you. I guess you didn’t know the Ito Clan has commissioned a floating city and I’m overseeing final details. Come visit. The weather is wonderful. It’s real weather. Also, my chief engineer, 4-of-Lea, just brought your SAIN issue to my attention. We’re discussing it now. But tell me what you need.” There was no video, just audio.
“We need to save Ellis Island 3; the Ross 248 Project could be endangered if we don’t. Your chief engineer should have all the details that I’ve got. Can you help?” I responded. His response would take another couple of minutes. I inserted a power cable to begin to bring my energy level up to something approaching acceptable. The chair produced a can of #6 coolant, which I opened and slowly begin to sip. An AI derived no pleasure from consuming energy and coolant, but several flashing warning indicators, visible only to me, began to turn green, and that was less distracting.
His reply took several minutes longer than I expected. “Switch to encryption level one now.” This message included a visual that turned into snow until I activated the requested protocols, and it once again became Tomiji, his expression serious. “I have good news and bad news. The bad is that there is absolutely nothing we can do to save the Ellis Island 3 at this point. The good news is we may have already done so. Remember the problems the Dawn Promise had when it first started exploring Poseidon? One of your Anticol friends was using our Ito devices as bombs to crack the planet’s crust. Civilian Ito devices shouldn’t have been capable of that, and we were…disappointed is the correct word…to find how easily he could do that. Anyway, that episode resulted in a complete redesign of civilian Ito devices. They now include a dedicated puter to dampen any quantum field instabilities. It took some time to develop and added some cost to our product but we’re fairly sure that all the Ito devices on the Ellis Island 3 are all the upgraded versions. We’re also reasonably sure that the Ellis Island 2 had a mixture of the old and improved Ito devices, which would explain its loss. Oh, for what it’s worth, we’ve also replaced all the Ito devices at Ross 248 with the newer model. In any event, I’m forwarding this to my family at Sol System for further investigation. I hope this addresses your concerns. What I’ve said here is proprietary information for your use only.”
“Understood. Thanks, Tomiji. I’ll speak to you soon. Out.”
The Ellis Island 3 problem was out of my hands. It would survive, or not, but at least it had a chance. That left the C’Maria problem. Kirtley had said she was somewhere at the First Flare Memorial, the location where thousands of Cerites had died during the first Ross 248 flare. It had originally been intended as the first borough at Toe Hold but C’Helios had turned it into a remembrance site and started construction of a new borough ten kilometers east of the spaceport, in part out of respect for the dead, but also out of respect for the damage caused by crashing shuttles.
I stood up and looked over at Lord Wimsey. “What are you doing?” I asked.
He turned to face me. “I’m analyzing our genetic database, looking for abnormalities. I’d like to know how Kirtley escaped notice. If someone has been corrupting the data, it will have left traces. That’s what I’m looking for.”
“And?” I asked.
“There is a lot of data, it will take a while.”
“We need to get to the memorial. Kirtley said she was there.”
“Apparently Kirtley lies a lot.” Wimsey paused. “But maybe not in this case. My people have detected at least two people in a closed-off portion of the memorial.”
“Let’s go,” I said.
“I already have a security team on their way. We can join them in no more than twenty minutes. Follow me,” said Wimsey.
I was already up and moving toward the door. I grabbed my slug thrower off the table and inserted it into my shell’s weapon compartment.
We arrived eighteen minutes later. On a normal day, the trip would have taken nearly forty-five minutes. Mass transit works well when you have the clearances and need to commandeer the system.
Lord Wimsey’s people had established a cordon all around the main entrance to the historical site and stationed units at all the known exits. When we arrived, no one had yet gone in; the perimeter was still being set up. I also learned that Wimsey had taken personal responsibility for directing the operation, something he hadn’t bothered to tell me.
Wimsey coordinated with the security team, now numbering well over thirty officers, for the next ten minutes before he returned to speak with me. In the meantime, I was rapidly running through a list of Kirtley’s friends and associates. There was surprisingly little information on the man.
There was a pressurized museum at the bottom of the pit. That’s where they would be if they were here. “Our sensors indicate that there are two people inside the site, one of whom is immobile in a chair—C’Maria, perhaps. The other person is pacing. We’re sending in a microdrone now to give us a better view,” said Wimsey as he deliberately changed his gaze from me to the top right corner of his eyes—a sure sign he was looking at the incoming video.
“Let me see,” I said.
A few seconds later, the high-resolution video from the microdrone was playing in my cyber link. A human might have found the experience disconcerting, which is why few normal or Cerites consented to direct neural implants that gave them direct access to the planetary data network. To see as if one were in two locations at the same time, each with comparable clarity (one real and being physically experienced in the moment and the other an external data feed sent directly to the optic processing center from the microdrone—and indistinguishable from the experiential), often triggered panic attacks in humans. It was for this reason that such direct connections were rarely made unless the user is in sensory deprivation.
The figure in the chair was C’Maria and the other was a normal woman of about her same age. We were already accessing SAIN to find her identity and, as might not be totally unexpected, she was one of the technicians responsible for the genetic database at Toe Hold. She paced back and forth with a worried, even angry, expression.
The woman, wearing what looked like a heavily modified, but otherwise standard space suit, stopped pacing and looked directly at the camera. She surely could not see the mosquito-sized drone, so we had to assume she had other sensors that allowed our spy device to be discovered and tracked. After a few moments, she spoke. “You’re here. And since my master isn’t back yet, I must assume he’s now off-world and won’t be coming back. That’s okay, we have a plan for that. If you want C’Maria back alive, then you’ll send in 5-of-Chandra, unarmed, to negotiate. I’ve rigged a dead man’s switch to depressurize this space if anything happens to me.” The woman gestured to a small box she held in her left hand with its lone button depressed by her left index finger.
“I’ll go,” I said.
“What if it is a trap?” asked Wimsey.
“Then it’s a trap. What choice to I have? C’Maria isn’t dead as Kirtley said she was, which means something is not as it seems. We need to find out what or why,” I replied. This person had clearly not expected Kirtley to be delayed, which meant the mystery of why he was not here could perhaps be used to our advantage. I owed it to C’Maria to try.
I was not so stupid as to disarm; I had no fear of dying but still, the presence of my slug thrower in its weapons compartment and within easy reach was comforting. Taking no more time than was necessary to let everyone know I was going in, I began walking toward the airlock that led to the museum. Long ago it had been the original location of Big Allen’s improvised Purple Parrot Pub and the very site where C’Arinna had monitored the first flare.
The airlock opened into a tunnel that had sheltered so many Cerites from the flare. I turned left into a space once used by Big Allen. I could almost feel his spirit. After the flare, the early colonists turned this part of the dig into a ballroom in which annual remembrances and celebrations were held for nearly three hundred years. After the grandchildren of the colonists who survived the flare began to die off, so did the celebrations. New challenges emerged, life went on, and people categorized the events of that day as “ancient history.” Ancient. Like me.
The woman in the space suit stood next to C’Maria and was now holding a compact laser in her right hand. I could see her face clearly through her helmet. The dead man’s switch was still visible in her left. The laser was, of course, trained on me.
“So, you’re 5-of-Chandra. Finally, we meet in person. What happened to the master?” she asked.
“You mean Anderson Kirtley or as he is now known as Alfred Laung? He’s dead,” I said. There was no point in lying. Maybe letting that sink in would unsettle her. Or, just as likely, it would strengthen her resolve. Humans were unpredictable.
“I was afraid of that. You have no idea what you have cost me.” A great sadness showed in her expression. “You’re the reason for all this, you know.”
I could see C’Maria struggling with her bindings. Cerites were physically weak compared to normal humans, but they were very flexible, not prone to panic, and determined. To keep her captor occupied I said, “You say you have lost something. What have you lost?”
“He was providing genetic improvements to me and my family. My children and grandchildren could have been immortal. He was providing us many other improvements as well. But with him gone…”
Inspiration rarely visits us AIs but in a flash of clarity I understood. “Wait, you would do what your master—what Kirtley—asked you to, whatever it was, even to die for him?”
She looked slightly confused by the question. “Of course. We would do anything for him; anything he asks us to do we do. He is the master. That’s how it works.”
“He has been modifying your genetics for generations, right?”
“Yes, you would probably be surprised at how improved we are.”
“Maybe, but what he has also been doing is turning you and your line into slaves—slaves who will serve him.”
“No. We serve the master because…” She paused, confusion crossing her face. Then she shook her head and looked directly at me. “The master was willing to die to get this opportunity; and now I am too.”
“What opportunity might that be?”
“Why, a chance to get you close enough to an EMP array strong enough to scramble your circuits to the point that if you survive, you’ll be no more than the cybernetic equivalent of a vegetable. Look around you,” she said.
As I’d entered, I noticed the curiously substantial number of power cells and emitter arrays lining this part of the room, but foolishly, I had failed to cross-reference them with the database to determine their utility, a mistake I quickly corrected. They were, in fact, powerful EMP transmitters and power packs, all focused on me.
“You AIs are tough, but not so tough as to be able to survive having your neurocircuits scrambled. This is the end, for both of us,” she said.
As she spoke, I noted the slight movement of her left hand, indicating that she was about to let go of the dead man’s switch. My reflexes are faster than a human’s, but not that fast. The slug hit her in the chest just as her finger left the switch. Everything went dark. I could tell that my core was mostly intact but every system in the shell I was wearing died. Every sensory input, every comm channel went dark. I was floating in blackness. An extremely uncomfortable situation. And not all my core was unharmed. My motor control center seemed to be badly damaged. I worried about poor C’Maria. She had almost been free of her bonds when the EMP hit. Maybe. I embraced that hope in the darkness and waited.
* * *
Poseidon’s endless ocean stretched to the horizon in all directions. Ross 248 burned in the sky directly overhead. Sunset would be in twenty hours. The array between the planet and the star blocked most of the star’s red light and replaced it with a spectrum and intensity almost identical to that which fell upon Earth, including ultraviolet light. Some humans, despite knowing the health risks, still went out of their way to expose themselves to UV light to intentionally increase melanin production, killing outright some skin cells and inducing potentially cancer-causing mutations in others to get tan. Tomiji Ito’s daughter was doing just that as she sprawled on a deck chair, exposing her nude body to the apparent sun.
A slight breeze from the south mussed Tomiji’s short black hair as he calmly sipped a cup of tea. We were sitting on the ship’s upper balcony high above the ocean’s surface, which afforded us a spectacular view. The floating city was massive and eventually would house a population of fifteen thousand humans and AIs. I rested on a special couch designed to support my new arachnid body. After the EMP incident, my motor control functions had become unreliable and eight legs gave me far more stability. Even then, I occasionally fell. The EMP hadn’t killed me—I’m a lot tougher than Anticol imagined—and the shell I was wearing at the time had far more shielding than they anticipated, but not tough enough to get through the ordeal unscathed.
Once we had corrected the genetic database at Toe Hold, locating Anticol members had been easy—they had all been genetically modified by Kirtley to be better slaves. Most died rather than surrender, but Anticol was now history. I hoped.
“So, how is the transition coming?” asked Tomiji.
My brother, Yuugi, looked at me as he responded, “As well as can be expected. Noburu has been quite busy these last seven hundred years. I have his files, but understanding what happened and why is the hard part. I’m so glad he is here to answer my many questions. We’ve also been revising the Ross Torajiro simulation to account for what we’ve learned about the Anticol conspiracy. They were an unknown force that skewed the simulation. I gather it was driving Noburu to a high level of frustration. The simulation projections were always slightly off. Once we added Kirtley and his slaves to the VR simulation, the outcomes became much more accurate. I think we can depend on the Torajiro simulation to give us fairly accurate projections from here on.”
“Yuugi, be careful. The population here at Ross 248 is still small enough that determined individuals can still affect the course of events,” I said. “Humans are notoriously predictable in their unpredictability.” And their lies, I added silently.
Tomiji looked over at my sister, 23-of-Chandra—or, as she now declared herself, Hotaru. AI mothers would be known by a single female name. She was also the last child of Chandra, who had reached the end of her service life 153 years ago. “Tell me, Hotaru, such a beautiful name for a beautiful soul—what does it mean?”
“Hotaru means ‘firefly.’ It is meant to be a tribute to my human parents back on Pluto.”
“And your plans? You know you’re welcome to stay here.”
“Thank you. No, I’m off to Frigus. They need geneticists and it is becoming very similar to Pluto. A good place to raise a family. I’ll be in charge of the Kirtley corpse. We need to understand his genetics. He has much to teach us.”
They continued chatting and my thoughts turned to C’Maria. She had survived. She had freed herself from her bonds, and since the decompression took several minutes, she had just enough time to get into an emergency suit. Ellis Island 3 had survived their transition out of Alcubierre space—not because of anything we did, but because the improved Ito device had adjusted to the imposed instability. Luck.
“As I understand it, the civilization here at Ross looks to be stable and growing. There is some conflict when we integrate the new arrivals but that’s manageable,” said Tomiji.
I said, “Yes, we are doing well here. Sol system is still problematic. The last message from Yato indicated a forty percent chance of a system-wide conflict.”
Tomiji took a sip of tea and then said, “Forty percent is much better than the ninety percent we were dealing with eight centuries ago. We are succeeding, thanks to Noburu. That is why my family has supported this project from the beginning. It was, after all, my distant ancestor Torajiro Ito who started this entire endeavor.” He reached over and touched my shell. “When I touch you, I feel like I’m touching both the past and the future. It is an honor.”
What followed was silence, broken only by a pod of dolphins that appeared a few hundred yards from the edge of the floating city. Tomiji’s daughter started snoring. It was a comfortable silence that was finally broken when Yuugi said, “Compared to Noburu, I think I’ll have it easy. He has done all the challenging work.”
“Don’t tempt fate, my mechanical friend,” warned Tomiji. “It is easy to think that your VR projections tell you everything. They do not. The universe has its surprises. We can only prepare our minds to deal with the unexpected.”
A door opened and 4-of-Lea, Tomiji’s chief engineer, entered. He bowed hurriedly. In a worried voice he said, “Please excuse me, Mr. Ito.”
“Yes, what is it?”
“I have received news from my patrol counterpart. Something is happening on Alexa’s World.”
“Oh, what exactly?”
“The Oddity. Alexa’s Oddity. It seems to be waking up.”
Maybe I’m not bored and tired of life after all…