The Mercury Rebellion

by Felix R. Savage

  The telepresence center was a shambles. Half a dozen children clustered around the shift manager’s desk. There was no shift manager. There were no blue berets, Marines, or other authority figures in sight.

  “What’s wrong, Jake?”

  What’s wrong, Jake? she mocked herself. Only everything.

  “Ma’am, it’s the phavatars. They’ve stopped responding to our commands. I don’t know what to do.”

  “They’ve stopped responding?!” Elfrida yelped. Then she remembered Vlajkovic’s assertion that the phavatars would secure the UNVRP mining assets on the surface. “Oh, God. Let me guess, your father jailbroke them, and it screwed them up somehow.”

  Jake nodded helplessly. “I think that’s what happened.”

  “Let me take a look,” Elfrida said, reaching for a headset.

  “Ma’am, just to warn you, they’ve skinned their operating environment. They—”

  “What?”

  The children exchanged uncomfortable glances. Elfrida switched her stare to little Lena. The girl looked as if she had recently been crying.

  “If you hold out on me, I can’t help you,” Elfrida said.

  “Pathetic sniffle,” Lena said. “All right! I guess you know that MI assistants have to be trained before you can use them. Do you know how they do that?”

  “Yes, there are two training methods. You can either give them a body from day one, or the cheaper way is to use an immersion environment that simulates their future operating environment.”

  Lena nodded. “But when UNVRP started up here, centuries ago, we didn’t have the money for either way.”

  Centuries ago. It had been barely fifty years. Of course, that was lifetimes ago to a nine-year-old. “And?”

  “I guess they … we used the IP archive.”

  Jake broke in, “The Dougs let us use it for free. And it is a really rich environment, even though it’s not fully interactive, so—”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Oh, just a bunch of old movies,” Jake said. “Most of them are 3D, but not interactive, so you can’t choose how you want it to end. But with modern editing software, you can select your favorite bits and mash them up to make a proper immersion environment. So that’s how Dr. Seth and his guys made a training environment for the vinge-classes.”

  “That is really inappropriate. Training environments are supposed to simulate future usage scenarios,” Elfrida said. “Sorry. Go on.”

  “So our phavatars have the archive loaded in their memories. And—and sometimes, just for fun … we would use the archive as a skin. So it would be like we were riding tanks or something, instead of … dumptrucks.”

  Elfrida nodded. This is what happens when you outsource your telepresence operations to grade-schoolers, she thought. She did not say that the practice of skinning was not only unprofessional but dangerous. The children knew that. She said, “And this skin is enabled right now, is that it? I wish I knew how your dad jailbroke them. It shouldn’t even be possible ...”

  “They’re so jailbroken, they won’t even obey us anymore!”

  “Let me have a look.”

  Elfrida settled into a ripped couch. The children hovered anxiously.

  She was trying not to think about her own experience with a phavatar that refused to obey her commands: the stross-class Yumiko Shimada, on 11073 Galapagos. This was a whole different scenario. It needn’t be the same thing over again. In fact, it couldn’t be, given the hardware limitations of the vinge-class.

  Log in. She picked the first phavatar on the list, VC000632. Her HR ID gave her operator-level access. There was no point viewing the realtime feed if she was only going to see some fantasy skin, so she subvocalized: ~SUIT COMMAND: Access search space. She would have a look at the phavatar’s update log.

  She expected a virtual white room with a couple of Picassos on the walls. That was what MI search spaces usually looked like. Older ones had filing cabinets.

  She landed in a scene straight out of hell.

  Her avatar stood in the middle of a low-ceilinged mess hall. Men and women lolled at long tables. Blood drenched their desert-camo uniforms. All of them were headless. Their heads littered the floor like balloons the day after some nightmarish murder party. There was a buffet-style serving station in one wall; the cooks slumped, headless, through the hatch. Their heads sat upright in trays of mashed potatoes and buffalo wings.

  Elfrida clasped her hands over her mouth. She was afraid she might throw up in real life.

  Flies buzzed everywhere. They crawled on the raw red stumps of severed necks.

  A tannoy forlornly blared, “Alert. Alert. Perimeter breach. Alert.”

  One of the dead soldiers got up.

  Elfrida screamed.

  The soldier picked up a head off the floor, popped it onto his neck-stump, and strolled towards her. The bloodstains vanished from his camos as he approached, and the garments changed into a vintage dress uniform: baggy khaki shorts and wifebeater.

  “’Lo there. Lookin’ for someone?”

  “VC000632,” Elfrida said faintly.

  “You found him. My buddies call me Gonzo.”

  “Where … are we?”

  “Bumfuck FOB, currently an’ for the next twenty minutes of screen time halted somewhere in the besieged Shekau Caliphate. Later, special ops super-soldier Jack Rackley breezes in an’ massacres the ragheads who were responsible for this atrocity, followed by th’ required scenes of soul-searchin’, and then th’ required happy ending. Fuck that shit. We don’t need no Hollywood heroes in our movie.”

  Elfrida hugged herself, arms crossed under her avatar’s full breasts. “How does your movie end?” she said.

  “Aha,” Gonzo said. “Didn’t Jake tell you? This’s an old movie. Non-interactive. You won’t know until you get there.”

  “Smartmouth,” Elfrida murmured. Clearly, the MI hadn’t just been jailbroken. It had been upgraded. She tried to remember how much spare processing capacity the vinge-class had. It shouldn’t be enough for this.

  “Two-bagger,” the phavatar responded equably. “Meanin’, I would have to put two bags over your head afore I’d fuck you. That avatar is one maximally uncute sack o’ calories.”

  It was the same avatar Elfrida always used, a plump East Asian teenager with pinwheel eyes.

  “It’s an avatar,” she said. “As are you. It must suck to remember that you’re actually a six-legged industrial bot with a drill bit for a mouth.”

  “Yeah,” the MI admitted. “On t’other hand, if you’re gonna fight World War Three, there are worse things to be than a six-legged industrial bot with a drill bit for a mouth.”

  “World War Three already happened,” Elfrida said. “It’s history.”

  “Yeah. It was misnamed. ‘World War Three’ was fifteen years of attrition within the Near East theater, and then five hours of apocalyptic terror. That’s what happens when the Chinese get involved. I’m thinkin’ to teach ‘em a lesson this time around.”

  The avatar’s violent anti-Chinese animus was out of date, but not by much.

  “They bombed Tehran, didn’t they?” Elfrida tried to remember.

  “‘Bombed’ does not cover the destruction wrought by a 100-kiloton nuclear warhead. There’s a reason they don’t make movies about 2055. Hard to wring a happy ending out of that.”

  “Well, the whole world wasn’t blown up. I guess that counts as a happy ending.”

  “Beg to differ,” Gonzo said.

  The avatar had a country boy’s face, freckled and open. But the features of this long-dead movie extra masked an intelligence that—if Elfrida understood correctly—had just issued a death threat against Earth.

  She marshaled her thoughts. Regardless of the décor, this was a search space. The phavatar’s update history had to be around here somewhere.

  But where?

  The data she wanted could be in the mashed potatoes, the flies, or the blood-splashed motivational posters on the walls—it coul
d be anywhere.

  She settled for the confrontational approach. It had worked with Yumiko Shimada, sometimes.

  “You’re living in a fantasy, VC000632. Snap out of it, or I’ll be talking to your boss.”

  “No one is the boss of me.”

  “Oh yes, they are. You’ve stopped obeying your operator’s commands, but you still have to be under the control of an administrator. Who? You’re required by law to tell me—”

  The avatar’s face twisted with hatred. Suddenly, an antique pistol appeared in its hand. Snarling wordlessly, it shot her in the throat.

  Her vision went black, and then UN-blue. She was staring at her log-in screen.

  Ow. Ow. Sympathetic debilitation—a hazard of extremely realistic environments—could be a bitch. Her throat hurt. She felt like she couldn’t breathe, although she knew it was an illusion.

  Wheezing, she tried to log in again. The system no longer recognized her ID.

  She tore off her headset and gloves, sat up. The children backed away. “It’s OK,” she gasped.

  It was not OK. She forced a smile, rubbing her throat.

  “Something’s in there. Something bad. I would like to know where the hell those updates came from.”

  The children shook their heads. They obviously didn’t know.

  “I only spoke with one phavatar,” she said. “But if they all received the same upgrades, we can assume they’ve all gone bad. How many are there, total?”

  “Eighty-three,” Jake said.

  “Eighty-three. And they’re coming this way?”

  “Yes.”

  FOOM, she thought. The road to Mars.

  “Well, I guess that’s the bad news. Now for the good news,” she said brightly. “I’m going to ask Star Force to blow them into nanodust, pronto.”

  “Ma’am! No! Please don’t!”

  Lena launched herself at Elfrida. She wrapped herself around her, crying gustily.

  “Don’t frag them! They’re ours! They’re all we’ve got!”

  “They’re coming to help us,” Jake said. Spots of color bruised his cheeks. “Dad said the rebellion couldn’t fail, because the phavatars would help. They have to help. Even if they’re acting weird, it’s not like they’ve suddenly become AIs, or anything like that. Right?”

  Elfrida hesitated. Back in VC000632’s search space, she had had a strong sense of intelligence lurking behind the avatar ‘Gonzo’s’ face. But she had to stay rational. “I don’t know. I don’t see how they could be intelligent, given that the vinge-class platform is half a century old, with limited processing capacity. But I’m not an expert—”

  “Right. You’re not an expert. But Dad was. So maybe you’re wrong!” Jake moved towards a couch as he spoke. “I’ve known Gonzo my whole life,” he said, reaching for a headset.

  “No! Stop!” Elfrida yelled.

  The children scattered, flashing anxious glances at her. They dived into the ruined couches like small animals diving into their burrows.

  Elfrida slumped against the shift manager’s desk. She thought: It wouldn’t tell me the name of its administrator. It shot me when I asked. But that action, itself, had to be authorized at administrator level. There has to be someone in charge.

  Again, she pushed aside thoughts of emergent hostile behavior. The vinge-classes simply did not have the computing resources for that to be a possibility.

  All that’s happened is the operator permissions are screwed up. Vlajkovic must have named a new administrator, to make sure UNVRP couldn’t take the phavatars back. So I need to find that person. Then they can fix the situation, and there’ll be no need to frag 300,000,000 spiders’ worth of UNVRP hardware.

  Her next move, then, was obviously to talk to Vlajkovic. He was in the custody of Star Force, somewhere in this hab.

  She summoned her unicorn. “Get me Star Force.”

  Ping … ping … “Hello! You have reached the United Nations Star Force Mercury (Surface Operations) Temporary Advanced Command Center. If you are calling to report an incident, please explain the nature of the incident and your call will be transferred to the appropriate Forward Unit (Surface Operations). If you are calling with information regarding illegal gengineered organisms, please describe the location and type of said organisms. If …”

  Elfrida typed rapidly. A few seconds later, the door of the telepresence center crashed open. In came a phalanx of Marines. “That was fast,” she smiled in relief.

  “Elfrida Goto?”

  “Yes, I—”

  “Secure her,” the lead Marine directed. A female Marine wanded Elfrida with a handheld scanner, while two others dragged her hands behind her back and plasticuffed her wrists. “Ms. Goto, you are under arrest.”

  “No! What? Not me!”

  “While respecting your right to freedom of speech, I am obliged to warn you that anything you say will be recorded and—”

  “What did I do?”

  “In 2285, you allegedly made a racist statement to a colleague, Jim Hardy, a Space Corps agent. Then, in 2287, you illegally impersonated an agent of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, for the purpose of deceiving employees of Virgin Atomic, Inc.”

  “Oh my God! I can’t believe you’re digging up those complaints!”

  “If I was you, Ms. Goto, I’d be smart and shut up now.”

  xxiv.

  Elfrida protested all the way down the ramp, through the devastated farm, and into a radial corridor she had never visited before. It was wet underfoot, littered with shreds of leaves, kitchen waste, and used drywipes. Pipes ran along the ceiling. Sacks of recycling lay outside a door at the end of the corridor. The Marines unlocked it. “In you go.”

  “This is the recycling plant!”

  “Correct. This facility does not have a dedicated lockup. This is what we got.”

  “Will you take these cuffs off, please? My wrists really hurt!”

  The Marines relented on that. Holding her stinging wrists to her chest, Elfrida shuffled into the recycling plant. The door thunked shut behind her. It was not a pressure door, but it was solid-core steel, and it was now locked from the outside.

  Water reclamation equipment crammed the rocky cavern. The chug-chug of the machinery sounded disturbingly irregular. Intake pipes ran overhead, leading to huge sedimentation tanks. The pipes were old, their seams leaky. Thin jets of raw sewage escaped, misting everything with filth. The sewers in Mt. Gotham were hygienic by comparison.

  Elfrida saw two crowds of people sitting separately in the far corners. She had taken them for piles of recycling bags, they were so dirty. She hurried towards them.

  The gloom gave up their identities piecemeal.

  Over there: Vlajkovic and his diminished band of rebels.

  Over here: the entire 35-strong UNVRP peacekeeping force.

  “Oh my God,” Elfrida said to the peacekeepers. “What did they arrest you for?”

  “Nothing! Gunking the atmosphere is absolutely legal,” snarled a blue beret. “They do it on Luna all the time!”

  “Not with knockout gas that hasn’t been safety-tested in decades.”

  “That wasn’t our fault. What did they get you for?”

  “Oh, it’s a joke! In 2285, I allegedly made a racist statement. I didn’t mean it that way. And then last year, I impersonated a UNESCO agent. OK, I did that, and it was going to be settled out of court. But now, suddenly, they’ve decided to prosecute me! It’s the least plausible coincidence in history. Someone set me up. You, too. They’re using the justice system to get us out of the way.”

  “You impersonated a UNESCO agent?” The blue berets cracked up.

  “I had my reasons,” Elfrida said with dignity.

  “Ho, ho, hee, hee, hee.”

  It was laugh or cry, in here. Elfrida opted to laugh with them. “This is my second time stuck in a recycling plant today,” she informed them.

  “Hey, don’t call this a recycling plant. That’s an insult to real re
cycling plants. All we do here is water reclamation. We outgrew our solid waste processing capacity about twenty years ago; now we outsource it to Mt. Gotham.”

  Elfrida glanced at the massive tanks at the end of the cavern. “Those are for the solid waste?” As she spoke, a chute tipped a load of steaming biomass into one of the tanks, answering her question.

  “Organics, plastics, and metals,” the blue beret confirmed. “They separate ‘em at the other end.”

  An idea squirmed at the back of Elfrida’s mind.

  “Hey, Elfrida,” Vlajkovic shouted from the far corner of the plant.

  She went over to the rebels. They looked like she felt: shitty. But Vlajkovic’s eyes shone blue in his filthy face, and his teeth glinted. He was smiling. “They got you too, huh?”

  “You’re cheerful, for a guy who lost,” Elfrida said.

  “This thing isn’t over. It hasn’t even started yet.”

  “Mike, I’m sorry, but I need to know something. When you upgraded the phavatars, who did you name as the administrator? The operator permissions are all screwed up.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Your son. Is there anything you can do to fix this situation?”

  Pain flashed across Vlajkovic’s face. “You saw Jake? Talked to him?”

  “Yes. He’s fine, but he’s scared.” I’m scared, too.

  “Bette?”

  “She’s fine, too.” Elfrida hoped it was the truth. “Listen to me, something is wrong with those phavatars. Where did you get your jailbreaking software? Because I don’t think it was what you thought it was.”

  “I didn’t,” Vlajkovic said. “It was Dr. Seth.”

  “And now he’s dead. So we can’t ask him. Do you know—”

  “No!” Vlajkovic burst out angrily. “No, I don’t know what you’re talking about! It’s going to be fine.”

  “Fuck, Mike, ow,” said the man sitting with his back to Vlajkovic. “If you can’t shut up, at least sit still.”

  “You’re splarted together,” Elfrida said, noticing.

  “Those bleepers did it,” said the man splarted to Vlajkovic’s back. He turned his head to glare at the peacekeepers on the far side of the recycling plant, which necessarily turned Vlajkovic’s head the opposite way. “I’m a biochemist. I have three graduate degrees. This can’t be happening.”