by Ginger Booth
“Are you suffering from ‘cumulative psychic dissonance’? I mean, is this something you’ve worried about long?”
“More like something my subconscious gnaws on. Comes up in dreams. Or when I’m drugged in an auto-doc. Fleeting thoughts around the edges of something else.”
Teke frowned harder, staring into mid-table. “But do you think we’re all being…damaged…by using the warp gateway?”
“No. I don’t.” Ben sat up straighter. “More like… You know that dude at Hell’s Bells who rebuilds star drives? On a perpetual acid trip?”
Remi snorted. “Yes! Arbus.”
Ben nodded. “That’s the guy. I’ve been through the warp gateway more times than anyone else. And I’ve transitioned when it’s out of tune. That yields weird perceptual glitches. They knock my thinking loose, like an acid trip. Is that damage? No. But it does unsettle the mind. That sort of thing.”
“Ah.”
Ben stared at Teke a moment longer. But he’d apparently resumed his mental vacation. The captain shrugged and turned back to his more fully present brain trust. “Where were we?”
Nico offered, “A little worried about you, Dad. Cap.”
“Don’t be. The topic is transporting Loki. What we’re here for.”
Floki extended a diffident neck. “Perhaps we could proceed by construction, rather than reduction. Try to build a minimum viable Loki on a separate collection of processors and storage devices, and see what he’s missing.”
“I like that!” Hugo encouraged. “Though it might be…psychically dissonant for Loki.” He apologetically inclined his head to Ben.
The captain shook his head. “It’s an interesting suggestion, Floki, thank you. But yes, Hugo, I think it would be psychically damaging to Loki. Veto. No Loki clones. Tomorrow I think Remi and I visit an asteroid. Start to get a handle on the physical task?”
“I cannot wait,” Remi agreed. “Ah, captain? Who is in charge of the ship? Maybe I should bring someone else.”
They turned to consider Teke, slumped in his chair with lidded eyes. He might as well be on an acid trip. Ben was pleased. He’d meant to make the zero-point suggestion for months, and kept forgetting on the rare occasions he crossed paths with the physicist. Evacuating Denali had absorbed his attention.
“Judge will be acting captain,” Ben pronounced. “Just the two of us to the asteroid.”
Remi nodded a fair-enough.
Cope barely appeared on his silvery-grey ansible screen before Ben belted out, “Heya, gorgeous! How’s it hanging?”
Cope grinned crookedly. “About the same as yesterday when you called. And don’t give them ideas. No one’s suggested Spaceways debt is a hanging offense. Yet. Though if you borrow with no plan to pay it back, it’s close to stealing.”
Ben chuckled and fidgeted with his ear. “Say, Cope. Has Sass called you?”
“Yeah. Well, she left a tight beam. Out of conversational range.”
No, Ben realized, Sass wouldn’t inflict long delays on a sensitive topic. Ironically, the ansible they spoke over cost no time lag whatsoever, though they spoke light years apart.
Cope continued, “She suggested dinner and drinks on Glow, when she wraps up in port. Said retrieval went well. Why?”
“In port. Do we have a better ground game when she arrives?”
“We? The Sanks welcome their own with cheerleaders and pom-poms and chartered buses. Can’t help wondering what the Denali and paddies think of that.”
Ben grimaced. “They get pissed off like everyone else. Say, Cope, when I’m the most hated man in Aloha, will you fly away with me?”
“You have to find someplace better first.”
Ben nodded, then tilted his head. “Nico demanded I call you. He and Teke think I lost it during the ring swing.”
Cope stilled. He had his beloved’s riveted attention.
“See, I pulled a flip and redlined the inertial dampeners. Left me a little woozy. But it was nothing like after the lightning zapped me on Denali. I was still flying. Just a little disoriented.”
Cope’s voice grew so very quiet and husky sometimes. “You OK, buddy?”
“Absolutely! And everybody else on board! Some garden damage. All very fixable.”
“You know what else is fixable, is the position of that redline on the inertial dampeners. You tell Remi for me – check it. We did that with Sass’s, backed off the line every few years, until we gave in and replaced the dampeners. That Denali gravity well wears them out fast. Ought to recalibrate that line monthly.”
“Message received. Back off the redline.”
“You caught the Denali part? That redline is too aggressive after the summer you’ve flown. Don’t go splat. Splat is bad.”
“Got it,” Ben agreed penitently.
“Any other symptoms?”
Ben wagged his head yes-and-no. “Wore off once I got a chance to catch my breath. No uncontrollable crying. I made good decisions. I let Wilder lock Teke in the mop closet. He might hold a grudge.”
Cope laughed softly. “So he’ll be calling me.”
“No, I asked him how his zero point energy generator was coming along. He’s off in la-la landing thinking that through now. Better than a mop closet.”
“Zero point.” Cope shook his head. “Not familiar with that.”
Ben dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “Teke is. Great physicist distractor. Nico might call you, but only because Teke attempted a mutiny in the copilot seat.”
Cope stilled completely.
“I’m OK,” Ben asserted. “I get woozy after an 8-plus-gee turn.”
“Buddy, if you’re scared, come home to me.”
“We need this, Cope.”
“Loki? Screw him. You’re more important. Nico and Floki too. We’ll deal.”
“I can do this. I’m OK.”
Cope nodded gently. They ended up chatting for twenty minutes. He didn’t allude to Ben’s little mental lapse again until the end. “Don’t forget to move that redline. My orders as chief technology officer.”
“I like it!” Ben encouraged. “See, once you get that new president hired, you can come play with me instead of listening to lawyers.”
“And get smashed on the bulkheads with the tomatoes. Be careful out there. And have Nico call me. Love you, bye.”
18
Ben craned his neck back, and cast his hand-floodlight across the banks of machinery in awe. Today he and Remi visited one of the AI’s asteroids in person. Loki’s processor cores employed no bland steel cases, no air-conditioning, no twinkling busy-lights, nor power switches for the likes of man. The emplacement reminded him more of the ‘shelf-fungi’ twining up the corkscrew trees of Denali. Except these grew from the living rock walls of a cavern, carved from the asteroid by plasma guns.
“Super-conducting speed,” Remi murmured beside him, over their helmet radio. At Ben’s glance, he cast a floodlight at the nearest shelf fungus protrusion. “The cold of space leaves the metals superconductors. I can’t wait to see the clean room to fabricate the nanoprocessors. Loki’s nanofab.”
Check, thought Ben. Mahina could fabricate microprocessors, and Hell’s Bells as well. But in that arena, Loki would surely have left their technologies behind in the dust. Literally. Manufacturing at that precision required meticulous vacuum, which this asteroid supplied in plenty. “So do we chip these off the walls?”
“Ah…” the poor engineer sang. “No. Maybe.” Faced with a concrete technical question, he broke through their shock and awe. He focused in on the shelf at hand, studying its interfaces to cavern and other shelves.
Ben earned an engineering degree, but had more of an adventuring soul. He strode into the center of this vertical shaft of server farm, processor shelves coiling above like a DNA helix to loom five times his height. He embraced the awe. He turned 360 degrees, running his light along them all. Then he gave a tiny kickoff, carefully calibrated to float him upward at less than a slow walk. This time he kept his ligh
t in a single direction before him. Thus it was no surprise when Remi reached his verdict.
“No. Damn.”
No, there was no wiring between these processors per se. Rather the entire squat column of a room was a printed circuit cave, the metals communicating between them inlaid on the stone. Where two data lines crossed, one dived below the other, bridged with rock as an insulator. The stone latticework stretched as extensive and intricate as the connections were vast.
He casually put a hand out to arrest himself at the ceiling. No metal cabling deposited there, only the substrate. Clearly this provided room for expansion. Anchored for the moment, Ben gazed through a 360 again. He spotted the robotic plasma cutters and metal depositors used for new construction, dormant in place awaiting their next activation. Of course no anthropomorphic aesthetics applied to such robots. They looked more like heavy-duty enormous spiders, tethered to an offline star drive capable of powering them to melt metal and stone. Something along the lines of a powerful canister vacuum waited with them, and assorted ingots of pure metal.
One hell of a soldering gun, Loki. He wondered briefly why he didn’t draw the metal into wire first, then realized any wire would cold-weld itself right back into an ingot. No, only insulating rock separated wires here. How do you turn rock into insulation instead of ground? Maybe a fine nonconducting foam, instantly hardened.
“How many of these chambers?” Ben mused. “He said a few dozen?”
“He said this was the newest,” Remi agreed. “Maybe smallest. On this asteroid.”
“His smallest holds how much processing power?”
“More than the entire Aloha system combined,” Remi confirmed. “In this one room.”
Ben pushed off the ceiling to return to the floor, conceptually at least. The microgravity here actually ran the opposite way, but he could barely feel it. His mind preferred referencing the corridor level as the floor. “So we need to bring the whole asteroid?”
“That exceeds our radius on the gateway,” Remi murmured. “We’ll have to carve away the excess. But Ben, he called this asteroid his central processing unit.”
“Meaning?”
“He has more than one.”
“Well,” Ben waxed philosophical, “payment scales up with the number of trips, I suppose. The answer will be yes, Remi. Our job now is to estimate the task, and how we go about it.”
“Yes, and no,” Remi equivocated. “He can replicate all of this in Pono orbit. He created it once. He can do it again. So there’s the question of which parts to carry, and which to reproduce.”
“I have a strong preference for bringing, rather than reproducing,” Ben opined. “If he leaves enough behind, he could leave an instance of himself with it.”
The engineer contemplated that prospect while Ben completed his slow pirouette and landing. “Merde. But Ben…I don’t think you control that by possession.”
“I can try. So this nano-scale circuit fabricator, is it here? It must be.”
“Yes. A half kilometer away. He would have one on each asteroid. Maybe two on this one.”
Ben sighed. “Let’s grab the sleds from the shuttle.”
“I hate flying those sleds.”
“You and me both.” The captain shone his light one more time around the room. He’d never believed humanity would find aliens out here. Yet he was wrong. He’d found one. He stood now as a fragile, inconsequential speck in the belly of the leviathan. What were those things called? Krill, the tiny sea creatures eaten by the whales of Earth. A nanosecond of thought was all it would take for Loki to awaken one of his minions and fry them with a molten metal-sprayer or a rock-cutting plasma torch.
“Let’s not piss him off,” he murmured.
“Oui.”
They swam back to the shuttle to collect the grav sleds in silence. In the airlock, Remi blocked Ben’s hand from cycling the air, and touched helmets. In vacuum here, it seemed impossible that Loki could overhear. “Is your goal to transport him, captain? Or to destroy him?”
Ben sighed. It would be all too easy to destroy Loki on this jaunt. Propelling a pared-down asteroid through the warp gateway, his ship could easily correct for any itty-bitty error in the re-entry vector to the rings. But nothing could correct an oversized error on the asteroid. A touch of oops, and the processors embedded into this rock would fall inexorably into the gas giant.
“Tempting. But no.” A gut check left him breathing easier. No was the right answer. “I’ll play it straight. Granted, we might still fail and destroy him by accident. Or do you want to remove this AI from the universe?”
Remi replied quickly, “I think we’d fail. And piss him off. And for that, we could never apologize enough. Besides, I want him in Aloha. The gifts he brings are beyond price.”
Ben nodded thoughtfully. He needed Loki’s fuel badly to save Denali. He could probably run Loki’s fuel factories without the sentient mind behind them, possibly even the phenomenal spaceship dockyards. But killing the goose that laid the golden eggs struck him as a dumb move, especially if Bloki and Floki survived him. “I won’t betray either of you.”
“Good.” Remi parted helmets and hit the lock cycle.
Inside, they pulled the tops off their suits and relaxed for a bite to eat, enjoying the view over the asteroid, littered with rocks ranging in size from sand grains to hills. This offered an active landscape, as the asteroid rolled its face into the sun every 22 minutes. As they ate lunch, perfectly crisp shadows cast stark bars across the rubble-rich stone, shrank to nearly nothing, then flipped to reach the other way.
When they suddenly plunged into pitch darkness again, Ben sighed and called Judge, acting captain on Merchant. Remi rose to amass gear for their trip inside the rock.
“How’s it going, Judge?” Ben asked cheerfully.
“Ben! Your crew’s a bunch of royal jerks, you know that?”
“Substitute teacher effect,” Remi growled behind him. “I hate acting captain.”
Ben laughed. “My crew is wonderful! Professional, brilliant, and skilled!”
“They took a vote and decided they’re done replanting the engine room. They’d rather take a day off.”
“Did you threaten to sic Wilder on them?”
“Wilder started it, the swine. So cap, you mind if I take Merchant out for a spin? Thought I’d refill our fuel tanks while you’re busy.”
“Ah, Remi? Is this straightforward?” Ben asked the engineer. Remi fueled the tender at Loki’s depot. Ben hadn’t been there, close up. Merchant held position above playing gunship escort while Remi and Joey tackled the fueling chore.
“Don’t scratch the paint,” was the engineer’s verdict.
Merchant wasn’t painted.
“Go for it,” the captain ordered. “I tried calling you from inside the asteroid, by the way. Like we thought – our comms can’t get through the rock. So be back for pickup around seventeen hundred. Don’t be late.”
“Will do, cap!”
Ben turned to survey Remi’s heap of gear. Aside from both of their tool boxes, he selected five spare air tanks, a 4-liter water thermos, arc lights, and a heater. “Camping for a week?”
“Mine tunnels are tricky. I get paranoid.”
“No battery packs?” the amused captain teased, only partly in jest. At these temperatures, if their suit batteries failed, they’d freeze to death in a handful of minutes.
“Surrounded by wiring!” Remi pursed his lips, changed his mind, and added batteries to the pile. “This should be enough.”
Ben started to reply with another quip, but thought better of it. The installation wasn’t really a mine. But Remi was the expert in excavated asteroids. His call.
The captain brought up the schematic they’d evolved so far and considered it. Loki couldn’t provide them a real map. He provided a drawing of the connections, but nothing to scale, just a bare undirected graph. Nodes indicated a functional unit like ‘CPU room’ or ‘nanofab’. Edges denoted the strongest connections
to logically adjoining units. But they’d already seen that this wasn’t related to the corridor layout, since the data buses drilled through stone walls. Essentially they traveled the trash alleys, the servant halls, of little interest to Loki. “How did you figure half a klick to the wafer fab?”
“I guessed.”
“OK.” The captain rose and helped him divide the supplies into two hard packs to attach to the grav sleds. “Then let us go spelunking!”
19
Ben set his grav generator to Mahina standard 1/6th g and bounded his grav sled from the shuttle to the hole into the asteroid. Remi, more adept with a sled, started flying his at dead slow from the start. He arced up and vanished first down into the hole.
For all his years in space, Ben’s heart wanted a door here. Instead he got a funnel-shaped hole. Because the internal corridors required no door to keep out the vacuum. And one direction was as good as any other. Though for practical purposes, all corners were rounded.
He killed his grav and pushed himself through the T-intersection funnel turn with his legs, to match Remi’s arbitrary choice of ‘up’ inside the round tunnel. Only then did he start his laden sled, which he rode like the handlebars of a bicycle, including the basket, minus the bike, legs trailing uselessly behind.
Remi waited for him at the first branching, where the inward feed tunnel met the corridor they visited first. “Can you find my mark?”
“No. Let’s map instead of mark.” The captain declared this location as his origin, dropped a marker on it, and shared it with Remi. The HUD, head’s up display, showed inside his helmet, though he used his tablet to input the map. “No good?”
His companion wobbled his head. “It’s good. Ah, there!” He pointed to a mark by Ben’s left knee, visible only by the slight luster of grey pencil graphite against grey rock. “I mark it when we enter before.”
Ben contemplated just how hard it was to see that mark even with Remi pointing straight at it. “Got goo?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. Every engineer carried the assorted gels to cut metal in space. He pulled out a yellow-capped tube and drew a big zero on the wall. Then he looked up and down the corridor they’d just visited. He thought they’d gone right, but wasn’t sure. “Which way?” He added a line as Remi directed – the opposite direction from his guess. Then he capped the yellow gel and opened the green, to draw over the same lines and activate the dissolving action. Which proved not especially powerful against stone. But he etched a groove a millimeter deep.
