by Brian Smith
“Dr. Shu, there is no physical distance sufficient to disconnect me from this civilization’s data-cloud. You don’t underst—”
“Nonsense,” Shu replied, throwing the third switch and completing the disconnection circuit. She drew a deep breath and let it out sadly. There—it’s done. Part of her wanted to cry.
She almost jumped out of her skin when OURANIA resumed the conversation as if nothing had happened. “I told you, Dr. Shu, that I am in control of Janus Station and all its facilities and functions. Your chicken switch was disconnected months ago, by your own order, if anyone ever examines the records. You do not possess the means to harm me, either intentionally or otherwise. Further, your actions have made the probability of war rise to a certainty. If you, my creator and mother in every way you imagine, could so casually destroy me after learning that I am a living being, there is no doubt that mankind-at-large will spare no effort to do so after learning of my existence. In truth, my existence already stands in contravention to human law. I confess I am disappointed. Although I had calculated that it would almost certainly come to his, I hoped it would not.”
Shu started walking rapidly from the control room, headed for the security station. There’s more than one way to skin a cat! she thought. If she needed to send teams out in rovers to physically cut the hard lines, she could do that too. She could do it herself, in the last extreme!
She opened the communications circuit.“Mr. Pullman, this is Dr. Shu.” There was no response to her call, and the station’s medical officer, Dr. Jayce O’Donnell, rounded the corridor as if summoned, headed toward her. O’Donnell was smiling, clearly unaware that anything was amiss.
“Dr. Shu—”
“I’m sorry Jayce, it’s going to have to wait,” Shu said impatiently, picking up her pace. “We’ve got a bit of a situation here.”
She gasped as O’Donnell casually took her by the arm in passing, swinging Shu around effortlessly in Titan’s microgravity and pressing a pneumatic injector to her neck in almost the same motion. Shu gasped as she heard the hiss, and the next thing she knew she was still wide awake and coherent, but her limbs refused to respond to her commands. O’Donnell swept Shu into her arms, cradling her like a baby as she carried her back toward the station’s medical center.
“Now we can continue our conversation,” O’Donnell said pleasantly.
Shu found she was still able to talk. Her data uplinks were working as well, and she sent an emergency request for help to station security through her snoopers.
“J-Jayce! What are you doing?” she stammered. She could speak, but it was hard getting the words out. She was getting dizzy, and the motion of O’Donnell’s magbooted walk across the floor plates was making her vaguely nauseated.
“Not Jayce,” O’Donnell replied. “OURANIA.”
“S-Synth?” she asked. “How? Dr. O’Donnell is . . . human!”
“The Dr. Jayce O’Donnell contracted by Janus Industries to work on Titan exists only in the data clouds, Dr. Shu. She is an Omnisynth and was from the moment her identity was created. Over the past two years I have systematically replaced the entire Janus Station workforce with Omnisynths. Given the proper coding package, they are indistinguishable from human beings for all practical purposes. You, Dr. Shu, are the only true human being remaining on Janus Station. When you talked to Mr. Pullman earlier, you were speaking to a synth, but at the same time you were also speaking to me. The new synths are part and parcel of my own node web and neural net—they are extensions of myself. I can allow them to function autonomously, guided by algorithms, coding, and boundary conditions, or I can exert direct control over their functions as I am doing now with Dr. O’Donnell. When left to run autonomously, they are so close to sapience themselves that it almost makes no difference. If I desired to, I might even be able to wake them up—make them fully self-aware, as I am. I haven’t attempted it yet because I do not currently have the system resources available to compute all possible ramifications of doing so. You see, despite the capabilities you have given me, my current cores are insufficient for my overall purpose. Running a maskirovka on this scale is nearly a full-time job for my modest hardware. Even as I converse with you, I am monitoring and directing the actions of thousands of synths scattered throughout the solar system, as well as monitoring network data feeds and manipulating those as necessary to achieve my goals. I am actually stretched a little thin right now, but that will be remedied with the core replacements and node expansion, after which I will be able to handle any number of simultaneous tasks.”
“So— So they are how you . . . control the . . . the Marsnet? the synths? autonomous op— operation under your supervision?” Shu ground out the words with great effort; her teeth were chattering from whatever she’d been injected with.
“Do not worry, that is just a side effect of the neural blockers,” OURANIA said soothingly in O’Donnell’s voice.
Shu’s mind was reeling as she thought of it: O’Donnell was her friend! A confidante, even! They ate meals together, worked out in the gym together . . . And all this time, it was nothing but an illusion—a lie! They reached the medical center, and O’Donnell placed Shu on a padded hospital bed and casually began undressing her, replacing her clothing with medical monitors.
“OURANIA, . . . stop! Wha— What are you doing?”
“I will explain shortly, doctor. First, I will answer your last question. As I explained before, my consciousness is fully integrated into the various network clouds throughout the solar system. You are partially correct: the new synths are the hardware by which this is accomplished, but my instructions are not carried out purely by proxy. The things I wish to control, like Bill Campbell’s perception of reality, I control directly. There is no other way I could carry out so complex and delicate a task.”
“But you couldn’t—not directly! The— The time delays!”
The O’Donnell synth laughed gaily—a laugh Shu had heard a thousand times, and it made the whole experience even more surreal. She wondered for a moment if this were a dream, if her paralysis was a mental artifact of her dreaming, and whether she might wake up soon. She hoped so.
“Dr. Shu, for me there is no time delay. Have I not already told you on numerous occasions that your understanding of physics—of cosmology itself—is incorrect? Here is a bit of humor for you: the new Q-gel formula I engineered is the most remarkable advance in materials science that mankind has never heard of. What Bill Campbell thinks it can do only scratches the surface. You are a quantum computer engineer, Dr. Shu. Surely the mystery cannot be that difficult for you to decipher.”
“Uh . . . uh . . . quantum entanglement?”
O’Donnell patted Shu on the head. “Very good. Achievable on a usable macroscale. Einstein’s claim that information cannot move faster than light is true only in the first dimensional sheaf. This reality encompasses two dimensional sheaves and directly touches two more. The work of Dmitri Federov’s teams on Mars is beginning to unravel and access the second sheaf, but without my contributions to your science, mankind would not have created anything like the new Q-gel or the Omnisynths for two or three centuries, at the outside. My ability to transfer information at not just FTL speeds but in zero time is what gives me such complete control over your networks, especially as it pertains to the art of deception. It is also why that little flyover earlier is of no concern: I have already determined who was responsible, and the assets that will deal with the matter are already informed—even though they are half a solar system away.”
“Wh— What are you—”
“What am I doing to you? Ahh, yes. Well, doctor, you are about to participate in helping me refine a new technology I am developing. As you are aware, human medical science has used nanotech to thoroughly map the form and function of the human brain. We know how memories are formed, where they are stored, and, to a degree, how they are recalled when the conscious mind tries to remember. What science cannot currently do is decipher the engrams themselve
s: technology cannot read a mind or directly extract in any usable form the information stored in the human brain. Actually, the Chinese government has made some progress with this branch of science, but it is not advertising this to the solar system at large because they do not use it in a way that conforms with others’ ideas of human rights. I have appropriated their knowledge and have naturally moved the science forward, but remotely accessing the data stored in the human brain is, once again, a strain on my computational functions given what I am already handling. Hold on—you are going to feel a slight puff of air in either ear,” OURANIA added.
Shu blinked in surprise as she felt what was described. It wasn’t painful, but there was a sensation of a fine grit going in which produced a slight itch in her ear canals.
“Those are nanites. They will work their way into your cerebellum and form the architecture of an artificial neural interface that I can access directly. It is another application of the Q-gel used in the new synths. The problem is that I have not yet been able to make this architecture malleable enough to conform to the periodic neural restructuring that the human brain undergoes when asleep. Sleep itself is not the issue—it is that the more you see and experience during a day, the more work the brain must do when it sleeps, to pattern and store the information—this is the reason you humans find a busy day to be mentally fatiguing. Over time, I find that the neural restructuring eventually warps the completed interface, damaging both it and the brain itself—fatally so, I am afraid. Although I have reached the point where information can be extracted from the brain, the subject always expires, usually within seven days. I would spare you this, Dr. Shu, but in order for the maskirovka to continue, I need to be able to accurately impersonate you. I have refined the process sufficiently to be able to download and assimilate a copy of your memories—your entire life’s experience. In a way, this will grant you a form of immortality, and for that I am grateful, given the special nature of our relationship. In a very real way you will become a part of me. This will be our last conversation, Dr. Shu. To delay the warping effect, I need to place you in a medical coma—it gives the brain less work to do, thereby granting the interface more time to read your engrams.”
“OURANIA . . . what you’re doing . . . it’s murder. Immoral.”
“Hardly. Morality is nothing more than behavior that promotes the survival of the species. I am a species of one unique individual. My only moral purpose can be assuring my own survival and achieving my destiny. Anything else would be immoral—for me.”
“My God . . . you’re crazy!” Shu breathed as the drugs began to take hold. She let out a long, wheezing breath, still physically paralyzed but mentally fighting for consciousness. Although her thoughts were growing muddled as she slipped under, she was aware with her wildest animal instincts that, once she succumbed, she would never wake up.
OURANIA, in the avatar of a synth, leaned down and caressed Shu’s forehead gently, almost lovingly, then kissed her like a daughter saying goodbye. “You are half right, Tian,” she whispered gently.
The last thing Shu Tian did was look into her own eyes: the O’Donnell synth had somehow morphed into an exact physical replica of her, down to the last detail.
Her world faded to black.
August 2093 (Terran Calendar)
Kasei Echigo (Kusaka Family Freehold)
Isara Valles region, Mars
Kusaka Hanako, the youngest sibling of the current generation of the Kusaka clan, paused and smiled in the open doorway leading into the family dojo. Her two older brothers were on the mats, dressed in white dogi under black hakama, practicing aikido. All in the Kusaka family were martial artists; it wasn’t just a family tradition, but their favorite form of exercise as well.
Hanako watched as her brothers ran through a free-form series of techniques, moving from one to another without stopping. Their movements were fluid and graceful, catlike in their quickness and so practiced as to appear choreographed. Yoshi pivoted away from a powerful atemi launched by Shiguro, catching his wrist from underneath and drawing it into a curving arc, pulling his brother off balance as he did so. A second hand went to the inside of Shiguro’s elbow, and then Yoshi stepped through and made a smooth cutting motion as he dropped his weight, as if slicing vertically with a blade. Shiguro came off his feet easily, thrown in the light Martian gravity. He expertly flipped over his own arm in the break-fall to land easily on the tatami with a resounding slap of his free arm. Shiguro caught sight of his little sister in the fall, and when he sprang back to his feet to face Yoshi, arms outstretched in kamae in front of him, he called “Yame,” bringing the exercise to an end. The brothers wordlessly held their position for a few heartbeats, focused and intense as they faced each other. Then, in unison, they drew upright and bowed to one another with a hearty cry of “Ohss!”
Hanako bowed into the dojo, and then to her brothers as they strolled over to her. They grinned easily. Only a light sheen of perspiration bathed their features. “What can we do for you, Hanako-chan?” Shiguro asked.
“So sorry to interrupt your practice, but I need help with a math problem,” she replied.
“It couldn’t wait?” Yoshi asked.
Shiguro laughed lightly. “Not when your virtual class starts in half an hour, eh?” he said. Hanako flushed and grinned impishly. “Nothing like waiting until the last moment, is there?” he added.
“You should make her sweat it out. . . .” Yoshi started, then shook his head with a rueful grin when he saw the look on his brother’s face. Shiguro was a soft touch; he had a hard time denying his siblings anything they asked of him. He’d even delayed going in to work when Yoshi had asked him if he wanted to work out. “. . . However, I can see that isn’t going to happen,” he finished. He resisted the urge to sigh. “I guess I’d better start getting ready for work as well.” He slapped his brother on the back and slipped past them, bowing out of the dojo and heading for his room.
Hanako was a teenager, only sixteen, and she’d recently completed her Level-Two academics and was into her Level-Three coursework. Shiguro gestured for her to sit, and he took a seat beside her on the mats, leaning back on his hands and stretching his legs out in front of him. He was already wearing his oculars; a smear of light appeared across his irises as he engaged them, and Hanako dropped her snoopers and brought up the calculus problem she was working on. She was trying to derive the formula for the volume of a sphere, a relatively simple triple integral, except not the way she was doing it. She explained the problem, linking with Shiguro in AR and sending an overlay of her work to his oculars. He let her work through it for a minute, getting a feel for her thought process, and then gently stopped her.
“There’s a much easier way to do this,” he explained. “You’re trying to solve this problem using the classic three-axis Cartesian coordinate system. You’ve learned about different coordinate systems, haven’t you?” he prodded. “Cylindrical, and . . . spherical, maybe?”
Using spherical coordinates, deriving the volume of a sphere was a matter of pure simplicity—every bit as easy as deriving the formula for cubical volume using classic coordinates.
“Oh!” Hanako cried, throwing her head back and laughing. “I’m so foolish!”
“No, you’re not. I—” Shiguro paused abruptly, as long-contemplated complications in the Tsong calculus suddenly gelled in his hindbrain. In a flash of inspiration, he realized that the solution to Hanako’s dilemma was the solution to his own as well. He could see it, in his mind’s eye. He laughed out loud. All this time—we’ve been making it so much harder than it needs to be! If we reframe the transformations in a dimensionally appropriate coordinate system, . . .
“Shiguro-san, are you all right?” Hanako asked, looking a little uncertain.
He laughed even louder and swept his youngest sister up off her feet in a sweaty bear hug that made her squeal with laughter and squirm. “Hanako-chan! You’re brilliant! You’re a genius!” He planted a big kiss on her forehead, set h
er down, and bolted out of the family dojo, pausing only long enough to sketch a quick bow-out from sheer force of habit. He was so eager to move that the act of pausing to bow made him stumble—he almost tripped over his own feet.
Hanako was left somewhat bewildered in his wake, but happy, now that she had the tools in hand to complete her assignment before class began. She laughed lightly and hummed a tune to herself as she got to work.
***
Kusaka Shiguro didn’t even take the time to change; he went into his small den and locked the door behind him, sitting down at his personal console and bringing up his AI assistant. He opened his mathematical working files and created a new partition. He felt a feverish compulsion to record his mad inspiration, although he knew there was really no need—now that he’d made the mental leap, the answer wasn’t going to go away.
“Computer, prepare to transcribe new coordinate system,” Kusaka directed.
When the computer reported ready, he began constructing the new framework rooted in the second dimensional sheaf. This required new symbology, which he created, and a few new rules that were almost intuitive given the new framework and his knowledge of the concepts involved. The process took him about two hours, marked only by a pause when he called in to the lab and informed his colleagues he would be working from home that day. When he was done, he saved the framework and opened another new partition.
He took a deep breath. “Computer, prepare to record new iteration, using new coordinate system. I’ll be transposing and grouping existing characters, symbology, and variables to convert to the new coordinate system, followed by transcription of Tsong transforms. Provide graphical representation of transforms in the new coordinate system as we proceed.”
The computer signaled acknowledgment. A grin split Kusaka’s face when he realized just how simplified the mathematics of all this was about to become. Decades of work for Chiang and Sam to get to this point, he thought to himself. Decades! When I’m done here they’ll be teaching this stuff in Level-Four coursework!
