Singularity Point

by Brian Smith

  “What’s this and who’s this?” asked one of the pilots at the table. Without waiting for an answer, another pilot opened the case and pulled out one of the half dozen bottles of scotch nestled inside. She whistled appreciatively.

  McClain introduced Ashburn to his squadron mates, informing them that three more cases of scotch had been delivered as well: one to the Five-One and one each to the maintenance crews of both squadrons.

  A synth server, nicknamed “Chip” by the ship’s officers, appeared at the table as if by magic. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s my duty to remind you that personal liquor stores must be logged in and rationed according to—”

  “Yeah, yeah, we know,” the female pilot replied, slipping the bottle back into the case. “This here is strictly Five-Two hooch, Chip. Hear me CFB?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the synth replied. “Would you like a round now?”

  “Doubles for everyone, including our guest,” McClain answered. “Mr. Ashburn drinks on my ration card.”

  “But I’m buying,” Ashburn added quickly, glancing around as the Marines laughed at him.

  “You don’t have to buy the same booze twice, mister,” one of them informed him. “You already bought it and brought it. As long as it’s logged as personal stores, we don’t pay again to drink it—it just gets charged against our grog ration, that’s all.”

  “Guess I picked the right time to buy, then, didn’t I?” Ashburn grinned.

  He settled in at the table with the pilots, glad to have been invited but feeling like an outsider. He’d been in a fighter squadron once—it was like a tribe, close-knit and always subtly hostile to those who didn’t belong. Being here made him nostalgic, but it also reminded him how far removed he was from this life.

  Two days after their arrival at Achilles Hab, he’d been all but ordered aboard the Ranger for a grilling by RADM Costello over Thuvia’s business, Barsoom Traders’ business, and anything else the admiral felt like picking his brain about. By the time Ashburn had presented himself aboard, Costello already knew who and what he was: the “what” being an inactive-reserve LTJG who still owed time on his service obligation. That hadn’t endeared him to the man, but at least the interrogation allayed the suspicion that he might be some sort of criminal.

  The attack on Thuvia was unusual—more unusual still was the fact that the raider was an export gunship converted into an autonomous AI drone—that conversion being a crime considered far more egregious than any act of piracy itself. Not only that, there was still no trace of Dejah Thoris to be found, and she was officially listed as missing on every network feed in the solar system. Something unusual was happening and everyone involved sensed it, but nobody had any real answers—not even Ashburn. He still couldn’t be sure there was any connection between his activities at Titan and anything that had happened afterward, but if there wasn’t a connection, it was all one hell of a coincidence. As far as he knew, every other ship in the Barsoom Traders fleet was operating normally and without any problems.

  When Costello had finished raking Ashburn over the coals, both men remained edgy and tense.

  Ashburn had left the scotch in McClain’s custody when he came aboard—the pilot was making a rapid recovery. Sensing frazzled nerves in the aftermath of a somewhat stormy meeting with the admiral, McClain invited Ashburn down to the Dog House to meet the gang and have a drink.

  Chip, the synth server, came back and set in front of them glasses brimming with single malt. It would have been impolite to ask how much Ashburn had paid for four cases of genuine scotch whisky out here in the Trojans, but the Marines knew it was exorbitant and they appreciated the gesture. McClain raised his glass and the others followed suit.

  “To CAG, Emily Reynolds, and Chetan Bakshi—fallen but not forgotten. Semper Fi.”

  “Semper Fi,” the others echoed, drinking off half their portions.

  “Thanks again,” Ashburn added quietly. “Y’all saved my ship.”

  McClain nodded solemnly, not saying much—Ashburn had already noted that he was soft-spoken, if not downright introverted. McClain was 5’10” and Caucasian; he had the physique of a fighter pilot who spent a lot of hours in the gym. His blond hair was already running to silver, but he was still youthful in spite of that. The first thing others noticed about him was a sense of quiet dignity. Quietly confident and prideful, he tended not to speak unless it was necessary, and when he did it was because he had something to say that was worth hearing. His blue-eyed gaze was intense and piercing, even on a casual first meeting—the kind that seemed to appraise the soul of whomever he met. It was the sort of look that made lesser men avoid meeting his eye, but Ashburn had weathered it easily enough.

  Two more Marines approached the table: CAPT Khatri and another pilot from their sister squadron, VMF-51. McClain invited them to pull up a chair, and Chip brought the two of them whisky, as well. Khatri gave Ashburn a frank, appraising look before addressing the group.

  “Did this character tell you who he is? Anyone recognize his name?” he asked the others. There was a chorus of negative replies, and Khatri shook his head. “Youngsters!” he snorted. “Marines, this is Mike Ashburn . . . as in the Ell-4 Mike Ashburn.” Ashburn smiled tightly, staring into his whisky as his compatriots’ eyes widened, glances were exchanged, and asses shifted in seats. Khatri chuckled. “When you said on the radio that A.J. here pulled the ‘ballsiest move ever,’ I said to myself, ‘Now, how the hell would he know?’ Then later I heard your name, put two and two together. . . . You are Dakota Ashburn, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ashburn replied.

  Almost everyone remembered the Ell-4 incident or had at least read about it, even though it was now years in the past. A ring of drug traffickers had developed a biomedical means of harvesting pure endorphins from human brains—a process that was invariably fatal to the brain being tapped. They’d set up their house of horrors in the habitat, and tourists had started vanishing. When law enforcement cracked the case, it went south and turned into a protracted hostage situation. A hostage-rescue team of Royal Marines was brought in from Jellicoe Station, led by Colin Harper. When negotiations broke down and the situation turned deadly, the commandos breached the section sealed off by the traffickers and recovered the hostages—Ashburn’s sister and brother-in-law among them. The ringleaders had bugged out early, making it to a pair of armed spaceplanes and running for it.

  Purely by chance, then-CW2 Dakota Ashburn happened to be on Ell-4 for a family visit. He’d flown himself over from the task force patrolling nearby, using the age-old pretense of putting on a static display for the locals. That was just an excuse to log a few space hours at taxpayer expense and catch a break from gray bulkheads and navy chow. In a fit of daring, he’d manned his fighter and gone after the ringleaders with no wingman, without any escorting drones, and armed with nothing but his particle-beam cannon and an aggressive heart. He’d fought an inspired, fangs-out 1v2 dogfight and taken down both spaceplanes before they could reach their getaway torchship. Although similar actions were fought on a semiregular basis in the outer system, the sheer perfidy of the traffickers and the fact that the incident had occurred in the inner system propelled it into the newsfeeds. Ashburn enjoyed brief celebrity, picked up a decoration, and soon faded back into relative obscurity—except among his peers, where “green ink”—combat time in the logbook—and hard kills were marks of high esteem.

  Khatri’s revelation did what nothing else could have done: it brought Ashburn back into the fold, at least among these men and women. They were quick to remind him that he remained a lesser breed—a squid among Marines—but he was accepted nonetheless. As the scotch flowed and tongues loosened, Ashburn spitefully flipped Bill Campbell the mental bird from across the solar system and told the pilots his story about overflying Janus Station, along with what little he saw there. At least the Marines could appreciate what he’d done: flying an ISR run in a civil spaceplane over a site with unknown defenses—just the sort of stupid, ball
sy thing a bunch of fighter pilots would love. The fact that it turned out to be totally benign didn’t matter, at least not after a few drinks.

  What Ashburn didn’t notice was McClain listening closely to the account, even to the point of grabbing his snoopers and recording some notes. He knew that the admiral had interviewed Ashburn, but he wasn’t sure the commercial captain had told him everything they were hearing now. He decided to treat this as a little overt intelligence gathering; he’d write it up later and shoot it up the chain of command, with no harm done to anyone—you just never knew when a meaningless bit of information could turn out to be a valuable piece of intelligence.

  September 2093 (Terran Calendar)

  Crandall Foundation Annex, Crandall Academy

  Daedalia Planum, Mars

  “. . . And that’s it, in a nutshell,” Bill Campbell finished explaining. He glanced around the table nervously, stifling the urge to drum his fingers the way he did when he was agitated. The looks returned to him were not encouraging.

  Following his receipt of Captain Ashburn’s private message, Ty Forester had sought out and confronted his friend and colleague. There was still no sign of Dejah Thoris despite a concerted search along her last known trajectory—she was missing and presumed lost, cause unknown. The attack on Thuvia almost immediately thereafter had spurred Forester to action. He ran a mercantile shipping firm, nothing more, and after years of operations without a major mishap it suddenly appeared that someone might be waging corporate warfare against him, all after he’d agreed to do a favor for Campbell which amounted to mild corporate espionage.

  Forester hadn’t been in any mood for cute evasions or arguments—he’d forced Campbell to come clean with him, and within hours of that meeting Forester had called an emergency gathering of the entire Crandall Foundation board. The annual meeting was still months away, but the board members had dropped everything to meet at the Foundation Annex and hear Campbell confess what he’d done.

  Carter Drayson listened intently along with the others as Campbell gave them the broad outline of his activity vis-à-vis Janus Industries for the past few years.

  When it was all out in the open, Drayson pierced Campbell with his gaze for a long moment, then patted the table absently with his palm before sitting back in his chair and taking in the others’ reactions.

  Forester was leaning back casually in his seat, a familiar posture for him, but there was a dark scowl on his face which the others rarely saw. He was fighting mad—that much was certain—and Drayson didn’t blame him for it.

  Dmitri Federov seemed to take the revelation more in stride—he had the look of someone who had just solved a puzzle that had been vexing him for some time.

  Maria Vasquez’s expression was one of boredom mixed with sullen anger and disappointment.

  “All right,” Drayson began. “We’ve heard Bill spell it out for us. Let’s cut to the chase. This is what we know: One: There is an AI superintelligence sitting out on Titan. Two: The computer’s capability is being further expanded without Bill’s authorization. Three: Bill asks one of Ty’s captains to fly over the facility to see what he can learn. Four: Not long after, Barsoom Traders loses a torchship, and another is attacked heading into the Trojans. Five: Both torchships are involved in the events at Titan. Six: Bill hasn’t gotten any data back yet from this amateur-hour run over Janus Station. Seven: According to this Dr. Shu at Janus Station, absolutely nothing is amiss—I think we can safely call bullshit on that one.

  “Here’s what we don’t know: One: Whether OURANIA is self-aware, conscious, and sapient. Dr. Shu claims she isn’t, but we’ve already established that OURANIA’s claims are suspect, based on what we do know. Two: We don’t know what happened to Dejah Thoris. Three: We don’t know whether the attack on Thuvia is linked to anything that happened out at Titan. Four: We don’t know if someone else, corporate or otherwise, has their hooks into Janus Industries and this whole program. Dr. Shu might be double-dealing Bill here. Nobody has brought that possibility up, but it would explain a few things. Five: We don’t know for certain that this mess can’t be traced back to the foundation. Even though Bill acted on his own in establishing Janus Industries under a false identity, his use of Barsoom Traders for his larger supply runs, as well as Ty’s involvement, leads straight back to this table. Even designing a computer like OURANIA is against all international law, much less building it. You’ve potentially put the foundation in a very bad position at a very bad time, Bill, despite your attempts to keep it all separated out.”

  “I know. I’m sorry,” Campbell replied. At that moment, he may have meant it.

  “Now we’re all complicit, as well,” Vasquez added dryly.

  “Not if we quietly correct the problem before anyone else learns about it,” Drayson said firmly. “I’ve outlined in hard terms what we know and what we don’t. Everything else is pure guesswork and speculation. It’s entirely possible that OURANIA is nothing more than a very capable computer and that nothing nefarious is going on in the spacelanes other than Dejah Thoris’s suffering some sort of catastrophic onboard casualty, and some belt pirates’ trying to land a really big fish regarding Thuvia.”

  “That’s a lot of goddamn bad luck and coincidences all at one time!” Forester half shouted.

  Drayson held up a placating hand. “Agreed, and I don’t think for a moment that’s actually the case, only that we don’t know. There’s also the small matter of Bill’s administrator out there at Janus Station, who may have gone rogue on him—that’s something we do know, ironically, thanks to the fact that during a chance meeting Thuvia’s captain casually mentioned a cargo run that Bill knew nothing about. Everything we don’t know, we are going to find out, immediately. The answer to all these questions is right out there at Janus Station, on Titan. Bill, you started this mess and dragged us all into it. We’d be well within our rights to hold a vote and strip you of your trusteeship.”

  “Damn straight!” Forester thundered.

  “Madre de Dios, Ty, shut up for a minute!” Vasquez chided him.

  Campbell nodded. “I know.”

  “Then you know what I’m going to say next, right?”

  “It’s my mess to clean up,” Campbell replied. He took a deep breath, glancing at the others around the table but unable to meet their eyes.”

  “Exactly. In case none of you are keeping up with current events, Mars is not the most stable place in the solar system at present. If we were to oust Bill right now and create a major shakeup in the foundation, we’d immediately draw the sort of attention we’re trying to avoid. Bill, you need to undo all of this—quietly. It doesn’t matter anymore if this machine is alive or not—get out there and unplug the damn thing once and for all, scrap the hardware, and close up Janus Industries.”

  “And you’ll do it bloodlessly,” Vasquez added pointedly, causing everyone to turn and look at her.

  “What?” Campbell asked.

  “You heard me—all of you,” she added, taking the others in with a hard look. “You’ll tear this down the same way you set it up: buy out the contracts of the people you hired and send them home, dismantle the machinery, and so on. What you don’t do is go in there with a pack of cutthroats like a belt pirate, burn it all down, and leave no witnesses. This is the Crandall Foundation, not some fly-by-night pack of corporate mercenaries. And don’t give me those looks—any of you!” she added, her voice turning a little shrill. “There may already be a few dozen people dead over this, by God, and there’d better not be any more! Or I will see Campbell ousted and the whole thing made public . . . and let the chips fall where they may!”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, woman!” Campbell retorted, his burr showing through. “Get a grip! I’m an engineer, lass, nae a bloody murderer!”

  “Easy there, Maria,” Forester added, surprised at Vasquez’s outburst.

  She stabbed a finger toward Campbell. “I’m not sure what you are any more, Bill,” she vented. “Going behind our backs like
this! For years! And don’t give me any of your self-righteous crap about this all being to advance Project Daedalus and the goals of the foundation. We make those decisions here—together—in this room! You don’t get to make them on your own! You aren’t the only one, either,” she added, firing a venomous look at Drayson. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to, Carter!”

  Drayson’s face twisted into a scowl. “Really? Why don’t you explain to us all what I’ve been up to?”

  “You’ve been meeting with the leadership of the Martian Coalition and the Ares Freedom Alliance—acting as a go-between. A mediator! Do you deny it?”

  Drayson looked like a kid caught red-handed, with both hands in the cookie jar. He flushed and his scowl grew deeper. “Trustee Vasquez, have you been spying on me?”

  Vasquez laughed—her laughter came out as a shrill, unpleasant sound when she was in this sort of mood. “Hardly! I’m the president of CPU, Carter! I know people! My own campus is a hotbed of Mars Independence activism! It’d be one thing if you were just observing and knew how to keep a low profile, but you haven’t! I know these political-activist types, and they aren’t your friends! Wait and see what happens at the next annual meeting, when we make our annual statement to reaffirm the nonpolitical nature of the foundation. Those pendejos are going to plaster your face all over the newsfeeds, showing you arm in arm with the jefes from Ares and the Coalition! Think of our loss of credibility! How do you suppose that’s going to sit with the governments of Earth?”

  “Do we really care how it sits with them?” Drayson asked. “We’ve been a Mars-based entity since 2060.”

  “Are you for an independent Mars, Carter?” Forester asked curiously.

  “It doesn’t matter if any of us are or not,” Drayson replied. “The fact is, it’s going to happen sooner or later—it was always an inevitability. We’re drifting off topic, people—we were discussing how Bill was going to clean up his mess?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Campbell said firmly. “I’ll go out there myself and shut it all down. Don’t worry,” he added to Vasquez. “I’m not going to call forth the clans and go on the warpath—I couldn’t do it that way even if I wanted to. It’s a bloody shame, is what it is,” he lamented. “All OURANIA has given us . . . Who knows where it would eventually have led?”