Gravity of a Distant Sun

by R. E. Stearns

  “I’ll find out where Biometallic stores its certificates.”

  * * *

  The one piece of good news since Sunan’s Landing was that Noor was using the temple’s drones to give them regular updates from Yăo Station. At least, Iridian thought it was good news until she and Adda watched the most recent update with the rest of the crew. Something seemed off about Noor, and it wasn’t just that his vid was projected from Adda’s comp in the bulkhead-mounted cradle onto the opposite bulkhead in the Mayhem’s main cabin.

  “. . . back to that workspace generator in Water Processing.” Yăo Station’s low gravity magnified the way Noor shifted toward the meditation room’s doorway, like he’d rather be in the generator than recording the vid. “The AIs have been staying out of the way. It’s actually a pretty good setup if you can get over the smell.” The wet scent of the plants growing over the water tanks hadn’t been all that bad, as Iridian remembered it.

  The intelligences can’t be staying out of the way, Adda subvocalized. She let Noor’s vid conclude. His latest recordings ended in black with the temple’s contact information in white text, inviting people missing loved ones to find out if the missing person had ended up on Yăo Station. “Aside from the fact that I’ve never seen Casey stop using something it’s identified as useful, intelligences are designed to interact with humanity at every opportunity,” Adda continued aloud in a quaking voice. “An unsupervised zombie intelligence wouldn’t just ignore someone with an ID that qualifies them as an emergency supervisor. Especially not when that person is inside a generator in a facility the intelligence controls.”

  “That signal, the one that Mairie used to send you into the generator the first time,” Iridian said. “It would’ve done that same thing again as soon as he walked in there.”

  Rio’s eyes widened, probably heading for the same conclusion Iridian was. “But now there’s nobody there with him to pull him out.”

  “And Mairie did that the first time before Casey got involved,” Adda said. “Casey and Mairie are both communicating with him, and I can’t imagine either of them leaving him alone until they get what they want. He’s lying.”

  CHAPTER 21 Days until launch: 27 (holding for mechanical issues)

  When Adda was under Casey’s influence, she had said anything it took to keep Iridian from looking closer at her relationship with the intelligence. The intelligences had shown her almost everything they’d been doing, and she’d told Iridian only a fraction of it.

  Beneath the lights of the Mayhem’s main cabin, Iridian’s face went alarmingly pale. “Lying about contact with an AI is an influence symptom.”

  “When we get there, I can check his workspace settings,” Adda said. “There are safety measures he might’ve disabled. It’s not easy, but . . .”

  “If he’s influenced, he’d manage it.” Iridian nodded, determined as always.

  “And talk to him,” Adda said. “If he’s influenced, Mairie will come up often in his conversations. Or Casey.” In her mind, she was seeing all the influenced Odin Razum people Mairie already had under its control in the water treatment plant. Depending on how much control Casey had gained over the Yăo Station intelligence, it could be using all those people too.

  If Casey or Mairie had used Noor’s implant’s vulnerability to influence him as thoroughly as it had done to Adda on Vesta, then Noor would tell Casey everything. Despite the Mayhem’s flawless air mixture, Adda felt like she wasn’t breathing in enough oxygen. Casey couldn’t find out that they were working to close the vulnerability in her and Noor’s implants.

  Pel wrapped his arms around himself and hunched his shoulders, making himself small. “Fuck.”

  “Fuck indeed.” Adda had accepted that escaping to the new solar system wasn’t possible given their current situation, but she’d thought there’d be more time to fix the vulnerability. Now she could barely afford to pay Gavran for taking them back to Yăo Station, and Casey might outmaneuver them before they got there.

  “Isn’t that an extreme conclusion to jump to?” asked Wiley, who was holding Rio’s armored suit so she could examine it in the low gravity they were currently tolerating. “I mean, we saw a lot of influenced people down there, but . . .”

  “Adda knows all about influence,” Pel assured him. “If she says he’s influenced, he’s influenced. Anyway, it’s safer to act like he is unless you get proof he’s not. I’ve seen the other way around and that goes really bad really fast.”

  “And this is why I’m not following the ZVs around like a little lost pup,” Rio said resignedly while she checked over her armor. “They’ve got pilots, but they don’t have any AI experts. They still have no idea what hit them on Ganymede.” She’d rubbed off most of the scuffs from the fight on Biometallic 1, but she, Iridian, and Wiley all seemed to feel that every conflict required at least an hour of equipment inspection afterward. “I told them, but since I’m not supposed to be contactable right now and the ITA says there aren’t any awakened AIs, it’s kind of a hard sell.”

  “Your major believed you though, yeah?” Wiley asked hopefully.

  “Oh, sure,” said Rio. “ ‘That’s what I thought,’ was what he told me. That doesn’t help him with his boss, though.” Wiley and Iridian nodded like that made sense to them. Adda was happy she’d never gotten involved in that kind of hierarchy. It sounded needlessly complex.

  Even though all she felt like doing was strapping herself to a bunk and falling into a miserable sleep, Adda forced herself to start the search for more information about Yăo Station’s intelligence. They’d be leaving the Patchwork behind soon, and she had to be ready to deal with whatever Mairie and now Casey were doing on the station. She didn’t have time to mourn this setback, and there wasn’t any point in doing so.

  When she’d met Mairie in the water treatment module’s generator, her comp had recorded enough information to pin down the exact version of the intelligence that she was dealing with. She confirmed her translation of its name, Mairie, as “town hall” in English. Its developers had been bought out by a larger intelligence development corporation, which later made Ficience, the intelligence that managed Biometallic 1. Mairie was the oldest intelligence that Adda had ever dealt with, even older than AegiSKADA. And it’d still used her implant to talk her into entering a workspace with the intention of becoming its supervisor.

  She pushed that mistake out of her head. Everybody knew about that signal pulse Mairie had used, and they wouldn’t let it do that to her again. If she accepted the supervisory role it offered, she’d do it on her own terms. That meant somebody would have to accompany her whenever she was near a workspace generator on Yăo Station. Since the only one she’d found was surrounded by Odin Razum, she’d want company anyway.

  “I can get him back,” Adda said aloud.

  Since she’d started reading, Pel had fallen asleep, untethered arms drifting up from his passenger couch. Rio and Wiley had put away Rio’s armor and, having already checked over his and Iridian’s, were looking at something on their comps. Iridian was still strapped into the couch beside Adda, projecting her new shield schematics on what Adda had to imagine was the ceiling, since it was on the opposite side of the main cabin from the couches.

  Wiley and Rio looked up from their comps, and Iridian turned away from the schematics, grinning. “Yeah?”

  “If I accept Mairie’s offer to become its supervisor, I can separate him from Mairie, and Mairie is allowing him to communicate with Casey.”

  Iridian’s grin disappeared. “No. Not if Mairie is talking to Casey too. Absolutely not.” Subvocally, she added, I’m not trading you for him.

  We can’t be sure that’s what would happen, Adda replied.

  Over her protest, Wiley said, “Why not? That seems like an easy fix.”

  “If Casey’s in contact with Mairie, getting wrapped up in one AI is the same as getting wrapped up in both of them,” Iridian snapped. “This is not an option. Can’t we just isolate him until
he calms the fuck down?”

  “That will take a long time,” Adda said. “Weeks, probably.”

  “Then he’ll just have to wait it out,” Iridian said. “Nobody’s plugging into anything connected to Casey.”

  As Mairie’s supervisor, it would’ve been simple to add people’s IDs to a blacklist that would prevent the intelligence from contacting them. An awakened intelligence would’ve found a way around that, or it would’ve deleted its own blacklist. In its zombie state, Mairie would’ve had to abide by the list’s requirements. That would’ve separated everyone on the list from Mairie, forcing them into the first step of influence recovery.

  Easy as it would’ve been to keep arguing for that solution, Adda stayed silent. Until her implant’s vulnerability was fixed, entering a workspace with Mairie or Casey would invite them to influence her as deeply as they’d influenced Noor. Keeping her implant out of those intelligences’ reach made it much harder for them to control her, although Casey’s reach grew hourly. Assuring both Iridian and herself that she wouldn’t hurt Iridian was more important than freeing Noor from Casey quickly. By this time, he’d probably told Casey all the information he had. And the Odin Razum had never been Adda’s problem to solve.

  The passenger couches barely accommodated Adda’s wide hips. The beds, though, had room for two. She untangled herself from the couch’s straps, and Iridian followed her into the residential cabin. Rio had taken the other bottom bunk. They carefully avoided her to reach the top one and curled around each other.

  “We’ll sort it out,” Iridian whispered, her breath warm on Adda’s lips. We will. We’ll make it. Nobody and nothing can stop us for long. Adda wished that were true, and for once, she wanted to believe it badly enough to stop herself from voicing all the ways it wasn’t. She kissed Iridian, hard, and thought of nothing else.

  * * *

  The low gravity that Gavran had maintained throughout the trip rose as they approached Yăo Station and inserted themselves into its slow spin. After days of no gravity at all, the transition made Adda as sick as it always did. Even Yăo Station’s low gravity felt exhausting as she stepped out of the passthrough and into the oily air of the station’s docks.

  Gavran would be staying with the ship. “How can you breathe all this CO2?” he asked. “And besides the bad atmo, there are too many scrappers and thieves here. Mayhem can defend herself from scrappers, but I hate to make her do it alone.” He patted the main cabin’s wall fondly.

  Iridian said, “We’ll be back with Noor soon. Be ready.” Gavran nodded and retreated down the passthrough to his ship.

  Iridian, Wiley, and Rio wore their armored suits and formed the points of a triangle that enclosed Adda and Pel as soon as they were all out of the passthrough and crossing the port module. Every distant shout drew their attention and raised their gloved hands to their weapons.

  “Anybody see Noor?” Pel’s pseudo-organic eyes widened his pupils for a moment and then returned them to their regular size. “He said he’d meet us in the port mod, right?”

  Adda looped her arm through his, the way she used to guide him before he got pseudo-organic eyes. “Yes, that’s what he said, but you know what this place is like. Plans change.”

  “Whoa!” Pel joined the rest of them in dodging a runaway cargo hauler overloaded with what looked like a deep fryer, small animal meat, and several unwinding rolls of disposable wraps. The bot careened down the open space between the passthroughs and the wall that separated the port module from the rest of the station, where its track might’ve been before that was scrapped. A molting parrot squawked from the top of the cart, scattering small feathers in the food and everywhere in a two-meter radius. Five people followed the cargo hauler’s path through the dock, shrieking, “Get it!” “Faster!” and “Idiots!” in a language it took her implant a second to translate.

  “Colony ports.” Wiley shook his head tiredly. “They never have their shit together.”

  “And it’s always scattered in different ways.” Iridian’s cheerful tone sounded forced.

  They kept walking, looking for Noor and fending off more people selling or buying things the crew couldn’t afford to buy or part with. Iridian, Rio, and Wiley had to drop their triangular formation to fit through the single functioning door in this section of the module and into a connecting hallway beyond. Noor leaned on the wall across from the door.

  He was thinner and dirtier than he’d been when they’d left Yăo Station. The conversion rate between NEU currency and Yăo Station’s water-based money was still bad. Perhaps he’d run out. Or, more likely, he’d been sleeping near the workspace generator he used to contact Casey through Mairie.

  He pushed off the wall and approached in long steps, holding Adda’s gaze for a moment before turning to Iridian. “Finally,” he said, in a tone even Adda recognized as a rude way to greet friends. “If you’d taken any longer, I would’ve gone back to—”

  Without missing a step, Iridian raised her armored forearm and slammed it into Noor’s throat. He staggered backward and fell, choking and swearing while Pel yelped in surprise and Adda winced in sympathy. Iridian knelt beside him and put an armored hand on his chest, holding him down. “Are you supervising Mairie right now?”

  “What the hell kind of question is that?” Noor wheezed. “Do you think I’d be here waiting for you if I was?”

  Iridian picked Noor up and wrapped an arm around his neck with one gloved hand covering his mouth. “Back to the Mayhem.” Gavran had already told them he didn’t like the idea of imprisoning Noor on his ship, but it was a secure location where the station intelligence wouldn’t be able to reach Noor, once they took his comp.

  Noor said something angry behind Iridian’s glove and looked to Adda as if she might side with him. Iridian hauled him back across the port module, with Wiley and Rio looking big and menacing and Pel and Adda staying well behind them, out of the way. “That went faster than I thought it would,” said Pel.

  “We surprised him,” said Adda.

  “No kidding. He’s going to be pissed, too.”

  Adda had been furious when Iridian second-guessed her with safety recommendations while Adda had been under Casey’s influence. In the end, Iridian had been right about most of it. “He’ll get over it, eventually.” That wasn’t guaranteed, but she’d grown used to telling Pel comforting lies. He seemed to need and even expect them, and he never held them against her after the truth came out. “It’ll be weeks before we can trust him, though.” Adda raised her voice so Iridian would hear her. “Can’t we take him to the clinic first? To check on his implant?” If an intelligence was influencing him, then his neural implant would’ve been under heavy use for days.

  “Let’s get the money we got for the firmware copies exchanged for Yăo money first,” Iridian said. “If his implant’s fucked up, then fixing it’ll cost us something.”

  The Mayhem had two residential cabins, one for Gavran and one for passengers. He watched from the bridge doorway while Rio and Iridian muscled Noor into the residential cabin Gavran didn’t sleep in. With another short struggle, they separated Noor from his comp glove. “Get off!” Noor roared. “What the hell are you doing?” When Rio passed the comp to Iridian, she handed it to Wiley in the main cabin. Noor shouted, “I need that!” He faltered and his eyes widened. He’d just lost his connection to the intelligence that bound his mind, and if his influence experience was anything like Adda’s had been, that’d scare him. “I need it.” His voice was all quiet desperation.

  “You don’t.” Iridian’s cheerful tone didn’t match her and Rio’s cautious exit from the residential cabin, without taking their eyes off Noor. After the door shut, Gavran disappeared into the bridge to lock the cabin from the outside. The residential cabin door’s lock icon appeared in its center.

  Adda backed away from the door as Noor pounded on it from the other side. Iridian started talking to Rio, Wiley, and Pel about who would go get their payment and who would wait on the ship. N
oor’s frantic pounding stopped. “Adda Karpe,” he said, so quietly that she barely heard him. “You will receive a message with coordinates. Meet us there. Acknowledge.”

  “Who are you?” Adda had to know how much Noor knew about what was happening to him.

  “It’s me,” Noor said. “Nobody’s fucking influencing me.” An influenced person would say that, and anything else they thought would get them back in contact with the intelligence. “That’s the message I had to give you.”

  “But who’s it from?”

  “A ship’s copilot,” Noor said. “It’s the awakened AI Iridian said to look out for, isn’t it? The Casey Mire Mire.”

  CHAPTER 22 Days until launch: 21

  Even though Yăo Station’s local time was around 05:30, the short-term solution to a buddy getting influenced was to get a gods-damned drink. Iridian only managed to convince Pel, Rio, and Wiley of that fact, though. Noor was obviously indisposed, and Gavran wouldn’t leave the Mayhem alone with an influenced stranger onboard. Now that they’d switched everything they’d earned from the Biometallic op over to Yăo currency, Adda was too busy messing with their finances to process what’d happened via alcohol.

  Iridian’s feelings about giving up on the expedition were as chaotic as Yăo’s port always felt. Now that they had Gavran for as long as they kept paying him, they could’ve at least tried threatening Oxia’s facilities until it turned the expedition over to the University of Mars. Aside from the pure enjoyment of hassling Oxia Corporation, the university would’ve done a better job of getting Björn’s research team everything they needed to launch. According to the newsfeeds, Björn was still struggling with last-minute essentials. Switching expedition sponsors could’ve been the break ve needed to consider letting Iridian and Adda join. It would’ve been difficult, but possible, to see the new star system for herself. That was a hell of a thing to give up.