Limit of Vision

by Linda Nagata

  “For now,” Virgil said. He shook his head, feeling so wired he wondered if all this might be just a dream. “The organization’s always lost as soon as E-3’s focus changes. It always forgets what it learns, what it is.”

  Panwar leaned across the table. “I’m not so sure of that anymore. Even when it seems to forget, the knowledge is there, waiting to be rediscovered. It could be just a problem with organization, but even that’s fading. No ethical ethics committee could condemn it.”

  E-3 interrupted: This is fear.

  Virgil sat back in his chair, rubbing his face, his tired eyes, wondering why they were being allowed this session at all. Maybe some of the bigwigs on the ethics committee shared their curiosity? “It’s learning so quickly.”

  “Of course it’s learning quickly.” Panwar rose from his chair. He approached the screen, so that Virgil could see him now only in silhouette. “Summer pumped up the cellular metabolism. No computational resources are wasted on computing muscle coordination, handgrip, digestion, walking, eating, or any of the physical realities we have to deal with. So LOVs are efficient, and they’re nonspecialized too. Resources can shift to whatever function is required.”

  “Focus on the problem,” Virgil said. “Survival.”

  “Ours?” Panwar asked. “Or E-3’s?”

  It wasn’t the same issue. Virgil felt the truth of this sink in. “E-3’s, then. Because we’re not getting out of this. No matter what decision they make about E-3, they will take it all away from us. You know they will. No lawyer is going to change that.”

  Panwar’s shoulders rose and fell as he stood silhouetted before the screen. Virgil could hear the soft sussuration of his breath. “All right!” he snapped. “I’m not giving up, but for now, focus on E-3.”

  Virgil nodded, feeling a little cold, but still thinking clearly. At least his mind felt clear. But was it? No way to know. “Two questions,” he said. “If the committee’s decision goes against E-3, will it know, and be able to react?”

  “Not a chance,” Panwar answered. “You and I won’t be here to warn it. Shit. I wish we could hijack the whole station. Bring it down. Land it in a friendly country. A LOV protectorate. That’s it. I wish we could.”

  Question: Now?

  Panwar turned halfway back to the screen. Virgil could see the quick flash of a smile. “Yeah,” he said, a bitter chuckle in his words. “I wish we could do it right now.”

  This-I will do it now.

  Virgil froze, as a dark, absurd suspicion surfaced in his mind. “Panwar, what does it mean by … ?”

  Panwar shook his head.

  “E-3,” Virgil said. “Explain this. What will be done?”

  Execute partial solution: Bring down this module to LOV protectorate.

  “Bring the EquaSys module down to Earth? That’s not possible.”

  This partial solution is found possible. It progresses.

  “Describe progress.”

  Silence ensued.

  Sweat started on Virgil’s brow. “Describe progress!” he insisted after several seconds had passed.

  Vocabulary deficient to define activities.

  “It doesn’t know the words,” Panwar muttered. “Damn, what is going on?”

  “Show us the progress,” Virgil ordered.

  E-3 could link with any public cam in the world—and there were hundreds of public cams aboard the Hammer. The right-hand screen came alive, dividing into a dozen lesser screens, each showing a different view of the EquaSys module.

  The company module was one of a cluster of twenty bound together like a stack of cigars. The cluster in turn was tethered to an identical set of modules that made up the other end of the station. The whole thing spun, imparting a centrifugally induced pseudogravity at either end. It was called the Hammer, but from a distance the station looked like two gleaming dewdrops set at the end of a perfectly straight filament of spider’s web.

  The EquaSys module was one of those on the outside of the cluster so of course it was studded with view cams … and all of them showed the same thing: an army of construction robots at work. With their six legs and the solar panels mounted on their backs the robots looked like silver cockroaches. They congregated around the weld bands that secured the EquaSys module to its cluster. Virgil shifted his gaze to a close-up image: one from a cam on the back of a construction roach. It showed the robot busily sawing at the metal seam with a small, circular blade that spun luminous silver. On either side other roaches mirrored its efforts.

  Virgil’s gaze shifted back to the LOV colony. “E-3,” he croaked, “do you have control of the roaches?”

  Insects?

  “The construction robots there in the image!”

  Yes.

  “Stop. Let them go. This won’t work. People will die. You’ll die.”

  This people will descend to LOV protectorate.

  “There is no LOV protectorate!”

  That is you.

  “No.”

  Yes. There with you the thoughts not mine. LOVS.

  Virgil touched the hard grains across his forehead. “God no.”

  God no is emphasis-no. This survival is yours.

  “No! You can’t survive this. Stop it now.” He scanned the cam images again to see the roaches still sawing. Why had there been no response from the station staff? “E-3, the module isn’t made to enter atmosphere. It can’t be steered. It will fall, and burn.”

  “Or it will be flung away,” Panwar whispered. “Depending when the welds break.”

  It will fall. That is a requirement of the partial solution.

  Panwar yanked out the keyboard. “I’m suspending the audio link.” Then he turned to Virgil. “If it can break the welds on the downswing, that’ll ensure a fall.”

  “People will die if the debris reaches ground!”

  “People will die if it doesn’t,” Panwar said. “If the module doesn’t fall, it could become an orbital hazard like no other. An eighty-ton, uncontrolled missile. And in either case the LOVs are going to be lost.”

  “God help us.” Virgil stood up, breathing hard. “We need to call the station. Maybe they can still stop it.”

  “This link to E-3 is our only line out of here!”

  “All right. Don’t panic. Just keep talking to it then. Convince it this is stupid.”

  Talk to it. But E-3 wasn’t human. Two days ago it hadn’t even existed as a true entity. They had no real conception of how it thought, or what motivated it. In their selection program they had encouraged unity, curiosity, problem-solving talents … a sense of self. Had they also endowed it with a survival instinct? There had never been a hint of such a thing before Gabrielle’s long and fatal conversation with it, and so, unwittingly, they had coaxed it to escape …

  They had coaxed it to die.

  Virgil’s gaze fell across the aerostat, silent in a corner of the ceiling. His breath caught. Who was watching there? Was it a live guard, or a ROSA? Probably a ROSA.

  He shoved a chair across the room, jumped on its seat before it stopped, and grabbed at the aerostat, pulling it down. “We’ve got an emergency! Can you understand that? Get me a line to the Hammer, now. To the director, if they’ll let you.”

  He jumped as a woman’s steely voice issued from the room’s speakers. “Stand by.”

  Panwar was speaking softly, calmly, in the question-answer rhythm the LOV colony always generated. Virgil didn’t listen to the words. He released the aerostat. Then he jumped off the chair. He didn’t look at the screen. He didn’t want to be caught up again in the trance of the LOVs. Not now.

  How the hell could Epsilon-3 control the construction roaches? It shouldn’t be possible. The LOV colony had open access to every public cam aboard the station, it could explore the corridors through an aerostat, and it could access news sites, but it did not have any connection to secure systems aboard the station.

  Unless …

  The aerostat. He looked again at the spy device bobbing near the ceili
ng of the conference room. Very like the aerostat on the station. How had he described it to Summer? The device had behaved like a puppy, following people through the corridors, hovering in corners …

  What had it seen?

  It shouldn’t matter!

  Even if E-3 had spied out codes, identity files, and command scripts, it could not enter any information into the system …

  Except of course that it had. Somehow it had devised a way.

  A new window opened in the wall screen. A woman peered out of it. Faint shadows nested in her creamy skin, accenting the sharpness of her features. She glanced at Panwar, still murmuring to E-3. Then she fixed Virgil with an aristocratic eye. “Dr. Copeland? I am Director Julianna Vallejo. If you’re calling to tell us your LOVs have infested the station, we already know.”

  “Infested … ?”

  Dr. Vallejo’s gaze darted to the right. She nodded. Then a new window opened over her image. Virgil found himself looking at a scabrous, gray-white crust growing along a bundled cable. The crust looked to be made of distinct, dirty grains, packed tightly together.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  Vallejo’s voice answered: “LOVs.”

  Virgil glanced at Panwar, but he was so deeply absorbed in his murmured negotiations with E-3 that he did not seem aware of Vallejo. “No,” Virgil said. “That’s not what LOVs look like. It’s not even a liquid medium.”

  “I don’t care what kind of medium it is!” Vallejo said. “Those things are LOVs. Tawa: Magnify the image.”

  The view dived inward. The grainy crust transformed into a tiled wall of gray disks, each displaying the familiar, intricately perforated architecture of a LOV’s silicon shell. Virgil could even make out their stubby limbs, wound together to hold the mass of shells in place. And yet these were not the familiar LOVs of Epsilon-3. He thought that these gray LOVs might be smaller, but it was the color of their membranes that truly set them apart. Instead of translucent white, their perforations were guarded by glossy black tissue … an adaptation to the drier environment?

  He shook his head. “Even if they are LOVs, how could they have gotten out? We have filters to protect the waste system.”

  Vallejo’s glare was searing. “The filters didn’t work! And now these parasites have corrupted our fiber-optic lines—”

  “You really think they’ve tapped the system?” It seemed impossible. But then nothing E-3 had done in the last few minutes should be possible.

  “How much evidence do you need?” Vallejo snapped. “We’ve lost control of the roaches! But we’re working on pumping steam through the conduits. If these things are organic, we should be able to cook them.”

  Virgil nodded. “And break any connection back to E-3.”

  “It won’t be soon enough.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Her gaze shifted, to scan another face, or another bit of data somewhere beyond Virgil’s view. “The LOVs in the lockdown must be sterilized too, Dr. Copeland. Now. Or the entire EquaSys module is going to fall. But we can’t get in there.”

  Virgil stared at her in horror. That was the worst-case solution, to send the LOVs into extinction. But wasn’t this a worst-case problem? Not quite. “We can use Lucy, our robotic remote, and cull E-3. That should be enough. But I need a connection …”

  “Open all of his lines, dammit!” Vallejo shouted to someone off-screen. “I don’t give a shit what his status is!”

  Panwar finally looked away from E-3. His eyes widened as he saw the mutated LOVs.

  Vallejo said, “Your links are up.”

  Virgil used his fingers to tap a quick command to his ROSA, Iris. Then he remembered: his farsights were gone. “Hark!” he said, alerting the project ROSA instead. “Activate Lucy.” He yanked open a drawer under the conference table, pulled out a set of wired gloves, and slipped them on.

  The project ROSA spoke in a puzzled, masculine voice: “That link will not respond.”

  Panwar shifted, his eyes sunken, his face waxy with fear. “Did you think E-3 would forget about Lucy?”

  “It can’t know what the robot’s used for.”

  “It knows very well. It holds Lucy responsible for the loss of earlier generations.”

  Director Vallejo had been talking to someone off-screen, but now her attention returned to Virgil. “We have only seconds, Dr. Copeland.”

  Panwar said, “I asked it to run the problem again, Virgil. The result was the same. It understands lying, and it understands what will happen to it if it changes course now. That’s one key to sentience of course—a survival instinct. I didn’t realize we were teaching it that, but what else could we be teaching when the LOVs compete for dominance as much as they cooperate among themselves?”

  Like a human society, Virgil thought, everyone forever trying to find their own place. “So we’ve lost it.” Slowly, he pulled the gloves off his hands.

  Director Vallejo frowned. “Dr. Copeland?”

  “We’re helpless,” he told her. “In the last forty-eight hours the system has … transcended itself.” He knew it was stupid to ask. It was the first thing Vallejo would have tried, but: “Can’t you cut power to the module?”

  “With a backup fuel cell in the LOV lockdown? No point.”

  “Can’t the connections be physically cut?”

  “That’s what E-3 is trying to do.”

  “Dammit!” His fist hit the table. “This is not a joke! If the module goes down, everyone of the LOV colonies will be lost.”

  “That is the least of my worries, Dr. Copeland. I’ve had to evacuate the neighboring modules. I’ve put everyone in vacuum suits. There will be a shift in momentum when the module goes, though how bad that will be we don’t know.”

  “You can’t just let it go.”

  “It’s going, Dr. Copeland. In less than a minute by our best estimates, so if there’s anything at all you can do, do it now.”

  “Can’t you send people out there?”

  “To be attacked by the roaches? To fall when the module falls?”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah. I’m told the roaches will finish their work on the downward swing of our next rotation. There’s not even time to set explosives.”

  Virgil turned around to face the colony again. “Panwar, this is it.”

  “I can’t do anything.”

  “Crash stations!” Vallejo ordered her staff. It was the last thing Virgil heard before she cut the link.

  The public feed from the Hammer continued. Among the bank of images were empty hallways, sealed doors, and the bright sparks of construction roaches burning holes in the darkness of space. “Don’t do this,” he pleaded, not sure if E-3 still bothered to listen. “Stop now, and we still might save some part of you, but go on, and it will all be lost.”

  The EquaSys module snapped free: a great silver bead breaking away from the station. Virgil watched it through a camera at the other end of the Hammer, and at the same time, through a camera on a construction roach falling with the doomed section.

  Two of the silver-backed roaches had been knocked loose. They followed the station like pilot fish unable to keep up.

  chapter

  8

  A ROVING SILICON Agent owned by NetFlash News detected the anomaly on the Hammer several minutes before the module fell. Following its training, the ROSA directed video streams from the Hammer’s public cams back to a supercomputer in Iowa, which synthesized and released a first-pass story announcing that an eighty-ton armored and insulated missile was coming down to Earth.

  Updates followed every thirty seconds. By the time the module broke loose the article had generated seventy-three million hits, including one from Ela Suvanatat’s personal ROSA. Kathang monitored the situation, following the explosive creation of betting pools aimed at predicting the exact site of impact.

  Tens of thousands of ROSAs specialized in complex mathematical theory went to work on the problem while the venerable betting site LuckyNumber sponsored am
ateur calculations by posting figures for the weight, shape, and mass distribution of the module, the speed of the Hammer’s rotation, and the exact moment of severance, along with continuously updated reports on conditions in the upper atmosphere.

  Initial estimates established the impact zone as a very long, very broad corridor running in a diagonal swath across the Pacific, from the Aleutian Islands to the South China Sea. Kathang compared this track to the geographic locations of past incidents that had drawn Ela’s interest and came up with a medium-high rating. This combined with the incident’s high news value to stimulate Kathang to action. The ROSA sent an audible signal through Ela’s farsights, a faint beeping that swiftly rose in volume.

  ELA lay on her back, wrapped up in a light sleeping bag on the hard, damp floor of Phuong’s platform, still wearing her farsights from the night before. At the alarm’s third pulse she opened startled eyes onto the beautiful, deep blue vault of the predawn sky, blinking at the white fires of lingering stars. “Enough,” she murmured. “I’m awake.”

  As she stretched and rubbed the sleep from her eyes Kathang whispered, “News alert.” The ROSA displayed a LuckyNumber graphic map explaining, “An object is falling from orbit, with an estimated impact corridor that includes this area.”

  Ela eyed the map, smiling at the ROSA’s optimism. Their sliver of coastline barely made it into the corridor. She would be lucky to see even a faint glimmer of reentry. Still, she was awake. She might as well look into the incident.

  She sat up, pushing her hair out of her face. Phuong lay asleep against a pile of boxes, but several of the fisherfolk on neighboring platforms were stirring. A few had already put out to sea, the tiny lights on their boats looking like stars come down to the ocean. Ela tapped her fingers, summoning the articles Kathang had gathered. She skimmed the facts, while the LuckyNumber map updated once again. The estimated impact corridor had narrowed and shortened to a brushstroke that paralleled the Chinese coast, before sweeping through the South China Sea, to end at Borneo, just north of the equator.