Darkness Falling

by Ian Douglas

  Lloyd, meanwhile, had stepped up to the alien, extended his arms, and touched the Dhald tendrils. “It is our intent,” he was saying, “to give to Ki and to the Galactic Cooperative what aid and assistance we can. . . .”

  “Put a lid on that, Ambassador,” St. Clair said over a private channel. “We are not making promises until we know which end is up. Understand me?”

  “We can be polite, Lord Commander,” Lloyd replied. “We can be diplomatic.”

  “Diplomatic is fine,” St. Clair told him. “But no politics.”

  “Politics? I would never dream of it, my lord. . . .”

  Lisa 776 AI Zeta-3sw had gone walkabout.

  She’d never been to the nation-state of Australia when she’d been on Earth, but the word was part of her onboard vocabulary. The term had come originally from the indigenous Australian peoples, to refer to the native rites of passage where adolescents left the tribe and lived alone in the wilderness for as long as six months, making the spiritual transition from childhood to adult.

  Walkabout, unfortunately, had taken on a somewhat negative connotation among the country’s non-aboriginal inhabitants, and eventually been replaced by the more neutral sociological phrase “temporal mobility.”

  She didn’t like the term. Hell, “temporal mobility” sounded like the colony ship’s current problem, adrift in time, which had nothing to do with Aborigines. Australia and its aboriginal culture were 4 billion years dead, though it was remotely possible that a few, at least, had survived on board Tellus Ad Astra. Etymological musings aside, she much preferred their more colorful “walkabout” to describe what she was doing.

  To be completely honest, she wasn’t entirely certain what she was actually doing. She’d left the house while St. Clair was standing his watch on the bridge, boarding an inter-cylinder pod to cross over to the port-side hab and losing herself in New Hope, its largest city. She very deliberately had not told St. Clair where she was going, or when she might be back. She didn’t know the answers herself.

  Robot AIs didn’t exactly experience emotions, not in the way that humans understood the pesky things, but they did feel internal nudges one way or another that might translate as fear, or joy, or longing . . . or, in this case, as guilt. It was the feeling that something important had been left undone, a dangling bit of programming code necessary to complete an important subroutine; the lack of resolution left her feeling incomplete somehow, and that and other emotions connected with the issue made her . . . uncomfortable.

  Was this, in fact, what humans experienced? How could they concentrate their full attention on anything?

  But despite the guilt, and another set of internal nudges that might possibly translate as loneliness, Lisa felt that she needed to get out in the world in ways that were simply impossible for a sex-worker gynoid in the company of her human owner.

  She needed to test the limits of her new and unexpected emancipation.

  Lisa 776 AI Zeta-3sw had been assembled by the General Nanodynamics Corporation in San Francisco of North California, a human simulant designed as a sex partner, hired out to clients through Robocompanions Unlimited. Hired . . . not purchased. Robocompanions had been very specific on that point. Artificially intelligent simulants were not slaves. . . .

  . . . not exactly.

  Grayson St. Clair had contracted for her services four years after his wives and husband had thrown him out. She wasn’t entirely certain why they’d done so; she gathered that Natalya had been the instigator, and that it had to do with St. Clair never being at home—“workaholic” was the term she’d used. How Natalya St. Clair could have expected anything different of a starship officer Lisa could not comprehend; human behavior often was extremely difficult to untangle.

  Those pesky emotions, again. . . .

  For two years, now, Lisa had been St. Clair’s companion, providing not only sexual relief but the far more important long-term emotional support humans seemed to need so deeply. He’d surprised her just a week earlier when he’d officially released her from her contract; Robocompanions Unlimited was dead and gone, lost 4 billion years in the past, and that meant that she was . . . free.

  Lisa 776 AI Zeta-3sw still wasn’t sure exactly what that meant.

  And that was why she’d gone walkabout. For two years she’d been St. Clair’s companion, which, in effect, meant existing in his shadow. She went where he wanted to go, saw the plays or concerts he wanted to see, wore what he liked her to wear, talked about what he wanted to talk about . . .

  What, she wondered with a thoroughly robotic single-mindedness and focus, would it be like to do what she wanted?

  Perhaps more important: What is it that she wanted?

  She’d considered telling St. Clair, considered explaining to him what she was trying to do, but there was the possibility that he would try to talk her out of it, and she wasn’t yet sure she could resist the command of his voice. She’d been programmed to obey her owner, after all.

  Besides, she needed to understand why she was doing this herself, and she didn’t think it was possible to put into words, not yet. St. Clair likely would worry about her, but she would return, at least for a little while.

  Eventually.

  For now, Lisa was standing on a New Hope public overlook, a large, elevated platform twenty meters above vista window SVW-4, one of the kilometers-long, eighty-meter-wide transparencies set into the hab cylinder floors looking down into space. Though she was aware of the starscape below, punctuated at regular intervals by glimpses of the ring and the planet Ki sweeping past as the starboard module made its ponderous three-turns-per-minute rotation, she wasn’t really watching it. The platform was fairly crowded with people, and all of them were watching a fifty-meter-high public vid display towering above the far end of the overlook.

  St. Clair was prominent on the screen, along with Ambassador Lloyd and Dr. Dumont and a number of other humans and humanoid robots. They were communicating with a group of alien life-forms. She recognized the Kroajid and the Xam, but the other species were new to her. St. Clair, she gathered, had flown down to the artificial planetary ring and was attempting to establish a dialogue with its alien occupants. She couldn’t hear what was being said, but she was relieved to see that at least the two groups weren’t engaged in combat.

  Tellus Ad Astra’s temporally mobile castaways needed friends in this epoch.

  “Hey, doll,” a male voice said close by her ear. A hand groped at her buttocks, squeezing hard. “What’d you say to a little fuck?”

  She turned and stared at the speaker, a short, sandy-haired man in a green hab jumpsuit. “I would say,” she replied quietly, “‘go away, little fuck. Leave me alone.’”

  The man’s eyes narrowed, his face flushing dark. “Listen . . . doll. Your electronic ID says you’re a sex-worker and you’re UA—unattached. An indie. So you gotta do what I say, right?”

  “And where did you get that idea?” she replied. “I am emancipated, not ‘unattached.’ And you have no absolute right to my services in any case.”

  His right hand closed on her upper arm, squeezing hard. “I say different, and I’m human so my word goes, right? Now you come with me. . . .”

  He tugged at her, but she remained planted in place, immovable.

  “Remove your hand.”

  “Now you listen here, doll—”

  She reached up and broke his little finger. He yelped, releasing her, and took a backward step, cradling his damaged hand. “My God . . . you can’t do that!”

  “I believe I just did.”

  In fact, she was very nearly as surprised by what she’d just done as he was. While she had free will—could guide her own programming moment by moment and make her own decisions, there were precise restrictions on her overall behavior, a kind of programmed moral code, and hurting a human in any way—unless he’d told her before a play session that it was okay, with safety words and established limits—was strictly prohibited.

  “Programming
override,” the man spluttered. “Alpha-sierra-bravo one compliance!”

  Lisa froze, momentarily unable to respond. The phrase was one of several hardwired into her to make certain she would respond appropriately to verbal instructions. She could disregard the code, in effect sidestepping it, but it would take her several seconds to untangle the clash of competing instructions.

  “Leave her alone, Shorty,” a new voice said.

  Shorty whirled to confront a much taller man in Marine utilities. “And who the fuck are you?”

  “Gunnery Sergeant Roger Kilgore, and the lady does not desire your company.”

  “The ‘lady’ is a doll . . . a fucking sex robot! And if I tell it to—”

  The Marine reached out and his hand closed on Shorty’s collar, lifting him easily off the platform. Shorty squirmed and thrashed, helpless. “Put me down, you big ox!”

  Kilgore brought Shorty’s face to within a couple of centimeters of his own. “Leave. The lady. Alone,” he said with cold finality. “Or we’ll see how well you fly when I toss you off the side of this platform!”

  The scowling Marine swung Shorty around so that he was dangling over the side of the platform, clear of the safety rail. The man shrieked, struggling against Kilgore’s grip. “Alright! Alright! Put me down! Please! Put me down!”

  Kilgore brought him back inboard of the safety rail and set him on the deck. Clutching his throat, the man gave them a wild-eyed look and then ran off through the crowd. Several other people standing nearby laughed, and a woman applauded.

  “Are you okay, miss?” Kilgore asked Lisa.

  “I’m fine.” She cocked her head to one side. “What would have happened if you’d dropped him?”

  The Marine shrugged. “He would have been essentially in free fall, but he would have kept moving in a straight line while the rotating habitat deck curved up to meet him. The hab’s tangential velocity is a couple of hundred meters per second, but he would almost match that. I don’t think it would have killed him. Might’ve scared him to death, I suppose. . . .”

  She considered several possible responses. “I did not require rescuing,” she told him.

  “No, it looked to me like you had the situation well in hand. I thought maybe I should rescue him before you really hurt him.”

  “I would not have done that. There are inhibitions against severely injuring humans.”

  “I don’t know about that,” the Marine said. “You seemed to be doing pretty well.”

  “I am a robot,” she said, falling back on the basics. She was having difficulty following the man’s banter.

  “I know. Your electronic ID says as much. That’s why he was coming on to you. He pulled up your personal data and saw that you were an unattached sex gynoid and thought he’d score a little action.”

  “But I am not unattached.” She pulled up her own ID data, and saw the UA tag after her identifier. Odd. Unattached meant that she was not owned, not associated with any human companion. Humans were free to approach her for sexual services, although she was under no compulsion to go along with them.

  In any case, while it was true that she wasn’t owned in the traditional sense, she did still consider St. Clair to be her partner.

  “No?”

  “My human partner emancipated me.”

  “Then you’re unattached.”

  “No. I am still . . . with him. . . .”

  But was she? She found that she didn’t know. The feeling was disconcerting, a kind of emptiness inside.

  “Huh. Might be a mu, then.”

  “A mu? What is that?”

  “When you’re entering data . . . in a form or application or something like that, sometimes you’ll find a badly phrased question, one that requires a simple entry like ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ but neither answer fits.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “It’s like if I asked you . . . ‘yes or no, have you stopped hitting your wife?’”

  “I would reply that I do not have a wife—”

  “Ah, but you have to answer yes or no, so what do you say? If you say ‘no,’ you’re telling me you beat your wife. If you say ‘yes,’ the implication is that you’re not beating her now, but you used to. Either way you’re a bad person. ‘Mu’ is the term that means ‘bad question.’ Understand?”

  “Yes. But ‘UA’ is not ‘mu.’”

  “No. But your partner might not have been able to enter something more appropriate when he freed you. Not enough space in the window to enter ‘unattached but still with me.’”

  “That seems inefficient.”

  “Of course it is. We humans are always screwing stuff like that up.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  The statement was blunt and matter-of-fact, and not intended to be humorous at all. But Kilgore laughed.

  “So who was your owner, anyway?”

  She gestured at the towering screen, where St. Clair was engaged in silent conversation with a collection of extremely alien beings.

  “Grayson St. Clair?” he said, eyes widening.

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Well, I mean, he’s only the lord commander of the whole fucking expedition. And you want to leave him?”

  “Actually, I don’t know what I want.” Nor did she know why she was discussing such personal details with a complete stranger.

  Kilgore hesitated. “Okay. So . . . uh . . . want to have a drink with me or something? Do you eat?”

  “I don’t require food or drink,” she told him. “I would value your company, however.”

  And she didn’t know why she’d said that, either.

  “It would perhaps be best,” Na Lal said, “if you could explore some of the ring. Perhaps 10 percent has an atmospheric gas mix, pressures, and temperatures appropriate for your species, and you will find yourself unable to accidentally enter compartments that would be harmful to you.”

  “I, for one,” Lloyd said, “would prefer to discuss things with you or with your superiors, to see where we might have some common ground.”

  “That could certainly be arranged, Ambassador Lloyd.”

  St. Clair hesitated, then nodded. He’d thought at first that he was going to need to stick close to Lloyd just to make sure the guy didn’t give away the store, but his concerns had faded as the conversation had proceeded.

  He still didn’t trust Lloyd; the man was too ambitious by half, and had the slippery ulterior motives of a consummate politician behind everything he said and did. But Newton would be listening in on everything Lloyd said to the aliens; hell, Newton was handling the translation, so Lloyd couldn’t say anything that Newton found objectionable. And St. Clair trusted his ship’s artificial intelligence.

  “Sounds good,” St. Clair said. “Where do you want us to go?”

  “One moment,” Na Lal said . . .

  . . . and a bubble formed around them. There was a moment’s disorientation, and then the bubble walls vanished.

  St. Clair was in quite a different place. Lloyd and his retinue were gone, but five of the other civilian passengers, including Dumont’s teleoperations robot and Mercer, were still at his side.

  And the view was . . .

  He caught his breath. It was spectacular.

  Chapter Six

  “How the hell did we get here?” Mercer asked.

  “‘Any sufficiently advanced technology,’” St. Clair quoted, “‘is indistinguishable from magic.’”

  “Who said that?”

  “A fiction writer from a couple of centuries ago,” St. Clair replied. “Among other things, he wrote about advanced technology.”

  “Ah,” Donald Kiel said, nodding. “Arthur C. Clarke.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He wrote about things like . . . like this,” St. Clair said. “And how Humankind’s future would be shaped by his technology.”

  “God, this place is huge,” Marc Garrett said, craning his head back.

  St. Clair looked up . . . and u
p . . . and up. They stood in a world, in a universe of light and spun glass, with towers lost in a thin haze of clouds high overhead. The floor beneath their feet was transparent and slightly yielding, giving them the illusion of hanging in midair, while the towers around them dropped into unfathomable depths as far beneath their feet as the clouds were above their heads.

  Mercer glanced down, yelped, and clutched hard at St. Clair’s arm.

  “Easy there, miss,” he said.

  “I—I’m sorry, my lord.” She looked acutely embarrassed as she let go. “Heights don’t usually get to me like this.”

  “You don’t usually have them sprung on you without warning, either,” St. Clair told her. “It’s okay.”

  He wasn’t entirely certain that it was okay. They’d obviously just been whisked away from where they’d been, outside the ramp of their transport, to here . . . but where was here? They might be a few hundred meters from the ship, or on the far side of the ring, tens of thousands of kilometers away. How were they supposed to know?

  “Ad Astra,” he thought, transmitting the call. “This is St. Clair. Do you copy?”

  “We read you, Lord Commander,” Symms’s voice replied in his head. “Are you okay?”

  “So far, so good. Can you get a fix on our location?”

  “Working on it . . .” Seconds passed. “Got you. You’re two hundred fifteen kilometers antispinward from where you entered the ring, and about forty kilometers higher up. How the hell did that happen?”

  “Not sure, yet. Keep tracking us.”

  “Will do.”

  “This is amazing!” Garrett said. He was one of Ad Astra’s small army of AI techs. His head swiveled about as he tried to take everything in at once.

  Donald Kiel, another AI tech, agreed. “They must be millions of years ahead of us!”

  “Millions?” St. Clair asked. “Or billions?” He was still thinking about the unproven—and perhaps unprovable idea that Ki was a far-future Earth, that the ring was somehow an extension of ancient human technology.

  “I would imagine,” Dumont said, “that after just a few tens of thousands of years, it really wouldn’t matter. A solid post-scarcity civilization would have no need to change, and might become effectively eternal.”