Fear the Survivors

by Stephen Moss

  It was not long before the fledgling AIs started to come out of her. Semi-sentient beings, imbued with all the knowledge they needed, no more, no less, in order to do the tasks she knew they were needed for. For she was able to compartmentalize her own knowledge and abilities as no human would ever be able to, package them and birth them, like little children, or, perhaps more fitting, like worker bees, limited but effective, an echo of the queen’s full self.

  She had only one need. She needed information, ever more information. She needed it like air. She craved it. It was the only sustenance she demanded.

  - - -

  Amadeu stepped back into his living room/office in the small building which he and his fellow members called home. Stretching, he sat down in the low, long, hammock-like chair he’d designed and had fabricated in the facility’s small resonance chamber. He wore workout clothes as he always did nowadays. They were comfortable and wicking, and fashion could not have been more inconsequential to him.

  He lay back in the chair. The system jack in its back detected the approach of the spinal interface at the bottom of Amadeu’s neck and lined itself up with the port as he got comfortable. As the two gelports melded, Amadeu felt the familiar question appear in his mind.

 

  At his consent, the barriers fell, and he stepped forward, felt his preset parameters click in, felt the monitoring AI they had designed begin to monitor his bodily functions for him so he could direct his entire attention to his work. He also felt the buzz of his anchor program, something he had designed to keep himself and others that used the spinal interface aware of the fact that they were in the machine, and avoid people forgetting where or even what they were, as Amadeu himself had come dangerously close to doing in his first, unfiltered foray into cyberspace.

  It was not really a buzz, it was not a sound at all, but the mind interpreted it as that. It was, in fact, a direct signal to each of his cortexes literally telling him that he was in a system, and reminding Amadeu, in every part of his cerebral soul, that in reality he was lying on a bed, in a small office, in a building on the island of Sao Tome, about a quarter mile north of the Island of Rolas and its mighty elevator.

  He felt her presence as soon as he logged in.

  Minnie:

  She knew he liked to be greeted in Portuguese, but she also greeted him subconsciously. It was an image/sensation/smell/sound of a hug, the cumulative pleasure of every hug he had ever had from his mother, or father, or anyone else he ever felt safe with, and it filled his right brain. He ‘hugged’ Minnie back, and that part of her that was him felt some semblance of the same happiness the sensations had once given Amadeu.

  Amadeu: ‘todo bien?’

  Minnie:

  As Minnie said this, a data packet made itself known to Amadeu asking to be read at Minnie’s bequest. Turning his attention to the data, it came to Amadeu and entered his mind, becoming part of his in-system memory, and as Amadeu thought about the data, he found that, in the esoteric way now familiar to him, he now ‘knew’ all the data that had been contained in the file, as though it were a memory of his own.

  The data was from Hektor’s team’s latest tussle.

  Amadeu contemplated each member of the team in turn. They were improving. Every time they fought, they each became faster. But while Hektor was practicing with them in order to bring them up to his level, he was also honing himself. His margins of improvement were diminishing, as they must do the closer you got to perfection, but it was with those ever-smaller margins that Amadeu was obsessed.

  For they were working against an absolute. Amadeu knew, as did all the members of John and Quavoce’s inner circle, that once they engaged with the Armada, it would come down to milliseconds, flashing moments of unfathomable violence, and reaction speeds would be everything. And for now, the advantage there sat squarely with the Mobiliei.

  The thought, ever present on some level in Amadeu’s mind, brought a conversation to life with Minnie.

  Minnie:

  An image appeared in 3D in Amadeu’s mind of the Mobiliei Armada crossing the boundaries of the solar system. It would not be for another eight years, but when it happened, they would be travelling at something close to two thousand kilometers a second. It would be here that Earth’s first wave of defenses would be sent to meet them.

  The image, such as it was, showed both great distance and great detail. Now it shifted to the answering Earth fleet. Closing at almost equal speed in order to join battle with the Mobiliei, this first wave would be a screaming horde of missiles, mines and attack craft, and it would pass the enemy with such relative speed that the initial engagement would be over in less than two seconds.

  Over three thousand enemy warships, each of them bearing exponentially more firepower than the entire Chinese and US armed forces combined, passing in the blink of an eye. Hand-eye coordination in such timeframes would be moot. It would be over before any audible order could be given.

  Amadeu: ‘the minds, that will be the place this battle is won or lost.’

  Minnie:

  The view swam down, perspective still clear at a stellar level, even as they now looked inward to simultaneously view three very different mindscapes. One human, one Mobiliei, and one Artificial.

  Minnie:

  Minnie said it as a joke, appealing to Amadeu’s, and in part her own, slightly puerile sense of humor. Amadeu smirked even as he acknowledged the fundamental truth behind her quip. She was talking about the anomaly of the mind. Technology had allowed them to build a synthetic intellect capable of amazing computational feats. But computation alone was not everything.

  Minnie:

  Amadeu knew this, they had discussed it a thousand times, but he acknowledged anyway. She was still working on her understanding of the vagaries of human memory, that we could know something and not be able to recall it immediately was, at best, counterintuitive, and at worst downright confusing for a sentience such as hers.

  Amadeu: ‘¿yes, minnie, but it is not a fight between you and me, is it?’

  Minnie:

  Amadeu: ‘¿now why would you want to fight me, minnie? you are so unreasonable sometimes.’

  Minnie:

  Amadeu: ‘¿an attempt? ouch minnie.’

  She ‘smiled’ at having successfully goaded him, and he ‘smiled’ back halfheartedly, only bolstering her enjoyment at the seemingly simple exchange, yet so nuanced for a machine.

  Amadeu: ‘but the fight in question will be between us and trained mobiliei pilots, skilled far beyond our current abilities, embodied in the machines they fly.’

  Mobiliei pilots were expected to have close quarters, multi-input reaction times as low as one hundredth of a second. That was humanity’s tidemark. Above that and we would be exposed and vulnerable, another disadvantage to add to the list. Matching it was a minimum requirement. But beating that time … Amadeu almost did not dare think about it, for there lay the realm of real hope, of real chance: the chance of victory, of survival.

  For now, though, it was a distant dream at best.

  To date the spinal interface software had given them best time reactions of one hundred thirty-seven milliseconds. And only Amadeu and a handful of others had even managed that. Most soldiers and pilots were achieving, at best, one hundred ninety milliseconds, and that was only after intensive training.

  Their attention returned to Hektor’s most recent fight, and it came to them as
though they were experiencing it themselves, the sensation of brutal hand-to-hand combat washing over Amadeu.

  He felt the exhilaration of the combat mastery as Hektor manhandled his fellow shock troops. He amazed at Hektor’s tactical choices, at the way he attacked with relentless ferocity. Hektor’s mind interacted with the suit’s servos, accelerators, and weaponry with near perfect precision, and the result was a devastating fighting machine. Against ordinary troops, he would cut a swath of destruction, and pride filled Amadeu at the beautiful efficiency of the machines he had helped design.

  At certain points Amadeu slowed the experience, reviewing particularly complex and fast maneuvers, and the antagonistic response times of Hektor’s subordinates. Hektor was one of the rare ones. Hektor got it. He felt rather than looked. He sensed his surroundings through radar eyes rather than trying to interpret it back to sight and sound. Hektor’s heart sang with the music of the interface.

  And he was getting better. One hundred thirty-five milliseconds. That was the best yet. When Hektor’s team had him pinned down, the lone CO had been fending off five highly trained shock troops at once. And he had nearly won. He had been on fire. The suit had been forced to limit his heart rate to two hundred twenty beats per minute. His brain had been a swarm of activity, pure adrenalin had pumped like joy through him, and he had almost become one with the suit.

  Almost.

  Minnie:

  Amadeu: ‘yes … our best … but not good enough, not yet.’

  Minnie:

  Amadeu: ‘i know, i know, i am not trying to be defeatist. but even then the problem remains, we don’t need one person who can do this, we need hundreds.’

  Minnie:

  Amadeu: ‘i know. it is unlikely she will reach much below 140.’

  There were only three people who could consistently get below one hundred fifty milliseconds: Hektor, Amadeu, and another scientist on Amadeu’s team, William Baerwistwyth. When engaged in their respective areas of expertise, they had all registered phenomenal interaction times.

  Amadeu thought he knew why he could do it. He was the man who had conceived of the software, he understood it at its most fundamental level, like an architect understands every corner and nook of a house. Naturally he could navigate its corridors on an intuitive level.

  Amadeu’s colleague William was a different matter. William Baerwistwyth had been born with many disadvantages in life, not least of which being his last name. But the greatest of which was a rare form of muscular dystrophy which had stunted his muscular development and eventually forced it to regress, confining him to a wheelchair.

  At eight, he had been able to use only his arms and hands. By twelve, only his neck had been responsive. By twenty, he had only his speech and the movement of his eyes as his skeletal musculature finally all but failed him. But the mind that had been driven into isolation by misfortune had been a strong one, and he had flourished as a doctorate student in advanced robotics, writing and cowriting several pivotal papers on speech recognition and synthetic senses via the primitive eye-flick-based GUIs available to him.

  William’s scientific excellence no doubt qualified him for a place on one of Madeline’s research teams, but it had not been the reason Amadeu had requested that Madeline recruit William.

  Though Amadeu would never tell William the truth, Amadeu had actually been motivated by a desire to see how an advanced mind, limited by circumstance to intellectual, instead of physical pursuits, might react to the spinal interface. William’s disease was not neurological, and his nervous system was almost cruelly unaffected. It simply had no functioning muscles to instruct. The truth was that Amadeu hoped William’s lack of preconceptions about how his nerves should inform his body’s movements might leave him open to interact with the machine more efficiently.

  In return for being an unwitting participant in this rather cold-blooded experiment, William had been granted something fantastic, for in the machine world, he had once again enjoyed the gift of movement. He was able to experience sensations an able-bodied person would be jealous of, and, not surprisingly, he had flourished.

  It had nearly worked, as well. William had learned to commune with the system even faster than Amadeu had. He had quickly surged up to meet the well-practiced Amadeu as one of the fastest users of the interface.

  But it had not been enough, for even William had begun to plateau at the same level Amadeu had. And so they had come up against the wall once more.

  Amadeu screamed silently at the frustration of it all. He had not been logged in for very long, but he needed to be out, to be alone, and the one thing that the pervasive feel of being jacked in could not provide was a sense of solitude.

  And so he bid farewell to Minnie for a moment and opened his eyes. His connection severed, his link silent, he remained lying there, staring at the ceiling.

  He felt the familiar sense of loss at the sudden reduction of his world once more to the four beige walls of his office. The inflexibility of his senses. So mundane when compared to the ebb and flow of pure information when he swam in the ether.

  Of course, where Amadeu experienced a sense of loss when he unplugged from the system, William experienced a sense closer to imprisonment as he was returned to the cell of his traitorous body. So where everyone else had limiters on their time in system, Amadeu had covertly disabled the limits on William, a fact that Madeline and Birgit had both discovered independently, and both ignored with just as little consultation.

  But Amadeu wanted that isolation. He felt he deserved it.

  What was different?

  Why could Hektor do it so well when others struggled?

  Why could even the very best of his team still not achieve the hypothetical perfection they sought?

  These questions bounced around in his mind, almost as though they wished to escape down the spinal tap that he had closed at the back of his neck. And as they rebounded around in his brain for the thousandth time, a voice told him he knew the answer.

  A voice told him that he simply needed to be willing to hear it.

  For it was not something these soldiers lacked that stopped them from interfacing perfectly with the machine, it was something they had. Amadeu knew that, deep down he knew that.

  Amadeu took a deep breath and closed his eyes. A feeling of shame at what he was about to do came over him even deeper than it had when he had requested the recruitment of William. For where it could be said that William had benefited from being part of the mental experiments Amadeu was conducting, what he was about to do had no such upside.

  With a sigh of resignation and a sense of self-loathing at his inability to find another way, Amadeu opened up his link once more. He did not step wholly into the ether, but instead sent a closed signal to another mind. This mind was also tapped into the network that connected Neal’s global triptych of Research, Construction and Military Groups. As always, the link to this mind was open, for this link was actually built into the mind of its host, one of only four such links on Earth.

  Amadeu: ‘lord mantil, if you have a moment, i have a request to make of you.’

  Quavoce: ‘greetings, amadeu. how may i be of service?’

  Amadeu: ‘it’s complicated, quavoce. I want to talk to you about your ward. I want to talk to you about banu.’

  Chapter 30: Drop Zone – Part One

  The craft left without ceremony just after sunset. With barely a word, Hektor and his team of Spezialists stepped up to the strange plane and were guided by Captain Falster into their respective cubbies. As they climbed aboard, the ship grasped them in its black embrace, and one by one the six slots sealed their now unconscious bodies into its wings. Jennifer then walked over to the last remaining open
cubby and stepped up into it, feeling the ship reach out to her, and latch into her consciousness as it also sealed her into its secure grasp.

  With everyone safely stowed, Jennifer opened her machine eyes and flexed her black muscles. Inside her mind, the biometrics of her six passengers confirmed all her wards were in the computer-induced hibernation known as cybernation, and all had been ready.

  At a signal from Jennifer, two other members of Ayala’s team opened the big hangar doors, exposing the Slink to the recently fallen night. Engaging the esoteric engine, a tall, invisible magnetic corkscrew formed at the center of her plane’s hollow discus heart. As the corkscrew began to whirl, the resulting downdraft lifted the big black wheel off the ground.

  Outside the darkened hangar, the ground crew stared, somewhat awed, as the strange object floated quietly out into the warm equatorial night on a cushion of downthrust air. Their hair was being brushed this way and that as though by a helicopter’s vortex, but no noise came with the power. The magnetic blades whirling at the center of the wide disc made no sound as they spun, and only the powerful gust of wind on their faces gave the ground crew any clue as to how the machine was able to glide so easily out of the hangar.

  Once free of its confines, Jennifer did not waste time. She did not need to receive clearance from central traffic control to pass through the heavily guarded airspace over SpacePort One; they would barely register her passage anyway. And so she ramped up the ship’s engine, thrusting the air down toward the ground with massive torque, and launched the ship skyward into the night sky.

  Spiraling upward, the Slink vanished into the night, out of the SpacePort’s gun range, and up to its relatively low cruising altitude to begin their long flight to Russia. From his office in the very bowels of SpacePort One’s concrete mass, Neal monitored their departure from his desk, Jennifer’s flight control feeding directly into his spinal interface via the hub’s tweeter.