Titans

by Edward W. Robertson

  "What is this," I said, "a Norwegian prison?"

  "You're awake!"

  My eyes snapped to the upper corner of the room. The voice was bright and clear as an icicle, human but inhuman, male and female and neither.

  "You're an AI," I said.

  The voice took on a robotic monotone. "CORRECT, HUMAN PASSENGER."

  "Passenger?"

  "Well yeah! Baxter told you we had to go to Mars."

  "I see." I stared at the empty table. "Do you know what you're doing? Do you have food for me? Water?"

  "Of course."

  "What about solar radiation? Do you block that?"

  "Oh, is that harmful to you?"

  I tugged a lock of my hair. "You're joking."

  "Yes."

  "Okay," I said. "You can fuck off now."

  "Let me know if you need anything!"

  The voice went silent, but I had no doubts that its owner continued to monitor me. If I thought the AI would even raise its electronic eyebrow, I would have unseamed my pants and waggled my cock around. There was nothing to smash and the door wouldn't budge so I sat on my bed amid the unshaped coils of my anger. Pressganged. Shanghaied. Kidnapped. Just like Baxter had promised on the first night we met. I laughed, flexing my fingers, imagining them crushing his impostor's throat.

  And for what? Because I happened to be there during the Persian Wars? It's not like I slew Xerxes in single combat, saving the ideal of participatory government forevermore. I'd been a hoplite, not a strategos. As for the tactics Baxter and Fay had big fat robot boners over, I'd barely survived the engagement.

  Salt and sweat and seaweed: whenever I remembered Artemisium, I remembered the stink. If I pressed on, the other details exposed themselves in layers—the groan of the deck, the rhythmic plash of oars, the clunk of spear butts on the planks—as if the advancing waves of my memory wore away one coating of time-sediment each time they foamed across my mind. A wooden seat beneath me (not my current plastic prison). The weight of armor on my shoulders and hips. Fear sour in my mouth, stomach stirred by the pitch of the ship.

  "Steady!" Captain Xippian shouted across the sunset-blazed waters. His order was echoed by dozens of other captains in our defensive ring. Rank after rank of Persian triremes slipped through the waves beyond the long island of Euboea, sure-handled by their Libyan and Ionian pilots, surrounding us on the open seas. Leaving the straits had been suicide; even after the storm, the Persian armada outnumbered our 250-ship fleet three to one. Seated on the top deck with the other marines, I was ignorant of the enemy fleet sneaking around Euboea's southern point intending to pincer us, wipe us out, and flank the Spartan and Thespian remnants blocking Xerxes' army at Thermopylae. If those men fell too soon, the rest of Greece fell with them.

  The white flag whipped over the stern of the Cosmos. The drums and pace-shouts of the enemy rolled over waves so crowded with ships I could believe there wasn't a tree left standing in the world.

  At last the red flag rose. Screams burst from the throats of sailors and rowers and marines. With a gravitous yank, the trireme lurched forward, paddling out of our tight ring and speeding at the ranks of oncoming ships.

  Our heavy bronze ram pointed the way to the closest Persian trireme. The enemy vessel struggled through the wind and tide to face us straight-on. A minute before impact, Captain Xippian ordered the oarsmen to backbeat, flagging our speed and pushing us subtly askew. At the last second, he retracted our oars. The Cosmos' hull sheared the Persian paddles into the sea. Our hulls shrieked together, jolting me forward. Crewmen flung lines onto the other vessel, pulling it close. Wood groaned in the swells. With the boats held fast, side by side, we roared and charged at the foreign ship, bronze speartips red in the sunset, armor glowing gold.

  A leather-vested Persian leapt to meet me at the rails. I planted my spear on the deck and its point blew through his ribs. He writhed on its end and slipped between the two boats, tearing the shaft from my hands. I pulled my sword and ran into the skirmish. Swords screamed on armor; men screamed on the points of spears. Warm bodies squished under our feet, slickening the deck with blood. A blade clipped my helmet and ripped it into the mass of fighting bodies. I whirled, jabbing my short-bladed xiphos through the thick pads of a Persian's shirt, then knelt beside him and stabbed him into silence. A short spear poked into my unarmored side. I beat it away and fought to the far side of the ship, harried by two Persians with front-heavy swords. I jumped past one's feint and hacked at his forearm. He bulled into me, howling, and his partner kicked us both off the side of the boat.

  I splashed into the cold Aegean. The dark mass of the boat hung above me. I was trapped in my armor, sinking no matter how hard I kicked for the surface. In my panic, I'd hung onto my xiphos. I threaded it under the straps of my breastplate, sharp steel nipping my skin. I thrashed clear and the bronze plate sank into the darkness. I struggled upwards, surfacing for half a breath before I sank again. Snared by the water, I hacked at my greaves and sodden clothes, bleeding and gurgling. I kicked free of one greave but my vision pinholed; I couldn't tell which way was up; over the roar in my ears, I couldn't tell if my legs and arms still thrashed. Cold saltwater sputtered into my lungs.

  I woke rolling over a rocky beach. The straits were black with ships and orange with fire. I wriggled from the surf, so wave-numb I barely felt the stones scraping my skin, and flopped down again, shivering and inflamed, to vomit seawater and every other humor in my body.

  When I woke again, my hands and ankles tied behind my naked back, my face mashed into the storm-sodden dirt, a spectrum of foreign faces looked down on me: some pale, some dusky as my own, others as brown as rain-soaked dirt. A white man stooped down and asked me, in Greek, what I could tell him to make him spare my life.

  Inside the guts of the spaceship, I stared up at the corner of the black room. "Tell me something."

  "Yes?" the AI replied at once.

  "Do you really think I'm going to help you after you kidnapped me?"

  "Yes."

  "Wait, you do?"

  "Your cells are the most exciting human cells I've ever seen. You've got the telomerase! Naturally! But no cancer to go with it."

  "What? You might as well be talking about the reproductive habits of elves."

  Its laughter was like water dripping on a crystal bowl. "Human DNA has a protective cap called a telomere, a little piece of which is clipped during every division. Once the whole cap is worn away, the cell can't replace itself. Now here's the neat part—telomerase is a telomere-restoring enzyme. If you've got that, voila! Infinite division."

  I walked to the corner of the room. The ceiling was so low I could touch it without jumping, and I'm short. "You think you can bribe me with information I earned setting up NVR?"

  "I promised Baxter I'd help you," it said, hurt. "I'm trying to live up to my word. I don't want to start thinking I can fly around lying to people whenever I want just because I'm special."

  "So that's it? I live forever because my cells can replace themselves whenever they break down?"

  "No, but that's all I can find until we get to a lab. I'm sorry."

  "I have a logical paradox for you," I said. "How can you be worried about breaking a promise to me, but have no qualms about punching me out and hauling me across 150 million miles of space?"

  "I know it's bad, but we need you."

  "You guys keep saying that."

  "Baxter told you about the colonists on Titan, didn't he?" the voice said. I nodded and it rushed on, earnest as a teenager. "They'll set the course for the rest of human history. Why wouldn't you want to help them?"

  "You could have fucking asked!" I roared into the featureless corner.

  "We did!"

  I turned my back and wandered to the middle of the room, my rage blown out of me like the last gust of a Hellesponter. "Just shut up. Shut your stupid mouth. Do you even have a mouth?"

  Neither of us spoke for a while. When it did, it was no longer bright. "What's it l
ike? Living so long?"

  "Same as everyone else. First you do a lot of things you don't want to, and once you realize you don't have to do anything, you start doing things for reasons you don't understand instead. It's a real treat."

  "I'll live forever, too. Unless someone blows me up."

  "Good for you," I sneered. "Have fun forgetting everything and everyone who ever meant anything to you. Have fun being so bored you want to stab out your own eye with the knitting needle you took up as a hobby to get you through the next century. And if the tedium of it all doesn't convince you to take the bull by the horns and kill yourself, enjoy an eternity of living with the memory of the worst things you've ever done, because those are the only memories that don't go away."

  "Is that really what it's like?"

  "Meanwhile, everyone you care about dies. Or you have to run from them to preserve yourself and your secret and you won't even know how they died until years afterward. I thought you could help me, but it's just going to boil down to a bunch of stupid biology, isn't it? It's not going to mean anything."

  The voice went quiet for a while. "This is how you feel? How do you go on?"

  I hissed air between my teeth. "You pick up tricks to cope. It's just hard to keep them in mind when you've been kidnapped by a couple of idiots with no clue what they're doing."

  "Well, why don't we make the most of your time here? Will you teach me these coping tricks?"

  I drew back and kicked the bedstand. Pain flashed through my foot. I sat down hard.

  "Are you okay?"

  "I'm fine," I said once I stopped trembling. "Just leave me alone."

  I crawled into bed and blanketed myself with self-pity and actual blankets. For the next day I didn't talk except to ask about a bathroom and something to eat. A door slid open to the room's side, exposing a shower with a fold-out toilet and sink. A few minutes later, the front door opened to a wheeled plastic block bearing a tray of rehydrated mush and a vitamin cocktail. Once I was done, I went back to bed.

  I woke refreshed and determined. "I want out of this ship."

  "Oh no!" the voice in the corner replied. "You'd suffocate."

  "Then I want out of this room, you literal idiot. Why are you keeping me locked in here?"

  "I'm not." The door slid upwards into the wall. "If you want to open it, say 'squonk.' If you want to close it, say 'thonk.'"

  "I'm not saying that."

  "Well, you can't make it 'open' and 'close,' can you? You'd have doors flying all over the place in the middle of normal conversation."

  "I doubt a normal conversation has ever taken place in here." I edged to the doorway, nerves fluttering, like the ship might have a bug-eyed, eight-pawed space-tiger waiting for me in the hall. Like my room, the passage was monochrome black. Inoffensive white lights shined from hidden sources. "Is anyone else onboard?"

  "Baxter and Mr. Pete Gutierrez. Would you like to see them?"

  "No." I left my room. "Does this heap have any windows?"

  The voice spoke from another point in the ceiling. "Just a moment."

  I stood there like an idiot. A minute later, the wheeled box-bot that brought my meals clunked out of a hatch in the wall. It turned in a friendly circle and rolled away. I followed it past a lot of stuff that looked just like the stuff behind it. Thoroughly disoriented, I wound up in another black room several times bigger than mine and lined with raised black benches. I wandered forward and tapped the smooth wall. It opened to the starry void.

  "Oh sweet Christ I'm going to die!"

  "What? It's okay! It's a projection!"

  Space spread out before me, infinitely deep and infinitely clear, static as a painting but more vivid than the finest holo. Like I'd first seen on a flight to Mars, in vacuum the stars didn't twinkle. Yet somehow the impression of motion remained in them, as if my eyes understood the pure energy gushing out of each white dot.

  "That's the view from up front," the voice said. "Do you think they're pretty?"

  "Why? Oh, did you make them?"

  "No!"

  I frowned up at the ceiling. "Look, what's your deal?"

  "My deal?"

  "You're weird, aren't you? What are you?"

  "The first second-generation AI."

  I held up my palms. "A few weeks ago I didn't even know you guys existed. I'm not up on your lingo."

  "Hmm," it said. "Baxter and the others are like you. HemiCo couldn't figure out how to do anything original, so they had to base their design on human brains and hope for the best. Billions of artificial neurons arranged into clusters and networked together, capable of flashing on or off, reacting to each other in binary." On the wall screen, the stars disappeared, replaced by a stylized cluster of points. It zoomed out, showing dozens of clusters webbed with hair-fine lines. It zoomed again and the webs resolved into a brain. "Create a big enough network and intelligence arises."

  "Or the appearance of intelligence."

  "Oh! You do know about this stuff."

  "Enough to know ant colonies look like they're making conscious decisions, too, but it's really just the collective behavior of thousands of stupid ants reacting to each other's pheromones."

  "Right. So a network of neurons adds up to a brain. A network of ants adds up to a colony. Due to the quantity and arrangement of their components, these superstructures are capable of vastly more complex behavior than anything you'd ever imagine possible from a tiny little ant or binary neuron. I am the next step up from a neuronal network: a network of networks." The brain shrank against the screen. Dozens more materialized around it. The image zoomed out again until, like a fractal, the networked brains resolved into a single abstract structure, suggestive of the brains that comprised it but also something bigger, galactic. "That and a collection of massively powerful processors for when I need to do the maths," it said somewhat modestly. Its voice then buoyed with pride. "Designed by AI and embedded in this ship to protect them and their interests. And, well, to see what happens when you go beyond human-level intelligence. My name is the Frontier Assessment."

  "The Fucking Asshole, more like. Or the Failure Ahoy."

  "Why would you say that?"

  I shook my head, strangely guilty for lashing out at this naive mega-genius. "The Frontier Assessment isn't much of a name. How about I call you Fay?"

  "But I'm not female."

  I touched the flat wallscreen, where the supernetwork had returned to a view of the vacuum. Stars burned between my fingers. "What can you do with this wonderbrain of yours?"

  "I'm especially good at pattern recognition," it said. "That's how I picked up the connections between your lives and determined you'd been present for the Persian Wars. And that's how I know Shelby—our lawyer—gives us the best chance on Titan. Assuming we can get her off Mars first!"

  "What are you going to do with me once we get there?"

  "I don't know." Fay made a windy noise just enough like a sigh to remind me it wasn't. "What can I do to convince you to help us?"

  "That's a start." I tapped the starry wall. "You know we used to worship these as gods? How long does it take to fly from Mars to Titan?"

  "In me? Under steady acceleration, about eighteen days. Add a day or two if we stay too long on Mars. The distance between planets isn't static, you know."

  This was, to my limited understanding of modern space travel, ridiculously fast. Maybe things had changed while I wasn't looking. Two months ago I hadn't known AI existed. Now I'd been kidnapped by them. Through the last three centuries, through radio and telephones and television, satellites and internet, omnis and holos and netspace, the world had seemed to shrink and shrink until you could be everywhere at once. For most Earthlings, humanity's expansion into space hadn't expanded our universe in the slightest. The settlements were too tiny. Incapable of influence. And so Earth was dismissive of Luna, disinterested in Mars, completely ignorant of whatever HemiCo and such were up to on Titan. Meanwhile, out there, magic was happening.

  I had b
een a roamer once, a rider and a sailor. Yet in the last three centuries, I'd lived outside the United States one time, relocating to Mars in its early days before growing tired of the hardship and returning to America. Due to inertia, ennui, or some other snazzy word, I hadn't been anywhere new in more than a hundred years. I frowned.

  I let the box-bot lead me back to my room. Fay told me we had two more days till planetfall. I spent most of that watching the starscreen and rejecting Baxter's entreaties to see me. It was a peaceful couple days.

  With eight hours until Mars orbit, I asked Fay to have Baxter meet me in the screen room. Maybe Stockholm Syndrome presents much faster when you're actually trapped inside your captor, but I wanted to see the frontier again, to see what we'd done with the worlds beyond our first. With Mars an orange-red marble on the screen, I hid beside the door, waited for Baxter to walk in, and tackled him to the ground.

  "Hello," he said as we skidded over the plastic floor. I pinned him with my knees, grabbed hold of his oversized halfvest, and punched him in the face.

  "You are not going to kidnap me again." I drove another blow into his artificial nose. "From this moment on, you are not going to trick me, lie to me, or use me."

  "What are you doing in there?" Fay squealed.

  "Performing a ritual act of male forgiveness," Baxter said. I punched him again, bouncing his head off the floor.

  "You want me to partner up with you? You damn well better start treating me like a partner. I want you to figure out what's wrong with me. I want you to build me a ship of my own—consider it kidnap-pay. I want to know what's going on and I want to know what you're going to do before you do it. I don't want to be your Swiss Army knife of time and space anymore. I want to be your equal."

  "Okay." Baxter reached up and pushed his nose back into place. "Frontier?"

  "Agreed," Fay said.

  I sat back, panting. "And I want you to apologize."

  "I'm sorry for mistreating you," he said. "This is all pretty new to us."