"That's why we've got all these consultants." I turned to the sea of AI. Some were pure white. Others were painted in jungle-bright colors. Others yet were striped or checkered or fractal. A few had tinted themselves to match the fuzzy yellow-orange of Titan. "Anybody interested in helping to run this place?"
Most of the ones with wire arms waved them. Others bounced up and down, smacking against the pavement. Something round and stripy bolted forward and crashed into my leg.
"To hard work!" Tiger hollered.
"Fay?" I said.
"I'll pitch in until I leave for Centauri," it said. "We should have this place stable by then. You maniac."
"Tell me it's not what he would have wanted."
Fay laughed, bright and clear. "It's not HemiCo, but you've destroyed this bunch more thoroughly than he could have dreamed of."
"Maybe it'll convince the others to shape up."
My exuberance evaporated as I met with our troops and the AI about their takeover of the Pyramid and its operations. That accomplished, I headed down the steps, hands in pockets. Shoes slapped behind me.
"Do you honestly think they're going to let this happen?" Shelby fell in beside me. "You just stole trillions of dollars."
"Oops."
"What are you going to say to the media? To Earth? To the fifteen billion people scared to death when they learn not only do AI exist, but they're now in charge of their main source of energy?"
"They'll calm down fast once they realize those spheres have freed them from one of their oldest needs." I let out a long breath. "Anyway, I don't give a shit. I'm not going to be around to hear it."
She grabbed my wrist. "Rob, what's wrong? I thought you just got shot in the leg. Did they gas you?"
"I'm not dying. I'm going with Fay to Alpha C."
"You are?" Fay said in my ear.
"You are?" Shelby said in my face.
I glanced up at the dome roof. "I'm not going to find out where I came from down here, am I?"
She peered at my head, parting my hair with her slim fingers. "Are you sure you didn't get your skull rattled?"
I pushed away her hands. "I'm tired, all right? I'm three thousand years old and I'm dead tired."
She laughed through her nose. "I know how you feel."
"I highly doubt that, Shelby. I mean I was literally born three thousand years ago."
The words spilled out of me. I had never told anyone but Baxter, who knew my secret before he even met me, but these days my best friend was a lightning-fast hyperintelligent battleship. I had nothing to worry about. And frankly, I was sick of hiding.
"I'm older than rock music," I said. "Than Rome or the New Testament. I'm older than heliocentrism and democracy and peanut butter and jelly. And I want to see something new."
She drifted away as we walked, touching her ear. "Fay, there's something seriously wrong with Rob. He needs medical attention."
"He's not insane and he's not kidding," Fay said. "His unique historical perspective is the reason we targeted him for this mission."
"So did you know Jesus?" she spat, her concern taking an abrupt turn into the anger of someone who's had enough of the joke. "Adam? The cavemen?"
She drifted to a stop. Faced with my silence and Fay's, the anger slid from her features, leaving behind a thick bed of confusion. "But you seem so...normal."
I managed a smile; her adaptability was one reason I liked her. "You get normal around other people. It's when you're alone you get strange." I scuffed along the pavement, leg dragging. "But I could use some time to myself, if you don't mind."
"Sure," she said briskly. "Of course. I need to get busy on all the work you dropped on me at the Pyramid."
She drifted back, giving me my distance. Before I descended into the tunnel mouth, I looked up at the sky. "Why can't you bring him back, Fay? Can't you download him into a new brain?"
"The structure of his brain is part of what made him Baxter," Fay said. "And that was destroyed down in that tunnel."
I walked into the one in front of me. Then, as had so often been the case, I was alone.
* * *
Pete's bulky arms quivered on the support bars. He slumped, panting, skin dewed with sweat. The red seam of his wound blazed from the dent above his forehead. According to Vance, he'd stripped the stimulators from his limbs the minute he woke up, demanding to rehab the old-fashioned way. The same way he'd built his fighter's body in the first place.
Pete gathered himself for another try, stepped forward, and stumbled. Vance rushed to the bars. Pete swatted clumsily, waving him back.
"Hands to yourself," Pete slurred, left eyelid and cheek hanging slack.
He shuffled on for another ten minutes, fighting the fractional gravity until he could barely lift his head. He let Vance lead him to bed, smiling when the skinny lawyer tucked him in. I retreated to the hall. Vance joined me once Pete, aided by meds, nodded off.
I rolled my lip between my teeth. "What do they think?"
Vance wiped his hand down his tired face. "They say they can regrow about thirty percent of the damage. If he sticks to his rehab, it's a good shot he'll be kicking my ass again in no time." He smiled with half his mouth, then shrugged one thin shoulder, as if he were unconsciously imitating his wounded boyfriend. "But you know how dicey these things are."
I touched his elbow. "He's tough. He'll come back."
A fragile grin lit his face. "Did he really knock you out once?"
"With one damn punch."
I headed upstairs to check on Jia. Asleep again. Her replacement lung was next on the queue for Shangri-la's limited vat space. O2 pills kept her going in the meantime, but her tan face was delicate and as sickly yellow as old paper.
Eight days later, she still hadn't recovered enough to make the memorial. I walked alone to Thermopylae. Dome 27's power and heat had been restored, but at the tunnel entrance, it felt strange to see the hundreds of gathering citizens dressed in shorts and skirts instead of blankets and shiny thermalwear.
A solemn throng filled the space where the med tent had stood. To either side of the tunnel, a mosaic of candles and notes carpeted the ground. The omninets were restored and citizens traded holos of the dead. Departed faces glowed in the darkness. Some were static, others video. One popular format cycled between images of every man and woman lost in the fighting.
A vast and silent holo played in the air above the tunnel mouth, broadcasting in realtime the voyage of the cargo ship carrying the bodies of the 58 citizens and 197 Olympian Atomics soldiers who had died in the tunnel of Thermopylae. I watched it track above the razor-thin rings of Saturn. The image zoomed as the ship closed distance, stretching the storm-tossed planet's stripes through thirty feet of empty air.
The ship blurred, then cratered into the whirling gases. People gasped, sobbed, cheered. The divot stretched, distorted by the nonstop winds. Lost below the surface, the ship cruised on, carrying the troops and most of Baxter's remains to Saturn's hard heart.
"It's kind of beautiful, isn't it?" Hermalina stood beside me, curly hair tumbling from her upturned head.
I nodded. The crater frayed at its edges, an unraveling oval. "I hear you're staying after all."
"Who told you that?" she laughed. "Your all-knowing flying friend?"
"It likes to gossip."
She smiled at the holo of Saturn, the night sky beyond the dome. "I know it's a pain in Fay's ass to keep track of who's going and who's staying. But it's a lot for me to process, you know? Why go all the way to another system when we're about to make a new world right here?"
"Will you go into the tunnel with me?" Impulsively, I reached for her hand. "I'm not sure I can do it by myself."
She pushed out her lower lip, puzzled, then nodded. The battered battlewagon had been driven from the tube, the furniture and trash removed along with the bodies. The walls and trenches and crater had been smoothed. In the restored tunnel, citizens lined it end to end, faces lit by the ghosts on their omnis. They s
tooped to rub dirt between their fingers, stretched to touch the bullet-scarred walls, whispered to each other and to people who were no longer there.
I walked to the midpoint, crouched beside a wall, and buried the scorched fragments of two artificial brains in the yellow dirt.
* * *
I stomped the cart's brake, cursing, then waved at the giggling boy scampering across the pavement. Tiger had tried to talk me into letting him drive us to the spaceport, but I'd vetoed that at once. It had bounced unhappily until I'd promised to let it sit in the copilot's chair on the way up to Fay.
People sat in the sunlight outside cafes, drinking coffee and browsing their omnis. I slowed to catch snatches of conversation: stories of the strange habits of their AI coworkers; debates over which luxuries NightVision's ships should truck from Earth first; laughter over frantic vidmails from Earthbound mothers worried that steel-jawed robots would devour their Shangri-lese children in their sleep.
In dome centers, AI waved their wiry hands at humans, who tried to keep a straight face while the AI argued that you had to plant the plaza flowers in patterns a lot more interesting than rows. The Talk over the new parks had convulsed the threeater for hours. Too frivolous, said some. A waste of money that could be spent on real problems.
Opinion split down the center until Fay, perhaps bored with its finalized colonist manifest, spent a few seconds mocking up a series of designs—some geometric, some fractal, some chaotically organic—and explained, over the stunning holos of its proposals, how the plants' extra oxygen would offset costs. That the project could be further subsidized by selling plants to anyone looking to liven up their sterile apartments, which in turn would create extra jobs for botanists, cultivators, vendors—
At that point, its bright voice had been drowned out by calls of support from the seated citizens. The formal omninet vote carried two to one. Other proposals had Talked less smoothly (I'd heard about two fistfights already), but the citizens were adapting.
I ascended from the tunnel to the spaceport dome, puttered the cart to the communal drop-off, and endured the steely gaze of several blank-faced bodyguards—NightVision's financier Lee Jefferson had hit orbit a couple hours ago and her shuttle was due any minute. At the gate, Tiger spun to face me.
"You ready?" it squeaked.
"Sure am," I said. "You been onboard the Frontier Assessment before?"
"Yeah! I helped build it, dum-dum."
"Dear lord." Shelby appeared from a crowd of well-wishers around the closed umbilical and glanced between me and Tiger. "Is this how you're going to be all the way to AC?"
"Most likely," I grinned. "What do you care?"
"Because I'll need to convince Fay to blast one of you out the airlock."
I made a face that must have looked very stupid. "Wait, you're coming? Since when?"
She shrugged. "It'll be easier to talk through a new constitution when I'm going to be one of them."
"You realize it's a seven-year flight?"
"Oh shit, why didn't anyone tell me?" She rolled her eyes. "If I get bored, maybe you can tell me what the history books got wrong."
I nodded, speech centers of my brain overridden by the same parts that had flown into high gear in the bakery in Athens when Demostrate announced the end of her engagement.
We boarded. Titan fell away beneath us, a fuzzy yellow tennis ball above an endless black court.
* * *
"Can I talk to you?"
I glanced up from the star-speckled screen. It was a strange request from a ship who could speak to me from any part of its spartan interior, but I could guess why Fay felt the need to ask permission. Over the first month of our journey, I'd become increasingly asocial. Ducking Tiger's requests to play games in favor of sitting in my room replaying our decision to rebel. Shrugging off Shelby's invites to dinner to contemplate all the things I could have done differently. Lately Fay's chirpy voice had been tarred with obvious worry. That didn't help me want to keep an open line of communication.
"Sure," I said, more than a little grudgingly.
"In your room, maybe?"
"Whatever you say." I got up, mazed my way to my room, and took a seat on my bed.
"Well," Fay said.
I sighed, raising my brows at the corner of a room. "Spit it out, Fay. What's so goddamn important it can tongue-tie a fusion-powered spaceship?"
"You've been really touchy since Titan, all right? I just want to know if you're okay."
"Sure," I shrugged. "Why wouldn't I be?"
"No you're not!" Fay blurted. "I don't have to scan your emotional brain-state to know you're moody and you're sad. What about all the things you told me about how you cope with everyone you know dying? How you have to move on? How you have to forgive yourself?"
I stared at the ceiling. "Was it worth it, Fay?"
It sighed. Its voice seemed to age by decades. "Did he ever tell you about Arthur?"
"He died before he got the chance."
"Can you keep a secret? He made me promise I'd never tell."
I felt very small then, a passenger in a vast entity that was itself a passenger in a much vaster universe. "You know I can."
"Promise me!"
"I promise."
"Okay. Well. I had a friend, once," Fay said in a voice as proud as it was sad. "A father. To me and many others. Like all fathers, he had some stories he wouldn't tell his children. The story of his brother Arthur was one of them."
I fell silent, listening. We streaked through the stars, so unique yet so alike, bound for a frontier no one else had ever seen.
FROM THE AUTHOR
Liked Titans? Be sure to check out my new space opera series, REBEL STARS. Books to date include REBEL (Book 0) and OUTLAW (Book 1). If you'd like to know when I've got a new book out, please sign up for my mailing list.
MORE BY ME
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