Hydrogen Steel

by K. A. Bedford

  It was a lot to take in at once.

  Gideon, meanwhile, had gone silent. He sat, legs folded, eyes closed, looking both calm and full of resolve, on the surface of Hydrogen Steel’s ship. I saw swarms of huge defensive bots stalking across the ship’s surface, looking for him.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I asked him, still not quite realizing that Gideon couldn’t hear me.

  “Now,” said Gideon.

  “Gideon! No!” I screamed.

  Both he and Hydrogen Steel vanished in a flare of power.

  “GIDEON!”

  There was a pause that felt like years passing. I could not believe what I’d just seen. It wasn’t possible, was it? In my new mode of existence, it was impossible to cry.

  “Inspector McGee,” Otaru said gently, “he is gone. Watch the star.”

  I was confused and angry. “The star?”

  “It will take some time.”

  “What are you…?” I then started to see what Otaru was saying. “He’s going to…?”

  “We should retreat to the outer system.” We swept away, heading out into the colder reaches of the system, moving by sheer will alone.

  “Can’t Hydrogen Steel just jump out of its ship?”

  “Not instantly, Inspector.”

  I swore quietly. Back when I was a kid the death of my father was something I thought I would never get over. I’d felt like everything purposeful and good and safe in my world had been lost. I walked around in numb shock for weeks, unable even to articulate how abandoned I felt. Mum used to tell me she admired my stoic “maturity”. It wasn’t maturity; it was loss so vast I could not bear its weight. Merely crying everywhere didn’t seem like enough to convey how I felt.

  All of which, of course, had been lies and fictions. I’d never had a real family.

  Gideon Smith, on the other hand, was real, and now he was gone. In his last moments he’d believed I no longer trusted him.

  I could have died of shame, were I not already dead.

  “The star’s photosphere reaches millions of degrees Kelvin,” Otaru said, interrupting my thoughts. “Even if Hydrogen Steel attempts to escape from its ship, the heat and hard radiation would destroy it.”

  In the time it took for the explosion to develop, grow and burst the star apart, and in the time it took the nova’s blast to reach out to us, I saw what I should have seen all along. Gideon was my friend. I could trust him. And now he had sacrificed himself to destroy my enemy. The enemy who had planted so much doubt and confusion and suspicion deep in my useless doll brain, corrupting the fabric of my consciousness like a psychosis, making me believe everything except the truth. I remembered the image of Gideon huddled on the surface of Hydrogen Steel’s ship, all alone, crying.

  I did not know how long I could live as part of a firemind, even a helpless fragment of one, but I did know that I would carry my guilt for a long, wretched time.

  The star died well. Otaru explained that the detonation of the ship’s displacement drive powerplant would have been enough to cause the chain reaction needed to destabilize the star’s delicate balance between outward pressure and inward gravity. I would say that the explosion was beautiful, but all I could see was my own stupid, failure to trust a man who very probably, in his own way, had loved me.

  Later, awash in despair, I said to Otaru, “How do I live, knowing this?”

  “You go on,” he said. “You honor Mr. Smith’s sacrifice. Complete the case.”

  “Right…” I said. “Yeah.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Javier Mondragon’s secret bolt-hole was somewhere deep beneath the surface of Mars. I had the address stored in what Otaru encouraged me to think of as my “wave”. He said that without the vacuum energy our wave would dissipate into noise and chaos in no time at all. In this strange form I still felt much as I had felt in my various bodies. This, too, was encoded into an emulation of my personality, and all part of the wave.

  The weirdest part was that Otaru and I “lived” in the woodcut illustration world of temples, gardens, trees, streams and distant, ruined castles. He was still a very sick old man, greatly reduced in circumstance and power, wearing tattered rags over his gaunt flesh. He struggled to walk; I helped him, and sometimes carried him. He slept a great deal, leaving me to explore. There wasn’t a lot to see. In the “real” world, this entire thing would occupy barely a hectare. Things in the misty distance stayed in the misty distance.

  Otaru explained something else to me. “As an entity of organized energy, we are limited to the speed of light for our travel purposes.”

  This was bad news. It meant it would take us 60 years to get back to the Home System. I pointed this out, and then Otaru demonstrated a wry sort of smile. “You are forgetting: we will be travelling as photons, at the speed of light. For us there will be no travel time. We will arrive at our destination as soon as we depart.”

  I stared at him, confused. “We’re talking about sixty lightyears! It’ll take time to get there!”

  “You are mistaken, Inspector,” he said, very patiently, considering. “Watch and see.”

  I didn’t see how such a thing could even be remotely possible, and grumbled about how cold the evidence trail would be by the time we got there.

  Otaru said, “It will take many years for us to reach our destination. You are right about that. But to us it will be a moment, no more.”

  “So the trail will be cold by the time we get there.”

  “The alternative is even less attractive, you will find.”

  I saw his point, and felt chagrined.

  He said, “You might be surprised, Inspector. Long experience with the affairs of human space has shown that nothing is too surprising, or too unlikely.” He was tired once more and visibly in pain.

  I helped him to his bed. He rested.

  We travelled, weary glimmers of light — and less than a day later, 92 years had passed.

  We were back in the Home System, after a hard journey. Otaru’s grasp of celestial astronavigation was, like everything else about him, greatly reduced. Many times we arrived in what should have been star system X only to find we were in star system Y. We relied on intercepted communications, media streams, passing probes and other vessels. I would have just about killed for decent holographic starcharts.

  Once back in the Home System, we found that while there had been great changes in our absence other things were still the same.

  Humanity was now slowly rebuilding interstellar civilization. Hydrogen Steel’s final deranged attack on the infostructure of human space had brought about an age of darkness. And as the last hypertubes disappeared, restricting interstellar travel to fractions of light-speed, human space began to collapse into isolated, devastated worlds. The Reconstruction took a long time, at least partly because not everyone wanted it. Those who had done well during the darkness opposed the process at every step. Progress, as ever, could be deeply threatening to some.

  In terms of my personal mission things were just as surprising.

  Javier Mondragon had died 86 years ago, six years after Hydrogen Steel’s death. He was survived by various family members who took possession of his few effects. Once back in Mars space, I used the last of Otaru’s threadbare power to hack a nanofabrication plant and managed to transfer my wave into a shiny new android body that had been intended for destruction due to minor but unimportant production flaws. It was no loss to the company, and once again I had a new body, a young female similar to my last one. It was good to feel the ground under my feet, to breathe, to have a heartbeat.

  With the Otaru spirit resting now deep in my mind, I made extensive inquiries among Mondragon’s descendants, who finally referred us to Mrs. Ellis Mondragon, a sculptor living in the Old Quarter of Viking One, one of the oldest cities on Mars, in the Plains
of Gold region. Mrs. Mondragon, it turned out, was Javier’s great-niece.

  We arranged a meeting with Mrs. Mondragon for the following morning. She lived in a noisy light-industrial area in a converted warehouse not far from the docks. A new fangled taxi-hov with no visible driver, dropped me at the wrong address, so I walked up the narrow, cobbled streets to her house. Even from a distance, I could see odd-shaped windows and apertures opening and then closing again at apparently random locations in the high maxplax walls of her house. There was an array of cacti growing in numerous terracotta pots either side of the main entrance. Some, I noticed with a certain quiet alarm, turned to look at me as I approached. It was an unsettling feeling.

  Mrs. Mondragon opened the door. At a glance I saw she was middle-aged and lean, sinewy, with long dark hair streaked with silver-grey pulled back in a ponytail. A working sculptor, she met me dressed in grubby overalls with the sleeves rolled up, and with reddish clay under her fingernails. She smiled quickly, “Inspector McGee?”

  “Mrs. Mondragon?”

  “Thank you for coming, Inspector,” she said, urging me in warmly.

  As I went into the stark entrance lobby of her house she made nervous small-talk: “Did you have much trouble finding the place?”

  She activated an open-sided lift to take us up to the living area. I mumbled something derogatory about taxi-hovs without pilots, and she laughed.

  At the top we stepped out into an expansive, cool, airy living area with a high ceiling. I was distracted by the randomly opening and closing windows, which were on all sides, including the roof. At any given time there were perhaps as many as ten open at once. I also noticed brightly colored artificial birds flitting around the room and darting among the dangling light-fittings. Family images were everywhere, but so were strange and unsettling works of sculpture. Some looked like neo-classical humanoid forms in marble, bronze and other typical media, but there were other, more unusual works that looked like nothing I could quite identify, and constructed of a seemingly random assortment of machine parts and animal bones. Mrs. Mondragon caught my interest and invited me to take a closer look at her work, and asked me if I was a fan of sculpture.

  “Not really, I’m afraid. I’ve been somewhat out of things for quite some years now.” It was probably not the time to chat about my experience as a disembodied wave of organized energy.

  Mrs. Mondragon invited me to take a seat on one of the many couches around the room, and to just be firm and say “no” to any furniture that tried to get a little too friendly. While I was still blinking in disturbed surprise about that, she asked if I’d care for a little refreshment. I asked for a cup of tea and thought about where — and perhaps on whom — I was going to sit.

  She reappeared a few moments later bearing what looked like an antique sterling silver tray, on which an ornate porcelain teapot stood with matching teacups and saucers.

  Looking around at everything, and in particular at the antique tea-set, I kept thinking of Gideon. He would have been fascinated. And, thinking of Gideon, I nearly came undone right there in the middle of the interview. For me only a few days had passed since his sacrifice. I’d been doing my best to keep busy, to cling to the routine of work, to keep from dwelling too much on the mad bastard. It was impossible. Everywhere I’d gone since coming to Mars I’d seen any number of tall, good-looking men, both young and quite elderly, who seemed to look in some ways just like him, either as I’d originally known him or in his later, younger aspect. At first seeing these men I’d been sorely tempted to run up to them, hoping it was Gideon, and that he’d somehow survived the nova.

  I felt cold and hollow inside, afraid of what I’d do to keep from thinking about Gideon once I finished up this case.

  “You said when you called that you wanted to ask about Uncle Javier’s effects?” said Mrs. Mondragon.

  I sipped the tea, which was superb. “Right. I’ve been looking into the murder of a woman he knew, Airlie…”

  Mrs. Mondragon looked like I couldn’t have surprised her more if I tried. She put her teacup down on the saucer with a loud chink noise, and her olive skin drained of color. “That woman? You’re here about that woman?”

  “Airlie Fallow, that’s right. My information is that she and Javier…”

  “If it hadn’t been for that woman, we’d probably still have Uncle Javier around today. You know he killed himself over her, don’t you?”

  I was surprised that these events, from a century before, still seemed fresh and upsetting to Javier’s niece. I was also surprised to learn that he’d killed himself. I had only been informed by others in the family that he had died some time ago; they hadn’t said how. “Your memory is very impressive, Mrs. Mondragon,” I said.

  She was taking another sip, but I could see she was still upset. “What do you want to know?”

  I took a breath. “Javier and Mrs. Fallow, they were working on something together, weren’t they? Do you know…”

  Mrs. Mondragon rolled her eyes as she realized what I was talking about. “You’re here about that? God, I thought everybody knew about that. Where have you been all these years?”

  This was confusing. Everybody knew about it? “Um, excuse me?”

  “The Earth thing, yes? You’re here about the whole Sinister Secret of Human Collaboration in Earth’s Destruction, yes? All of that?”

  I sat, staring, mouth hanging open, dead cold inside. “I … I…?”

  “God, I’m so tired of that crap!” Mrs. Mondragon muttered, putting her teacup aside on a table. She got up and walked back and forth, clutching at the small of her back, looking like she was in pain. “Pardon me, Inspector. It’s my back again.”

  I could still hardly speak. Staring at the lush carpet, I noticed that the discreet pattern was moving slowly, and that it looked a little like the storms of Jupiter.

  At length, trying to get some moisture back into my mouth, I managed to say, “Human collaboration? Is that what you…?” It was the greatest secret in human space. Hydrogen Steel had been killing anybody who knew about Earth’s fate. In its final madness, it had destroyed our interstellar civilization in order to keep the information from spreading. We sort of knew that aliens had been involved; that part was obvious. But aliens doing the deed didn’t explain why human governments had refused for so long to reveal the truth.

  “Inspector, you do look awful. Can I get you something to eat, or some more tea?”

  Once Mrs. Mondragon understood that I really didn’t know what she was talking about, she rummaged about in her files and eventually produced a sheaf of documents. There was a lot of material, from every media source in human space. She explained that Javier’s Last Will and Testament had contained a provision in which 50 years after his death — a long enough gap that any repercussions should be minimal — his family was to release a set of data files into the human space infosphere. The files were the result of the work Javier, Airlie and many other researchers had conducted in trying to piece together the truth about Earth. It had been desperately hard work, trying to pick the truth from the many subtle and persuasive lies human space intelligence services had been releasing over the years. The collapse of interstellar civilization had also complicated the problem of disseminating the information.

  Mrs. Mondragon went on. “Well, this whole business, human collaboration in what happened to Earth, it was a big story at the time, but not for all that long. The general reaction was this very sarcastic, ‘Oh really? What a surprise!’”

  I thought I might faint with shock. “But people died trying to put that information together.”

  She glanced up at me, then looked off for a moment. “Oh, yes. Of course. The Hydrogen Metal Project. I can send you a brief summary if you like.”

  I was shocked, and sat there, unseeing eyes pointed at the artificial birds darting about against the winking window
s, trying to get to grips with these developments. “Okay, sure,” I said.

  Mrs. Mondragon shot the file across. My new body came with headware incorporated into the brain at the genetic level, and was, in a sense, a redesigned human brain. I became aware of the file’s arrival the way I might previously have become aware of a new smell in the air, or a new taste on my tongue: I just knew it was there. And, no sooner was I aware of its arrival, its content and meaning registered. Within a moment, I understood all there was to know about the Hydrogen Metal Project, and it felt like knowledge I’d always known.

  The Hydrogen Metal Project was the creation of a secret United Nations committee whose task was to come up with a plan for keeping the unsavory truth about Earth’s destruction from becoming generally known. Recognizing that secrets have a way of getting out, and that no system is ever perfect, the committee wound up authorizing the creation of an artificial consciousness, code-named Hydrogen Metal, a reference to the way molecular hydrogen, under colossal pressure, becomes metallic.

  Hydrogen Metal’s sole task was to secretly monitor the human space infosphere for evidence that the truth about Earth was getting out, all without in any way drawing attention to its own activities, which in turn would lead to questions about Earth’s destruction.

  Over time human space expanded. The interstellar infosphere grew at an astonishing rate. Monitoring the entire vast complexity of it required ever more power and resources. Hydrogen Steel, like many other synthetic minds, left its hardware. Unlike other such entities, which had been built with the aim of emulating human minds, Hydrogen Metal had a clear purpose: protecting the truth at all costs — but covertly.

  Freed from the limits of hardware, with all the energy it would ever need freely available, it blossomed into a new, fearsome form, and renamed itself Hydrogen Steel. Spreading itself across human space, monitoring the infosphere, interfering with anyone and anything that showed any interest in the truth about Earth, it began taking increasingly ruthless measures in pursuit of its goals. It created a storm of conspiracy theory disinformation to deflect investigators away from anything resembling the truth. It either created front organizations to peddle its lies, or it influenced existing organizations, corporations, intelligence services, anything at all that might help it achieve its covert aims.