Jack Glass

by Adam Roberts

  ‘There’s one thing, MOHmies,’ said Eva. ‘One thing that does puzzle me. When I think of the trouble you take to keep us both safe . . .’

  ‘Of course,’ said MOHmie Yang. ‘Nothing is more precious than you two girls. The future of the Clan depends upon you.’

  The expression on Eva’s face tightened a little, but she pressed on: ‘surely, surely, but . . . given that such is the case, aren’t you a little alarmed that somebody has been violently murdered within – within metres of us, literally? Shouldn’t you . . . I don’t know – shouldn’t you pull us out?’

  For the first time MOHmie Yang spoke up: ‘pull you out? No, no. You need your gravity, dear girls.’

  ‘There’s no threat to you, my darlings,’ agreed MOHmie Yin. ‘The servants are all dosed with CRF. All thoroughly dosed and conditioned to the nines.’

  ‘To the ninety-nines,’ agreed MOHmie Yang.

  ‘They could no more harm you than cut off their own legs! Don’t worry about that. And as far as this murder is concerned – well, it’s a problem to be solved. And who is better at solving problems than you two, my darlings?’

  ‘There’s always Anna Tonks Yu,’ said Eva, under her breath, as the call ended. Diana heard this, but chose to ignore it. Chose to ignore and snore. The Yu Clan would chop their heads off (literally, no doubt) given half a chance. It was actually quite insulting – actually, in fact – for her sister to mention that little flatface idiot. Close to Clan treason, actually; and, at the very least, hurtful to say that Anna Tonks Yu could outperform Diana in problem solving. On the other hand, if Dia challenged her, or bridled, or reacted in any way, Eva would only ramp up the taunting; and it wouldn’t be long before it got to ‘you love her’ and ‘you want to marry her’ and so on. Marry her! She’d never even met her in the flesh. As if Eva had any conception of love what! so! ever! She was cold as a comet, all rational thought and data crunching. She might as well have been an AI.

  Their quarrel didn’t last long, of course. The two girls said their prayers together, and afterwards kissed and went to their respective beds.

  Eva fell asleep easily. Both girls slept a lot: and falling asleep was never a problem. (The problem, in this gravity, was staying asleep.) If Diana lay awake for a while, reflecting upon the day that had been, it was not because she was too excited to sleep. It was more pragmatic than that. She wanted to process the day’s input a little before the dreams came.

  Dreams! Any old AI can crunch data, draw hypotheses and spot patterns. But there are no AIs, and precious few human minds, that can intuit solutions from interacting chaotic systems. This is what made Eva and Diana special, and that specialness – exhibited in their MOHmies too, of course; and in various other siblings and buddings, to much lesser degrees – was the foundation of the Clan’s success. They served the Ulanovs directly, and how wealthy it had made them! As far as dreams were concerned – well dreams are generated by the random processes of neural oscillation during the brain’s rest phases. What dreams do is cycle and recycle images and feelings, rationalisations and fears. There’s nothing special about that. It’s not the dreams that matter (chaff, mental turbulence, the rotating metal bars moving endlessly through the transparent tub of metaphorical slushy). It is what the problem-solving circuits in the mind make of the dreams. Dreams iterate and test mental schemas, discarding the maladaptive to return the adaptive to the slush to be reworked. Dreams are emotional preparations for solving problems – that is why we have evolved them, because problem-solving abilities are highly adaptive and thus strongly evolutionarily selected. Dreams intoxicate the individual out of reliance on common sense and preconception, and tempt her into the orbit of private logic. Dreams have utility.

  Dreaming was central to what the girls did, not because of what the dreams contained, but because of what the urge to interpret sparked inside them.

  Diana liked to prepare her thoughts before descending to her personal dream-avernus. She sorted the events of the day, mentally. She rehearsed all she had seen and heard, and thought for a while about her emotional reaction to what she had seen. It was odd how much of her feelings were ones of unsatisfactoriness. The corpse itself. She had expected to encounter death as a kind of existential depth and had been disappointed. But maybe there was a deeper truth there. Maybe profundity actually is a mode of disappointment. The rhythm of the climax – joy and despair, sex and pain – is of course the currency of life. Death can only ever be a sort of anticlimactic belatedness.

  It hardly mattered: because tomorrow she would begin investigating her very own murder mystery! There was no question that she could solve it. Too too too exciting.

  She composed herself, and went straight into sleep. Of course she dreamt. She always dreamt.

  She saw the whole Solar system: the incomprehensible sprawl of it. Planets blotted with people; and the billion or so globes and houses orbiting in free space – a foam of bubbles, tinting the sunlight green and ochre where they clustered together. So much plastic, extruded from rocksilicate and algae oils in the endless manufactories. Some of these zero-g houses were mansions, sparsely populated and expansive; many more were rock homes, hollowed-out asteroids and brick-moons. By far the greatest number were shanty bubbles: cheap balloons of inch-thick transparent plastic, crammed with the poorest of the poor, subsisting on a diet of ghunk augmented by whatever plants they could coax into growth. Pass through the shoals of these crowded homes: the ghunk soaking in sunlight within, and hundreds of faces pressing up against the walls to watch you pass. Many of them were dirty, greying or black or blue-black, blistered and scabbed by long years of exposure to pitiless sun-radiation. Or –

  Stop. Something odd here.

  It occurred to Dia, inside the dream, that she rarely dreamed such bigness. That was more Eva’s kind of thing: the vastness of space, orbital mechanics and faraway stars. Diana usually dreamed on a more intimate and human scale. Yet here she was, taking in the entire System. She looked down at herself, wondering how it was she could hang in space and see these sights without dying. But she saw that she had been gifted the body of a spaceship; a sloop hull, painted white (why white?), and inscribed upon her flank the legend: FTL. But the odd thing was that her fuselage was positively bristling with wings, fins, vanes and struts. Wings – in space? Fins are perfectly purposeless in zero-gravity. Yet there they were: all manner of them, bristling all over her spaceship body. Why?

  ‘Where am I going?’ she asked herself; and the answer came back to her like an echo: ‘into the sun’. Past the foam of houses and bubbles and the population of human beings in their trillions she saw the sun. It had a human face; and although it didn’t look like Leron, the murdered handservant, Dia somehow knew that it was him, nonetheless. ‘My spaceship body is hard. If I fly into the sun,’ she thought, ‘I shall smash his skull and kill him. Does that matter?’

  Does it matter? The voice said: ‘the shrapnel will scatter and kill all of humanity. Does that matter?’

  Does that matter? She woke up, suddenly, breathing hard. But her heart was not hurrying; and the room was calm. It was the gravity that made her haul her own ribcage in gasping breaths. Bristling, she thought, with wings, fins, vanes and struts. Odd. She thought about the dream for a while, and then she sent herself back to sleep.

  4

  The Mystery of the Champagne Supernovae

  Eva Argent, five years older than her MOHsister, had been shaped in slightly different ways. Not too different, obviously, or the whole point of the Argent family would be obviated. The physical differences between the girls were minor; but mentally they were star and black-hole. Both, of course, lived for information – they were moved by it, they delighted in it, they immersed themselves in it. It was what they were for. The Argent family had made its fortune, and had risen to its Systemic eminence, on the back of suchlike information skills, and accordingly the new generation – both Eva and Diana – had been made with the same passion for problem-solving. But Diana’s
mind worked best when she could personalise the information. Hers was a creative sort of problem solving, freewheeling and intuitive. Eva was different. People-problems did not interest her. Data seemed to her a larger, purer, more transcendent quantity than Homo sapiensness. Human-to-human interactions were, effectively, all just politics, and politics bored her. It wasn’t that she actively disliked people. For example; ironically enough, her dispassion meant that she had already engaged in a good deal more sexual experimentation than her virgin sister; both with her peers, and with some of the more physically attractive servants. But she was able to do this precisely because she ran no risk of emotional entanglement. No; what set her mind alight were the problems far removed, in a literal sense, from the worlds of humankind.

  Right now she was working on her seventh PhD. That was why she was spending so much time in her Worldtuality rather than engaging with reality (not that there was much point in even trying to engage with the real world until her body had adjusted a little to the horrible pressures of gravity). This would be her third thesis on Supernovae, her fifth on astrophysics more generally, and she was close to completion. And it was interesting! The development of specialised AIs had made available a quantity of raw data on supernovae unimaginable even a few decades before. It gave data artists a wealth of new ways of addressing the several dozen as-yet-unsolved astrophysical mysteries.

  Eva’s current work was on a particular kind of Type II Supernova. Normally, such events only occurred to stars that had at least nine times the mass of the Sun; for a certain minimum threshold of mass was absolutely necessary for the supernova reaction to take place. Which is to say: it was (of course) possible for less massive stars to go supernova, but they generated a different data-profile, in terms of the balance of hydrogen and helium, than was the case with Type II. In an earlier PhD Eva had addressed the problem of stars that generated a Type II supernova despite lacking sufficient mass. Now she was looking at a different variety of stars; ones that achieved Type II supernova luminosity without generating a debris shell and despite being much too small; far smaller than any other examples observed. Only four such cases had been identified – the first, observed in the early twenty-first century had been given the name ‘Champagne Supernova’. After a song, apparently (that was the great era of the song, of course; that was when everybody had been crazy for the song). Since then, only three more of the champagne type had been located amongst the trillions of observed stars. Extrapolating proportionately from the parameters of observational capacity (a simple algorithm) suggested that this was a phenomenon that had happened maybe two dozen times in the entire history of the universe – which made this ‘anomalous superluminosity’ problem vanishingly rare and extraordinarily interesting. Something made these tiny stars mimic supernovae explosions! And Eva was determined to find out what. The data was rich, although not rich enough to propose 90th-percentile explanations. Nevertheless she had three working hypotheses, and two of them 50th-percentile likelihoods, which was enough for a PhD.

  She had not been made as any kind of child prodigy, but nevertheless Eva was awarded her first PhD long before she was sixteen. Diana, on the other hand, was different: her sixteenth birthday was only weeks away, and she had nothing more to show for herself than a regular Tertiary School degree. The truth, Eva knew, was that Dia had a distractible mind. She lacked the staying power required for higher-level information work. And since the family’s eminence, its usefulness to the Ulanovs, depended upon information work of the very highest calibre, that might prove a problem in the long run.

  In the long run the Clan needed a clearer vision in charge.

  For Eva, all these Whodunits her sister loved were nothing more than symptoms of an unshed immaturity. ‘Who is the killer?’ was never a serious problem – not in the cosmic sense. Take the recent unpleasantness: one servant amongst a group of nineteen had killed another servant with a hammer. There was no question that it was one of the servants – nobody else had gone into the building, and nobody else but billeted servants had come out. So the only questions that remained were: which one of the nineteen was guilty? Why did they do it? And did the act constitute any sort of threat to either Eva or Diana? Had Dia canvassed her opinion, Eva would have answered those questions in a moment, to within data-tolerances with which any reputable information explorer would have been more than satisfied. But Dia would never ask – because she was hooked on precisely the romance of the crime mystery. Romance!

  Put silly romance to one side, and take those three questions in order. First: who committed the crime? Narrowing the group of suspects down to only nineteen people already placed the solution in the 99.9+++th-increment. Even if you limited yourself to the population of the island (though, since the whole Argent group had only just landed, and had not yet interacted with any island natives, the murderer was massively unlikely to be found outside the group – but for the sake of argument) we were talking about 19 out of 102,530, which was the 99.998+th percentile. Eva had never reached such levels of near-certainty in any of her PhDs! It was ridiculous to ask for more. Trillions of people in the solar system, and Diana wanted to waste her time sifting through a group of nineteen? Let her. If Eva had been in charge, she would have treated all nineteen as guilty – and then either execute them all, or perhaps treat the group conviction as a technical mitigation and sentence them all to long prison terms.

  Second: why did the one-in-nineteen do what he or she did? Here the increments weren’t so good; but even idling in the relevant section of the Imaginary Palace for ten minutes gave Eva enough data to arrive at an 85th-percentile or higher probability. The motives that explained human murder bunched, historically, into three groups: material gain; personal grudge and sociopathy. Since these were close family servants, all carefully vetted by the Argent’s systems (they would hardly have been assigned to attend directly on the girls, otherwise), Eva could rule out the last of these. The first also seemed unlikely. They were servants, not citizens. They had grown up in solar orbit shanty bubbles, on the edge of the Sump, subsisting on ghunk and living by cheap scrubbers and fusion cells. We’re not talking about the more durable rock houses, excavated out of old asteroids and the like – only the relatively wealthy could afford those sorts of homes (and only the superwealthy, like Eva’s family, could afford the massive multi-part plasmetal structures they inhabited). No: shanty bubbles were designedly temporary structures, alright for a few years, until solar radiation began to degrade the structural integrity of their plastic. When you bought them, you agreed to a warranty that specified no longer than three years’ use. Then, on pain of prosecution under the Lex Ulanova, you were supposed to buy a new one. But the Sumpolloi, the very poorest – of course they couldn’t afford that. So they lived on and on in those deathtraps, patching leaks and fractures, overstraining the fabric with a much higher population than they were designed to hold. Or, worse, jerry-rigging them – all warranty immediately voided by such action, two-year maximum prison sentence possible (though who could be bothered to police it?) – drilling windows and linking the holes by crawlskins, tying Globes together in clusters. Horrible, vulgar, teeming humanity. Bodies in constant proximity. The smell, the threat, the waste. Usually even the data access was held in common, so there wasn’t even the possibility of privacy there. Often the Bubbles would break wide open and everybody inside would be killed; or only a few desperate survivors would be able to suit themselves up, or scrabble, ratlike, along the crawl-skins to a neighbouring shanty. It didn’t stop them. ‘They’ kept on breeding. And there were billions of these bubbles in solar orbit, staining the sunlight dark green! The limitless poor.

  These servants, the Argent daughters’ personal handservants, had been uplifted out of that morass. By virtue of taking on Argent livery they were automatically wealthier than anybody else they had hitherto known. It was actually low-level stuff, of course; a pittance. But it was a lot to them. Why would they want more? Indeed, since their contracts were all
-time, it wasn’t as if they would ever have the leisure to spend extra credits. So, although Eva couldn’t rule out the possibility that the crime had been committed for reasons of material gain, it seemed unlikely. By far the most probable explanation was personal grudge. You might delve deeper into circumstances and uncover exactly what the grudge was, but why would you bother? Here was an explanation any professional information artist would be happy with. At least: anyone who worked in the sciences.

  And that only left the third question: did the crime constitute a present threat to the sisters? Cursory thought might imagine it did. Somebody capable of murderous violence was in physical proximity to the girls. But the girls were surrounded by expert bodyguards; the nineteen suspects had been confined pending investigation, and – above all – the girls themselves could never have been the target. All the Argent servants were dosed with high levels of CRF, geared to generate not just feelings of loyalty but, actively, of self-sacrificing love, the real thing, towards the core members of the MOHfamily. Quite literally, they would sooner chop off their own limbs than hurt either Eva or Diana.

  The clincher, as far as Eva was concerned, was the way her MOHmies had reacted. If they had the slightest fear their daughters were in actual danger, they would have pulled them straight back up into orbit. But not only had they not done so, they were actively encouraging Diana to indulge her hobby and investigate the crime – on site. Evidently the crime posed no direct threat to the girls.

  Not that the two girls were ever safe, of course. On the contrary, danger was a constant part of Eva and Diana’s lives. They were the chosen key daughters of the Argent Clan. Their family was one of five MOHfamilies that were, collectively, second only to the Ulanovs in the Solar System’s hierarchies of power. Below them, thousands of Gongsi corporations, of varying size and aggressiveness, jockeyed for position. Any one of them, or (of course) any of the other four MOHfamilies, might have good reason to want to hurt the Argents. But none of that had anything to do with one servant bashing another servant on the head with a hammer! Most servants had only the vaguest sense of the structured hierarchy of power’s upper echelons – beyond the sense that the Ulanovs had won the war all those years ago and gifted order and law to the System. The MOHfamilies, and below them the Gongsi, and below them the myriad bands, police, civvies, conventional genetic families, cults and mafias, and below them the Polloi, the hundreds of billions of ordinary citizens – all arranged in concentric circles around the Ulanovs, like medieval species of angels around the throne of God. And below the Polloi, only the sub people, the Sump, the dregs – the trillions. One less, whether dispatched by natural causes or by a hammer to the skull, hardly mattered.