“People are dead.”
Halliday tutted to himself, and frowned. “You’re right, Mr Parrish. Worst case marketing scenario. The blame needs to be placed quickly onto a Halliday sub-contractor if the military are going to play hard-ball.”
He lightly touched a button on his jacket lapel. “Ms Kjanvik, who owes us the most money this quarter?”
“Accessing. Just a moment. It’s on-screen now, Mr Halliday.”
A bright rectangle of graphs and figures burst upon one wall.
“2.5 trillion com dollars. Ajemende Mining. Copper from the Mioumo Unity Collective. Ms Kjanvik, how are our other copper mines operating?”
“Just a moment, Mr Halliday. On screen two.”
Another screen came alive in the gloom of Halliday’s office.
“Kensguss on Braben Neldy is doing well. Terminate the contract with Ajemende Mining. Sink another billion into Neldy. Plant an iridium isotope or something in the Ajemende mine. Fuck them up. Thank you.” He flicked ash from his cigar into the copper ashtray and drifted back behind his desk, where he began sifting papers distractedly. "There you go, Mr Parrish - substandard copper from the Ajemande mine caused a wet/dry interface malfunction. You can make up the details. Good day."
Art looked from the screen, to Halliday, and back again. He felt very vulnerable. Against his better judgement, he took the vial of Prodraxil on his way out.
CHAPTER 6
The lab was dark when Art got back. Dawkins was plugged into his recharging station and quietly analysing the actions he had performed during the day. Digital dreaming.
Art was expecting questions. To be honest with himself, he was expecting police, but everything was quiet. Air traffic had also been non-existent. Imo had unexpectedly shut down.
Something wasn’t right. His in-ear phone rang. He pulled his earlobe to answer.
“Kate?”
“Come home, Art.”
“What?”
“Please come home.”
“Okay.”
He had been expecting a confrontation, something awful only a wife or girlfriend could construct, something that questioned all the fundamental rationales upon which male behaviour rests. Instead, she had sounded fearful, conciliatory, human.
He tried for twenty minutes to hail a skycab, but no one answered, so he hacked into the electricycle cubes next door that belonged to a bland 3D TV lifestyle channel, and stole a skycycle to get home. And not for the first time.
Kate and Franco sat huddled around the holographic TV. The rest of the house was in darkness. The kitchen, normally the hub of the house, was abandoned. Half-started recipes sat cold on the hobs.
Art flung off his coat, chilled from his ride, and strode into the living room to warm himself by the fire screen. A digital image of a log fire blazed excitedly on the surface of the heater.
“What’s going on?”
Art drew closer to the TV. The news was on.
“Evacuation ships have been scrambled from Earth to enter the Luhrmann Breach in nine weeks’ time. From there, it is estimated they will reach the Mio system within eight months.”
“What’s happening?”
Kate ran to him and hugged him tight. She was trembling. And crying. “Art, a star went supernova – the shockwave is on its way – we have to get out!”
Now Franco was up on his feet and by his side. “E-416 in the Delcroix triangle.”
“Fluctuating spectrometer output?”
“Yeah. It was burning itself out, using whatever was left for fuel.”
“But that’s – “
Franco nodded.
E-416 was 0.7 light years away. The nearest neighbour to their system's twin suns, Yar and Yeg.
The maths sank in quickly. There was not enough time.
“Waste of a good fleet,” said Art, holding Kate gently to his side. She looked up to him fearfully, and then to Franco. He slipped his arm around her shoulders.
“They’ll arrive three months too late. We’re going to die here, Kate.”
The three of them stood suddenly silent and still. No tears were shed, no voices were raised in anguish. This was the end. There was nothing to do but wait.
Art went into the kitchen and brought out the good whisky. From Earth. From the Isle of Skye.
They got drunk, all three of them, and laughed and cried and shared their stories like men from eons ago, before the light of the capering digital fire.
Out in the black, hard oblivion of space, a rough sphere of white-hot gases and whirling plasma, bigger than the solar system, more powerful than anything men could imagine, raced at nearly the speed of light away from the collapsed core of E-416, vaporising everything in its path.
Sol 2 rose as normal the next morning, over the verdant plains and vertiginous mountain peaks of Imo. Mioumo rose an hour later, its iridescent rings shimmering through the atmosphere like strips of silver sandpaper.
Art woke at eleven. His ear hurt. He pulled his earlobe and a tinny voice relayed its messages. “You have one hundred and thirteen new messages. Pull once to hear the first message.”
He winced. “Play back most urgent message.”
A tiny logic circuit in the phone server located in a small satellite two hundred miles overhead sifted the data.
“Dawkins feed, 2.55am Imo adjusted time.”
“Art Parrish. Can reach Luhrmann Breach in five months.”
The phone voice came on again. “End message. Play all phone messages?”
Art muted the phone with a tap to his temple.
A priority message overrode it.
“Halliday feed, 1.05am Imo adjusted time.”
“Art, my friend, your salvation is at hand. Come to my office at your earliest convenience tomorrow. I’ll send a car when you’re ready.”
This time he switched his phone off.
CHAPTER 7
Kyko Halliday met the skycab, unusually, on the roof of his office. His chair bobbed and hummed. His frail body was wrapped up in a mayinsk fur coat of soft grey folds and dappled markings, despite the spring warmth.
“Art! Good to see you. My, you don’t look well. Has the news been keeping you awake?”
Art cocked his head and kept his hands in his pockets. “What do you want, Mr Halliday?”
“Do you want to live, Mr Parrish?”
“Pour me some of your Earth saki and I’ll listen to you. Hair of the dog.”
Halliday’s office was tropically hot as usual, and smelled of sweat and cigarettes. Someone had been busy overnight. Halliday picked out a long, lacquered tube of cut bamboo stuffed with a fat cork and shook it by his ear. Empty. He tossed it to the ground and picked out a second from a tiny forest of bamboo bottles. “Okinawa, 2852. The year of the Exodus. Perfect.” He picked up a pair of tiny porcelain bowls decorated with a blue painted image of a stork flying over a temple, and poured the clear spirit liberally into them. Handing one to Art, he said, “To survival.”
Art tossed the bowl back into his mouth and swallowed hard on the fire and spice of his drink. Then he held out the cup for more. Halliday filled it again, but this time slowly, with care. His eyes flicked up to Art’s face, and then down again to the tiny bowl. He didn’t think Art had seen the look, but he had, and the balance of the meeting shifted imperceptibly.
Halliday manoeuvred his chair back behind his desk, the showy friendliness of his greeting evaporating like frost under a winter sun. He popped a fat French cigarette in his mouth and lit it with a crystal lighter. He blew smoke out in front of his face.
“Mind if I join you, Mr Halliday?”
Halliday rewarded him with an awkward smile, and offered him one from a slim silver box.
“It’s okay, I’ve got – “
He changed his mind. He didn’t want an airette right now. He wanted old fashioned tar and nicotine clawing down his oesophagus and settling like deadly Pompeiian ash into the deepest recesses of his lungs. He slipped one of the cigarettes out from under the th
in elastic strip that held them in their box and lit it with his own plastic lighter. Down the smoke went. He heard blood sighing in his ears.
That’s what he wanted.
“Art, look at this.”
Halliday picked up a remote control and pointed it at the wall behind Art. The whole wall became a screen. Art turned to see an excitable young Japanese lady dressed quite formally, walking down the aisle of a laboratory or a factory, pointing out features of interest as a hovering cameradrone backed away from her.
Art watched politely for a couple of minutes before Halliday tutted to himself and pressed the translate button on his remote. She continued.
“Cryogenic engineers have taken your health issues into account, Kyko San and Hypocrates Neural Logic circuits will monitor your life signs from second to second. Better than a nurse!” The woman giggled to herself and held her hand politely in front of her mouth.
Halliday switched it off.
“It’s an escape vessel. A ship. After what happened on Earth, I knew I’d never feel comfortable anywhere again unless I had means of getting out. I nearly missed my ship last time, Mr Parrish. Never again.”
“You’re rich. You would have got through it.”
“Really? A billion or so didn’t. I didn’t like my chances.”
“But this time, Mr Halliday, we have nowhere to go.”
“We go back to Earth, you fool! Once we’re through the Luhrmann Breach, this whole system can blow itself to bits. Who cares? One big tax right-off. We go into cryogenic stasis and wake up in Earth orbit.”
Art blew out smoke and stubbed out his cigarette in one of Kyko Halliday’s giant copper ashtrays. “The thing is, it takes nine months to reach the Luhrmann Breach from here. The nova shockwave will tear through the Mio system in seven months. Unless some star-drive engineer has earned his research grant this semester, we’re ash.”
“I have the Farringdon-Kaarlsonn drive with Krupp mass-converters.”
“The D-12’s?
“Eight of them. Enough to fool a room full of Einsteins.”
“Eight D-12 mass converters. Well, that’s the fastest thing I can think of. Still eight and a half months to the Breach, though. Too slow.”
Halliday circled round in front of his desk. He was on his second cigarette. There were dark circles under his eyes.
“I can get more. There are another ten converters. The superstructure is still open. They can be in place in three weeks.”
“Three weeks to fit them cancels out your speed advantage, Mr Halliday.”
“No!” Halliday threw his cup on the floor, smashing it. He whirled about the room on his chair, knocking over plant pots, scattering papers on the ground. Cigarette smoke followed him, like an incense-wreathed priest.
“No! There must be a way! I will not sit here on this fucking frontier world and wait to die!”
Despite himself, Art struggled to hold back a smile. Kyko Halliday in a panic. The victim at last.
“You could head toward the Drop Off. You do a maximum burn, get up to eight-tenths lightspeed and fly straight. You can't go any faster, you'd kill everyone on board."
Kyko stared at him, thinking.
Art continued. “Use your ram-scoop once you reach half lightspeed, preserve your fuel, only use your reserves to nudge your trajectory and you can fly for a thousand years.”
“The Drop Off is the edge of known space. There is nothing beyond it. Eight-tenths lightspeed is not fast enough..."
Art leaned over Halliday's big, polished desk and took another cigarette from the silver case. Then he picked up the case and slipped it into his jacket pocket. This time, he lit it with the crystal lighter. He pursed his lips as he inhaled.
Halliday sat hunched and morose in the far corner of the room, half-turned away from Parrish. Sunlight slanted through the window blinds, casting horizontal bands of shadow across his narrow shoulders. Cigarette smoke bloomed luminously around his head.
“Ms Kjanvik?”
No reply.
“Ms Kjanvik, I know you’re listening, there is a green light on my intercom.”
“Sir.”
“Ms Kjanvik, access our research database and display our neural development experiments, would you?”
“That is a lot of material, sir.”
“You’re quite right. Show me neural network developments.”
Now Art was curious. “What are you thinking, Halliday?”
“Between us, Mr Parrish, our brains have failed to satisfactorily resolve our problem. We are, however, in the unique position of having thousands of brains at our disposal.”
Art shook his head. “You’re going to ask a bunch of manual labour mechs and combat cans to help save the colonies?”
Kyko Halliday turned towards Art Parrish as his chair hovered into position behind his desk, and proffered him a warm smile. “Let’s talk about Dawkins. Let’s use him as an example, Mr Parrish.”
Art froze. “What about Dawkins?”
“Just an example. When Dawkins is in downtime, I presume you occasionally access his neural net, just for routine maintenance checks?”
“He has a problem down his left side, just a motor nerve glitch. Some sort of wet–dry interface issue, I think it’s a fungal infection. Keeps coming back.”
“And his neural net screen looks like this?”
Halliday’s screen lit up again. There was the vast, dense, ever changing code screen for a living brain inhabiting a man made body. Numbers fluctuated, chemical names flickered and changed, then changed back again. Tiny graphs rose and fell, indicator lights and level displays shone amber, then green, and hopefully never red.
Art saw it plainly, read it easily. Fifteen years of experience, looking at identical code screens, building brains for Halliday Industries, made it like reading the expressions on a loved-one’s face.
“This isn’t Dawkins.”
“Never said it was. Easy reading, yes?”
“Standard interface.”
“Anything you don’t understand?”
“No.”
“Glad to hear it. I only hire the best. This is voice operated. Delete the last two lines of the pituitary gland algorithm.”
Art frowned. “You’ll disrupt metabolic functions. Brain death.”
“How do you know that?”
Now Halliday was back on the saki. He opened the bottle and threw the cork away. He didn’t offer it to Art.
“Textbook mistake. The organic brain makes the algorithm. Change it and you start a chemical chain reaction that results in brain death, brain injury, or impaired brain function. You always work with your mechanical system, and change that to fit in with your organic or wet systems.”
“And who wrote your textbooks?”
“Dr Werner Bucher.”
“A good pseudonym. I wrote them, Mr Parrish. Now delete the algorithm.”
Art glanced at Halliday. “Tell me this isn’t Dawkins, Halliday. I know you can manipulate code.”
Halliday drained his little porcelain cup and pressed a button on his intercom. “Kurasawa, come into my office.”
An elegant, white, featureless, round-topped cylinder, the height of a man, entered the office silently, an inch off the ground.
“Registration.”
The robot sent a silent signal. On the giant screen, its unique identifying code appeared, linking it to the neural net read out.
Art relaxed. “Okay, Halliday. You can pick this poor sod up when he falls over and leaks brain juice all over your floor. PG delete four and five. Confirm, confirm, confirm.”
It was a standard voice activated delete command, repeated three times to avoid accidents.
The screen went white. Then up came the Halliday Duosphere company logo. And then: Neural Network. Present retinal data. It was a concealed back-door code for Halliday's engineered brains. Kurasawa silently left the room.
Halliday leaned over the intercom. “Retinal scanner,” he whispered. A thin metal rod
telescoped out of the intercom. A tiny transparent ball at its tip lit up, and a narrow cone of light shone first into one of Halliday’s eyes, and then the other.
On screen, the display changed. Retinal data confirmed. The screen changed again. This time, a big avatar’s face filled the wall. It was human and hairless, a kindly face, and entirely man-made.
“Hello, Mr Halliday. How can I help?”
The voice was deep and reassuring.
“Hello, Hiroto. How are you feeling today?”
“I’m frightened. The news programmes say there is a supernova shockwave heading towards the Mio system. The survival rating is two percent.”
Halliday cocked his head to one side, then looked at Art, before replying. “Hiroto, repeat survival rating.”
“Two percent. It will be devastating.”
“But the blast will vaporise every planet in the system, and Mr Parrish tells me even escape craft will not be fast enough to reach the safety of the Breach.”
“Dawkins mlf/0988745 has additional information.”
Now Halliday’s gaze was fixed on Art.
Art recalled Dawkins' phone message from his hung over memory.
Halliday steepled his fingers under his nose. “Access Dawkins' feed.”
The screen flickered. The avatar actually winced at the electronic disruption. “Access denied.”
Halliday poured more saki and swilled it around his cup. “Mr Parrish, I could have you fired, you know…”
“He’s protecting himself. He’s self-medicating against external violation.”
“Ms Kjanvik?”
“Sir?”
“Bring some lunch at your earliest possible convenience, would you? I’ll have my usual. Mr Parrish will have something that tastes like bacon. He’s still hung over, I think. Thank you.”
“You leave Dawkins alone, Halliday – “
“The Halliday Neural Network includes every Halliday manufactured brain in the Mio system, Parrish. It is a giant computer, generating massive amounts of data.”
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