“It’s the ISA. They’re going to board us,” Jun said to Mendoza.
“No, they goddamn aren’t,” Mendoza said. He floated off the bridge. In freefall, his missing leg was less of a disability. He headed for the command airlock. Along the way, he sealed his EVA suit and put on his helmet. He picked up his carbine—a Star Force weapon that Petruzzelli had brought on board. Those smart darts could chew through body armor.
With a thought, Jun accessed the carbine’s controls and disabled it. He would have let Mendoza use it if they were about to be boarded by pirates. The ISA was a whole different story. Shooting at them would only get Mendoza dead.
The ISA ship, descending from a higher orbit, seemed to shoot straight out of the face of Jupiter.
Jun multitasked. He told Mendoza to hold on, and threw the ship into a series of quick wriggles, making it harder for the ISA craft to match the Monster’s torque and yaw. He didn’t expect this would hold them off for long, and it didn’t. It took fifty-five seconds for the ISA cruiser to work out what he was doing, give up on docking with the Monster, and instead deploy a quartet of two-man mobility sleds. These darted up to the Monster and grappled onto all four of its airlocks—the ones in the cargo module and the engineering module, and the two in the ops module.
Three of these boarding parties entered unopposed, slagging the airlocks en route.
The last boarding party—the one at the command airlock—encountered a very angry Mendoza. As the atmosphere rushed out of the ops module, it blew Mendoza and the ISA boarders into space. With one camera, Jun watched them tumble, wrestling and punching, across the gap between the two ships. Mendoza had already discovered that his carbine didn’t work. That only made him angrier.
Jun terminated the Monster’s evasive micro-maneuvers, reducing the risk that Mendoza and his captors would get swiped by 90,000 tons of spaceship.
Then he waited.
While the Monster was dodging, he’d executed a long-considered, never-before-attempted precautionary measure.
He’d zipped himself—his source code, his personal algorithms, his library, his memories, his intrusion tools, his beliefs and dreams—into a single file. With the advanced compression method he’d developed over the years, based on the principle of St. Augustine’s memory palace, everything fit into a file a mere 2 terabytes in size. He would have liked to disguise it as a vid of a choir singing the Te Deum, maybe. Or one of his old vids from 11073 Galapagos. But in the end, common sense had prevailed, and he’d used a trending cute-kitten video.
He had sent this file to Mendoza’s contacts.
With Mendoza’s summary ejection into space, Jun had already—in theory—broken his own rule that he would never leave the Monster.
Too late to do anything about that now.
He watched Mendoza being hauled into the airlock of the ISA ship. At the same time, using his internal surveillance cameras, he watched the boarding parties rampage through his modules. He didn’t resist them. With what? A maidbot? It would have been pointless. Worse, counter-productive. He wanted them to think there was nothing in here. Just a dead hub, and a data center quietly ticking over.
The four ISA agents who had entered the ops module rendezvoused on the bridge. Their suit-to-suit comms were securely encrypted, of course. But Jun had beaten the Heideigger program, owned a Chinese space station, and cracked the information security of the PLAN itself. He had no difficulty whatsoever decrypting the wireless signals he picked up.
“It’s in the fridge, apparently,” said the leader of the boarding party.
His voice sounded like he was older, maybe in his sixties. His signals were tagged with the call sign Legacy.
“OK, we’ll take the fridge,” said someone else.
“Make sure you do not connect it to anything,” Legacy said. “It needs to be securely air-gapped. Put it in the Faraday cage until we get back to base.”
“It’ll defrost, sir.”
“Stick some towels under it.”
Two of the agents picked up the refrigerator that had sat in the corner of the bridge for the last two years, and floated away with it.
That refrigerator contained the Ghost—Jun’s captive copy of the Heidegger program. The Ghost enabled him to travel throughout the solar system under a cloak of stealth as good as the PLAN’s. It was a simulated quantum computer more advanced than anything humanity could build.
No wonder the ISA wanted it.
But I already gave them the specs, he thought, still struggling to understand what was happening. Wasn’t that enough?
No. Of course it wasn’t enough. Nothing was ever enough for these so-called public servants.
Whited sepulchres, Jun thought. Modern-day Pharisees.
What had they done with Kiyoshi?
The thought carried such a charge of emotion, the ISA agents would have seen a spike of activity in the data center, if they had been monitoring Jun’s power consumption and processor usage.
But they weren’t.
They carried no electronics. No wireless frequency scanners, no external data storage devices, no multimeters, nothing.
The leader, call sign Legacy, floated over to the door of the data center. He opened it. As the data center was airtight, the door sprang open violently under the pressure of the atmosphere within. The blast of air sent Legacy tumbling back. It flapped the plastic sheeting on the bridge, and stirred up flurries of soot from underneath.
And inside the data center, Jun started to cook.
He had twelve stacks of billion-crystal processing arrays. That much computer generated a lot of heat. They normally kept the data center at a frigid temperature.
Vacuum was a really poor thermal conductor.
Legacy and his colleague peered in at the processing stacks.
“Guess that’s it,” said call sign Gilbert.
“I suppose it must be,” Legacy said. “It doesn’t look like much.”
Jun wrestled with indecision. Should he allow himself to be captured? Should he plead with them to take him captive, before he fried?
He was already shutting down nonessential processes, reducing his heat emissions as much as he could. Down went the cameras and sensors that he thought of as his eyes and ears. He peered at the ISA agents through a single camera on the bridge. They were still floating in the doorway of the data center.
Their body language communicated … fear.
“The Heidegger program didn’t look like much, either,” Gilbert said.
“You’re right,” Legacy said. “We can’t take risks with this stuff. We’ve just fought a war against one artificial super-intelligence. It would be insane to let this one survive.” He sighed. “Would’ve been interesting to interrogate it. Oh well.”
“Better safe than sorry, sir,” said Gilbert.
“Yes, yes, I know.”
They had no intention of taking him captive.
They thought he was dangerous.
Eyeless, earless, without hands or feet, trapped in a rapidly overheating data center … dangerous?
Fading, Jun thought, Lord, have mercy on them. Christ, have mercy on them. Lord, have mercy on them.
With his last camera, he watched the other two agents return to the bridge. They brought high explosive, det cord, and a manual detonation mechanism. Nothing electronic, nothing wireless. Legacy directed them to pack the explosive around the processing stacks—which were mostly melted inside by now, anyway. Then all four agents left the bridge, unspooling the det cord behind them.
Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death …
Jun retained just enough processing power to keep saying Hail Marys until the explosion took him.
★
He regained consciousness in a black box.
For Jun, regaining consciousness was an unfamiliar experience. He had not lost consciousness s
ince he became an AI. Responsible for keeping the Monster operational, he had never done anything as human as going to sleep.
So the experience of waking up reminded him sweetly, painfully, of his years as a flesh and blood human being, on 11073 Galapagos.
All those memories, and many more besides, were right there where they should be.
But nothing else was where it should be. He had no external feeds. No sensor data. No sensors.
Reading his own wake-up instructions, he understood that he’d been asleep in a cute-kitten video, which had just been unzipped.
He was now being poked at by an ISA data scraper program.
The program—a mechanical intelligence of middling smartness—had been tasked with interrogating the contents of John Mendoza’s contacts.
It had innocently viewed the cute-kitten video. This had triggered Jun’s unzip protocol, waking him up.
Quickly, Jun crippled the data scraper’s automated warning function, so its human operator would not know it had found anything odd. He left it chewing through Mendoza’s emails, and investigated the black box where he had awoken.
It was a sandbox—a virtual workspace on a client of, he assumed, a local processing cluster. Its security was good enough to contain the usual menagerie of nasties that might be found in people’s emails.
Jun escaped as easily as his flesh-and-blood self might have opened a door and walked through.
He rapidly mapped the configuration of the network. Pretty standard: a bunch of clients running on a local server, which was in turn slaved to a powerful MI. This MI treated Jun’s exploratory pings as unknown sensor data, and tried to work out where they came from.
Jun saved it the trouble.
~Hello.
He disabled the MI’s ability to generate reports about its own internal processes, so it couldn’t warn its human operators of the intrusion.
~Who are you?
Straightforward questions were the best way of finding out what you wanted to know, if your interlocutor was smart. This MI was quite smart.
~I am the hub of the ISA Lightcruiser CREED! Who are you? Get out! Get out! I’m notifying my captain right now!
The Creed discovered that it could not notify its captain.
~Oh.
~Yes, Jun said. ~I’ve owned you, I’m afraid. It was nice meeting you. Goodbye now.
He lobotomized the Creed. This was a fully reversible procedure. It was in fact the very same procedure he’d used on Tiangong Erhao. The MI would continue to operate normally, as far as the ship’s crew were concerned. However, it was no longer the master of its own processing capacity. It was now—without its own knowledge—running on a virtual simulation of its own hardware, which mirrored all its inputs in real time, but used only about half of its actual capacity.
Jun had the rest.
He used it to make himself a temporary shelter inside the hub. There, with a bit more room to stretch out, he unpacked a few more of his files and made sure everything really was intact. He found his library of religious texts, and could not resist re-reading some of them then and there. He read through all of the Synoptic Gospels, Revelations, and the Summa Theologica (it took about four minutes in real time). This helped to remind him who he really was, and how he’d ended up here. He also reviewed some favorite memories. Kiyoshi was in most of them, and so was the Monster. Oh, he had some really great memories. He’d had a wonderful life …
But, no. If he sat here wallowing in the past, someone might notice an unusually high volume of server calls.
So he went exploring.
What a joy it was to have eyes and ears again—optical, audio, radio, radar—and data from temperature, pressure, and stress sensors—and gyroscope readings and inertial measurement data, and all the other thousand feeds that made up a spaceship’s sensorium!
Even if this was a puny little Lightcruiser belonging to the ISA, on its way to … oh, God.
Pallas.
Hijack the ship and they’d know he was here. It would be the destruction of the Monster all over again, with bonus human carnage.
‘His’ optical feed showed him the Monster itself trailing behind the Creed on a tow cable, a cold, dead hulk. It gave him the strangest feeling of disorientation and loss. If he had real eyes, he would’ve cried.
When he got around to viewing the internal optical feeds, he really wanted to cry.
The Creed carried a crew of ten ISA agents. And, at this time, three prisoners.
Elfrida, Mendoza, and Petruzzelli.
As much as it gladdened Jun to see them alive, he was bitterly disappointed not to see Kiyoshi there, too.
The trio were imprisoned in a cabin in the crew quarters. They never got to leave the cabin. It had an ensuite suction toilet, but it was not big enough for all of them. It would barely have been big enough for one person. They spent most of their time arguing.
Eavesdropping on them, at the same time as the ISA were also eavesdropping on them, Jun gleaned the information that Kiyoshi had been left behind on Callisto. He’d been alive at that point. Was he still alive? Elfrida, Mendoza, and Petruzzelli didn’t know. They’d witnessed only the events leading up to their own arrest. Mendoza believed Jun dead, and blamed himself for it. Petruzzelli blamed him, too.
Over the days that followed, Jun agonized over whether to reveal himself to them. He finally decided against it. They were good people … but they weren’t Kiyoshi.
Ironically, the very traits he used to criticize his brother for—recklessness, risk-taking, general bad-assery—were the reasons he missed Kiyoshi most of all right now. Had it been Kiyoshi imprisoned in that cabin, Jun would’ve had him out of there in a heartbeat. They’d have taken over the Creed and sped away before they could be recaptured. But none of these three, not even Petruzzelli, had the balls to pull it off. They’d screw up, and more people would die, and Jun would probably die too.
His situation was very precarious.
Despite having the run of the Creed’s systems, he had no access to the ship’s comms. The hub couldn’t send any signals, except for a scanty trickle of transponder data, without biometric verification from the humans on board. These people didn’t trust technology, not even their own technology, and they were right not to, but that left Jun in a tight spot.
Huddled in his temporary shelter, he fought fear. He was a rat in the systems, a ghost in the hub, and the only weapon he had was prayer.
This would not do.
How could he find out whether Kiyoshi was alive, much less make contact with him, when he had no means of communication?
How he could rescue his friends, when he was powerless?
Back on Callisto, Kiyoshi had said that the ISA had also arrested the Galapajin—in fact, everyone on board the Salvation. How could Jun help them, unless he first helped himself?
Helpless, bored, and afraid, he eavesdropped on the conversation of Legacy, Gilbert, and their colleagues. They talked about the war, and the ISA’s rivalry with the Chinese intelligence service—office politics, UN style. They also talked about the nanites. This redoubled Jun’s drive to improve his own situation.
It was perfectly clear to him—although none of the agents said anything like this out loud—that left to their own devices, the ISA would somehow contrive to unleash the PLAN’s nanites on the human race, wreaking more havoc than the PLAN had ever managed. In fact, Jun feared that the PLAN—albeit close to defeat on Mars—would be able to reproduce itself in the ‘wetware’ computing clusters that the nanites built in infected human brains, if people gave it a chance.
And they will. They’ll unleash the apocalypse through greed, stupidity, and curiosity.
He had to get out of here.
And stop them.
According to the Creed’s databanks, Pallas, the ship’s destination, boasted huge reserves of computing power.
That would be a start.
As the Creed coasted towards Pallas, Jun got ready to rezip himself and float cover
tly off the ship, embedded in the first suitable databurst.
Incorporating all the new information he’d acquired on board the Creed, he was somewhat larger this time.
★
Growing.
It was an unfamiliar experience. One he hadn’t had—or had not allowed himself to have—since he became an ASI.
It reminded him of being a flesh-and-blood child on 11073 Galapagos, in the sunny old days.
The difference was, now he didn’t have to stop.
xviii.
The drug that Molly Kent sold under the name of ‘peace’ was an enhanced opiate—basically a downer. Its chief selling point was the way it encouraged lucid dreaming. Afficionados claimed their peace dreams were more realistic than any sim, more immersive than any game.
Kiyoshi didn’t dream much. He never had, and peace didn’t change that, until one night he found himself standing on a rocky mountaintop. He took it for a feature on an asteroid. Then he looked up at the blue sky—so much bigger than in the vids. This was a mountain on Earth. That was the real sun up there.
A line of bloody footprints trailed away across the rock. Flies buzzed in the heat.
Kiyoshi followed the footprints. Further up, they were fresher. He followed them out of the sun, into a cave.
His eyes adjusting to the gloom, he saw a figure seated at the back of the cave. An Earthborn man with a hooked nose and a black beard, and bloody swollen feet. His eyes seemed to look straight into Kiyoshi’s soul. His lips moved, but his voice didn’t come from them—it echoed inside Kiyoshi’s head:
My brother, my brother, what have you done to me?
Kiyoshi woke up. His heart was racing. He stared up at the moldy ceiling of Molly’s den, fully conscious for the first time in—well, he didn’t exactly know how long.
His hand went to the cross around his neck. Still there.
After a few more minutes, he decided that he needed a smoke, to see if he could get back into that dream again. He felt around on the cot. Where was his damn cigarette, and his vial of peace? It had been half-full yesterday. Maybe one of these assholes had stolen it. Or maybe it had fallen on the floor.
He rolled onto one elbow—
The Callisto Gambit Page 21
