by Ginger Booth
Ben held his eye on her, grown into an assured man long since. “I prefer Abel on Cupid.” She nodded.
That bottle of wine might come in handy for the two of them to reconnect. If that was even possible anymore.
19
“Accelerating?” Ben leaned over Zan’s shoulder, his third officer. With Abel busy on market development, then flying out of here on Cupid, Ben was missing a first officer at present. He wasn’t worried about that.
The advancing nude gold statue bothered him, however. He hit a button. “Thrive, Prosper Actual. Tracking our lady of the peach butt?”
“I am, Prosper,” Sass agreed on the channel. Neither bothered with video. “One idea we were tossing around was to relocate the statue.”
Ben scrunched his face, perplexed. “But what is it doing? I mean, is it threatening us?”
“We don’t understand how it’s moving over here,” Sass confessed. “You’ve got the science wizards on Prosper. So far as Remi and I can tell, the thing has moved to the end of its track.”
“Always has been,” Ben clarified. “It’s creating the track for itself as it rolls. That’s why it’s going so slow. Though it’s begun accelerating.”
Pause. “Ben, I’ve seen toddlers tip-toe faster than that statue.”
“True. Maybe Loki’s goal is to drive us crazy wondering.”
“Your theory about a toppling hazard made some sense,” Sass said. “Loki’s going to bring it close enough to fall on one of us. Or the fuel, or water, or Cupid.”
Ben nodded to himself. “You haven’t asked him, have you?”
“Loki? No,” Sass responded. “I’d like to hear Cope and Hugo’s thoughts before talking to Loki again. And then maybe…leave the system real soon thereafter.”
“Yeah.” Ben shrugged, though she couldn’t see him. “My main conversation with this AI was with a blaster.”
Zan offered, “Blasters are expressive.”
Ben chuckled. He felt the same way. “Yeah, I think I’m done with this, Sass. Where shall we plant it?”
“Plant it? Oh!” She caught on. In moments he received her coordinates of a shapely hill overlooking the great Dead-Sea-style nanite-killing lake.
“Would you care to dig the foundation?” Ben offered. “Or plant a beautiful golden lady?”
“Speed picking up,” Zan noted. “Almost up to walking speed.”
“I’ll grab the broad,” Ben decided instantly. “Dig as your guns bear, Sass. Acosta out.” They didn’t have anyone on Cupid to move that ship. At walking speed, the statue would reach the courier soon.
Zan did the first mate honors checking all warm bodies accounted for, whether on ship or off. Ben checked the cameras to make sure no one else was in range of his engines. No need for pressure bulkheads, or even taking a seat for this one.
As soon as they were sure the coast was clear, he took off.
“Hail from Sanctuary Control,” Zan noted from the gunner’s seat.
“Not feeling chatty,” Ben returned. He hovered Prosper over the 10-meter statue, and activated his grav grapples. The metal contraption proved heavier than he thought. He managed to break her – it – from its self-made track. And he could lift it a half meter, but then hastily set it down to let the planet carry its weight for a moment.
Sass commed. “Ben, you need help on tractors?”
“Don’t think so, just need to warm up the engines. Sass, remember the biggest slice of Mahina we ever picked up?”
He grinned. The occasion was one of the high points of his youth, the first time he sliced a hill out of the regolith with Sass, operating real mining guns instead of video game simulations. He didn’t care what that statue was made of, it could not out-mass a half-kilometer pie slice of raw regolith. He kicked the engines to warm to power level 7. Then he gently tugged again at the derailed statue.
This time he lifted with confidence. Ben brought Prosper forward, out above unimproved native dust, and up a hundred meters.
Zan noted, “Incoming hails include all three mayors. Plus Abel, Cope, yada yada.”
“We hold these things to be self-evident,” Ben intoned. “It’s pretty obvious what we’re doing, isn’t it?”
“They might want to know why,” Zan allowed.
“Because the statue’s behavior was unacceptable to me,” Ben claimed. “And that was a bad place to put it. We’re offering a public service.”
“Whether they like it or not,” Zan acknowledged. “Works for me.”
At last Sass lifted. Unencumbered, Thrive zipped to the crest of the hill and hovered for a few minutes.
Ben cut his speed to approach more slowly. On the slow and scenic route, he had time to appreciate how well Sass had chosen. The high point was clearly visible from the spaceport, to the north so glare shouldn’t be much of a problem. And the ground route offered deep gullies of loose scree. No easy approaches on the surface. Oh, Loki could still load up a truck full of robots to work on it. But the AI might not bother if his charges told him how pretty it looked up there.
Sass finally got her angle and measurements worked out, and a laser beam shot out to carve the hill. Ben appreciated how tricky the cut was, only so deep and no further, with the radius just so. Then Thrive scooted around to the back of its new hole, facing the lake, and applied the fine rock cutting gun again. ‘Fine’ being a relative term. The big guns weren’t nearly as accurate, but vaporized fair-sized asteroids with dispatch.
“Toe space!” Zan exclaimed.
“That’s my guess,” Ben concurred. He hoped she made the hole wide enough for the feet to slip in. He got busy with his sensors. Aha! Yes, she cut the diameter so he could simply stand the statue in upright, then nudge it forward into the toe hold. Then he assumed she’d grab loose scree and pack it in behind the shins.
She veered out and around, coming to rest a hundred meters away. Ben crept forward, then tenderly lowered the statue in.
It sank past its knees. As he lightened up on the gravity lifters, the statue immediately began to topple forward. But Ben strengthened the beam and caught it first.
Ben considered, and commed. “Sass, could you get an opinion from Remi on how deep we should plant this statue? And whether it’s strong enough to lean on its shins.”
“Here, Ben,” Remi responded. He was Sass’s gunner and third mate for her first voyage here. The Sagamore Remi Roy was more than qualified as chief engineer. But to go so far, with no backup, Sass brought two engineers. “No on shins. I suggest we glass rubble. Then position statue, weld. Or melt. Hold steady until it cools.”
“Ah. More trouble than it’s worth?”
“Not much trouble,” Remi differed. “Same melting point. Copper and glass, they are hard to fuse. Steel is OK.”
Thrive flew away to find a couple cubic meters of sand. Remi neatly tucked this into the hole, clearly blowing away Ben’s dexterity with a grav tractor. Then he used the precision gun to heat a flat glowing-hot glass puddle, only a quarter meter inset to the hilltop surface.
“She is ready,” Remi reported.
In some of the most finicky, detailed flying he’d ever done, Ben slowly lowered the massive statue precisely to where he wanted it.
“Pull up!” Remi shouted at him. “No, glass is too hot. Wait for my call.” They waited another minute. “Now.”
After setting the lady on her feet, Ben attempted to fine adjust. “Stop that!” Remi rebuked him sharply. “You pull her feet off, or stretch her ankles. And then how do we fix? Some things, captain, you do right the first time. Just hold still.”
Ben held Prosper steady, bracing the statue, for nearly an hour before Remi declared the job done. With infinite care, Ben eased off the grav tractor, and looped around to regard the giant Sass from the front.
“Tilt within error tolerance,” Remi reported. “Maybe.”
“Good enough!” Ben decreed. “I think you look right pretty there, Sass.”
“Screw you, Ben. I shudder to think what they�
��ll put on the plaque.”
“Eyes,” Remi critiqued. “They should be gold, not blue. I can fix.”
So they dawdled a while longer while Remi got his tools together. Then Sass lowered him, in a pressure suit, through the trapdoor on a stand-up swing. It took him a few pendulum swipes to damp out the sideways momentum by grabbing at the enormous nose.
A single weak laser emitted from the crack of the peach. It barely missed Remi dangling below Thrive. Sass wasn’t in position, but Ben and Zan spotted it fine. Zan blasted the peach before its aim could improve. It proved to be a separate part, only bolted to the sculpted hand, because the exploded peach dropped off and rolled away down the hill. The pair traded high-fives on Ben’s bridge.
Remi finally got to within working distance of the giant eyes. He hammered a screwdriver into first one corner, then the other, to break some cabling and make the eyes stop tracking. Once immobile, he sprayed them over with some gold-leaf paint, a slightly lighter shade than the overall golden body.
Ben scooted Prosper backward to send them images of the overall effect.
“Much better!” Sass encouraged. “Well done, Remi! Let’s reel you back up.”
Ben wheeled first back toward the spaceport.
“Thirty-four messages, cap,” Zan reported the score. “Nine from your husband.”
“Oh, yeah? Computer, dictation to Abel and Cope. Returning now, statue looks great in its new location. Abel, please explain to the mayors the need for an unobstructed flight path to a spaceport. Cheers. Acosta out.”
He and Zan exchanged a grin. But the comms lit up immediately. “Cope or Abel?” Zan offered.
Ben punched the button. “Hey, Cope! How did Nico’s presentation go?” The kid was terrified of public speaking. His materials were great. He spent hours selecting images to make life in Mahina’s settler creches breathe for the younger audience, and data and syllabus to educate the adults.
“Nico did great –” Cope began.
Nico’s own voice came on the line. “Only because Dad got on stage to bail me out, ’cuz I froze. And the audience hated me.”
“Not true,” Cope said softly. Ben envisioned him kneading Nico’s shoulder in encouragement. “A dozen came up to say what a good job you did. They want a softer, easier deal. So we get job security.”
“We’re still a go for Cantons?” Ben confirmed.
“No doubt about it,” Cope agreed. “Aurora pissed them off, insisting no one can terraform Sylvan.”
Ben smirked. “She has that gift.”
“Can you spare me a couple hours tomorrow? I want to talk to them about the problem of airlifting people to a transport ship. I’ll bring Abel. Start negotiating the price. But I want to make sure we’re on the same page first.”
“Sure,” Ben allowed. “But isn’t Loki the one who builds spaceships?”
Spaceways’ payment for this trip to Cantons was to be a second spaceship. The original deal was another JO-3 like Merchant, or possibly a small courier like Cupid. But clearly they’d found a market for passenger transport. The Sanks had that 5,000 capacity transport the Martian colonists arrived in. But the mass people-movers weren’t designed to land on planets. Lifting 5,000 to it in batches of 100-150 as they did on Denali was as a miserable prospect, prohibitive on fuel. What they needed was a passenger shuttle like the Loonies once built. Those lifted refugees from Earth to the great colony ships like Vitality that settled Mahina, 500-1000 at a time.
Further, this shuttle didn’t qualify as payment to Spaceways, merely a tool needed to perform the job. Thrive Spaceways also asked a Prosper-class ship in return for their months-long multi-ship service to take the envoys to Cantons. Carrying out an airlift and migration would be a separate payment, and a much larger one. Abel and Cope had yet to determine whether Sanctuary, or Denali, could pay for the extreme effort involved.
Pay with what? How many rock-hoppers can we keep busy? Sure, they could sell them. But that merely shifted the challenge to someone else. Any buyer would need a gainful application to the tune of a hundred million credits or so.
And there remained the core problem. Spaceways negotiated these deals with the three borough mayors of this tiny town. But any trade goods here of that magnitude were manufactured by Loki. Who didn’t exactly take orders.
Cope sighed loudly. “Yeah. We won’t solve it tomorrow.”
“We got our evening cut out for us. See you in a few.”
20
Well after dinner, Cope convened their AI brainstorming trust on the dogleg stairway in Thrive’s hold. Their Sank spokesman Hugo Silva thought the venue an odd choice. But the rest of them were starship crew. If their butts ached from sitting on steel mesh, they simply dialed down their personal gravity.
Nico leaned forward between his knees, to address his dad, stretched a couple steps below him, one up from the middle landing. “Dad, how much of Loki could fit inside a robot? I mean, not a pole robot. We could encourage him to build a human-shape chassis, like the electric horses. He could have sensors.”
His buddy Bron Silva nodded beside him. “Not just eyes and ears. All the senses.”
Nico built on this. “Yeah! Stress the tactile feedback. Wind on his skin. Smell, touch. Whatever it’s called when you feel your own body moving. And music! You don’t just hear it, you feel it.”
Cope smiled encouragement, but felt his son had gotten off track. “And the goal?”
“Oh, yeah. You put lots of memory space on board, and a processor strong enough to run his logic engine – his identity.”
Remi stood in the corner of the railing, leaning back on his forearms. “Speech recognition and generation and comms.”
“Strictly limited comms,” Hugo suggested. “Plus the motor skills. It’s a fair bit of computational power on board. But it would fit, wouldn’t it?”
Cope shrugged the question to Remi, who casually nodded. “Not a problem.”
“OK, we have an android Loki,” Cope summed up. “Not all of Loki. And he builds it for himself. Are we trying to trick the genie into the bottle? To give up his power?”
“Oh. No, Dad, you said Loki longs to be a real person. This is a way to experience being a person.”
Hugo sighed. “Well, a few sensations of going out to play, perhaps.”
“Depends what part of being human he wants to experience,” Cope suggested. “If he wants love – he needs a love target. But he won’t get people to interact with him as a person, unless he’s in a human body. Or human-like.” Was Sass’s body human? Human enough.
“That’s a dangerous direction,” Hugo mused. “Because where does it end? Does he want to become like Sass? A human-seeming body? Self-repairing?”
“I was thinking the other direction,” Cope said. “If he enjoys one body, why not two? Or two thousand?”
“Wouldn’t that fix our population problem?” Bron offered. “Somehow Shiva turned Sass into a set of instructions and memories. If you could then get output to an repairable body, we could have as many android people as we wanted.”
Cope grinned at Hugo’s priceless expression toward his son. “Bron, I think we’d rather be human.”
“Well, sure. But humans don’t live long. Just brainstorming!”
Cope bopped his knee.
“Unique,” Remi offered. “The ‘soul’ something made Sass unique. We can tell him it’s this uniqueness that is key to being a person.”
“We can tell him whatever we want,” Hugo reasoned. “But what he chooses to believe is up to him. And he’s smarter than we are.”
Cope tried to remember a snatch of a poem. His formal education never ran to poetry, but this thing was on a locker room wall in the phosphate mines. “Every man is my equal because I can learn from him. It’s OK that we’re not smarter than he is, Hugo. And that’s part of the value of uniqueness.”
Remi pointed at him. “That. To be human, we are discrete. Limited points of view. The opposite of Loki. He tries to be God.”
“Ooh, you’re good!” Cope praised.
Remi smiled modestly. “I try.”
“Actually,” Hugo offered. “We can extend that. As sentient beings, we have value only in our uniqueness. As the number of copies of Loki grows, the value of each is diminished. Two Loki, each is half as valuable.”
“So is the goal to separate Loki’s personality and identity from his manufacturing and toilet-scrubbing empire,” Cope mused. “Or to give him the gift of a human-like experience to enjoy?”
“Good question,” Remi encouraged. “What is your goal?”
“My goal is to separate the Sanks from their AI.”
Hugo warned, “My people won’t agree with your goal. Loki is our power, our livelihood. He protects us. He’s the source of our wealth, even the air we breathe. Cope, you’re asking us to leave Sanctuary, and bring our manufactures to buy a nest egg on the new world. That doesn’t make sense. Why would we leave behind the goose that lays the golden eggs?”
Remi grinned. “And golden statues. No. Cope, I don’t agree no one wants Loki. I think my people, Hell’s Bells, ask assurances and controls. But look what Loki makes in this asteroid belt. Look how little the Sanks work. What if Sagamore could replace slaves with this AI and robots? Revolution solved. Aristocrats and paddies both free, both live like kings. No one works the dangerous mines. On Denali, maybe Loki’s robots kill the monsters. Make air conditioning safe. Hunters don’t die. Leave the dome is for play, like here.”
Cope hadn’t expected Remi of all people to defend Loki. “Didn’t that AI shoot at you today? Again.”
Remi nodded judiciously. “Yes, we must fix this.”
Cope shifted slightly more upright, his attention riveted. “You think I’m making a mistake. The Sanks should bring their AI.”
Remi shrugged. “The AI, he is their only value possession. And he is value to us, too. The ships he builds. Or we would not be here. We earn another ship.” The engineer pointed upstairs to the crew cabins. “But when Loki was Shiva, he killed seven of my crew. No, nine with Sass and Clay. To me, the problem is, Loki is too powerful, too dangerous. I don’t trust his directives. His personality. His feelings.”
