Cyber Rogues
Page 1
Table of Contents
THE TWO FACES OF TOMORROWPROLOGUE
PART ONECHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PART TWOCHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
PART THREECHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
EPILOGUE
REALTIME INTERRUPTPROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Two classic novels from a best-selling master of SF.
Skynet and The Matrix have got nothing on James Hogan in this great two novel collection.
The Two Faces of Tomorrow
Midway through the 21st century, a proposed major software upgrade—an artificial intelligence—will give the world communications system an unprecedented degree of independent decision making. Now to fully assess the system, a new space station habitat is deployed with an A.I. named Spartacus. The idea is that if Spartacus gets out of hand, the system can be shut down and the station destroyed—unless, that is, Spartacus decides to take matters into its own hands and take the fight to Earth.
Realtime Interrupt
Joe Corrigan awakens in a hospital to find that his life no longer exists. As director of the supersecret Oz Project, his job was to create a computerized environment virtually indistinguishable from reality. Oz failed. Now Joe, left alone to pick up the pieces of his shattered life, Joe finds himself in an unfamiliar world—a world where nothing is quite as it should be. Now Joe must discover a terrible truth about his new world—and figure out how to get out alive!
Books by James P. Hogan
THE GIANTS SERIES
The Two Moons
The Two Worlds
Mission to Minerva
Code of the Lifemaker
The Immortality Option
The Cradle of Saturn
The Anguished Dawn
Bug Park
Echoes of an Alien Sky
Endgame Enigma
The Genesis Machine
Inherit the Stars
The Legend That Was Earth
Migration
Moon Flower
The Multiplex Man
Paths to Otherwhere
The Proteus Operation
Realtime Interrupt
Thrice Upon a Time
The Two Faces of Tomorrow
Voyage from Yesteryear
Worlds in Chaos (omnibus)
Cyber Rogues (omnibus)
COLLECTIONS
Catastrophes, Chaos and Convulsions
Kicking the Sacred Cow
Martian Knightlife
Minds, Machines and Evolution
Rockets, Redheads & Revolution
CYBER ROGUES
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by the estate of James P. Hogan.
The Two Faces Of Tomorrow Copyright © 1979 by James P. Hogan.
Realtime Interrupt Copyright (c) 1995 by James P. Hogan.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8035-1
Cover art by Kurt Miller
First Baen printing, April 2015
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hogan, James P.
[Novels. Selections]
Cyber rogues / James P Hogan.
pages ; cm -- (Baen ; 1)
"A Baen Books Original."
Summary: "The Two Faces of Tomorrow and Realtime Interrupt in one combo volume. Midway thru the 21st century, a proposed major software upgrade--an A.I.--will give the world communications system an unprecedented degree of independent decision making. A new space station is deployed to house the A.I. named Spartacus. The idea is if Spartacus gets out of hand, the system can be shut down and the station destroyed--unless, Spartacus decides to take matters into its own hands. Then, Joe Corrigan awakens in a hospital to find his life no longer exists. As director of the supersecret Oz Project, his job was to create a computerized environment virtually indistinguishable from reality. Oz failed...or did it?"-- Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4767-8035-1 (softcover)
1. Artificial intelligence--Fiction. I. Hogan, James P. Two faces of tomorrow. II. Hogan, James P. Real time interrupt. III. Title.
PR6058.O348A6 2015
823'.914--dc23
2014043652
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
THE TWO FACES
OF TOMORROW
PROLOGUE
The planetismal began as a region of a
bove-average density that occurred by chance in a swirling cloud of dust and gas condensing out of the expanding vastness of space. Gently at first but at a rate that grew steadily faster as time went by, it continued to sweep up the smaller accretions in its vicinity until it had grown to a rough spheroid of compressed dust and rock measuring fifty feet across.
Eventually the planetismal itself came under the pull of a larger body that had been growing in similar fashion, and began falling toward it. It impacted at a speed of over ten miles per second, releasing the energy equivalent of a one-hundred-kiloton bomb and blasting a crater more than half a mile in diameter.
Shortly afterward, as measured on a cosmic time-scale, a second planetismal fell close by and created another crater of similar dimensions; the distance between the crater centers was such that the raised rims of debris thrown up by the explosions merged together for a distance, resulting in the formation of a ridge of exaggerated height between the two basins.
In the time that followed, the rain of meteorites continued, pulverizing the landscape into a wilderness of sharp-grained dust to a depth of several feet, the desolation being relieved only by the occasional outcrop or shattered boulder. The outlines of the craters were slowly eroded away and stirred back into the sea of dust.
When the bombardment at last petered away, all that remained of the ridge was a rounded hummock to mark where the rims had intersected—a mound of dust and rock debris forty feet high and several hundred long. There it remained as one of the weary but triumphant survivors that were left to stare out over the gently rolling wastes that stretched to the horizon.
From then on the ridge remained essentially unchanged. A steady drizzle of micrometeorites continued to erode the top millimeter or so of its surface, exposing fresh material to trap hydrogen and helium nuclei from the solar wind; particles from sporadic solar flares caused isolated nuclear transformations down to several centimeters, and cosmic rays penetrated slightly farther. But in terms of its size, shape and general appearance, the ridge had become a permanent feature on a changeless world.
Four billion years later, give or take a few, Commander Jerry Fields, assigned to the International Space Administration’s lunar base at Reinhold, was standing staring up at that same ridge. Beside him, similarly clad in a blue-gray spacesuit bearing the golden-flashed ISA shoulder insignia, Kal Paskoe frowned through his visor, studying the line of the ridge with an engineer’s practiced eye.
“Well, what do you think?” Fields inquired into his radio. “See any problems?”
“Uh uh.” Paskoe’s reply was slow and noncommittal as he squinted against the glare of the setting sun. He turned to stare back at the metallic glint that marked the position of the base at the foot of the low hills on the skyline behind them, then returned his gaze to the ridge to register mentally a couple of salient boulders near its crest. “No . . . no problems,” he said at last. “I think I’ve seen all I need. Let’s get back to the truck and get the job scheduled. We can’t do any more here until the computers have figured out how they’re going to handle it.”
The mass-driver at Maskelyne, over a thousand miles away on the western edge of Tranquillatis, had been in operation for almost a decade. It had been built as part of the EXPLORER (EXPloitation of Lunar ORE Reserves) Project to hurl lunar rock up into orbit for metal extraction and construction of the huge space colonies being assembled within several hundred thousand miles of Earth. In fact the title was something of a deliberate misnomer. There were of course, no true ores on the Moon—ores in the sense of metal-rich substances concentrated by weathering and geological processes. Deep below the surface however, were rich accumulations of titanium, aluminum, iron and suchlike that had been precipitated by thermofluidic processes operative during the Moon’s early history. The compounds bearing these elements had been dubbed “ores” by the media and the name had stuck
The mass-driver was a five-mile-long, ruler-straight track banked by two “hedges” of continuous electromagnetic windings—an immense linear accelerator stretching westward across Tranquillatis. It accelerated supercooled magnetic “buckets” riding on cushions of flux at 100g to reach escape velocity in the first two miles. Beyond that the buckets were laser-tracked and computer-adjusted to eject their loads of moonrock in a shallow climb that just cleared the mountains two hundred miles away by virtue of the Moon’s surface curvature. En route the loads were electrically charged by being sprayed with electrons and fine-trimmed by massive electrostatic deflectors located at the two-hundred-mile downrange point to leave the final phase of launch with an accuracy better than one part in a million—comparable to a football being kicked between the uprights from 3,000 miles.
From there on each load, comprising 60 pounds of “ore,” climbed steadily for two days until, 40,000 miles above the lunar surface, it fell into a “Hippo” catcher-ship stationed at the gravitationally stable L2 point. The energy needed to power the mass-driver was beamed down as microwaves from a three-mile-wide orbiting solar collector.
Day in, day out, round the clock, the mass-driver sent up a charge every two seconds, halting only for maintenance or for occasional repairs. Every year, one million tons of moonrock fell into the waiting relays of Hippos. And farther out in space, the colonies steadily took shape.
The project had been so successful that the powers-that-be had decided to go ahead with the construction of a second mass-driver. This one would also be located on the equator, but near Reinhold, aiming out across Procellarum. The track, the experts had decreed, would pass right over the point at which Fields and Paskoe were standing. Not a little to the right nor a little to the left, they had pronounced after extensive surveys, but right there.
First-phase preparation would require accurate sighting with lasers, covering a stretch of terrain that extended from a mile or more behind them to several times that distance ahead, which would require an unobstructed path. The ridge was not really large—about the size of a dozen average houses set end to end—but . . . it was in the way.
And so it came about that the form that had stood valiantly to preserve its record of events from the earliest epoch of the Solar System at last found itself opposing the restless, thrusting outward urge of Man.
The ridge would have to go.
“How goes it?” The voice of Sergeant Tim Cummings came through over the open channel from the nearest of the two surface-crawlers parked a few hundred feet back at the bottom of the shallow slope that led up to the ridge.
“I think we’re about done here,” Paskoe replied. “Get some coffee on, Tim. We’re coming back down.”
“See all you wanted from the top?” Cummings inquired.
“Yeah. It’s pretty much as we thought,” Paskoe told him. “More or less symmetric on both sides. Probably not more than fifty, maybe sixty feet thick at the base.” He glanced automatically at the twin lines of footprints that led up to the point on the ridge crest that he and Fields had climbed to, and then led back to where they were now standing.
“Let’s go,” Fields said, and with that turned and began heading back to the crawler. Paskoe gave the ridge one final glance, then turned to follow at a slow easygoing lope that brought him alongside Fields in a few seconds.
“What do you reckon?” Fields asked as they bounced side by side down the slope. “Soil blower maybe?”
“Dunno,” Paskoe replied. “There are some big boulders in there, and it’s probably pretty well compacted lower down. Might take a digger or two, probably a heavy shover too. We’ll see what the computers reckon.”
“There’s some heavy equipment the other side of Reinhold,” Fields remarked. “If they shifted some of that over here they might get started inside a day or two.”
“Nah—I’m pretty sure most of that stuff’s tied up,” Paskoe said. “They may have to fly something in from Tycho. Anyhow, that’s their problem. They know their schedules. We’ll just have to wait and see what they come up with.”
“As long as
we don’t end up having to shovel it,” Fields said as they slowed down to approach the crawler. Paskoe steadied himself on the handrail and stooped slightly to clear his helmet past the entrance to the crawler’s lower cabin.
“No way,” he declared with feeling. “I’ve seen enough Massachusetts winters not to ever wanna see a shovel again. I’ll leave it to the computers. If they say the best they can manage is a week, that’s okay by me.”
“The boss’d get pretty mad about that if it happened,” Fields murmured as he ducked to follow the now invisible Paskoe.
“Then the boss could come out here and damn well shovel it himself,” Paskoe’s voice said in his helmet.
Five minutes later they had removed their helmets and were seated back at the crew stations beneath the viewdome of the crawler’s upper cabin.
While Fields and Cummings used the viscreen to discuss the next item on the day’s agenda with Michel Chauverier, who was in command of the other crawler parked next to them, Paskoe activated the main console at the far end of the cabin to close a channel via comsat to the Tycho node of the ubiquitous TITAN computer complex. After a brief dialogue via touchpad and display screen, he had communicated the nature of his request to the system’s Executive Command Interpreter. A few seconds later the screen returned the message:
ASSIGNED JOB NUMBER 2736/B. 72/Z72
SCHEDULED TO SUBSYSTEM:
SURFACE ENGINEERING P.927
REQUIRE DATA REGARDING NATURE AND
LOCATION OF OBSTRUCTION