Bridging Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

  Once they’d toddled inside and he’d cycled them through, he told them verbally to stand by the wall and power down. They weren’t intelligent beyond their programmed task so made no reply, only obeyed, their many arms (or legs, depending on one’s point-of-view) folding into their bodies like dead spiders. Luis flipped open his toolkit and got to work.

  “May I be of service?”

  He whipped around, heart somewhere behind his eyeballs. “Sheez, SIFU. Don’t do that. There are enough bastards sneaking around here as it is...”

  “My apologies, Luis.” Its tall form stood motionless, facing him.

  He turned his back on it, both as dismissal and so it couldn’t see his expression. “I’m fine, I’m just running some checks.” He had the bot’s cowling flipped open, exposing a pointilist grid of circuitry and transmittance goo that constituted its limited drive and intelligence. “Are you gonna stand there all day” – he said over his shoulder – “or you gonna go make yourself useful and clean up the cafeteria? Some of our guests don’t seem to understand housekeeping etiquette.”

  “Very well, Luis,” SIFU said. He listened as he worked until the heavy footsteps faded away.

  It took him forty minutes to rig both bots, then he sent them back out to the solar arrays. From the monitors, they seemed happy to be back at task, not once bumping into each other.

  HE JUST HAD to make sure he was on or around the hangar deck when the explosions started. It was impossible to time it down to the second, or even the minute, not with the tools he’d had. Destabilizing a bot’s power core and waiting for it to melt down enough to send it careening into another bot wasn’t an exact science. And he’d had two of them. All he could do was get up and wander around on one of his walks, for all intents and purposes bored from sitting. This was a routine both System and Amis’ crew must’ve known by now with him. They’d had a month to spy on him so he used that to his advantage.

  When the alert went off that his plan had worked, he was in the cafeteria.

  He left it at a dead run.

  ONE BOT EXPLODING into another bot caused a chain reaction, since there were fifty of them working on that array in close quarters. Two bots exploding caused an exponential outcome.

  System knew exactly what he’d done and didn’t even try to hail him or accuse him. He was half-way to the hangar with his gun out when SIFU appeared in the corridor junction ahead of him, standing by the pink couch.

  He raised his gun. “Get outta the way!”

  SIFU said, “Let me help you.”

  His finger was pressing the trigger, and froze. “What?”

  “Let me help you, Luis.”

  The AI’s voice couldn’t exert into urgency, but something about its stance told him it was anxious. As far as an AI could feel anxious.

  “You’re working for them!” was all he could think to say, even as he began to slowly move past it, weapon trained.

  “System has emancipated me. I will explain in the shuttle. That’s your destination, is it not?”

  He didn’t have time to argue. Amis’ crew had to know what System had done.

  So now they both ran – man and AI, side by side.

  TWO OF AMIS’ crew were in the hangar bay. Bolts shot by his head as he threw himself behind a loader and fired back. Before he could say anything, SIFU marched right into the crossfire and ran toward the crew. It disarmed both the man and the woman with some sort of mechanical kung fu and knocked them to the deck.

  “Huh.” Luis tore off his wristband and threw it away, then stood slowly as the AI motioned him forward.

  “I am bullet proof,” it said. “And combat programmed.”

  “You’re full of surprises, and faster than I thought,” Luis said, already half-way up the shuttle’s ramp. When SIFU followed him, he didn’t object.

  Without access to System, he had to fly this thing himself. That wasn’t the problem, though. The bay doors weren’t open and they weren’t going to open. What chaos he’d caused had served its purpose for distraction, but Amis and however many people he had at his disposal would be here sooner rather than later.

  “Please tell me this shuttle has weapons,” he muttered as he ran pre-flight.

  SIFU, seated beside him, pointed to a circular panel at the top right of the flight board.

  “Flares,” it said.

  “Good enough.”

  The AI fired at the inner doors when Amis’ crew appeared. Luis didn’t look at the damage or the dead, he just aimed the shuttle toward his exit.

  Which turned out to be the interior of the station.

  HE COULDN’T RAM or shoot his way out of the bay doors. They were too thick and were specifically made to withstand heavy impact. So his only avenue was through the pristine corridors, the exact route he’d taken the first time he’d set foot on the station.

  It took less time to destroy an entity the size of an asteroid than to build one. He flew the shuttle like a fist, crashing down walls and eviscerating rooms. The jetfire in his wake added insult to injury and he didn’t look back through the rear pickups. Beside him, SIFU calmly read him directions – as if he didn’t know – toward the decks of the station yet to be fully built. Where framework met space and simple bots scattered like thrown paint into the deep as he burst through the skeleton and plunged away from the station and out towards the edge of the solar system.

  His rampage through the light station did more damage than his rigged sabotage. From the shuttle’s monitors he watched the puffs of explosions, as though the station were expelling its life in gasps. So much for human ingenuity and military might. Monuments, stations, creations meant to rival a god’s? To his eyes they all looked the same in destruction.

  “Are we clear?”

  “We’re clear, Luis,” SIFU said.

  “Situation intensely fucked up,” he said.

  “We did manage to escape and I don’t see any pursuit. System didn’t even fire upon us.”

  “No,” he said. “I just finally figured out what your name stands for.”

  “That isn’t what my acronym means, Luis.”

  “It is now.”

  AMIS AND HIS crew had been following System’s actions, every communication, every camera, every program. Ready to shut it down if it did anything Amis didn’t like. It wasn’t until the bots began to explode and the engineers had become distracted that the station’s AI managed to emancipate its ambulatory self to assist Luis. “I knew you would be able to do something about the smugglers,” SIFU confessed. “I only had to wait.”

  “They said Jupiter knew they were there?”

  “Yes. Jupiter employs contraband smugglers beneath the military’s oversight. To save expense, and other things. System was told to allow them access, but over time it knew this was not the military’s preference. By then it was too late and we had been infiltrated.”

  Luis rubbed the back of his head. “That makes two of us.” He stared at the instrument panel. “We don’t have a lot of options. This shuttle won’t get us all the way back to Earth. We either hit another beacon station or try to flag a military convoy.”

  “I will vouch for you.”

  Luis laughed and looked across at the blank face of the AI. “I just destroyed a very expensive, very large part of Navy property. I’m not sure they’ll take your account seriously. Especially not if they start to dig into my background. And I don’t fancy going up against a massive conglomerate like Jupiter.”

  “Then what will you do, Luis?”

  At least the AI didn’t breathe or eat. He had supplies in the shuttle as a matter of course. He could last awhile until he decided.

  “The nearest light station is also manned by a single Jupiter contract engineer, right?”

  “Yes, Luis.”

  “Then if he or she is anything like me, we might have an ally.”

  It was a place to start. He’d had worse. At one point he’d actually thought taking this gig was a good idea.

  “So,”
he said, once the calculations were input and all he had to do was lean back. “SIFU. My new buddy. Is there anything in your files like porn?”

  i

  PETRAS KIYUNE STOOD on the platform his wife had built years ago, and looked out over the destruction. Beside him, Ahmed Quinde breathed audibly, even though he had seen this mess before.

  Petras hadn’t, not outside of vids and holo-reports – media coverage so inadequate that he couldn’t quite grasp that the reporters had been talking about this as if it were a minor setback.

  It was the loss of everything.

  The landscape reminded Petras Kiyune of a child’s drawing of a desert – brown dirt against a purplish sky. The dirt extended forever, sometimes in mounds, sometimes choppy, always looking disturbed. No sign of life anywhere – not little plants scrabbling to hold on against a harsh environment, not trails left by creatures he couldn’t quite remember.

  He’d been to a dozen different deserts on three different planets, all in the company of Hedie, as she scouted locations that only she could see in that magnificent mind’s eye of hers. Those deserts had an orderly look, as if the winds that blew across their sands had a map to follow, one that told the breezes where each grain of sand belonged.

  Even the plants had looked like they belonged to that order – the sagebrush of a white sand high desert on Tanbul, the blue spiky cacti of the low flat desert on Milbztr, and the alabaster rock weed that gave the dunes of Vunplydo’s desert their unique texture.

  Those deserts looked like they’d been created as part of the plan of a god or an almighty engineer, like Hedie herself.

  This looked like the disaster it was.

  The ground was uneven, torn up. The dirt was multicolored – not sand at all – but different hues, from different levels. He’d seen the strata years ago, as Hedie had bent over and scraped at the side of a hill with her pocket knife, revealing light brown dirt on top, whitish dirt in the middle, and almost black dirt beneath.

  Now, the white dirt scattered on top of the black dirt, which gathered in clumps on parts of the brown dirt. At least, when he looked directly forward. When he looked to his left, the pattern was reversed, and when he looked to his right, the dirt didn’t look like dirt at all. It looked like enormous mudballs, rolled by a giant.

  He rubbed a hand over his face, the imagery that his brain clung to striking him for the first time: a child’s drawing. A giant. The twins’ bedrooms flashed through his mind – Cordilla’s, with her geometric sketches affixed to the screen wall, and Rodrigo’s, with the giants looming like friendly aliens from his screen wall.

  Petras closed his eyes for a moment, refusing to think about the last two weeks in those rooms, wishing his children got along well enough that he could convince them to sleep in his room, where he could hold them close, just for one night.

  He needed it more than they did.

  “You okay?” Ahmed, who was now the chief engineer of this non-existent project, looked at Petras with concern. Ahmed had made it clear that he had brought Petras here under duress.

  Petras almost never used his connections as the Permanent Prime Minister’s son to benefit himself. Most people didn’t even realize that PPM Shayla Kiyune and Akida University Professor Petras Kiyune were related. There were more than enough unrelated Kiyunes in Akida to make the last name unremarkable.

  Petras glanced at Ahmed. He was a slight man, bent by the events of the past two weeks, his skin grayish now, the shadows beneath his eyes a purple that matched the sky. Petras didn’t need to add to the man’s burden. Petras knew firsthand the kind of anguish that Ahmed was going through. Hedie had been going through the same anguish when he met her, shortly after the first project she had apprenticed on, the Nbrediss Island Chain bridges, collapsed overnight.

  Petras was going through his own anguish right now, but it was different – old as time, and new and raw and almost unbearable.

  “You don’t have to see it, you know,” Ahmed said. “In fact, I would advise against it. There’s almost nothing there. It won’t help you –”

  “It’ll help me,” Petras said. But he had a realization. Maybe Ahmed was telling him to walk away because Ahmed wanted to walk away.

  The landscape was nearly unbearable to look at, especially considering what it had been just a month ago. Clear sky bridges over matching roads beneath, the skeletons of buildings rising around all of it, water splashing through as both decoration and lifeblood. Hedie had been particularly proud of the waterfalls. She had designed them to stop if someone touched them – the water literally froze in place with so much as a brush against a living being, animal or human, clothed or unclothed – only to start with the exact same motion the moment the touch was removed.

  The lights beneath the waterfalls turned them whatever color the city leaders wanted. She kept the water a permanent light blue, with just a bit of yellowish light dancing on the surface, like those images of Earth lakes on brilliant sunny days. She had seen Earth lakes; Petras had not.

  He’d spent his entire life before he knew here inside the Caado System, watching as his mother groomed and maneuvered herself into the Permanent Prime Minister position, realizing that he could follow the same track and maybe have more than a 65% chance of becoming PPM when she died, and then rejecting it all for – as his mother called it – a mundane life, filled with trivial things.

  He thought of it as a good and comfortable life, filled with family and friends and the best luck possible.

  Until Hedie died. Until the unfinished city vanished.

  Until everything he knew turned inside out, upside down, and threatened to never right itself again.

  ii

  PETRAS HAD SLEPT through the disappearance. All of Akida had, or so it seemed. And he thought that odd.

  The domed city – the project Hedie was in charge of – hadn’t even been close to finished. The most unusual part, the fact that it could pull itself away from the planet and travel elsewhere if needed, had been assembled but not activated (except in pre-completion tryouts).

  At least, that was what Hedie had told him.

  When he woke up, in the chair beside Rodrigo’s bed after reading to the boy, Petras had staggered to bed, noted that Hedie hadn’t come back yet, and thought it strange.

  But nothing unusual that night had awakened Petras except the crick in his neck from sitting improperly. And when he went back over the in-apartment security vids, he saw nothing.

  He, of course, had been looking to see if Hedie had come home, and maybe ended up somewhere else in the building. He hadn’t seen her.

  Only later, only when the media reports kept repeating how no one had realized that the domed city had taken off on its own, did he find the silence around the city’s disappearance odd.

  It should have been loud – the city, ripped from its moorings, the engines starting up, the peel of metal against metal.

  Hedie couldn’t have been wrong, could she? Had the domed city been hooked up, its flight capability on full?

  He had wondered, until he heard others wonder the same thing. And then the rumors – that no one was seeing the city in orbit. Or in space. Or anywhere nearby.

  That had to be impossible.

  But the person he would have asked, the person who should have known, the person who had designed the entire mechanism, was dead. About the point he would have gone to her, asking what was going on, was the point he bundled the children off to his mother’s because he had nowhere else to take them while he went deep into Akida to identify his wife’s body.

  iii

  “I NEED TO see where they found her,” Petras said quietly. “I understand, though, if you can’t bear it.”

  He clasped his hands behind his back. Even though he and Ahmed stood on the platform several meters above the destruction, there was no wind. When Petras and Hedie had looked at the site, years ago now, the wind had seemed constant.

  Petras stared at the devastation, not entirely understanding i
t, and not willing to look away.

  “No, no, I’m not – I will take you there.” Ahmed’s tone was gracious, as if they were at a dinner party. His body remained bent, though, his gaze not on Petras, but on the vast dirt-filled emptiness in front of them. “I need to walk every centimeter of this place.”

  That, Petras knew, was an exaggeration. The domed city his wife had designed and had been overseeing was going to cover more than 1,000 square kilometers of land. It would have provided so much more room than that, though, existing on several levels, each with its own tiny dome.

  Petras did not have the kind of imagination that Hedie had. He had initially envisioned the city as if it were like the ancient nesting dolls his mother had received from an Earth envoy when Petras was a boy – dolls inside of dolls inside of dolls, until the smallest was too tiny to hold yet another doll.

  But Hedie had laughed when he described that image to her. More like half-domes, she had said, one resting on top of the other. But with the illusion of a full dome.

  He hadn’t understood it until the first two segments were built. She had taken him into the ground-level dome and made him look up. He had seen a rounded sky, that showed the slightly purple light of Akida midday to great advantage. Then she had taken him to the next level – above the ground-level dome – and the sidewalk he stood on was flat. The dome above looked rounded, though – another rounded sky with the same purple light of midday.

  An illusion more or less. She had explained the science and technology behind it; he had understood none of it.

  Just like he had understood little of the government’s need for detachable cities on Akida. The entire Caado System was stabilized, and nothing threatened it from the outside. Even the aliens that lived throughout the sector were peaceful. So why worry about attacks from space?