There’s been a problem with the Martian Reality Show feed being shown to the colonists on Mars. Somehow the live feed from the android settlement, the one being beamed down to Earth, has been displayed to the settlers, instead of their own customised version. I’m running a root cause analysis to see what happened, so I can apply corrective actions. This has triggered a collapse in the conditioning programming of this human settler: Robert Cameron, from the first mission to Mars.
Bruce sighed.
I don’t understand these glitches. You should have ironed them out ages ago, and don’t give me that shit about having a high level of comfort that the people up there are safe. Besides, I thought you guys were the most technologically sophisticated civilisation in the known universe? How can this kind of thing keep happening?
The Transcendents remained silent, not rising to the bait. Bruce tried another tack.
Are they secure up there? Are we confident the environmental systems aren’t likely to be impacted or in a worst-case scenario, fail? That would be bloody embarrassing.
It’s not possible, The Transcendents insisted. The recording processes and those associated with the environmental systems are quite separate, not linked in any way, and there are multiple redundancies in place. It’s fool proof.
Bruce wasn’t so sure. There was a link: the MPU itself.
We could take them out of there at any time.
Well, why don’t you do it now? Problem solved.
This isn’t the most critical issue facing us, the Transcendents explained testily, which got Bruce’s attention.
Would you care to elaborate?
I think some of the MFYers, some fleshie anyway, may have found a way to get into the top layers of the MPU’s operating system. There’s no telling what kind of mischief they might get up to if I can’t stay ahead of them and lock them out.
Have you got any information for me to go on while I am up there?
Not yet. I’m trying to find the source of the incursion and block it properly and then we can work out how to respond to whoever is behind this. I don’t think they can do too much damage. Now, it added as an afterthought. Initial analysis indicated a newSkidian at The Farm. If so, the perpetrator would not be difficult to locate, but it didn’t want to share this information just yet.
Famous last words, Bruce thought. What was the worst thing that could happen if someone hacked into and then got control of the MPU? It didn’t really bear considering.
Any idea where I could start looking?
Not at this time, the Transcendents replied shortly. They were clearly a little spooked by the possibility the MPU had been infiltrated.
Well that’s helpful.
Bruce made a note to start enquiries of his own once he had touched base with Lake. He still preferred a tactile ‘to do’ list by jotting down notes on bits of paper. despite having enhanced neural capacity and the computing capability of an entire planet at his disposal. Sometimes, if he was on the ball, he transferred the notes to an app on his mobile. Now and again he would leave the notes on his desk and find them there at the end of the day. Other times he would lose them completely.
If they can hack into the MPU, can they subvert my connection to you and the underlying infrastructure? My brain?
I don’t think so. They would have to compromise our entire infrastructure. I believe this to be impossible because we built many layers of defence, redundancy, and self-repair capability, the Transcendents replied reassuringly.
This response didn’t fill Bruce with a huge amount of confidence, given the events on Skid in the recent past. The Transcendents next comment didn’t help.
As a precaution, you need to ensure your firewall is in place. It’s the last line of defence.
How the fuck do I do set that up?
The Transcendents didn’t seem to hear him and continued, ignoring the question.
The nodes we have built in your neural pathways to provide your extra processing capacity are designed to be able to reboot the entire system if required. You are the ultimate redundancy if anything goes wrong with the MPU, or we are unable to intervene. This is one of the key reasons you are so important to us.
Talk about putting a man under pressure, Bruce thought to himself. He wasn’t entirely convinced the Transcendents weren’t just trying to make him feel better, more important to the cause than he really was, to ensure he remained fully engaged.
Fair enough, he said. His first stop would be to check on Lake to see how he was progressing and see if he had any information about people trying to hack into the MPU. It was doubtful he would, but it was a start and gave Bruce something useful to do.
Bruce wasn't surprised by attempts to hack into the MPU, given there were many highly talented geeky types in the MFY population, people who would consider it a personal challenge to subvert any new computing system they encountered. There were probably others among the refugees with the same capability. He thought the Transcendents and the MPU under-estimated the newSkidians because they considered humans a lower form of life.
Once he had checked in with Lake, he would travel around the planet’s main settlements to get a feel for the progress of the integration of newSkidians into Skidian society. It would be interesting to see how the various groups who had been uploaded were getting on together and assimilating, given the diversity of their cultures and religions.
Bruce glanced down at his list. There were four items on it: Visit Lake, visit The Farm, make sure the dogs get a run, get Myfair and Leaf to get the ewe lambs in and give them a drench. Brilliant!
He quickly tapped the notes into his mobile, walked out to the kitchen, and put his cup in the sink on the way to say goodbye to Ngaio before he left the house. He poked his head around the bedroom door and saw her peering out at him from under the bedsheets she normally had pulled up around her head, even when he was in bed with her.
“You’re off then?”
“Yep, I’ll be back later today.” Bruce added while he bent over to kiss her on the forehead. “Love you.”
“Love you too. Be careful and I’ll see you tonight.”
“I will. Don’t worry about me. I’ll see you for dinner.” He felt a little bit guilty leaving Ngaio alone, because Mrs Pratt had wandered off on some mysterious errand which meant Ngaio had to look after Little Bruce full time.
Bruce hadn’t realised until the last few days when they were looking after the boy all the time what a wilful little shit Little Bruce could be when he wanted to be difficult. He was always so well behaved with the old woman. “Maybe mum and dad can look after Bruce for the day? It would be worth asking them.”
“I’ll ask them, but we should spend more time with him. After all, he is your son and Mrs Pratt isn’t going to be around forever.”
“You’re right dear. Maybe he can come along with me some days.”
“That would be nice. Honey, I don’t think Nancy...”
“Who’s Nancy?”
“Nancy is Mrs Pratt’s first name.”
“Well, I never.”
“She’s not very old, you know, she’s much younger than our parents.”
Bruce wasn’t sure where this was leading. Mrs Pratt looked fairly long in the tooth to him. Maybe she’d just had a hard life.
“We can’t rely on her to look after Little Bruce forever. She might want to carry on with her own life, and we need to get used to looking after the boy,” Ngaio continued.
“We’re going to get no help from his mother. She’s too bloody unreliable and erratic. Look, we can talk about this when I get home later.”
“OK, love.”
Bruce gave Ngaio another peck on the forehead and walked back through the house and onto the porch. He pulled on his boots and grabbed a hat. Sensing he was up and about and moving around, the dogs started barking They wanted to be involved in whatever he was up to, however trivial.
Don’t forget about us, Cop pleaded with him.
What about you? B
ruce retorted, then immediately relented. There was no real reason they couldn’t tag along. Just behave yourself.
He walked over to the kennels and let them out. The act was a formality really, Cop could and had opened the kennels himself when he felt like it in the past. The only way to contain them was for Bruce to use a padlock and a chain to secure the gates. It was the kind of trouble you experienced when you found you had a dog with the ability to reason and communicate, albeit on the level of a young adolescent. In his more reflective moments Bruce felt a little sorry for Cop, because the old mutt was probably bored shitless with no other intelligent dog to talk to.
You got that right.
While he waited for the dogs to go about their business, Bruce shivered in the chilly autumn dawn and wondered if he should get a jacket.
Harden up, soft cock, Cop grunted as he came and sat beside Bruce, closely followed by the other two dogs. All three of them waited patiently to see what was going to happen next. Bruce clearly wasn’t working on the farm, otherwise he would have got one of his vehicles out of the shed by now.
Bruce could have used the spaceship he had been allocated for today’s jaunt. It was a fun way to travel around galaxy and provided a lot more flexibility when he got to Skid, but the direct wormhole to Skid was a much quicker connection. By the time he used the wormhole to upload himself to the spaceship, and got underway, he could be anywhere on Skid.
He designated his target coordinates and activated his personal wormhole. Before he had time to blink, he was standing on the vast open plaza beside the Skidian government buildings. Bruce was completely oblivious to the fact that the amount of energy used for this trip was equivalent to the daily power needs of a large city.
Bruce recalled the plaza from his earlier visits to Skid. It was next to a vast spaceport. On their first visit, the dogs had charged out of the spaceship when the door opened onto a completely new world. Today, recognising their surroundings, without the cabin fever developed after being cooped up aboard a spaceship for a few days, they were much more sedate in their exploration.
The familiar buildings were still there, and space ships were still coming and going on their missions, the same way they always had, though perhaps not in the same numbers and with the same level of intensity.
Bruce wondered what they were up to on these sorties. The Transcendents were always a bit cagey about the purpose of the ship’s missions, and whether they were manned or not. They were most likely surveys or patrols of some kind. Myfair had been a pilot of one of these ships and had spent a lot of his time simply joy riding around the galaxy by all accounts before Bruce had inherited his ship, leaving Myfair stranded on earth.
He strolled towards the senate building, a towering edifice on the edge of the plaza. Bruce knew the Senate was in session and decided it would be a good place to get a feel for how the indoSkidians were dealing with the influx of newSkidians.
The dogs roamed far and wide, just like they had on their first visit. Eventually they found someone interesting to sniff. Bruce initially took him to be an indoSkidian who had a role at the space port, one of the few lucky indoSkidians who had a real job on the planet.
“Are you OK, mate?” Bruce then realised the man was a newSkidian. The poor guy tried to bat away Punch and Can, who were attempting to sniff at his nether regions.
“Get out of it!” Bruce snapped at the two dogs.
The man babbled in a language Bruce didn’t understand, wildly gesticulating and pointing all over the place. After a few moments Bruce shrugged his shoulders and wandered off. He didn’t have time to deal with someone he couldn’t communicate with.
I could have interpreted for you, the Transcendents chided him. He was speaking Arabic and just wanted to know how to get back to his home. He will remember this day if you ever need his help in the future.
Not to worry, I’m not a politician, I don’t need his vote. I’m sure you will get him home before he starves to death, Bruce replied as he entered the Senate. He’d visited the building many times in the past. He’d seen in its heyday when, along with his ex-wife, he had been presented to the full Skidian Senate. That had been an interesting experience. At the time Bruce hadn’t any idea why he was on Skid and he thought the place was like a circus. It had taken a long time for it to dawn on them that they were expected to save the inhabitants of the planet from starvation.
That first time, the chamber had been full of Skidian lawmakers. There had been hundreds, if not thousands, of them babbling away, conducting what they believed was the business of government. To a man or woman, for both sexes were evenly represented, they were convinced they were the true masters of Skid and its sphere of influence, governing the most powerful and sophisticated civilisation in the known universe. To them, Bruce and Sue were just primitive offworlders from a backward planet of no importance, displayed like exotic freaks of nature.
Few of the Senators had survived the unravelling of Skidian society after the famine. The dead ones were denied the indignity of discovering that they were no different to the offworlders, who they considered lesser and more primitive beings.
Bruce entered the building and strode through the vast reception area. Once it would have been crowded with Skidians purposefully going about their business: today it was empty. Bruce knew most of the Skidians who had once roamed around this building had no real useful function, and many of them just wandered about looking important because there was an obligation for Skidians of a certain class to at least appear they had gainful employment.
He pushed through the great wooden doors of the Senate chamber. Another sign of how things had changed: the imperious guards who had once flanked the entrance were nowhere to be seen.
The hinges creaked slightly, just enough to distract the speaker from addressing his fellow representatives.
“...we require leadership to make Skid great again..” a pompous voice insisted, “..and I will supply the leadership. I will make Skid great again. Very, very great.”
Bruce wondered if the man had been taking lessons from Ronald Chump, maybe watching news clips from Earth for tips. Maybe this is something useful I can do, Bruce thought, stamp out the idea of partisan politics where people spend far too much time defending the indefensible at the expense of focusing on the areas which really matter.
“The representative will take his seat.”
“I refuse to be silenced! I represent the Skidians who are ignored by this government and seek a return to the glory days when Skid was the most powerful civilisation in the galaxy. We are being misrepresented by weak leadership, and find ourselves overrun by immigrants of inferior quality who will quickly out-breed us and deprive us of our birth right...”
“Bloody hell.” Bruce had never expected to hear this kind of language on Skid. He wondered if the old populist Mitch had somehow slipped off the leash and insinuated his way into the auditorium. Bruce peered up at the speaker, who had paused to take a sip of water and have a drag on a cigarette. He smoked in the standard human fashion, not the old Skidian way where the cigarettes were smoked through the nose.
Bruce strolled across the floor and sat on a bench beside Lake at the front of the tiers of seats. Seeing him, the speaker paused with as much dignity as he could muster. He had temporarily run out of steam.
It wasn’t correct protocol, but Bruce shook Lake’s hand and waved to the representative.
“Don’t let me stop you. You were saying?”
That would certainly annoy the traditionalists, but Bruce had always enjoyed taking officious buffoons down a peg or two when he had the opportunity.
Bruce didn’t dwell on what he had heard of the speech. In some ways, he sympathised with the indoSkidians, their perceived loss of influence and status in a rapidly changing world and the impact on their sense of worth. However, they’d have to get used to it.
The representative made to stand again, grasping the front edge of the lectern to pull himself to his feet, but someone e
lse beat him to it.
Eight
Mahmoud rose quickly to his feet. He’d been looking for an opening to get a few things off his chest for days, but someone else always got the attention of the leader, who selected speakers by pointing a carved stick at them. Mahmoud knew he was welcome up to a point, but this didn’t seem to translate into active participation in any debate.
He stood without speaking, expecting someone to stop him. Every other time he had tried to speak, the indoSkidians had simply talked over him, pretending he wasn’t there, until he was forced to sit, feeling stupid. However, this time everyone was engrossed with the new arrival, so Mahmoud grabbed the opportunity and began to tell his story.
Mahmoud had discovered the Senate by accident one day while he explored the city, trying to make some sense of his new home, and had been attending the sessions for several weeks. He’d been searching for some form of government or local administration he could complain to.
He still struggled to believe he was on an alien planet as he had been told. He thought he was housed in a new form of detention camp. The weakness in his theory was the presence of people he had met who were not refugees or migrants, those from the MFY program, and the existence of this governing body full of people who believed that they were the native people of the land, and that he and his fellow migrants were interlopers.
His Book had explained the purpose of the Senate. Under the current senate rules, Mahmoud discovered it was a very simple process to become a member. To be considered a Senate member with all the rights and privileges of a Senator, all he had to do was take a seat for more than two consecutive days. There was no formal selection process, and no elections: all he had to do was keep turning up. An election process might come later if too many new and indoSkidians wished take part in the government process. The vast auditorium was capable of seating many tens of thousands of people, so Mahmoud didn’t think they were going to run out of seats any time soon.
He had sensed the dynamic within the auditorium had changed with the new arrival and the locals were stunned by the man’s presence. Maybe the real head of the Skidian state had turned up unexpectedly, and the Senators were now going to be held to account.
The Colonists Page 34
