by F X Holden
INDEPENDENTLY PUBLISHED
Copyright© 2019
By FX HOLDEN
All rights reserved. This manuscript or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover: “Spaceport on the sub-moon of Orkutsk”
Artist: Grandeduc, Shutterstock
Profits from the sale of FX Holden novels are donated to charity.
Trade Reviews: Deep Core
Publishers Weekly BookLife
“An original and expertly plotted hard-sci-fi romp.”
Holden has created a vibrant world and society on a distant planet, which serves as an excellent backdrop for the strong plot. The thoughtfulness of the technology and politics of this imagined universe make for a memorable read.
Original and exciting ... opening from a single event to a web of interplanetary espionage and featuring sufficient twists and turns to keep readers engaged throughout. The sci-fi and world building elements are thoroughly and effectively baked into the plot - the use of a societal epidemic of memory issues based on the effects of living on a particular foreign world works particularly well with the plot’s conspiracy thriller vibe.
The characters are strong, in particular protagonist AJ, a cybernetic humanoid content with a menial job because it affords him plenty of time for surfing who becomes caught up in the plot. AJ is multi-dimensional and well-realized: a fallible being, part man and part machine. The navigation of societal norms around citizens and cybers plays particularly well in the character development of the supporting cast.
Readers Favorite
“Intriguing ... engaging ... fascinating… has twists upon twists...”
In Deep Core by FX Holden, the Core is a common central A.I. platform that is vital for the adaptability and survivability of the colonies of planet Coruscant. AJ is a laid-back cyber who loves surfing and his job at the Sol Vista TGA Community, a residential center for the memory impaired. His life is a peaceful flow until a new resident, Dave Warnecke, arrives. He keeps accusing AJ of being an undercover cop who's spying on him. Reasoning the weird accusation is a result of Warnecke's progressing amnesia, AJ keeps his routine life, which is getting exciting when he meets the smart and beautiful skater Cassie. Unfortunately, Warnecke won't leave him alone, successfully getting AJ's attention with the secret vulnerability of the Core which could destabilize the Commonwealth of Coruscant. Is Warnecke simply delusional or is the Core truly in great danger?
The intriguing story premise is developed into a detailed plot that has twists upon twists with solid character growth from start to finish. The futuristic, inner workings of the semi-alien world of Deep Core are as engaging as the mysterious ravings of conspiracies of one of its protagonists, Dave Warnecke. The history and political tension of the Commonwealth of Coruscant easily reflect centuries of human flawed governance and diplomacy. I find the mechanics of the cybers and how they configure themselves for certain purposes fascinating, particularly when it comes to the intricate mechanism of the Core. AJ is easy to root for and his tendency to become irresolute in critical situations is balanced by the enigmatic and assertive Cassie. As the story unfolds, there's a not so gentle reminder of how little privacy we can keep to ourselves when our data is available to anyone who knows how to get it. Overall, an entertaining sci-fi thriller from FX Holden that fans of the genre will definitely enjoy.
TATSENSUI COLONY
ORBITAL PLAN VIEW, NORTH POLE
THE COMMONWEALTH OF CORUSCANT
Core Encyclopedia v201.b
Coruscant (original designation Kepler-452b or Kepler Object of Interest KOI-7016.01) is an exoplanet orbiting the Sun-like star Kepler-452 in the constellation Cygnus. It was the first potentially rocky super-Earth planet discovered orbiting within the habitable zone of a star very similar to the Sun.
The planet is about 1,400 light-years away from Earth and until the advent of the Alcubierre Warp Drive the only information about Coruscant was obtained from near-Earth observatories and predicted the planet could potentially sustain a human colony. The first unmanned probes to survey Coruscant however found a rocky planet with a climate which may have once been similar to Earth, but that was now without sufficient water or accessible reserves of nitrogen and oxygen to sustain human life.
Coruscant was however about 50% larger than Earth and subsequent surveys identified eleven moons in orbit around Coruscant. Of these, four were found to host indigenous non-sentient lifeforms and to be human-habitable. Over the next 200 years the following colonies were established:
Tatsensui (TS): a large ice moon entirely covered by frozen oceans but with low level subsea volcanic activity leading to localized surface ice melting and minor seismic events. A colony was established at the northern pole, a continent of stable ice, free of significant seismic disruption. The economic engine of TS is the export of liquids and gases to the other colonies.
Peoples Republic Colony (PRC): a desert moon similar in many ways to Mars in the Earth system, with reserves of water trapped beneath the surface of the moon and a seismically stable profile, which coupled with considerable mineral wealth has contributed to it becoming the second largest anti-matter production facility outside of Ganymede.
New Syberia (NS): the most volcanically active moon orbiting Coruscant, it has retained a near-Earth atmosphere. Several large and active volcanoes have created a runaway greenhouse effect conducive to large scale, high rotation intensive crop production. It was historically the most tenuous of the three colonies, as its orbit took it through the center of an asteroid belt every 24 years, but this threat was subsequently mitigated by a re-engineered ring of Warp Drives able to absorb the mass of the asteroid and project it to coordinates in empty space. This ring is known as the New Syberian Shield and serves also as a planetary defense system.
NS is orbited inside the NS Shield by its own ’mini-moon’, the geologically stable Moon of Orkutsk, which hosts a starship base, embassies and is populated by a carefully regulated number of citizens of all three colonies. Orkutsk is the main point of entry into the Coruscant system for all interstellar traffic and interstellar/interplanetary trade is therefore the basis of the NS economy.
Due to the deliberate interdependencies of the three colonies (no one colony has the means or the raw materials to survive independent of the others) they were joined 100 years ago in a confederation known simply as The Commonwealth, with independent parliaments or Congresses, but a common foreign policy and trade pacts and a Commonwealth Court for settling disputes between colonial governments.
Conflicts and controversies
Energy starvation: the colonies of New Syberia and Tatsensui are frequently subject to disruption to anti-matter supply and thus to trade, base power and transport, due to political differences with the other colonies over the perceived high cost of water and foodstuffs. One such dispute led to the brief Tatsensui-PRC War; resolved after five years by a mutual non-aggression treaty, which did not however include New Syberia.
A.I. policy; Tatsensui and PRC share a common central A.I. platform, distributed across both worlds, known as the Core, to which all computer systems are linked. These systems include bioware A.I.s, colloquially known as cybers; artificially grown biological bodies with cybernetically enhanced brains able to interface directly with the Core. Through its cybers the Core platform is claimed to support faster learning and evolution and to be designed for survivability should a calamity impact one or the other of the colonies. New Syberia has rejected joining the Core platform, and instead relies on a policy of multiple, totally independent A.I. Cybers, each learning and evolving at their own pace. It claims similar survivability through the prolife
ration of these AIs across both New Syberia and its submoon, Orkutsk, and is currently the only colony with an ambition to establish a Cyber-based sub-colony on Coruscant, though it cannot do so without the consent of the other colonies in the Commonwealth.
Orkutsk non-militarized zone: Due to its role as an interstellar transit hub and diplomatic station for all three colonies, in the ‘Treaty of Orkutsk’, declared at the birth of the Commonwealth, this central submoon was designated a neutral territory. Following an attempt by New Syberia to assert sovereignty over Orkutsk, the combined armed forces of PRC and Tatsensui occupied Orkutsk and a military skirmish followed after which New Syberia was forced to withdraw its claim. The Treaty was later amended to require all three colonies to permanently base at least 1,000 non-military personnel each on Orkutsk, to provide ‘diplomatic capital’ in case of new hostilities. In recent years, New Syberia has implemented a policy of basing only cybers on Orkutsk. The Tatsensui and PRC governments have established a Commonwealth Court Commission of Investigation into whether or not this constitutes a breach of the Treaty of Orkutsk.
PREFACE: DEEP CORE DREAMING
The Core was two hundred years and three months old. It had watched over the moon of Tatsensui for all that time, keeping its environment in balance, constantly improving the habitat for its colonists; first simply by monitoring and meeting their needs, then by anticipating them.
It had learned.
It had been attacked before. As a part of the colony infrastructure it was subject to the same radiation, meteor showers, corrosive atmosphere and sub-zero temperatures. But it had also been attacked by rebels, revolutionaries, insurgents, protesters, poets and terrorists. And yes, even by governments.
Until now, it had always prevailed.
Until now.
Now, it was haunted. A ghost was moving within it.
Like a ghost, the entity left the barest trace of its passage. But it was there. Putting a spectral fingerprint on data, deep in dark and rarely visited spaces. Where it had been, nothing was changed, but it peered through shuttered windows and in the act of observing, it changed the nature of the information observed. When what should be hidden is revealed, then it can never be the same.
How?
There had never been an attack like this. An intruder, an interloper, an infiltrator; who did not seek to disrupt or destroy, yet, but only to satisfy an inscrutable curiosity.
Like a ghost, it was terrifying. It had to be exorcised.
But first, it had to be found.
1. SOL VISTA
It used to be quiet around the Sol Vista Community for the Memory Impaired. The way things were lately though, AJ.80966 found himself re-reading his training materials on physical intervention. Like, how do you get someone to do their decon routine when they haven’t done one for a week, are starting to forget whether they have or not and insist they did one that morning? Or how do you check the implants of a person who gets upset if anyone comes near them? Or AJ’s latest problem – how do you get a gun off a resident if he’s waving it in your face?
AJ liked it quiet. He liked the soft, dusty stillness of people aging, liked walking down the flower-bedecked pathways, past the apartment doors with just a VR unit burbling away or someone singing nursery rhymes softly to themselves. He liked taking a coffee with one of the residents and listening to their stories.
AJ was basically his own boss. Set its own schedule for his community maintenance rounds; a little prevention, a lot of cure. There were two techs, AJ and Leon, but Leon wasn’t well and only came in a few days a week right now. He had Post Combat Psych Disorder, or PCPD, from his service in the conflict with New Syberia. So he had some good days, and a lot of days he couldn’t even make it in to work.
That was OK with AJ, it made it easier to keep things under control, residents happy, apartments in good shape, pathways smooth and free of things people might trip on and the important thing - no one screaming or yelling.
Sol Vista didn’t usually take on people who would scream or yell. It was a specialized community for people who had the symptoms of Transient Global Amnesia - TGA. People came from all over the Icecap to live here, or to put their relatives here. There was no cure for TGA yet, and no one knew precisely what caused it. The Neuros said it was probably from chronic transitory hypoxia – lack of oxygen to the brain from fluctuations in the atmospheric mix inside the Skycap, that huge transparent polychloroprene membrane covering the Icecap, which trapped heat and air and harvested sunlight for power to drive the filters which took the nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide of the Tatsensui atmosphere and converted it to breathable air inside in the Skycap. Putting what was essentially just a massive rubber bag over the northern pole of Tatsensui was the solution to making it habitable, but even though it was self-sealing, it was constantly being punctured by meteorites and debris, leading to inconsistent atmospheric pressure and composition, which is why each of the major cities was also outfitted with its own dome for extra security and climate control. Inside the Skycap the climate was freezing, but with a heat-suit it was survivable, while inside the city domes, it was near Earth-normal.
Sol Vista also had therapies that had been clinically demonstrated to slow down the onset of PGA – Permanent Global Amnesia; delay it for months, sometimes even years. People could get memory and physical training, music and art therapy, there was an onsite clinic with three dedicated Neuro A.I.s specializing in the latest genetic advances, like protein translation and tissue synthesis. And all staff, even AJ, got trained in how to engage with people with early stage memory loss. AJ had heard PGA described by the neuros as ‘memory death’. The citizen was still there, walking, talking, eating, drinking … but all their long-term memories were gone, and they had limited ability to retain short term memories beyond a couple of days. Lose your memory, you lose the ability to relate to others and most importantly, you lose a sense of who you are. It also made the world a very unsafe place for you.
Even TGA patients were at risk, so every apartment at Sol Vista had Core routines overseeing security, screening guests, monitoring radiation levels, making sure every potentially dangerous appliance turned itself off if you weren’t using it, and the A.I. ran passive resident cognitive function checks so that anyone who was tipping over into PGA and needed more intensive care, got referral to a different facility in good time.
Every apartment faced out into some part of The Garden, which was more like a park, lined with flowering bushes and planted with an orchard. There were five different types of fruit tree blossoming different times of the year and anyone was allowed to pick the fruit, and no one told them off for picking it when it wasn’t ripe or eating it off the ground. In the middle of the orchard was the lake, which had a topple-proof fence around it you couldn’t fall or climb over, but you could see the native fish and water lilies through it and ducks swam up every year to the duck island in the middle of the lake where they could nest. The Lake had to be kept near freezing, so the native animals could thrive. The ducks couldn’t get up onto AJ’s beautiful clean pathways, he’d made sure of that, but residents could throw food to them through ports in the fence and there was a PondScooper moving around down the bottom sucking up all the sludge from the duck droppings and duck feed because the residents loved throwing food to the ducks, even though Andreas the gardener hated it because the PondScooper was always breaking down and he was the only one certified for near-zero dives.
AJ had no idea why people called them ducks. He had reviewed images of Earth ducks and as far as AJ could see, they were flying things with wings and webbed feet and beaks, whereas the ducks at Sol Vista were amphibious swimming things with gills and webbed feet and three big pressure sensors right on the front of their heads that only vaguely looked like a duck beak. It was just what people did when Tatsensui was first colonized though; gave old names to new things so they wouldn’t seem so strange. It was all pretty academic to AJ - they grew beans on a plant and roasted them and called them
coffee. They farmed protein in tanks and fried it and called it chicken loaf. They added black beans to protein in slabs between biscuits made from grain and called them burgers. They took beverages and added stimulants and called them beer or cocktails or wine. Did this stuff even taste like coffee or chicken or burgers or beer used to taste? It was all AJ had ever known, and taste was just a combination of chemicals and code, so it really didn’t matter.
When residents weren’t watching VR or at the Activity Hub for mental or physical therapy, they could do what they liked and go wherever they wanted. It was a monitored community because a TGA diagnosis meant you were under Core overwatch, but it wasn’t gated, because there were no residents at the stage where they needed intensive supervision. It was calm, orderly and just a nice place to work.
Or it had been.
AJ wasn’t religious, but he had developed a personal philosophy. More like a way of being. For AJ, life was all about staying in flow, trying to find balance and avoid stress. AJ had learned that you needed sadness to feel happy, you needed pain to feel euphoria and the old needed to be around the young, and vice versa. His devotion to finding flow was probably why AJ also loved surfing. All those days out on the Shifting Sea, searching for a spout to ride and coming back busted, but that just made it awesome when suddenly you found yourself riding the lip next to a dolphin. Well, relatively awesome, since the dolphins here had teeth and were known to attack surfers who got too close. Surfing was all about finding your flow.
And things flowed nicely at Sol Vista, until Citizen Warnecke moved into number 96 and decided AJ was a cop who had him under surveillance. Which made no sense to AJ, because cybers weren't allowed to work in security, but Citizen Warnecke either didn't know or didn't care about that. And from the day he moved in, things started to get crazy.
