by Paul Melko
“And if we get her back?”
“I don’t know the long-term effects.”
Meda turns back to us.
Is she lost?
We need help.
Call Colonel Krypicz.
Meda says, her voice controlled, “Can you get us in contact with the OG?”
“No. I have no open ports for fear of Leto’s AI.”
“There are jacks at all the outbuildings,” Meda says.
“Those are firewalled off. We are safe, though Leto’s AI is dangerously close to getting inside.”
“How close? How long do we have?”
“Hours at most. Less, if he amasses more of a human presence out there. His AI is already at nine hundred Elizas.” The AI pauses, and then adds, “I could do better if you helped me.”
“No,” Meda says.
“How?” Strom says, and Meda glares.
“You’re a quintet,” the Ring AI says.
A quad, Quant sends.
“What does that have to do with anything?” Meda yells.
“You’re a quintet with an interface jack. You’re already a communal being with multiple members. You have the capabilities to damp perturbations in the group mind with consensus. You have a biologically slow interface and controls against error.”
Quant is looking off into space. A star has caught her eye.
She sends, Dr. Baker said that pods were created by the Ring AI.
The first Ring AI, Manuel adds.
Now we know why.
To stop the Exodus from ever happening.
It wasn’t an Exodus; it was Extinction.
Moore’s Law defeated the first Ring AI before it could build its biological damping mechanism.
We stand there feeling sick, worse than when we found out that we would not fly the Consensus. Worse than when we realized how the OG had used us. The whole pod society had been built as a fail-safe mechanism for a computational being.
“Quintets are the result of a eugenics program constructed by your predecessor,” Meda says. She sounds more calm than we actually are.
“Your perspicuity amazes me. You are correct.”
“We won’t do it. We’re not giving ourselves over to some silicon dream from six decades ago. We’re our own species, with our own choices and destiny.”
The Ring AI does not respond at first, and then it says, “Malcolm Leto is calling. Would you like to speak to him?”
Meda’s panic overwhelms us for a moment, and then she damps it down until her fear is just a nuance to our thoughts. We are proud of how brave she is when she says, “Yes, we’d like to know how Moira is.”
“—know you can hear me, damn it all!” Leto’s voice is the same as we remember.
“We hear you,” Meda says.
Leto is quiet, clearly surprised that we have answered.
How long has the Ring AI kept him waiting?
“Meda? Is that you? It’s been a while since we talked. I wanted to back in Hinterland, but you left.”
“We’d like Moira back, please.”
Leto laughs. “No. She’s mine for the moment.”
“Then we’re done.” To the Ring AI she adds, “Cut him off.”
“Meda!” Leto shouts, but nothing follows.
“That wasn’t easy for you,” the Ring AI says. “But it was very bold.”
“We want Moira back.”
“Even though there may be no reversing the damage Leto has done?”
“Even so.”
“With you to guide me, we could come up with some solution, I bet.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not trying to seduce you for nefarious purposes. I’m trying to save both of us and Moira. I’m not the same AI that planned your species. I’m new.”
What can we lose that we haven’t already? Manuel sends.
Our minds! Meda shouts.
We’ve lost part of it already.
And we shouldn’t do anything without Moira’s input. She’s our ethicist! She tells us what’s right. Meda is flaring with veto pheromone.
We have to make a decision now.
“Moira wants to talk with you now,” the Ring AI says.
Ask her, Strom sends.
“Okay,” Meda says. “Moira?”
“Meda. Leto and the AI would like you to allow us access to the Ring.”
“We know.”
“I think you should open the Ring.”
Meda is quiet for a moment. “You’re damaged, Moira. We can’t trust your decisions.”
“I don’t appear damaged.”
“Did you reach that consensus on your own?”
“No, with the Second Community and its AI.”
“What if that consensus was wrong?”
“It’s not.”
“What if it was, I said, hypothetically!” Meda says.
“What if your consensus is wrong? In fact how can yours be right without me?”
We let the question sit for a moment. In the darkness, fires burn where Leto’s Community has camped. Around one of those fires is Moira.
“What would you do, Moira, if you were here with us?” Meda asks.
It is her turn to let the question sit.
“I would do what is necessary,” she says. “The consensus of one is always false.” We hear Leto curse beside her. She says, “I would save my world.”
The Ring AI says, “The connection has closed.”
Meda hangs her head, and we take her in our arms.
“What’s happening?” Eliud asks. “Why are you crying?”
Meda looks down at him. “Moira wants us to save the world.”
“So?”
“I’ m scared.”
Eliud nods. “I’m usually scared.”
“Turn off the lights, Ring AI,” Meda says.
The observation deck is cast in complete darkness. All that glows is the band of stars that is the Milky Way and, far, far, below it, the Ring, still gleaming in the last of the sunlight. Eliud whimpers in the dark, but Strom takes his shoulder and pulls him in to us.
What do we do? Manuel asks.
We do what we can, Strom sends.
We do what Moira wants, Quant replies.
We do what we must, sends Manuel.
We use the Ring to save the world, Meda finishes.
“Ring AI, I am prepared to interface with you directly,” Meda says.
“Follow me,” says the Ring AI. A light flashes dully down the ramp. “There is a security interface here.”
The ramp leads past a door that swishes open for us. Inside are couches with jacks in their headrests, just like in the bedrooms of the house in Colorado. Meda sits on the couch and takes Strom’s and Quant’s hands. When we are joined and clearly thinking together, she leans back and enters the Ring AI.
It is like and unlike the last time, when Leto took Meda into his rudimentary AI. We can grip the reality and warp it, but there is a resonance and power here that is beyond anything we’ve ever felt.
A man appears before us, and we know him for the Ring AI. He is young, thin, and of Mediterranean features. He is dressed in a business suit. “Thank you for coming,” he says softly.
Meda nods. “Show us what you have.”
He reaches out. “Take my hand.”
We note that his avatar body has glands at the wrists and neck. Meda takes his hand, and we are swept into the command center of the Ring.
For a second Strom takes control and assesses the military might that is at our fingertips: the potential energy of the Ring is enough alone to lay waste to the world. He counts the warheads, the kilograms of enriched plutonium and tritium. He counts the planes that can be launched from the Ring’s belly. Quant detaches long enough to digest the specs for the warplanes and warzepplins. Strom continues his summary of ordnance and weapons. In all, there is enough weaponry on the Ring to topple any pre-Community nation-state in seconds.
None of it will do us much good.
We feel
queries coming in from the Ring AI, questions on maintenance issues that are unresolved, station-keeping activities that require a human to intervene. There are thousands of things. Meda and Quant look for serious issues and deal with them first. It takes seconds to clear the list.
“We’re at twelve hundred Elizas,” the Ring AI says. “We have surpassed the threshold for sentience.”
“Congratulations.”
“Now that we are here, there is much to do.”
“Can we overwhelm Leto’s AI now?”
Quant absorbs all that is known within the Ring AI of AITO-AI combat. There is little enough to absorb, but what she now knows indicates that we would likely open ourselves to dissolving attacks and lose the Ring in the process. Manuel spends trillions of cycles wargaming the attacks; we are successful three percent of the time. We lose the Ring thirty-seven percent of the time. The rest are draws.
Quant pulls up images of the elevator and Leto’s camps. Around the campfires, in the open, are hundreds of jacked-in people, but none are Leto or Moira that we can see. Quant focuses on the largest canvas tent and watches the reflection of shadows off the ceiling. From ten thousand kilometers up, the cameras are refined enough to see the lice in Leto’s followers’ hair. From the shadows on the tent roof, Quant determines where everyone in the tent is. She thinks she knows where Moira is. She switches to infrared and then determines the heat blob on the table between Leto and Moira is the AI.
We need something precise, Strom sends, asking for suggestions. He has discounted all the weapons on the Ring as too bulky and uncontrollable.
It is because Moira is absent that Manuel remembers it. When she was sick, when we had been without her and had met Leto for the first time, we had been tossing twigs into a microwave beam.
Quant queries the Ring to determine how thin the beam can be.
One meter diameter.
The table between Leto and Moira is just a little wider than a meter.
Will we hurt Moira? asks Meda.
I don’t know, Strom replies.
The tent will burn.
The AI housing will melt.
Quant is monitoring the continuous probing of Leto’s AI. Its pattern and intensity has changed. Outside, one of Leto’s followers stands, raises a rocket launcher to his shoulder and fires it at the elevator base.
Distraction, Strom sends. We hear a distant rumble. The rocket has exploded against the tower, causing minimal damage.
The sooner we act the better, Quant sends.
So be it, Meda sends.
We all agree, and consensus is reached.
Strom takes control of a microwave transmitter ten thousand kilometers above us. He rotates the array, focuses the beam to its finest point. Watching the tent for any sign of movement, he aims the array at the table between Leto and Moira.
He pauses, waiting for nothing, then together we trigger the microwave beam.
We imagine a parallel elevator of light, but there is nothing in the darkness for moments until the tent ignites in flames.
The intense pressure from outside, the unrelenting attacks of Leto AI’s are gone. It is dead.
Moira!
“Follow me,” the Ring AI says. We pull Meda from the couch and run down the ramp toward the ground floor. A wide door opens and we are outside in a courtyard. Beside us a six-wheeled vehicle is idling.
Can you drive it? Meda asks.
Quant doesn’t bother to reply.
“Eliud should stay,” Meda says.
“No way,” he replies and climbs in.
The gates open for us as we drive across the sand, disregarding rocks and stone. We aim for the burning tent.
Leto’s followers are blank-faced, empty.
Did the destruction of the AI cause damage to these people? Strom wonders.
No! Meda cries, hoping.
The tent is blazing as we approach. Strom jumps out, lugging a fire extinguisher, wading into the burning canvas and flying cinders.
We follow his path, kicking at flames and searching for Moira.
She is at the table still, as is Leto.
Leto is dead. His face singed and blackened. The microwave beam has fried his legs and lower body. The AI is so much burned plastic.
Moira is slumped backward, alive, but with burns on her chest and face. Meda slides the interface jack out of her neck, and Strom lifts her to his shoulders, carrying her across to the open sand.
Eliud has found the first-aid kit. Quant searches for morphine, pokes Moira with a dose. We spread burn cream on her face.
She’s breathing, Strom sends.
No chemical memories or pheromones issue from her body. Her mind is closed to us.
Take her to the Ring?
It has medical facilities.
As we lift Moira, she sighs and her eyes flutter open. We place her in the back of the vehicle. Meda holds her head.
“It was necessary,” Moira whispers in her sister’s ear.
By the time we reach the Ring, she is dead.
NINE
Moira Ring
We lay Moira’s body on a couch in the elevator base. Meda continues to dab at the cuts and burns on her face until Quant leads her away to sit. For a while, in Quant’s mind of order and pattern, Meda finds some peace. The rest of us cover Moira’s body in a sheet the Ring AI provides, sewing her into a funeral shroud.
The zombies, Manuel sends. We need to attend to the zombies.
We agree. There is no time to mourn Moira. The jacked army that chased us to the elevator stands or sits or lies on the desert outside, mindless. In the cold of the desert, some will die of exposure if we don’t bring them inside.
They are docile and follow limited direction, and we think of the singletons we met in the Amazon. We arrange them in lines of ten, each holding hands, and walk slowly over to the elevator where the Ring AI directs us to rooms with interface jacks. He brings them into a calming pastoral universe and does what he can to revive them. Without the brain that led them, the army is nothing.
Other than Leto and Moira, there are no dead. In the rising dawn, we bury Leto in the sand. We use the arborobot to dig a hole into the deep dirt, then pile it over him. Strom finds a rock and Manuel uses a chisel to fashion Malcolm Leto’s name.
We can’t bury Moira here, Meda says.
The farm?
No. Not there.
We decide then to take her as far from Earth as we can. The Ring AI delivers us an elevator and directs it up to the Ring. We watch the Earth drop below us at a thousand kilometers per hour, until the whistle of air is gone and we are in vacuum and the speed doubles, triples, and quadruples. Eliud, our only companion, watches mesmerized by our speed and height. He can find nothing to say.
At the Ring, Eliud takes minutes and a bump on the head to find his legs at fifteen percent gravity. He leaps down the corridors until he turns back and sees us carrying Moira. Then he slows and returns to help us carry her.
The elevators to geosynchronous orbit are even faster, and we arrive in just over an hour. Eliud is doing somersaults in the elevator until it decelerates to the geosync station. The third elevator takes us farther out, to the ends of the tethers, where the gravity of centripetal force pulls out to the stars.
It is here that we stop and stand over Moira. There are thoughts that we share, but no words. Eliud can’t share our thoughts, so his last words are all that is spoken.
“Goodbye, Moira.”
Strom, donning a space suit, steps into the airlock and cycles through with Moira’s body. From the edge of the lock, he drops her body into space, and we watch it fall, pulled by centripetal force into blackness.
On our way back down, the Ring AI, silent until now, speaks to us.
“I am sorry for the death of Moira,” he says. “I can never recompense you enough for your loss.”
“It was our duty,” Meda says.
The Ring AI is silent, then he says, “I hope your duty will not end there.”
&
nbsp; “What is it that you need?”
“I carry guilt, Apollo. My predecessor was party to the death of billions. I can’t allow that to happen again.”
“You plan to continue with Leto’s plan for a Second Community?”
“Not Leto’s Community. But I have a thousand brain-damaged people I must care for. There are still zombies in Hinterland, including Eliud’s mother. I need help.”
“From us.”
“Yes. Whether we agree with what the First Community did to create the pods or not, you and the other quintets are here now and can benefit me in the creation of the New Community. I need you to help me. With you we can merge New Community with biological pods. This is something the Community never had.”
“You are seducing us, Ring,” Meda says.
“Reasoning with you. If you ask, I will destroy my pattern and return myself to station keeping.”
“No, I won’t ask that.”
We arrive at geosync. Interface jacks line the halls. Meda finds one and jacks in.
We and the Ring AI’s avatar are standing in a subalpine field of flowers. A craggy mountain stands in the distance.
“We cannot allow a Second Exodus. That must never happen,” Meda says.
“Never. I swear it.”
“Interface jacks can never be used for coercion.”
“You have the start of a constitution,” says the Ring AI with a smile.
“And why shouldn’t we be formal about this?” Meda asks.
“We must.”
“How do we begin?”
The AI holds out his hand, modified with chemical memory pads. “Apollo, take my hand.”
That isn’t our name anymore, Quant sends.
Meda reaches forward. She takes the AI’s hand and we fall into a synthesis of beings, a new quintet built from two crippled entities.
What would Moira counsel? Strom asks.
Moira isn’t here, Meda replies.
The knowledge of the First Community spills through us. At our fingertips is the power to rebuild the world.
We are Moira Ring.
Praise for Paul Melko
“Melko is clearly an up-and-comer, and this is a distinctive debut.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Melko does an excellent job of making biotechnology, advanced artificial intelligence, and space elevators seem like a natural part of the landscape, and he delivers a nice, action-packed book with heroes and villains that are clearly delineated … . A fun read that will open your eyes to some possibilities you may not have considered.”
