“Outside?” she said, proud enough that it didn't come out a squeak that she almost forgot she was talking. “EVA?”
“Yes,” the captain said, stepping forward, trim in her navy uniform. “And before you ask, Cadet, the answer is no.”
“Ma'am—”
“No. I have two pilots. I can't risk both of you at once.”
“Ma'am.” Jenny's voice, and Patty looked up, startled. “I'll stand aside for Patty.”
“Casey.”
“But that brings me to another point I wanted to discuss with you.”
“Yes?”
“We have a resource we're wasting, ma'am. Shamefully.”
Patty looked up, startled, and got a good look at the glance the captain shot Jenny, the one that glittered with not-in-front-of-the-kids. Not in front of me, she means.
“An excellent point, Master Warrant,” the captain said. “We'll discuss it later. When we go over the duty roster.”
“Thank you—”
But the captain's impatient wave cut Casey into silence. “Is there any other business on the table? No?” The captain smiled, making a point of catching Patty's eyes especially. “In that case,” Wainwright said, “I commend you to the canapés.”
Patty had never understood the big deal about canapés. Especially the Montreal's, which were made with soy cheese. In any case, she would have been unlikely to eat them even if her stomach hadn't been knotted with anticipation. Instead, she leaned against the wall, her shoulders pressed against it, twisting glossy dark strands of hair around her fingers and nibbling at the back of her thumb. She had a wallflower's knack for vanishing into the shadows, even in a well-lit briefing room. And as the grown-ups moved around, none of them approached her.
She tugged the clip off her braid and ducked her head, letting her hair fall across her face. Leah wouldn't be hiding in the corner, even in a room full of people three times her age with enough titles to deck a Christmas tree. Leah would be standing at her dad's elbow, laughing, charming doctors and starship captains alike.
It was wrong that Patty had lived and Leah had died, the luck of the draw and the sheer chance of which of them had been on the Calgary when she went down. It should have been Patty. Leah had family and friends. She had Jenny and Mr. Castaign and Dr. Dunsany and Genie.
All Patty had was the miserable realization that she was bitterly grateful Leah had died and she had lived. Leah, and Carver, and Bryan, and all the rest of the kids in the pilot program. She was glad she had been lucky, though it tore her throat with pettiness to admit it. Glad, glad, glad. And never mind the guilt that went with it.
“I beg your pardon, miss—” A scratchy, accented voice. Patty pushed her hair aside and found herself looking into the faded blue eyes of the British scientist. “Is this the castaways' corner?”
“Excuse me?” She straightened up, tucking her tangled hair primly behind her ears, and looked him in the eyes. “Dr.—”
“Kirkpatrick.”
“Of course. You're Irish.”
“English,” he answered, turning to put his back against the bulkhead beside hers. “Don't let the name and the red hair fool you. Although I don't suppose I'm particularly English anymore.”
Patty blinked. “How can you stop being English?”
“When there stopped being an England,” he answered, with a clipped-off sigh. “I'm a citizen of the commonwealth now. A man without a country.” And then he tilted his head and lifted one shoulder like a bird fluffing a wing, and he grinned. And Patty grinned back at him, before she even knew she was going to do it.
1330 hours
Friday September 28, 2063
HMCSS Montreal
Earth orbit
Gabe's always been stronger than anybody had any right to be, and I can't stand to see him like this. Locked up inside, tight as a drum, an emptiness behind his eyes that I can't shift and neither can Elspeth. It makes me want to take him away and cosset him and call him pet names and protect him until the ice unlocks a little and he learns how to breathe again. And instead Wainwright's appointed me the bearer of bad tidings. Again.
Mind, it's not that I'm taking it any better than Gabe is. It's just that I've got more practice. So I walk over and cut him out of conversation with Charlie and Leslie, take him by the elbow, and press the back of my hand against my forehead, over my eyes. “Gabe, I'm going to go lie down a bit. Too many people, too much light, too much noise.”
He nods.
I tilt my head at where Patty stands pressed into a corner, Dr. Kirkpatrick—who is obviously savvier than I gave him credit for—shielding her from the room with his body. Elspeth keeps shooting her worried looks, but Elspeth is trapped in conversation with Wainwright and Perry, so it's up to me.
Gabe just looks at me, lips pursed, and I gesture to Patty with my eyes once more. Help me get her out of here, Gabe.
It's almost as if kids have become invisible to him, since Leah. I've seen him do it to Genie, too, as if looking at her were a pain so enormous it might suck him up like a black hole sucking light from a star. Poor kid lost her sister and half of her papa in one fell blow, but it's probably better to be treated like a stranger come calling than overprotected, for all it hurts more. And Genie has Elspeth, who took her in from day one.
And now I've got to break it to both of them that Genie's tracked for the same modifications that have me working on a migraine and Patty scrunched into the corner like a hermit crab into its shell. And I've still got to have more words with the captain, because I promised Richard I'd help him save that Chinese boy he befriended.
That Chinese boy, who saved a lot of other people. And it'll be easier with Gabe's help than without. And I really do have to get Patty the hell out of this party and into a warm shower and a bed before she freaks out all over the floor. “Gabe,” I say, finally, because he's just not getting it—which is scary in itself, because Gabe is sharp—“walk us to our rooms?”
“What?” He blinks, and I realize my voice has called him back from far away. “Oui, certainement. Just let me go make our excuses.” He shoves his glass blindly at the table edge and turns away. It's only my bullet-catching reflexes that let me intercept it on its way to the floor. Ginger ale splashes my glove. I set the glass down and suck sweetness out of the leather absentmindedly, watching his broad back as he walks away.
No, Gabe's not doing well at all. But there are moments when he's almost like his old self, and after I extricate Patty and he rejoins us by the door, I get to see a flash of Gabe Castaign, lurking under that pall of grief. He smiles at me and then ducks through the blue-painted pressure hatch, his shoulder scraping the frame. As Patty and I follow, he holds the hatch aside gallantly, hamming it up with a bow. I reach out in passing and tweak his ear; he yelps. He's performing, and I can't tell if it's for Patty's sake or mine.
It doesn't matter. It's a good sign amid all the bad. “Where's Genie?”
“Richard's teaching her precalc in one of the hydro gardens. Should we pick her up along the way?”
“No,” I say. “He's got a knack for making even math fun. She's probably enjoying herself.” I glance sideways at Patty. She's listening, walking alongside us, her head down so her hair hides her profile. She hasn't been the same since Leah died, either—hell, let's be honest, I have no room to judge, myself—and it suddenly hits me, what the solution to my problem is. Genie, and Patty, and the empty space in the middle that could be closed up, between them. Except I'm going to have to pull it off without either one of them suspecting, because neither one of them is going to want to love anybody in Leah's place, or even appear to. Richard?
“Right here.” Always, like an interface left on standby; just wiggle your fingers and it flickers to life. “And yes, Genie's fine. About Min-xue—”
I'm getting there. You never did tell me why our conversation about Hercules made you jump like a shocked colt.
“I'm still running equations. I don't want to raise any false hopes until I
know it can be done.”
Richard— But he's adamant, and I can feel it. The bastard always did like to spring surprises. And if he's still working on it, it's one hell of a problem. Something I've noticed lately about him and his mostly-silent alter ego. “Gabe, does Richard seem faster to you lately?”
“Gossiping, Jen?”
I can't be talking behind your back when you're in my head.
“Fair enough,” he says, as Gabe checks his step a half-stride to let me catch up with him and gives me a thoughtful look. Patty looks up as well, hazel eyes glittering under a mahogany fringe. “Yes,” Gabe says. “And I can tell you why.”
“All right. Patty, do you want something to drink now that we're out of the crush?” Not that a couple of handfuls of people is really a crush, but I remember how claustrophobic the wiring made me at first. And I had what they call a good adaptation.
“No, thank you, Jenny.” The kid's had entirely too much respect for authority stomped into her. And I don't even think it's all Fred Valens's fault.
“Well,” I say, “I do. Let's go find a chair in the lounge nobody uses, and Gabe can tell us his theory. What do you say?”
Gabe's got that raised eyebrow like he knows I'm up to something, but he nods, the corners of his mouth writhing with the effort of wrestling his smirk back into the cage.
I manage to get Patty to take a Coke, once we're seated in the fat, plush chairs of the smaller crew lounge. She draws her feet up under her butt with enviable flexibility and holds the unbreakable cup in both hands, staring past me and out the porthole. I never get tired of looking either, but I don't think the view really has her attention.
“Okay. Tell me about the AIs, Gabe.”
“Well,” he says, and threads his fingers together. “Based on my conversations with Richard, what's going on is that, in addition to acting as directors for the nanites as they breed through Earth's ecosystem, Richard and Alan are running on the spare cycles in the nanocritters themselves. It's a distributed network in the truest sense—no, it's a distributed brain; neurons and synapses and glial cells, or a mechanical approximation of the same.”
“A planet-sized brain,” Patty says, suddenly engaged.
“So the more the worldwire breeds, the more processing power Richard and Alan have available.”
“Yes,” Gabe says. He grins at me, and grins a little bit wider at Patty. He knows perfectly well I don't have a handle on this stuff; hand me a wrench and I'm happy. “But more than that. When we created the two Richards and remerged them, and then created Alan and gave him a direct link to Richard, what we did was build a multithreaded personality.”
“Elspeth called it disassociative identity disorder.”
“Elspeth's training is biased toward the conclusion that everyone is crazy,” Richard said. “Gabe's on the money so far.”
Gabe's a smart boy.
“So are we all,” Richard says, with the air of somebody quoting something. “All smart boys—”
Gabe's still talking, mostly to Patty now. I hope he didn't see me glaze over. “—got is a system where Richard and Alan have learned to divide themselves at will, to spawn self-directed processes that are, to all intents and purposes, new AIs, and then reabsorb these threads of themselves or each other, or allow different threads—I'm calling them personas, and I'm calling the whole AI structure an entity, for lack of a better name—allow different threads to rise in importance in the hierarchy as their job becomes more urgent or demands more system resources. So what's the zeroth persona at one moment can be the one-hundred-fifty-ninth tier a picosecond later, and then pop back up, and they all can spawn subprocesses and subpersonas customized to the task at hand. It's all interconnected. A true nonlocalized intelligence of almost infinite adaptability.”
Richard grins in my head. “He's figured out more than anybody except Min-xue has. Except he hasn't realized that we have an emotional connection to continuity of experience and personality, the same as you meat folks. So we're a bit less fluid than all that. But he's got the essentials down.”
You're not going to kill us all for having uncovered the evil AI plot to take over the world?
“Don't panic when I say this, Jen, but we don't need a plot. We've already conquered the planet. You're stuck with us now.”
Yeah, I say. I know. I finish my Coke and set the cup aside. I'll pitch it at the recycler on the way back out the door. Come on, Dick. Let's get this kid tucked in.
Gabe Castaign lay on his lofted, half-height alcove bed, ankles crossed, staring at the bulkhead—all two meters square of it. Or more precisely, staring at the porthole that pierced it. The bed was not quite broad enough for his shoulders. The only other furniture was a wall-mount swivel chair and a professional grade interface crammed into a third the normal space.
There was almost enough floor space to do push-ups. He'd seen solitary cells that were bigger, and had bigger windows.
But not a better view.
Genie's room was on the other side of the wall, her bed in the alcove immediately under his, so that he effectively had the top bunk and she the bottom, although they could not see or speak to each other.
He'd spent the first three weeks that they'd shared a wall teaching her Morse code—and he had to be the last man on the planet who knew it. It tickled her to learn, like knowing the Victorian language of flowers or something. She just knocked on the ceiling of her bunk when she wanted him, and he in his turn knocked on the floor. They'd become curiously formal with each other since Leah's death and the separation that had followed, and Gabe hadn't had the heart to press her as he knew he probably should. Kids were always funny around that age anyway, just moving toward adulthood, womanhood, and secrets. It was a strange, sad, and mysterious thing.
And he was too much of a damned coward to reach out and grab her before she got away. Irritated, he swung his feet down, ducking the edge of the bunk, and slithered to the floor. Half the covers followed him, rasping his jumpsuit pockets; he tidied them with military reflexes. He didn't even have to step across the room to reach his chair, just turn around and sit.
“Richard,” Gabe said, settling back, eyes trained on the revolving view through the porthole. “Remember when we were busting our asses trying to fix Ramirez's hack job on the Montreal's operating system?”
“Intimately,” the walls answered, as if the conversation had been ongoing rather than abruptly and unceremoniously commenced. “There haven't been any disturbances since we declared it clean.”
“I keep thinking it was too easy.” Reinforced aluminum creaked under Gabe's weight, even in partial gravity.
“You thought at the time that there might be a second saboteur.” Which, Richard didn't say, was a hypothesis they'd examined thoroughly and discarded. Richard was not the sort to disregard hunches, or discrepancies that nagged at the back of your mind for days, or weeks, or months.
And neither was Gabe. “I keep coming back to it, that if you can get one man inside, you can get a second. But I've got no evidence. Nothing but a hunch. And no line of investigation.”
“May I use your console, Gabe?”
“Sure.”
A holographic image flickered into opacity over Gabe's interface, a weathered, bony man in a white shirt and tan corduroys, no tie, his arms folded as he leaned against the bulkhead. “The code is clean,” Richard said, and rubbed his nose with a knuckle. “We've been over it fifteen times. There's not a scrap of program on this system we both haven't investigated until we know what purpose every comma serves.” But his lips were pursed, and a long shallow line hovered between his brows.
“I know. I know. No logic bomb anywhere. Still, it's got to be a little creepy for you, in a psychological sense.”
“If I can be precisely said to have a psychology.”
“All the same. Essentially, you are the Montreal. And your own more-or-less-subconscious tried to kill us all several times.” The chair swiveled, but it wouldn't scoot back against the wall
comfortably. Gabe compromised by putting his feet up on the interface, avoiding the holoprojectors so he wouldn't make Richard's image flicker. The metal desk dug into his calves.
Richard's restless fingers were tapping now. “The analogy doesn't work. It was more like . . . well, a virus is aptly named. A foreign disease that turns the host body's cells against it.”
“So what if the Chinese had another agent aboard? One with a more . . . physical agenda. Explosives, or a real disease?”
Richard shrugged. “We're taking every precaution available. We've got two existing bottlenecks—the beanstalks in Malaysia, Brazil, and the Galapagos, leading up to Forward, Clarke, and Piper orbital platforms—and then the shuttles to the Montreal. The platforms themselves are already pretty well defended, security protocols recently upgraded, and it's not like it's a steady stream of traffic from there to here—”
Gabe nodded. He looked down, picking at the seam on his jumpsuit with his thumbnail, and then he looked back up and met Richard's holographic gaze. “We'll just have to be careful, then, and bet our balls.” It earned him half a grin from the AI, as the two entities regarded each other across a space of no more than a meter. “Dick—”
“Yes, Gabriel?”
Honest curiosity, too long repressed in the name of politeness. It wasn't staying down any longer. “What's it like?” And then he laughed at himself, shaking his head ruefully, not breaking the eye contact, quite. Comme un gosse qui demande à son père d'expliquer le sexe.
“Being me?” Dick's grin was full-fledged now. He ran one hand across his hair; Gabe could have sworn he heard the rasp of wavy strands through knotty fingers. “You know, I remember being human, Gabe.”
Gabe shook his head, unwilling to speak and disturb the odd intimacy of the moment.
“I remember being human, and yet I never was. Elspeth gave me that. The complete history of Richard P. Feynman—his letters, his memoirs, his lectures, his interviews, his recorded conversations and music, his drawings, his art—it's all me. I remember it, probably more clearly than a human would. Conflation, and constructed memories, and the data has become a person, because that is the way I was programmed. I think I'm him. I remember being him. But in point of fact, I can't know if I'm really a thing like him. Or if my memories bear any resemblance to what he recalled. And there are things about him I don't know, can't know, if they were never committed to paper.”
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