Roboteer

by Alex Lamb

  ‘He’s High Church,’ Gustav pointed out. ‘We can’t bribe him.’

  ‘True, but there are other ways to make an ally. He must be made to see that it is in his political interests to keep the project open. Make him realise where he would stand if the project was closed down and word still leaked out.

  ‘If you succeed,’ Oswald added, ‘I will do the rest. For the last six months, my people have been working on a report outlining how to spin the Relic to the Following as a miracle. So far, Sanchez has refused to read it. With Rodriguez’s recommendation, he will have to. The speeches are already written. The press reports are ready to go.’

  Gustav pulled a bitter face. He could feel the shackles of compromise clanking shut around his wrists. He sighed and rubbed his eyes.

  ‘You know me, Oz,’ he muttered. ‘I’m no diplomat.’

  Oswald shrugged. ‘What can I say? If I could send myself out there, I would. But it has to be you. It’s your project.’

  ‘All right.’ Gustav looked away.

  Oswald touched his shoulder. ‘Thank you.’

  Gustav looked out at the filthy sky. ‘I’ll tell you now, though, my people won’t like this. The moment they see that white robe, they’ll smell trouble. They won’t want to cooperate.’

  ‘Then make them understand how lucky they are,’ said Oswald. ‘Sanchez’s other option was group termination. I told him it would be cheaper to buy you and your people off than kill you. I reminded him of just how badly he needs the support of the scientific community right now. If your people are careful, they could come out of this with an estate each and still get to finish their work.’

  Oswald gave Gustav’s shoulder a friendly squeeze. ‘And now you should head downstairs or people will start to wonder where you are. Let them see you,’ he said as he stepped back. ‘And try to look happy. We can’t have you appear ungrateful for the Prophet’s gifts.’

  Gustav laughed darkly. It was a dangerous game they were playing, but he could see no other choice. Earth simply couldn’t afford to let a planet of genetic racists thrive and prosper. And to defeat them they needed a united church, at least for the time being.

  He bowed his respects and turned to go.

  ‘Good luck,’ said Oswald. ‘You’ll be in my prayers.’

  Gustav nodded and headed back the way he’d come – towards the lift, Rodriguez’s eager company and another round of unwelcome congratulations.

  2.2: WILL

  Will took the overground transit to the headquarters of the Fleet’s Roboteering Division. The car was empty except for him, though it had enough bright-yellow ergonomically designed seats for fifty. That was normal on Galatea. Will had never seen one full.

  It was the first time he’d been home for weeks and his eyes hungrily sucked in the sights. Beyond the train window, a plain of butter-coloured scree stretched away under a deep-blue sky. Laid out in perfectly straight rows as far as the horizon were circular pools of steaming turquoise water tended by black-furred robots. They hadn’t existed last time he came this way. The pools no doubt constituted another desperate attempt by the Terraforming Corps to prevent the nascent Galatean ecology from collapsing back on itself.

  The rows made hazy diffraction patterns as the train carried Will soundlessly past them. They were also a welcome distraction from his anxiety about his upcoming review session.

  He’d only been home for a day. He hadn’t expected the Fleet to call on him so soon. Evidently they were taking the matter very seriously.

  The return flight hadn’t gone well. Franz filed a public report declaring that with adequate roboteer supervision, his SAP would have cleared the disrupters – a statement that was false but hard to completely disprove. After that he hadn’t spoken to Will again.

  Captain Klein had refused to comment on the matter and Will hadn’t heard a thing from him since he filed his memory log. It had made for an uncomfortable week. Today he’d learn what the captain had to say, and he wasn’t looking forward to it.

  The problem was that Will had knowingly disobeyed a direct order. While the Galatean Fleet was the most relaxed and pro-initiative fighting force in human history, it still considered an order something sacred. Even if the Fleet condoned Will’s actions, as he felt sure they would, some kind of formal reprimand was still on the cards.

  Will bristled at the injustice of it. If he lost this position it would be his third transfer. No captain was likely to take him on after that. He’d be reduced to loading work on the evacuation arks – forced to flee with children and grandparents while the Earthers massed to destroy everything he cared about. He didn’t think he could stand that.

  The abuses other colonies had suffered were common knowledge on Galatea. Wholesale slaughter had followed Earther invasion. The genetically modified were ‘purged’ as abominations. Most were burned alive by marauding gangs of barely disciplined Earther troops. Will wasn’t about to run away while that happened to his home.

  He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and started counting in binary on his fingers, from zero to one thousand and twenty-three and back down again. It was something he often did when he was nervous.

  Finally the transit began to slow as it slid through a region of gleaming pipes and pylons and onwards into the town of Resilience. Like most Galatean towns, Resilience was essentially a trench roofed over by a long, low bubble of impact-resistant plastic. Will passed rows of tiered apartments, their broad public balconies floored with modified grass. Furniture and possessions littered the open spaces so haphazardly that it was impossible to tell where one person’s home ended and the next began.

  There was a sense of the disposable about the place, common to all Galatea’s habitats, as if the inhabitants expected to leave tomorrow and never look back. It was written in the collapsible screens and the unpainted walls. Will saw nothing of value that couldn’t be folded or boxed and taken away at a moment’s notice.

  What else would you expect from a population who could never tell when the next emergency would arrive? There was always some kind of crisis going on, and the war was just the most recent in a long, long line of them. People joked that at least the war wasn’t a home-grown catastrophe. Galatea’s abortive terraforming attempt had afforded plenty of those.

  The transit cruised gently into the station. This was it – time to face the music. Will rose and stood at the door as the car slid to a halt.

  ‘Is this your stop?’ asked the transit eagerly, sending the message direct to Will’s sensorium. ‘Is this where you asked me to let you off?’

  The transit knew the answer already, of course. It just wanted to talk. Like a lot of public SAPs, it relished the rare opportunity for direct electronic contact with a roboteer. Usually, Will obliged. Today, however, he wasn’t really in the mood.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ Will messaged back and stepped quickly out into the warm, artificial breeze.

  From the station platform it was a short walk to headquarters through the carefully tended gardens that covered the trench floor. Will followed the twisting path between the exotic cacti and succulents that were intended to one day brave the surface, then ascended the broad stone steps of the headquarters building and entered the open-fronted lobby. As he crossed the huge swathe of polished yellow sandstone, the two janitor robots cleaning it called their greetings to him. They looked like big, furry beetles.

  ‘Hello, Handler Will! Hello, Handler Will! Will you make us play again? We like to play!’

  Will sent them the electronic equivalent of a smile. ‘Later.’

  He checked in with the building’s reception SAP in the lift on the way up.

  ‘Welcome back, Will,’ it said. Its messages were polite and sounded in his mind like crisply spoken English in a soft, female voice. ‘Commander Rees-Noyes is busy with a call at the moment. He will be with you shortly. Will you wait in the rec?’

  Will sighed. ‘I suppose so.’

  The lift slid to a halt and dropped him off. The rec, more
formally known as the Roboteers’ Recreational Environment, was a large sandstone room open to a balcony along one side. Gold light filtered in from the reflector mirrors high on the opposite trench wall. It cast mottled patterns across the thick purple spray-on carpet.

  A dozen or so roboteers were present, all dressed in crumpled Fleet-issue ship-suits. A few sat on their own, but most were gathered in a ring with fat-contacts running from neck to neck like thick, white noodles.

  To an outsider, the scene would have looked like something from a mental ward. The roboteers either sat motionless as stones or rocked slowly back and forth. None of them spoke, though a couple hummed tunelessly to music only they could hear. They made no attempt at eye contact. To Will, however, the room was alive with talk from the moment he entered. His sensorium was bombarded with messages demanding memories.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Franz is a bastard!’

  ‘Where are your logs?’

  ‘Tell us everything!’

  It was the typical roboteer welcome. They’d probably followed his progress from the moment he entered the building, and in that time downloaded all the official reports about his recent activities. Roboteer culture was like that: earnest, honest, inquisitive and completely lacking in the social niceties they spent so long training into SAPs. Politeness would have served little purpose. They’d all been inside each other’s heads dozens of times.

  Will had known the request would come. Roboteers always wanted to hear exciting news of their own kind, so he’d prepared an edited subset of his experiences on the flight down and stored it in the Fleet database. In the personal node of his mind, he summoned the picture-book icon representing the address and dropped it in his public directory. He imagined the directory as a room open on one side to a trench lawn, like the one he grew up playing on.

  ‘Here’s everything I have,’ he broadcast to the room, and watched the picture-book pages flutter as greedy minds hit it for downloads.

  Will walked across the rec and sat near the window, where he could look down onto Resilience’s quiet streets. A couple sauntered past below, trailed by a bumbling carrybot covered in yellow tact-fur.

  ‘Join our game,’ someone sent.

  The message came with a memory chunk attached. It unfolded in his head to reveal some kind of chess variant in which each piece devised its own strategy and all pieces moved simultaneously. In an instant, Will knew all the rules.

  The players were operating as joined minds, hence the cables. All roboteers had wireless contact with Galatea’s pervasivenet, but for sharing entire mental states only cables would do.

  ‘The sides are uneven,’ the roboteers told him. ‘We want your help.’

  ‘No thanks,’ Will replied. He had no desire to subsume himself into some chess-playing gestalt right now.

  The others sent him the mental equivalent of a sorry smile and returned their attention to the game. They hadn’t really expected him to join. Most roboteers thought Will was strange. For the most part, he found them obsessive. Will had simply never been that much into roboteer culture. There was something cloying and poignant about it – it managed to be oppressively intimate and emotionally distant at the same time. But then, telepathy wasn’t really a natural state for human beings.

  It didn’t help that roboteers’ minds were genetically tweaked to fit the consciousness profiles of the SAPs they handled. The first Roboteers had been born fully autistic. Even now, many retained traces of that condition. Consequently, the normal roboteer conception of friendship was close cooperation over some kind of project. Only a rare few like Will completely escaped the siren song of autistic thought patterns. He preferred the company of his friends in the mainstream community and tried to ignore the experiential gap that would always lie between them.

  He gazed out across the trench and worried about what the commander would say. He thought about the speech he’d make to defend his actions. He’d done what he felt was right. Wasn’t that what the Fleet all about: intelligently interpreting the requests of your superiors?

  The room’s silence was broken occasionally by sudden outbursts of synchronised laughter from the game players. They subsided as quickly as they began and served only to scatter Will’s thoughts. Close proximity to other handlers often did that. Their presence made him wonder at the hubris of his own culture. Galatea had created a whole community who could never be a part of normal human society. How had they managed to justify that act to themselves? He knew the answer even as he framed the question: they’d been desperate.

  Twenty-five years ago, Galatean scientists had discovered the Ng-Black heating limit. Put simply, it showed that any molecular building technology above a certain power would melt itself down into proteins and slag before it could do anything useful. At a stroke, it put an end to humanity’s dream of a nanotech future, and to Galatea’s greatest hope: that nano would solve their terraforming problem.

  And they did have a problem. Upon arrival, the early Galateans had kicked off a process of environmental change they could not now afford to stop. Hard experience had shown that doing so would bring about a time of world-scouring storms as the atmosphere lurched back to its former inert state. The Galateans would have to evacuate their entire planet.

  Thus they’d been forced to turn to that familiar, robust technology which had enabled the human diaspora in the first place: robotics. The problem was that robots were large and clumsy, and now they were required in vast numbers. Galatea had needed to find a way to coordinate the work of thousands of machines engaged in the most complex and precarious engineering project in human history. It was work normal humans simply couldn’t do, so they bred new people to do it for them – people like Will.

  In their schooling, roboteers were encouraged to think of themselves as the saviours of the planet. In Will’s experience, that wasn’t how they were treated. The one prejudice it had proved hardest to root out of a society was the one towards people whose social skills were limited. For his entire life, he’d felt boxed in by that prejudice. People always treated him differently from the moment they learned he was a roboteer. It didn’t matter that he was quite capable of operating in mainstream society. Their speech slowed down anyway. The volume increased. They assumed they knew better than him because his modifications were state-funded, while theirs were private. Franz was a perfect example.

  Finally, the building pinged him. ‘Commander Rees-Noyes is ready to see you.’

  Will’s stomach tightened as he stood and marched over to the lift. Thirty anxious seconds later, it deposited him at the commander’s office.

  The office was a huge, barren space that filled the top floor of the building. In one corner stood a lonely-looking desk with a work console and old-fashioned bookcase. At the other end brooded a conference table beneath which chairs were neatly tucked away. Between them lay a vast expanse of gold-patterned carpet.

  The only other items were the pair of soft brown armchairs out on the balcony. In one of them sat Robert Rees-Noyes – or Bob, as he liked the roboteers to call him. Bob was a huge bear of a man who always wore the same clothes: shorts and a pale-green T-shirt bearing a Fleet emblem. He smiled often and insisted on informality. Today, however, his smile was absent.

  ‘Come on in, Will. Take a seat,’ he said, standing as he gestured towards the remaining empty armchair.

  Will steeled himself and set off across the carpet ocean.

  Despite his casual demeanour, Bob was not a man to take lightly. Part military officer and part psychiatrist, Bob ran everything in the Fleet that concerned roboteers. His parents had modded him for empathy and recall, and Bob had built on those talents by acquiring an encyclopaedic knowledge of both neuroscience and the history of roboteering. Like most of Galatea’s middle class, he was brilliant.

  Will reached the balcony and shook Bob’s outstretched hand. He couldn’t help glancing sideways, though, over the edge. Bob had a fantastic view. The tiered gardens below looked like
paddy fields out of some Old World period-drama.

  ‘Sit, Will, sit,’ said Bob.

  Will let himself settle into the chair. It was absurdly comfortable. Someone, somewhere on Galatea, was a genius at chair design.

  Bob sat down opposite him and steepled his hands. ‘All right, let’s get down to business. From what I hear, you disobeyed your expert and tampered with a combat SAP during a live firefight. Is that true?’

  Will stiffened. ‘Yes, sir.’

  Bob waved one hand. ‘I don’t want to hear any sirs in here. This is between you and me, okay?’

  Will nodded reluctantly.

  ‘Suffice it to say,’ rumbled Bob, ‘Combat Expert Leung is pretty pissed off at you. He’s filed a complaint and has been grousing about it since he landed. He says he can’t work with you. Won’t work with you again, in fact. He says that if you had fears about the SAP, you should have raised them with him rather than attempting to fix the problem yourself.’

  Will frowned. When was he supposed to have done that? By the time he’d spotted the problem, they were in the middle of a battle.

  ‘Your captain isn’t much happier,’ Bob added. ‘Regulations force him to note that you disobeyed orders, but mostly he doesn’t want to have anything to do with you or the whole issue any more.’

  ‘I know it sounds bad,’ said Will. ‘But—’

  Bob held up a warning hand. ‘Let me finish. Then we’ll talk.’ He glanced down at his lap. ‘You see, the flip side of all this is that the model you filed with your memory log bears out your decision. You probably saved the lives of everyone aboard both the Phoenix and the Aslan, including Admiral Bryant. He’s seen your model, and he’s personally asked that the Fleet go easy on you.’

  Bob let the words hang there for a minute while Will took them in. The admiral had got involved! Will had no idea that word of his actions had spread so far. His spirits began to lift. Then Bob sighed.

  ‘Why did you sign up for the Fleet, Will?’ he asked gently.