Contents
Dedication
Notices
Prolog
Trent the Uncatchable and the Temple of ’Toons
1
2
3
4
Interlude: The Crystal Wind
5
The Big Boost
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
About the Book
The A.I. War
A Tale of the Continuing Time
Book One: The Big Boost
Daniel Keys Moran
Dedication
This is for my mother, and for everyone who waited.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Angel Greenwood, for her friendship and her talent; to Steve Perry and Victor Vescovo, for encouragement; to Matt Stover, for making me jealous; and to Amy, for everything.
Notices
“The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost” is copyright © 2011 by Daniel Keys Moran.
The cover painting is copyright © 2011 by Angelina Greenwood.
The right of Daniel Keys Moran to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. None of the characters in it are real people and any resemblance to anybody, living or dead, is a coincidence.
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The A.I. War
A Tale of the Continuing Time
Book One: The Big Boost
“Players” – the child, the actor, and the gambler. The idea of chance is absent from the world of the child and the primitive. The gambler also feels in service of an alien power. Chance is a survival of religion in the modern city ...
– Jim Morrison
Players only love you when they’re playing
– Fleetwood Mac, Dreams
Prolog
THESE ARE THE things you should know:
On July 3, 2062, the United Nations Peace Keeping Force, under the command of PKF Elite Mohammed Vance, used tactical thermonuclear weapons to destroy a group of genetically engineered telepaths living at the Chandler Complex in lower Manhattan.
There are two survivors from that disaster, two children who were raised together and grew to love one another: Denice Castanaveras, a telepath; and Trent the Uncatchable, the greatest Player of his time.
On January 4, 2070, Trent, fleeing from the PKF, stole the LINK – the Lunar Information Network Key – from under the noses of Elite Commissioner Mohammed Vance, and a young Elite candidate named Melissa du Bois. It returned the Lunar InfoNet from the PKF DataWatch’s control to the control of those who used it; and it made Trent the Uncatchable a legend –
– a man who had, before the eyes of his enemies, walked through a wall.
On July 4, 2076, the TriCentennial of the American Revolution, Occupied America rose in rebellion against the Unification of Earth. In the course of that rebellion, rebels killed three hundred and forty-seven of the deadly French PKF Elite; killed a hundred and ninety thousand regular PKF troops, of all nationalities, including Americans –
The PKF, under the command of Mohammed Vance, killed two million Americans. The rebellion failed: Occupied America remained occupied.
Mohammed Vance became the Elite Commander; after Secretary General Eddore, the second most powerful individual in the System.
Three and a half years have passed....
Trent the Uncatchable and the Temple of ’Toons
2080 Gregorian
Ahimsa, infinite love, is a weapon of matchless potency ... It is an attribute of the brave, in fact it is their all. It does not come within the reach of the coward. It is no wooden or lifeless dogma but a living and lifegiving force.
– Mohandas K. Gandhi, 1924 Gregorian
Remember you don’t really own anything you can’t carry at a dead run.
– Unknown
1
THE ASSASSIN IN the rented p-suit, floating next to the holo of a crucified Porky Pig, said, “Are you Trent?”
Trent said, “No.”
Through the faceplate of the assassin’s p-suit, Trent could see the man shake his head. “Too bad.” He brought forward the gun he had been trying to hide behind his back.
Trent said, “I wouldn’t do that.”
Behind the assassin, Porky Pig’s beatified holographic image radiated love and compassion. The assassin said, “I’m sorry about this.”
He aimed carefully and fired twice.
The bullets left the barrel of the gun at 850 meters per second and struck Trent square in the chest. Trent’s camouflage scalesuit went rigid all over under the impact; the shots knocked him from his feet, sent him tumbling backward twenty meters through the vacuum, across the rocky surface of the asteroid, through the Roadrunner exhibit –
“Beep! Beep beep!” The Roadrunner zipped out of the way; the Coyote came alive and chased Trent through their display, missed him of course, fingers clutching after Trent’s toes as Trent’s scalesuited body left the Roadrunner exhibit and tumbled on into the Ren and Stimpy exhibit, fetching up against the backdrop. Ren came alive and screamed “You iiiidiot!” as Trent broke the laser beam that informed the holo of the presence of an audience. “Look what you’ve done!”
HIS LUNGS WERE empty and his chest ached as though it had been struck by a sledgehammer. Trent sipped air in shallow gasps, waiting for the pain to go away, waiting until he could breathe again. He stared up at the stars through his helmet’s faceplate; the stars stared back down at him, cool and distant and indifferent to one genie’s brush with death.
Off somewhere to his left, Sol shone, a light so bright his faceplate blacked it out.
He thought distantly, Downsider.
“...the Big Sleep, you stupid, bloated fool ...”
After over ten years in space, Trent no longer considered himself a downsider. It was a mistake no one not fresh from Earth would have made. No SpaceFarer, no loonie, Halfer, or Belter ... nobody but a downsider fresh from Earth would have tried to shoot him with an impact weapon while standing on the surface of a one kilometer long asteroid that had no gravity to speak of.
&n
bsp; With his right hand, Trent reached over and tapped the radio bar on his left wrist.
“– means Death! Death you imbe –” The shrieking Chihuahua’s voice ceased in mid-word.
After most of a minute had passed, an extra-large form in a custom scalesuit, much like Trent’s own, appeared and floated over Trent.
Over their secure suit channel, Trent’s “bodyguard” – Andrew Strawberry, a Reverend of the Temples of Eris, former World Football League star – said, “What are you doing down there?”
Fighting for breath, Trent answered through his inskin, had the inskin transmit the message to his suit radio, which turned it into speech for Reverend Andy. I GOT SHOT.
Reverend Andy did something that might have looked vaguely amusing to a downsider fresh from Earth; he held his hands out at right angles to his body, briefly mirroring the crucified holograph of Porky Pig, ten meters behind him. The maneuvering rockets at his wrists came alive, two strong blasts; he did a slow pirouette, three hundred and sixty degrees. “I don’t see him.”
“People don’t ... listen,” said Trent, gasping for breath. “Nobody ever listens.”
Reverend Andy completed his revolution, came to a nearly perfect stop with another blast of his wrist rockets. “Too true,” Reverend Andy agreed. “It’s the problem of our times. What did you do with him?”
The gravity at the asteroid’s surface was effectively non-existent; moving slowly, Trent came to his feet, ignoring the stab of pain in his ribs when he straightened out. Silently, the bad-tempered Chihuahua continued to chew both of them out.
“Nothing. He used an impact weapon.” Trent pointed out toward the stars. “Unless he’s a lot better with his wrist rockets than I think he is, he’s out there. Heading for Mars at about ten meters per second.”
Reverend Andy’s head swiveled to look, as though he thought he could make out the man’s pressure suit against the background of black space, stars, and the occasional distant glint of burning rockets. “Really.”
Trent winced at the jabbing pain. “Man, I tried to tell him.”
THE TEMPLE OF ’Toons Asteroid is large by Belt standards, a roughly oval rock nearly a kilometer in length along its long axis. Back in 2053 braking rockets had matched its orbit to that of the Belt CityState of Gandhi, at Ceres. It trails Ceres in its dance around the sun, only five kilometers distant: in 2080, twenty-seven years after opening for business, it is one of the oldest and busiest tourist attractions in the Belt.
The Museum of Animated Art which is located there was not always a Belt institution. It had been founded over eighty years previously, in Culver City, California, by the great Swami Dave Leary, a Hare Krishna whose teachings had, so legend said, helped inspire the Prophet Harry to give up waiting tables and become a holy man. In his great old age Swami Dave had moved the Krishna temple from Watseka Avenue in Culver City to the new settlement at Ceres asteroid. It had been only natural for Swami Dave to take the museum with him.
By 2080 the museum has grown far beyond its original boundaries. Sections of the asteroid’s surface have been turned over to holofields that recreate, life-size, the greatest art of the twentieth century.
Complete with copyright notices.
REVEREND ANDY RADIOED in; a sled carrying a pair of Security Services bodyguards, employed by the museum, came out to pick them up.
As the sled was lifting from the downlot where the museum’s curator kept her office, a pair of sleds cycled through the SpaceFarers’ Collective craft Vatsayama’s cargo lock. The Vatsayama was docked at an asteroid 180 klicks away from Ceres, after delivering supplies to the small Buddhist retreat there; its sleds tumbled once to get pointed in the correct direction and then blasted out along the vector Trent had given them.
They found the assassin hopelessly lost, just a short few degrees off the vector Trent had guessed, tumbling around his own axis so quickly he’d grown dizzy and vomited in his helmet, so dispirited that he did not even try to shoot at the SpaceFarers when they dropped a snakechain on him and towed him back to the Vatsayama.
TRENT COULDN’T GET out of his suit with his ribs cracked; they disassembled his scalesuit in sections to get it off him.
“Let’s play Good Cop/Bad Cop,” said Reverend Andy.
Sid Bittan, Captain of the Vatsayama, had met them at the airlock; she stood in the hatch to the infirmary after Trent’s scalesuit had been removed, a slim, attractive woman with white hair cut down to fuzz, and watched a medbot tape Trent’s ribs. “I’d space the bastard.”
“That’s not fair,” Trent objected. “I always end up playing the Good Cop. It’s boring.”
Reverend Andy snorted. “They wouldn’t let Gandhi play the Bad Cop either, okay? It’s not my fault you keep telling people violence is sinful. And they keep listening to you,” he added pointedly.
“Let’s play Bad Cop/Anti-Christ,” Trent suggested.
Reverend Andy grinned at him. “Okay. I love playing the Anti-Christ.”
“I’d space him,” Captain Bittan repeated.
STANDING IN THE Vatsayama’s brig a meter away from the assassin, wearing magslips over his bare feet, with his pressure suit removed and his broken ribs taped, Trent said, “So what’s your name?”
The assassin, sitting on the cot in the Vatsayama’s brig, stared mutely ahead. He looked American Indian; no beard, and long black hair tied in a ponytail. He was only a few centimeters shorter than Trent, Trent guessed, 190 centimeters or so – tall for a downsider – and roughly Trent’s age, too, that indeterminate period between twenty-five and first regeneration. He had been taken out of his suit and had his hands snaked behind his back. Aside from that the SpaceFarers hadn’t touched him. Vomit smeared his chin and chest and the smell of it overwhelmed the small brig.
Trent said, “You broke my ribs, you know that?”
The assassin flashed an abrupt exhausted grin. “I was trying to kill you. I’d say you got off light.”
“Do you know how many times this has happened to me?” Trent demanded. “Murderers breaking my ribs? Three. Counting this one, I mean, only two if you don’t count this one.”
“I guess you’re counting it,” said the assassin.
“You bet I am,” Trent said darkly. “The only thing you get points for is that we’re in the Belt.”
The assassin looked at Reverend Andy, floating in the brig doorway just behind Trent, and said, “Does he always talk like this?”
“He means,” Reverend Andy explained, “that if you had broken his ribs under gravity they would be hurting more right now, and then he would be angrier at you.” He looked at Trent. “But the second time you got your ribs broken was escaping from Luna, right? It was the mass driver that broke them. Not a murderer at all.”
“No,” Trent corrected him, “it was Mohammed Vance. He pumped about twenty rounds out of an autoshot at me right before the mass driver shot me off Luna. So the first time it was Melissa du Bois kicking me when I wasn’t looking, and then it was Mohammed Vance shooting me while I watched him.”
“Oh.”
“And now this guy,” Trent said. He turned back to the assassin. “The third rib-breaking murderer,” he concluded. “So what’s your name, anyway?”
“Chuck,” the man said after a pause.
“Chuck what?”
“Smith.”
“Right.”
“Wait,” the assassin said, “no, wait, wait, Jones.”
Trent laughed out loud. “Oh, come on.”
Reverend Andy said, “What? What?”
Trent was still grinning at the assassin. “Chuck Jones was an animator. From the Golden Age. Did a lot of the great Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons.”
The assassin’s expression changed slightly. “Don’t forget Duck Dodgers in the 24-½th Century.”
Trent said, “Man, I hate tourists. Let me see if I have this right; you came out here to visit the museum, watch a couple of Bugs flicks, saw me and decided I was Trent and figured what the hell
, let’s pop him. How are we on the broad outline?”
Silence.
Reverend Andy said, “Let me hit him a few times. Maybe cut off a few fingers. Or all of them.”
The man’s eyes widened.
“You’ll get vomit on your hands if you hit him,” said Trent.
“OK,” Reverend Andy agreed, “let’s just go right to chopping off his fingers.”
“Chuck Clearmountain,” the man said abruptly.
Trent expected that Captain Bittan was monitoring the brig; in the event that she wasn’t, Trent said through his inskin, CAPTAIN BITTAN: ASSASSIN IDENTIFIES HIMSELF AS CHUCK CLEARMOUNTAIN. TOURIST FROM EARTH. TRACK HIM DOWN WITH BELT INTOURIST, PLEASE. To Chuck Clearmountain he said, “That was too easy; you have a very low Threshold of Fear. Bad trait in an assassin. Any reason in particular we shouldn’t space you?”
Clearmountain just looked at Trent. “You wouldn’t.”
“Don’t believe everything you audit,” said Trent mildly. “All a virtuous reputation means is nobody’s caught you at anything yet. As if I didn’t know already, just why did you try to kill me?”
The man flushed and looked down at the deck. “Oh, Harry ... it was just –” He looked back up at Trent, said pleadingly, “Ten million Credits, dead or alive. You’re Number One on the bounty listings.”
“Number One with a bullet,” Trent muttered.
The words tumbled out of Clearmountain. “Do you know what that kind of Credit means? I could get full Medical for my parents, for my grandparents, I could make sure my kids and their kids never had to worry about ending up in Public Labor, I could afford the third child license –”
“You’re going to make me cry,” said Reverend Andy. “Goddamn blood money – ’scuse me. Damn blood money.” Sometimes Reverend Andy forgot that he was a Reverend and reverted to football player swearing. He looked over at Trent. “I say we let him suck death pressure.”
The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time) Page 1
