“I don’t know, so maybe it didn’t break up.”
The little figure nodded. “Yes, that’s right.”
“What do you mean?”
“It didn’t break up. In fact, it came together.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it was never comglomerated, until the very last moment. That’s why none of the detection systems on Mercury saw it coming. They should have seen it, it had to come from somewhere, and yet it was not detected by the surveillance systems. So to me this indicates an MDL problem. Minimum detection limit. Because there is always a minimum limit of detection, either inherent to the detection method, or else artificially set higher than the actual minimum.”
“Why do that?”
“Usually to keep warnings from going off all the time when there isn’t really any danger.”
“Ah.”
“So, each system is different, but in the Mercurial defense apparatus, what they call the method reporting level is almost equivalent to the system’s method detection limit. In other words they set their reporting level at twice the detection level, which is six or seven times the standard deviation in their measurement variability. It’s a typical setting to make people comfortable they’ll generate both the fewest false negatives and the fewest false positives.
“So, but consider what then lies below that reporting level. Basically, only very little rocks—pebbles, well less than a kilogram each. But if there were a lot of them, and they converged only at the last second, with each one coming in from a different quadrant of the sky, and at a different speed, but timed such that they all arrived at the same spot, at the same time… Then they would just be little pebbles, until the last second. They could have been tossed from the far side of the solar system, maybe, and over a number of years, maybe. And yet even so, if thrown correctly, eventually they make their rendezvous. Many thousands of them, let us say.”
“So, a kind of smart mob.”
“But not even smart. Just rocks.”
“Could that work? I mean, could anything calculate how hard to throw them, and on what trajectory?”
“A qube could. With enough of the solar system’s masses identified as to locations and trajectory, and enough calculating power, it can be done. I asked Passepartout to do it—to calculate an orbit for something like a ball bearing or a boccino, thrown from the asteroid belt to hit a particular target on Mercury. It didn’t take long.”
“But could the throws be made? I mean, would it be possible to build a launcher that would launch them with the necessary precision?”
“Passepartout said there are machines in existence with tolerances two or three magnitudes more precise than would be necessary. One would only need a steady launch platform. The stabler the better, in creating consistency.”
“That’s quite a shot,” Swan said. “How many masses get included in the trajectory calculation?”
“I think Passepartout included the heaviest ten million objects in the solar system.”
“And we know where all those are?”
“Yes. Which is to say the AIs know where they are. And all the biggest terraria and spaceships conform to itineraries set years in advance. As for the calculations, it takes a qube to be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time, meaning fast enough to use it for real-time launch instructions.”
“How long does it take?”
“For a qube similar to Passepartout, three seconds. For conventional AIs, about a year per pebble, which of course would render the method inoperable. You have to have quantum computing to be able to do it.”
Swan was feeling sick to her stomach, as if she were back in the utilidor. “So ten thousand little rocks thrown downsystem, over a matter of months or years, with such directions and velocities that they all arrive at one spot at the same time.”
“Yes. And a few stochastic gravitational fluctuations no doubt cause a little bit of scatter at the end. Indeed when that happens, those pebbles must usually miss entirely.”
“But some just barely miss.”
“Exactly. Like these little pits we see. Caused perhaps by a spaceship that changed flight plans, or the like. So maybe one or two percent of the pebbles experience a clinamen of this sort, or so Passepartout guesses.”
Now the wrench in her gut was getting severe. “So someone is doing this on purpose.” She waved at the abandoned terrarium.
“That’s right. And also, a qube has to be involved.”
“Shit.” She put an arm across her stomach. “But how… how could someone…”
The inspector put a little hand to her arm. Ygassdril floated under them, cold and dead. A gray potato. “Let’s get back to the Justice.”
Back inside the Interplan hopper, after they had eaten a meal, Swan stayed up late in the galley, and again the inspector did too.
Swan, who had not been able to stop thinking about the day’s revelations, said, “So, all this means that whoever—”
Genette raised both hands and stopped her. “Qubes off again, please.”
After they had both turned off the devices, she continued: “That means whoever did this could have done it years ago.”
“Or at least quite some time ago, yes. Some stretch of time.”
“And there wasn’t a single launch site.”
“No. But maybe there is still the launch mechanism. Their gun, or catapult, or whatever it was, would have to be a very precise instrument. A particularly fine bit of manufacturing. The tolerances Passepartout suggested were really quite fine, requiring molecular printers and so forth. We might be able to find the factory that made something so particular—we’re looking into that. And then, who might have ordered it.”
“What else?” Swan asked.
“We are looking for the program for the factory, and the design of the instrument. Its printing instructions. Also the orbital program needed to make the calculations. Qubes don’t make that kind of thing up without being asked to do it—or so we have been assuming until now. The qube that did it would have that action recorded in it, as I understand it. And so the program is likely to still exist somewhere. And there are still only a finite number of factories making qubes.”
“Couldn’t they have destroyed their qube when they were done using it?”
“Yes. But there’s no reason to assume they’re done.”
This was a chilling thought.
“We must look for the qube, the orbit program, the factory program, also the factory, and the launcher itself, and whatever the launch platform was.”
Swan frowned. “All those could be destroyed, or cleaned pretty clean.”
“It’s true. You see the nature of the problem very quickly. Even so, this investigation has to turn into a check of the records, a kind of bookkeepers’ search. As our work so often becomes.” Another ironic smile: “It is not often as dramatic as is sometimes portrayed.”
“That’s fine. But while you’re doing that, what else can we do? What can I do?”
“You can look at the other end of the problem. And I will join you in that.”
“The other end?”
“The motive.”
“But how would you determine that? And having done so, how would you locate it? Doing something like this is so sick that it makes me sick to think about it. It’s evil.”
“Evil!”
“Yes, evil!”
Genette shrugged. “Putting that aside, let us presume anyway that it is rare impulse. And so it may leave signs.”
“That someone hates Terminator? That someone is capable of killing worlds?”
“Yes. It’s not a common impulse. It may therefore stick out. And besides, it may be a political act, a kind of terrorism or war. It may be meant to convey some message, or force some action. So we can follow it that way.”
Swan felt her stomach clenching. “Damn. I mean—there’s never been a, a war in space. We’ve managed without them.”
“Until now.”
That gave her pause.
For a generation at least there had been warnings from people all over the system that the conflicts between Earth and Mars could lead to war, or that Earth’s writhing problems were going to drag everyone down with them. Little wars and terrorist attacks and sabotages had never entirely disappeared on poor Earth, and Swan had sometimes thought that diplomats played on the notion that Earth’s discord might spread, in order to boost their own prestige, their own budgets. Diplomacy as necessary peacemaking in a system on the brink—it had been very convenient for them. But what if it turned out to be true?
She said, “I guess I thought spacers knew enough to avoid all that. That once we got out here we would do better. Be better.”
“Don’t be a fool,” the inspector said crisply.
Swan gritted her teeth. After an intense struggle for self-control she said, “But it could be some psychopath. Someone who has lost their mind and is killing just because they can.”
“There are those too,” Genette agreed. “And if one of them got hold of a qube—”
“But anyone can get a qube!”
“Not at all. Not even everyone in space. They are tracked from the factories, and in theory are all located moment to moment. And whichever one was involved would have to be programmed for this, as I said. It would show in its own records what it had done.”
“Aren’t there unaffiliateds that are making qubes?”
“Well—maybe. Probably.”
“So how do we find it, or this person?”
“Or this group?”
“Yes, or nation, or world!”
Genette shrugged. “I want to talk to Wang again, because his qube is really powerful, and he also has the biggest data banks on the unaffiliateds. And also because it’s possible he was attacked by this same entity. But I admit I’m a little afraid to talk to his qube, because we’re seeing so many signs of qubes acting oddly. As if they have volition now, or in any case are being asked to do things unlike anything they’ve done before. Some qubes that we’ve been monitoring are now exchanging messages in an unprecedented way.”
“You mean they’re entangled with each other?”
“No. That seems to be truly impossible, because of decoherence issues. They use radio communication like anyone else, but the messages are encrypted internally at each end, using superposition as they do. So they are truly encrypted, even when we use our own qubes to try and break the codes. This is the reason why I want to keep these discussions out of the earshot of any and all qubes, for the time being. I don’t know which ones to trust.”
Swan nodded. “You’re like Alex in that.”
“That’s right. I used to talk to her about this, and we had the same opinion about this problem. I taught her some procedures to use. So, now I have to think about how to go forward here, and how I can best communicate with Wang and his superqube. Possibly the explanation for all this is even now stored in it, unrecognized because it hasn’t been asked to look for it. Because despite all the talk you hear of balkanization, we are still recording the history of the world down to the level of every person and qube. So to find this agent, we only need to read out the history of the solar system for the last several years, and it should be there.”
“Except for the unaffiliateds,” Swan pointed out.
“Well, yes, but Wang has most of them too.”
“But you don’t want his recording system to know you’re asking,” Swan said. “In case it’s the one doing all this.”
“Exactly.”
Swan never quite stopped feeling sick after that. Someone had meant to kill her city—and yet had missed hitting it directly, thus sparing its citizens, all but the ones who had died in the panic of the evacuation and that poor concert group, killed by the impact.
Was that right? She didn’t know what to make of that—that the impact had missed Terminator itself.
She ended up talking to Pauline about it. She had an idea that she wanted to check, and Pauline was the best way to do it. There she was, after all, her voice in Swan’s ear, and always hearing everything Swan said aloud. There was no way she wasn’t going to find out all about this, eventually.
So: “Pauline, do you know what Inspector Genette and I were talking about when I turned you off?”
“No.”
“Can you guess?”
“You might have been talking about the incident at Ygassdril, which you had just seen. This incident resembles the incident at Terminator in some features. If these were deliberate attacks, then whoever initiated them might have used a quantum computer to help them plot trajectories. If Inspector Jean Genette believed that quantum computers were involved, then the inspector might not want any quantum computers to hear details of the investigation. This would be similar to Alex’s efforts to keep some of her deliberations completely unwitnessed and unrecorded by any AIs, quantum or digital. The assumption seems to be that if quantum computers are in encrypted radio communication with each other, then they may be plotting activities detrimental to people.”
Just as she suspected: Pauline could deduce these things. No doubt many other qubes could too, including Genette’s own Passepartout, programmed in forensics and detection as it certainly must be. If-then, if-then, how many trillion times a second? It might resemble their chess-playing programs, which had proved themselves to be superhumanly good at that particular game. So it was a little bit futile to turn them off only for certain conversations.
Which meant that it was all right for her to say “Pauline, if someone had calculated the trajectory of an impactor to hit Terminator smack on and destroy it, but they forgot to include the relativistic precession of Mercury in their calculation and only used the classical calculus of orbital mechanics, how far would they miss by? Assume the impactor was launched from the asteroid belt a year earlier. Try a few different launch points and trajectory courses and times, both with and without the relativity equations for the precession.”
Pauline said, “The precession of Mercury is 5603.24 arc seconds per Julian century, but the portion of that caused by the curvature of space-time as described by general relativity is 42.98 arc seconds per century. Any trajectory a year in duration, plotted without that factored in, would therefore miss by 13.39 kilometers.”
“Which is about what happened,” Swan said, feeling sick again.
Pauline said, “Being a precession, the miss should have been to the east of the city, not the west.”
“Oh,” Swan said. “Well, then…” She didn’t know what to make of it.
Pauline said, “Ordinary orbital mechanics programs for inner planet transport routes routinely include general relativity as a matter of course. It is not necessary to remember to add the relativity equations. If, however, someone who did not know that tried to program a trajectory for an impact without using open-source templates, then they might have added the relativity equations to a situation where they were already being used. And thus, if targeting the city directly, they would create an error of 13.39 kilometers to the west.”
“Ah,” Swan said, feeling sicker than ever. She looked for a place to sit down. Terminator was one thing, its people something else: her family, her community…. That there could be someone capable of killing them all… “So… But that sounds like a human error.”
“Yes.”
That evening, late in the galley, she found herself again alone with the inspector, who again was sitting on the table in front of her, eating grapes. Swan said, “Since you told me about the pebble mob, I’ve been thinking that it was probably aimed directly at Terminator, but that somebody made a mistake. If they didn’t know that the relativity equations for the precession of Mercury were already part of the standard algorithms, and added the operation, they would end up hitting just the distance to the west that they did.”
“Interesting,” Genette said, looking at her closely. “A programming error, in other words. I’ve been assuming that it was a deliberate miss—a warning shot, so to speak. I’ll have to think about th
at.” After a moment: “You must have asked your Pauline about this?”
“I did. She already had deduced the general topics of what she missed when I turned her off. I’m sure your Passepartout is the same.”
Genette frowned, unable to deny it.
Swan said, “I can’t believe anyone would try to kill so many people. And actually do it, too, in the Yggdrasil. When so much space is available… so much everything, really. I mean, we’re in what people call post-scarcity. So I don’t get it. You talk about motive, but in a physiological sense, there isn’t a motive for stuff like this. I suppose that means that evil really does exist. I thought it was just an old religious term, but I guess I was wrong. It’s making me sick.”
The inspector’s attractive little face creased in a slight smile. “Sometimes I think it’s only in post-scarcity that evil exists. Before that, it could always be put down to want or fear. It was possible to believe, as apparently you did, that when fear and want went away, bad deeds would too. Humanity would be revealed as some kind of bonobo, an altruistic cooperator, a lover of all.”
“Exactly!” Swan cried. “Why not!”
Genette shrugged with a Gallic weariness. “Maybe fear and want never went away. We are more than food and drink and shelter. It seems like those should be the crucial determinants, but many a well-fed citizen is filled with rage and fear. They feel painted hunger, as the Japanese call it. Painted fear, painted suffering. The rage of the servile will. Will is a matter of free choice, but servitude is lack of freedom. So the servile will feels defiled, feels guilt, expresses that as an assault on something external. And so something evil happens.” Another shrug. “However you explain it, people do bad things. Believe me.”
“I guess I have to.”
“Please do.” Now the inspector was not smiling. “I will not burden you with some of the things I’ve seen. I’ve had to wonder at them, like you are now. The concept of the servile will has helped me. And lately, I’ve been wondering if every qube is not by definition some kind of a servile will.”
“But this programming error that might explain the impact hitting west of town—that’s a human error.”
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