Antony Allen spent most of the orbit throwing up into paper bags.
At last the shuttle leapt up into deeper space, silent and smooth, and Earth folded over on itself.
“Tempest 43, Tempest 43, this is UN Space Agency Shuttle C57-D. You ought to be picking up our handshaking request.”
A smooth, boyish voice filled the cabin. “C57-D, your systems have interfaced with ours. Physical docking will follow shortly.”
“I’m Dr. Antony Allen. I work on the UN’s Climatic Technology Legacy Oversight Panel. With me is Professor Frederica Gonzales of the University of Southampton, England, Europe. Our visit was arranged through—”
“You are recognized, Dr. Allen.”
“Who am I speaking to? Are you the station’s AI?”
“A subsystem. Engineering. Please call me Cal.”
Allen and Freddie exchanged glances.
Allen growled, “I never spoke to an AI with a personal name.”
Freddie said, a bit nervous, “You have to expect such things in a place like this. The creation of sentient beings to run plumbing systems was one of the greatest crimes perpetrated during the Heroic Solution, especially by AxysCorp. This modern shuttle, for instance, won’t have a consciousness any more advanced than an ant’s.”
That was the party line. Actually Freddie was obscurely thrilled to be in the presence of such exotic old illegality. Thrilled, and apprehensive.
Allen called, “So are you the subsystem responsible for the hurricane deflection technology?”
“No, sir. That’s in the hands of another software suite.”
“And what’s that called?”
“He is Aeolus.”
Allen barked laughter.
Now a fresh voice came on the line, a brusque male voice with the crack of age. “That you, Allen?”
Freddie was startled. This voice sounded authentically human. She’d just assumed the station was unmanned.
“Glad to hear you’re well, Mr. Fortune.”
“Well as can be expected. I knew your grandfather, you know.”
“Yes, sir, I know that.”
“He was in the UN too. As pious and pompous as they come. And now you’re a bureaucrat. Runs in the genes, eh, Allen?”
“If you say so, Mr. Fortune.”
“Call me Fortune…”
Fortune’s voice was robust British, Freddie thought. North of England, maybe. She said to Allen, “A human presence, on this station?”
“Not something the UN shouts about.”
“But save for resupply and refurbishment missions, the Tempest stations have had no human visitors for a century. So this Fortune has been alone up here all that time?” And how, she wondered, was Fortune still alive at all?
Allen shrugged. “For Wilson Fortune, it wasn’t a voluntary assignment.”
“Then what? A sentence? And your grandfather was responsible?”
“He was involved in the summary judgement, yes. He wasn’t responsible.”
Freddie thought she understood the secrecy. Nobody liked to look too closely at the vast old machines that ran the world. Leave the blame with AxysCorp, safely in the past. Leave relics like this Wilson Fortune to rot. “No wonder you need a historian,” she said.
Fortune called now, “Well, I’m looking forward to a little company. You’ll be made welcome here, by me and Bella.”
Now it was Allen’s turn to be shocked. “By the dieback, who is Bella?”
“Call her an adopted daughter. You’ll see. Get yourself docked. And don’t mess up my paintwork with your attitude rockets.”
The link went dead.
Shuttle and station interfaced surprisingly smoothly, considering they were technological products separated by a century. There was no mucking about with airlocks, no floating around in zero gravity. Their cabin was propelled smoothly out of the shuttle and into the body of the station, and then it was transported out to a module on an extended strut, where rotation provided artificial gravity.
The cabin door opened, to reveal Wilson Fortune and his “adopted daughter,” Bella.
Allen stood up. “We’ve got a lot to talk about, Fortune.”
“That we do. Christ, though, Allen, you’re the spit of your grandfather. He was plug-ugly too.” His archaic blasphemy faintly shocked Freddie.
Fortune was tall, perhaps as much as two full meters, and stick thin. He wore a functional coverall; made of some self-repairing orange cloth, it might have been as old as he was. And his hair was sky blue, his teeth metallic, his skin smooth and young-looking, though within the soft young flesh he had the rheumy eyes of an old man. Freddie could immediately see the nature of his crime. He was augmented, probably gen-enged too. No wonder he had lived so long; no wonder he had been sentenced to exile up here.
The girl looked no more than twenty. Ten years younger than Freddie, then. Pretty, wide-eyed, her dark hair shoulder-length, she wore a cut-down coverall that had been accessorized with patches and brooches that looked as if they had been improvised from bits of circuitry.
She stared at Allen. And when she saw Freddie, she laughed.
“You’ll have to forgive my daughter,” Fortune said. His voice was gravelly and, like his eyes, older than his face. “We don’t get too many visitors.”
“I’ve never seen a woman before,” Bella said bluntly. “Not in the flesh. I like the way you do your hair. Cal, fix it for me, would you?”
“Of course, Bella.”
That shoulder-length hair broke up into a cloud of cubical particles, obscuring her face. When the cloud cleared, her hair was cropped short, a copy of Freddie’s.
“I knew it,” Allen said. He aimed a slap at Bella’s shoulder. His fingers passed through her flesh, scattering bits of light. Bella squealed and flinched back. “She’s a virtual,” Allen said.
Fortune snapped back, “She’s as sentient as you are, you asshole. Fully conscious. And consistency violations like that hurt. You really are like your grandfather, aren’t you?”
“She’s illegal, Fortune.”
“Well, that makes two of us.”
Two suitcases rolled out of the shuttle cabin, luggage for Freddie and Allen.
Allen said, “We’re here to work, Fortune, not to rake up the dead past.”
“Be my guest.” Fortune turned and stalked away, down a metal-plated corridor. Bella walked after him, looking hurt and confused. Her feet convincingly touched the floor.
Freddie and Allen followed less certainly, into the metal heart of the station.
To Freddie, the station had the feel of all the AxysCorp geoengineering facilities she’d visited before. Big, bold, functional, every surface flat, every line dead straight. The corporation’s logo was even stamped into the metal walls, and there was a constant whine of air conditioning, a breeze tasting of rust. You could never escape the feeling that you were in the bowels of a vast machine. But the station showed its age, with storage-unit handles polished smooth with use, touch panels rubbed and scratched, and the fabric of chairs and couches worn through and patched with duct tape.
Fortune led them to cabins, tiny metal-walled boxes that looked as if they’d never been used. A century old, bare and clean, they had an air of staleness.
“I don’t think I’ll sleep well here,” Freddie said.
“Don’t fret about it,” Allen said. “I’m planning to be off this hulk as soon as possible.”
They left their luggage here, and Fortune led them on to the bridge, the station’s control center. It was just a cubical box with blank gray walls, centered on a stubby plinth like a small stage.
Fortune watched Freddie’s reaction. “This was the fashion a century ago. Glass-walled design, every instrument virtual, all voice controlled.”
“Humans are tool-wielding creatures,” Freddie said. “We think with our hands as well as our brains. We prefer to have switches and levers to pull, wheels to turn.”
“How wise you new generations are,” Fortune said sourly
.
Bella, with her copycat hairdo, was still fascinated by Freddie. “I wish you’d tell me more about Earth,” she said. “I’ve never been there.”
“Oh, it’s a brave new world down there, child,” Fortune said.
“In what sense,” Freddie asked, “is Bella your child?”
Allen waved that away. “Bella is an irrelevance. So are you, Fortune,” he said sternly. “We’re here to find out why Tempest 43 failed to deflect the Florida hurricane. I suggest we get on with it.”
Fortune nodded. “Very well. Cal? Bring up a station schematic, would you?”
A virtual model of Tempest 43 coalesced over the central plinth. Freddie had been briefed to some extent, and she recognized the station’s main features. The habitable compartments were modules held on long arms away from a fat central axis. A forest of solar panels, manipulator arms, and docking ports coated the main axis, and at its base big antenna-like structures clustered. The representation was exquisitely detailed and, caught in the light of an off-stage sun, quite beautiful.
Fortune said, “This is a real time image, returned from drone subsats. Look, you can see the wear and tear.” The habitable compartments were covered with white insulating blankets that were pocked with meteor scars, and the solar panels looked patchy, as if repeatedly repaired. An immense AxysCorp logo on the main central body, unrefurbished for a century, was faded by sunlight. “Do you understand what you’re seeing? The purpose of Tempest 43 is to break up or at least deflect Atlantic hurricanes. Maybe you know that during the twenty-first century global warming pulse, a whole plague of hurricanes battered the eastern states of the old USA, as well as Caribbean and South American countries, all year round. Excess heat energy pumped into the oceans, you see.”
“And Tempest 43 is here to fix that,” Allen said.
“Hurricanes are fueled by ocean heat.” Fortune pointed to the antenna farm at the base of the station’s main axis. “So we meddle. We beam microwave energy into sea water. We can’t draw out the heat that’s pumping up the hurricane, but with carefully placed injections we can mess with its distribution. Give it multiple foci, for instance. We manage to disperse most hurricanes even before they’ve formed.”
“Where do you get your power from? Not from these spindly solar cell arrays.”
“We have a massive fission reactor up here.” He pointed at the top of the central axis. “One reason the habitable compartments are so far away from the axis. Enough plutonium to last centuries. I know what you’re thinking. This is a dirty solution. They were dirty times. You people are so pious. You kick AxysCorp now, and all the rest of the Heroic Solution. But you accept the shelter of the machinery, don’t you?”
“Actually,” Freddie said, trying to be more analytical, “this station is a typical AxysCorp solution to the problems of that age. It’s a chunk of gigantic engineering, and it’s run by absurdly oversophisticated AIs. But it’s robust. It worked.”
“It did work, until now,” Allen said darkly.
“You needn’t try to pin the Florida hurricane on me,” Fortune said. “The AI runs the show. I’m only a fail-safe. I’m not even in the nominal design. The station should have been unmanned save for non-permanent service crews.”
“You keep saying ‘AI,’” Freddie said. “Singular. But we spoke to one during our approach, and heard of another.”
“Cal and Aeolus,” Fortune said. “It’s a little complicated. The Tempest 43 AI is an advanced design. Experimental, even for AxysCorp…”
The station’s artificial mind was lodged in vast processor banks somewhere in the central axis. Its body was the station itself; it felt the pain of malfunctions, the joy of a pulsing fission-reactor heart, the exhilaration of showering its healing micro waves over the Atlantic.
And, alone, it was never alone.
“It’s a single AI. But it has two poles of consciousness,” Fortune said. “Not just one, like yours and mine. Like two personalities in one head, sharing one body.”
Allen said, “You’re telling me that AxysCorp deliberately designed a schizophrenic AI.”
“Not schizoid,” Fortune said, strained. “What a withered imagination you have, Allen. Just like grandpop. It’s just that when building this station, AxysCorp took the opportunity to study novel kinds of cognitive architecture. After all there are some who say our minds are bicameral too, spread unevenly over the two halves of our brains.”
“What bullshit,” Allen murmured.
Fortune said, “The two poles were labeled A and C. Nothing if not functional, the AxysCorp designers. I gave them names. Aeolus and Cal. Call it whimsy.”
A and C, Freddie thought. It was an odd labeling, with a gap. What happened to B?
Allen said, “I understand why ‘Aeolus’ for your functional software suite, your weather controller. Aeolus was a Greek god of the winds. But why Cal?”
“An in-joke,” Fortune said. “Does nobody read science fiction these days?”
Allen said, “Science what-now?”
Historian Freddie knew what he meant. “Old-fashioned fictions of the future. Forgotten now. We live in an age of aftermath, Fortune. Everything important that shapes our lives happened in the past, not the future. It’s not a time for expansive fiction.”
“Yeah, well, there’s this old classic I always loved, with a pesky AI. Would have fitted better if the ‘C’ had been an ‘H.’ Cal’s a dull thing, though. Just a stationkeeper.”
“So where’s Aeolus?” Allen lifted his head. “Are you there?”
“Yes, Dr. Allen. I am Aeolus.”
It was another synthesized male voice, but lighter in tone than Cal’s—lacking character, Freddie thought.
Allen said, “Let me get this straight. Cal is the station’s subsystems. Housekeeping, power, all of that. Aeolus is the executive function suite. You fix the hurricanes.”
“Actually, sir, there’s some overlap,” Cal put in. “The bipolar design is complex. But, yes, essentially that’s true.”
“So what are you doing, Aeolus?”
“I am enthusiastically fulfilling all program objectives.”
“But you let one through, didn’t you? People died because of you. And a historic monument was wrecked, at Canaveral.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“I’m from Oversight. I’m here to find out what happened here and to decide what to do about it. So what do you have to say?” Allen waited, but Aeolus offered no further explanation. “What a mess this is,” Allen said to Freddie.
“Actually, this is again typical of AxysCorp,” Freddie said. “Given immense budgets, huge technical facilities, virtually unlimited power, and negligible scrutiny, AxysCorp technicians often took the opportunity to experiment. Of course a willingness to meddle was necessary for them to be able to proceed with Heroic-Solution geoengineering projects in the first place.”
“They used the climate disaster as the cover for crimes,” Allen said. “The purposeless crippling of sentiences, for example. We have to acknowledge their achievements. But it’s as if the world has been saved by Nazi doctors.”
“Humans are flawed creatures,” Fortune said. “Most of them are bumbling mediocrities. Like your grandfather, Allen, whose solution to the world’s ills was to exile me up here. To tackle monstrous problems, you need monsters.”
“Well, the hell with it.” Allen was growing impatient. “I need to study your bipolar AI. I’ve some gear in my luggage. Freddie, this will be technical. Why don’t you take a walk around the station?”
Bella said eagerly, “Oh, let’s. I’ll show you.”
“And you,” Allen said to Fortune, “show me back to my cabin. Please.”
With bad grace, Fortune stomped off.
Bella gave Freddie a tour of the habitable module and its facilities: cabins, mostly unused, galleys, washrooms, a virtual recreation room. Everything was drab, utilitarian, and old.
Bella told Freddie a little about herself. “My protocols are qui
te strict.” She tried to push her hand into the wall. Sparks scattered from her palm, and Bella screwed up her face in pain. “I can’t go flying around in vacuum either. I have to eat and drink. I even have to use the bathroom! It’s all virtual, of course. But Fortune says he designed my life to be as authentically human as possible.”
Freddie said carefully, “But why did he create you at all?”
“I give him company,” Bella said.
Freddie, an academic who was careful with words, noted that she hadn’t explicitly confirmed that Fortune had “created” her, as the AxysCorp engineers had created Cal and Aeolus, any more than Fortune had admitted it himself.
They soon tired of the steely corridors, and Bella led the way to an observation blister. This was a bubble of toughened transparent plastic stuck to the bottom of the module’s hull. Sitting on a couch, they looked down on the Earth, a bowl of light larger than the full Moon. Freddie was thrilled to see the white gleam of Antarctic ice. But the fragmented remnant cap on that green-fringed continent was the only ice visible on the whole planet; there was none left on the tropical mountains, Greenland was bare, and at the north pole was only an ocean topped by a lacy swirl of cloud.
Bella’s thin, pretty face was convincingly painted by Earthlight. “Of course, we’re suspended permanently over the middle of the Atlantic. But you can see day and night come and go. And if I ever want to see the far side, I can always call for a virtual view.”
She had no real conversation, under the surface. She was an empty vessel, Freddie thought. Beautifully made but unused, purposeless. But then the only company she had ever had was the reclusive Fortune—and perhaps the station’s artificial minds, Cal and Aeolus. “I’m no expert. But I can see that this environment doesn’t offer enough stimulation to you as a sentience. You’ve a right to more than this.”
Bella seemed moved to defend herself, or perhaps Fortune. “Oh, there are things to see,” she said. “It’s a marvel when Earth goes dark with night, and you can see the stars. And you can see AxysCorp facilities, studded all over the sky. Sometimes you can even make out the big Chinese space shields. The Heroics, Fortune’s generation, saved the world. You can see it in the sky.”
Year’s Best SF 15 Page 46
