Shoshanna crawled ashore, trailing skeins of pond-weed. “Who said I have anything to do with the ISA?”
Send.
She stomped, relishing the solid ground under her feet. Harry Persson had a lot to learn about plausible deniability.
When Shoshanna was done here, she’d drop out of sight. Cosmetic surgery and a new identity lay in her future. She’d continue her career, whereas Persson’s career would end in obloquy … unless he cooperated. Despite his bluster, he had to know that.
With the streetlights out, the crowds on the lakeshore had dispersed. Shoshanna plodded across campus and into town, turning off more lights to give herself cover. She climbed the hill towards the Bremen Lock. Abandoned possessions littered the road. As she walked, Persson frothed at her about his rights—a nice bit of hypocrisy, since he’d just been fantasizing about the downfall of the UN, which alone in the solar system guaranteed that he had any rights at all.
She stopped in surprise. A stunted, skeletal-legged silhouette sat on a boulder near the airlock. It bounced toward her on curved blades.
“I thought you’d be coming this way sooner or later,” Dr. Eliezer James said, briefly removing his rebreather mask to speak.
Shoshanna did not have a rebreather, and despite her electroceutically enhanced respiratory capacity, the climb had weakened her. “I’ve got your boss on the line. Want to help me convince him that he should cooperate?”
“Him? Not Dean Garcia?”
“No, meshuggener. Persson, the CEO.”
“I don’t work for Virgin Atomic,” Dr. James said. “However, I can tell you that if you’re waiting for Persson to wave his magic wand and fix this, you’re wasting your time. He’s three-quarters retired. He was a mining guy, anyway. He has no clue what they’ve been doing at the de Grey Institute. Doesn’t understand the science. If you want him to cooperate, you’ll first have to spend a couple of hours explaining black-box neural networks, utility maximization, and the theory of FOOM.”
Shoshanna eyed the crippled astrophysicist. “So you do know what they’re doing at the de Grey Institute.”
“Not in any detail. Błaszczykowski-Lee is a secretive bastard. We turned the thing over to them because they’re MI specialists: a lot of their work has been in the area of industrial robotics. We’re just stargazers. It made sense to let them have it. They proceeded to shut us out of the loop, while shamelessly borrowing our computing power.”
Dr. James’s rebreather mask prevented her from analyzing his expression. She said slowly, “‘The thing’?”
Now Dr. James’s expression was easy to read. It could have been in the dictionary next to Whoops.
“Yes,” he said eventually. “The space oddity.”
“Hmm.” Shoshanna subvocalized a quick message to her controllers: New information (audio file attached). May have to modify our scenario. This could have nothing to do with the Chinese, after all. Will investigate further. She used the ground-based transmitter at the spaceport to send it. With all her satellites down, she was reduced to this clunky method of communication.
“This thing,” she said. “This space oddity. Is it on the Vesta Express?”
“I believe so, yes.”
“That’s where I was going, anyway. Wanna come?”
Dr James nodded. “If your actions have endangered the physical or informational security of the de Grey Institute, the consequences may be … very much sub-optimal. I can’t absolve you of blame, but I’m willing to help you contain the situation.”
Shoshanna smiled at his logic. “Are you a rabbi’s son, by any chance?”
“How did you guess? Reform.”
Dr. James moved towards the airlock.
“We can get transport at the spaceport. It’s not too far.” He ducked behind the boulder he had been sitting on and came up with a spacesuit. “This is mine, obviously. There should be some spares in the airlock that you could use.”
“Not to worry. I’ve got my own, too,” Shoshanna said. She activated the shape-memory alloy layer of her jumpsuit. Then she unfolded the external garment and booties she had carried in her backpack. She inflated a bubble-style helmet and put her backpack on again: it had a built-in air supply. Packable spacesuits were very expensive, which didn’t help her deniability, but who was keeping track?
As they left, she turned the lights back on. The sun-windows louvred to their SecondLight setting. The light of distant Sol poured down on the wreckage of the Bellicia ecohood. Cleaning up would keep the population busy until she had prevailed … or not.
xxx.
Kiyoshi spacewalked, performing a visual inspection of the Unicorn’s guns. He assumed Jun was watching him. He wanted to hear Jun try to explain why they should not have this option.
Tethered, he walked out along the mighty barrel of the hypervelocity coil gun. The ship’s acceleration pulled him on towards empty space. The Unicorn was now backthrusting, with its drive oriented towards 4 Vesta. Kiyoshi seemed to be walking vertically ‘down’ the thrust axis, anchored by his gecko boots like a spider on a drainpipe.
The gun was mounted longitudinally on the ship’s spine, which pierced the Unicorn’s fuselage like a skewer through a bulbous dango. This antique design had made the hypervelocity coil gun an obvious choice when they tooled up. The ship now effectively had a rail launcher running its whole 450-meter length. That’s what a coilgun was. Hypervelocity meant that it accelerated its projectiles—in this case, metal slugs—so fast that they actually liquefied. The target would be enveloped in a mist of molten metal, each droplet armor-piercing.
Stars filled the universe like a galactic-scale version of that molten mist, forever on its way to engulf him. With Jupiter on the other side of the solar system this year, and Neptune a distant blur, nothing dimmed the stars’ blaze. It still amazed him how many stars were visible out here, compared to inside Venus’s orbit, where he had been born.
He switched on his handheld spectrum analyzer. The sighting apparatus of the coilgun had failed to report when he ran a remote systems check. He figured a micro-impact had damaged some tiny but vital component, and hoped it was something he had a spare for.
Funny: the power meter function reported that everything was working.
He knelt on the barrel and lowered his head so that he was looking ‘up’ the length of the gun.
“Bang,” whispered a voice in the dark.
Kiyoshi jerked his head out of the barrel and sat back on his heels. “Very funny,” he said to Jun.
“This just came in on the Ku-band,” Jun said. “I thought you’d want to see it.” A tiny image popped up in the HUD of Kiyoshi’s helmet. It was a cartoon of a signpost with grass growing at the bottom. Kiyoshi zoomed in. The lettering on the signpost read: C’mon In! Infinite Fun Space This Way!!!
“Where’s it from?”
“4 Vesta. Not addressed to us, of course; it’s a Ku-band broadcast. It’s just a coincidence that we were in the right part of space to pick it up.”
“Delete it.” It was strange how time could seem to slow down when everything was about to go very, very wrong. Kneeling immobile on the end of the gun barrel, Kiyoshi stared at that innocuous little icon and felt as if he were looking at a nuke in the milliseconds before it detonated. “There’s code in there. Something. I don’t want to know what. Delete it. Now.”
Silence.
“MI COMMAND,” Kiyoshi roared. “Delete that fucking file!”
“Deleted,” Jun said expressionlessly.
Kiyoshi found himself shaking. He wasn’t sure that Jun was telling the truth. What if Jun were already infected?
“The thing’s got access to a Ku-band transmitter.” While Kiyoshi spoke, he was accessing the comms suite. “We don’t know how long it’s been broadcasting that shit. The silver lining is, there’s not much else out here, apart from us, to pick it up. Tell me, given the orientation of the signal, would they be able to receive it at home?”
“Unlikely,” Jun said. “T
he Ku-band has a small-wavelength signal. Reception is a roll of the dice at these distances. The folks at home can’t even pick up television broadcasts from 6 Hebe.”
He sounded normal. Maybe he’s all right. Kiyoshi felt a sudden, overwhelming need for a dose. He looked down at the sighting apparatus. “This isn’t working,” he said. “All the components are drawing power. But it’s not responding. You know anything about that?”
“I turned it off.”
“Well, turn it back on.”
“Is that a command?”
Jun’s voice held a mocking edge. Kiyoshi ignored him—always the best way to deal with insubordinate little brothers. He composed an email and sent it, not feeling very optimistic. When he was done, he retrieved the spectrum analyzer from his workbelt. Holding his breath, he checked the sighting apparatus again.
It responded normally.
Kiyoshi let out his breath. Maybe Jun had finally accepted that blowing the thing away might be their only choice, no matter what—or who—else got blown away, too.
★
The Vesta Express lay at rest. A few kilometers ahead, small explosions continued to pop, as if someone were holding a fireworks show at the refinery. All the liquid hydrogen had burnt up, but the superheated wreckage of the autoclave glowed yellow-white against the black horizon.
Dangerously close to that Gehenna, tiny figures swarmed around the obstruction on the track.
It was not as intractable as they’d feared. Elfrida had been expecting a Biblical flood of molten metal, but all that had happened was that one of the handler bots had been hurled into the canyon when the autoclave ruptured. Now it lay head down on the track like a dead dinosaur. The refinery crew thought they could move it, given leverage and time. The first would come courtesy of a gantry, one of those that had positioned the hydrogen tanks for transfer into the launch cradle. The phavatars were cutting the gantry up with lasers to make, in effect, the solar system’s biggest tyre iron.
The second essential commodity—time—they also had, Elfrida thought hopefully. She was monitoring the shift manager’s display. She had also been making little mouse-like trips to peek through the pressure-seal door into the R&D module. The silence was certainly ominous, but nothing seemed to have changed.
She was steeling herself to take another peek when her HUD flashed. She had new mail from Kiyoshi Yonezawa. The lying bastard. Was he going to explain why he’d made all those trips to 99984 Ravilious?
She read the email.
Seconds later she was flying along the ramps of the de Grey Institute, screaming, “Turn off the comms! Turn off the comms!”
Satterthwaite jumped from the ramp above and landed in front of her. “What’s going on?”
His eyes were red, his lips bitten. She blurted, without stopping to wonder whether this might be the final straw for him, “You have a Ku-band transmitter. The thing’s got it. The Heidegger program. It’s using it to send itself around the system. It’s phishing. Turn it off! You have to turn it off!”
“That’s not possible,” Satterthwaite said.
“Why? Can’t you operate the transmitter without Bob?”
“The Heidegger program can’t be doing that. We’ve isolated Bob from every imaginable output, sandboxed the analysis software, blocked wireless signals from the computer room. Do you understand the concept of an air gap? It’s not physically possible …” Satterthwaite stopped. “Smith,” he said. “He was a film buff. He used to swap vid files with his friends on Triton. And we locked him in there with his home theater setup.”
Satterthwaite started to run, shouting, “Anil! Clark! Udo! Get down here!”
Elfrida sobbed. Three men hurtled past her. She huddled into the curve of the ramp, hugging herself.
Bangs and crashes echoed from below, as if furniture were being violently moved.
A man started to scream in German. Elfrida did not know the voice. It had to be Smith. There was another bang, and Smith switched into English. “Squabbling monkeys! Factionalists! Squatters! Crony capitalists! Public-sector employees! Demagogues! Philistines! Cultural chauvinists! Polyglots! Environmentalists! Utopians! Purebloods!”
Abruptly, Smith’s voice fell silent. Elfrida’s nerve broke. She fled up the ramp to the computer room.
Jimmy Liu and Wang Gulong were sitting in a vacant cubicle, eating pouch noodles.
“We’re finished,” Elfrida said, collapsing against a partition. “Everything’s finished. The solar system, everything. You guys might as well go home.”
They couldn’t very easily do that, of course. She just felt like saying it.
“What happened?” Jimmy demanded.
She told them. “So it’s been broadcasting its source code on the Ku-band. It’s probably duplicated itself inside a million other computers by now. This is it. The apocalypse. We’re all going to die.” She wiped her eyes. “I was baptized a while back. I wonder if it really makes any difference.”
Wang Gulong turned to his screen and started typing. Jimmy slurped another mouthful of pouch noodles. “We are all going to die, but not today, I hope. Luckily, we are on the dark side of Vesta, so the transmitter is oriented to the outer solar system. Smith can’t be broadcasting for more than one hour, maximum. Worst-case scenario, some spaceships will get infected. Maybe the signal reaches Triton, if we are very unlucky. What’s out there? A few corporate R&D facilities and some extreme snowboarders. That is the most we can lose.”
“Oh,” Elfrida said, feeling a bit more hopeful.
“Even if the Heidegger program got access to internet, I am thinking no big deal.”
“No big deal?” Elfrida echoed. “No big deal?”
Jimmy never got a chance to respond. Satterthwaite and his friends tottered into the room. Elfrida stared. And stared.
Bright red droplets of blood spattered all four men from head to foot, as if they’d been fighting with a high-powered firehose of the stuff.
Satterthwaite seemed to be vaguely aware of his gore-splattered appearance. He wiped an arm across his face. “We had to kill him,” he explained.
“The Infinite Fun show is hereby cancelled,” said one of the other men. “Laugh.”
“Anil, notify corporate,” Satterthwaite said. “Tell them to warn people. It’ll ruin what’s left of our reputation, but oh well. If the thing’s escaped, we ought to provide a public service announcement, at least.“
“The ISA will intercept it,” said the man named Anil.
“Try using the Ku-band,” Satterthwaite said. “Hollow snigger. Of course, you’ll have to wait until we rotate back to the dayside.” He sat down. “This is a nightmare,” he said to no one in particular. “An utter, bloody nightmare. That—thing. What it had done to him. The pain … dear God, the pain it must have inflicted on him … He had mutilated himself. One can’t imagine … Perhaps he was fighting it. Perhaps he was actually trying to counter its influence. Perhaps he could have recovered, if he’d had the right treatment … But I killed him. I killed him.”
Jimmy cleared his throat. Elfrida made a shut up! gesture at him. Couldn’t he see this was not the time to expound his theory that the Heidegger program was no big deal? It clearly was a big deal. The biggest deal the solar system had had to face since … since Mars.
With that thought, she came close to acknowledging what no one had yet said out loud.
The Heidegger program was an agent of the PLAN.
Satterthwaite looked up tiredly. “By the way, where’s Meredith-Pike got to?”
★
Hugh Meredith-Pike was not far away. He had got tired of Satterthwaite’s evasions, and of getting nowhere with his cryptanalysis. He wanted to know what they were really dealing with.
Satterthwaite had dropped a number of hints that convinced Meredith-Pike ‘the thing’ was actually a thing, not an abstract software-based problem. That made sense to Meredith-Pike. There was a strong argument that AI could not become AGI, much less ASI, in the absence of a physical v
essel that provided it with, well, the same sensory inputs as a human being. Evidence from the field of practical robotics broadly substantiated this notion. The smarter an MI you wanted, the better a body you had to build for it.
So the odds were that the Heidegger program had come to the de Grey Institute in a human-like vessel.
Acting on this premise, Meredith-Pike had called up a schematic of the de Grey Institute and identified several likely places where ‘the thing’ might be concealed. Then he slipped out of the computer room and went hunting. He was looking for a phavatar, or one of the geminoid-class bots coyly known as ‘companions,’ that would have been misguidedly upgraded here, or imported from an envelope-pushing startup on Luna, only to be (somehow) infected with the Heidegger program. Hadn’t there been a similar outbreak of trouble a couple of years ago? (Meredith-Pike was remembering the Galapagos Incident all wrong. To be fair, the news reports had been garbled.)
The first place he looked was Błaszczykowski-Lee’s sumptuous cabin. Not under the bed, not in the wardrobe, not in the spherical bath complete with snorkel attachment.
The second place he looked was the walk-in freezer, where the de Grey Institute’s gourmet chef had squirreled away a cornucopia of imported ingredients. There he found it.
The Vesta Conspiracy: A Science Fiction Thriller (The Solarian War Saga Book 2) Page 27
