by Ian Douglas
Cara had been with him for decades, first as his personal AI secretary, and later as personal aide within his command constellation, the group of humans and AIs who ran 1MIEF. Currently, she—he’d always thought of the genderless program as “she”—occupied what amounted to the MIEF’s Executive Officer billet, handling all of the internal details of his command. AIs were good at the routine and picky details.
In some ways, Alexander preferred AIs to people. Their logic, their clean rationality, their essential lack of random emotion coupled with their programmed commitment to such concepts as loyalty and duty made them ideal both as subordinates and as companions. The thought brought with it a pang of memory, of the sort that people said faded with time . . . but never swiftly enough.
He took the memory out once again, examining it, feeling it. For over two decades, he’d been partnered with a lovely and keenly intellectual woman named Tabatha, but she’d left him five years back. That had been just after the Battle of Krulak Space, and the destruction of a Xul base in the firestorm of a double star nova. Hermes had translated back to Sol Space for replacements and supplies . . . and Tabatha had simply packed her things and shuttled down to Earth. He’d tried to find her, but his attempts to link with her had been blocked. Her own personal secretary, imitating perfectly her voice and mannerisms, had told him only that she needed time and space to grow on her own . . . and to have a relationship with someone who would be there for her.
Well, they said the memories would fade. He’d seen precious little evidence of that as yet.
Five years. . . .
He shoved the memory aside. The trouble with artificial intelligences, he thought, lay in the deeper moral implications. They were nothing more than complex software, epiphenomena arising from the interplay of positive and negative charges within the networks interconnecting massively parallel sets of hardware.
But they certainly acted as though they felt—the more advanced ones, anyway—and most cyberneticists believed that they did possess a genuine sense of self, of self- awareness, and that they were sentient within any reasonable meaning of that still poorly understood word. It brought into question a lot of attitudes and assumptions about AIs that had existed since their first, crude incarnations eight centuries ago— programming them to accept self-immolation, for example, which was routine now in the case of the AIs piloting Euler Starbursters into the cores of stars to detonate them.
As a Marine general, Alexander had given countless orders that had, one way or another, meant death for men and women under his command, but those Marines were volunteers, all of them, and often they were asked specifically to volunteer a second time for particularly hazardous missions. Giving human beings orders that might result in their deaths seemed quite different from accessing the mind of a being every bit as intelligent and self- aware as a person and writing in lines of code that made it accept suicide as a right and proper action.
The orders being prepared now for what was evolving into Operation Heartfire were like that. The AIs that would precede 1MIEF and Pax Galactica into the Core would have no choice in the matter. Lines of code would dictate their choices, and they would choose to enter the Xul fastness at the Galaxy’s center in a mission at least as suicidal as diving an FTL starship through a sun. The humans in Heartfire would at least be able to make a more or less informed choice freely. . . .
Maybe he simply envied the emotionless aspects of artificial intelligences and their relationships with humans.
Damn it, why had Tabatha left him? The two of them had shared so much together for over twenty years. It just didn’t make logical sense. Why? . . .
There did not appear to be any answers.
He was still studying the simulated image of Earth moments later. “General?” a familiar voice said in his thoughts. “Am I interrupting?”
“Of course you are, Liam. That’s your job, isn’t it?”
Admiral Taggart’s icon unfolded in Alexander’s mind, dress Navy uniform, medals, and corona. He wondered what the admiral really looked like at the moment. With icons and simulated realities, Liam Taggart could be in his bathrobe and slippers at the moment, and Alexander would never know it.
“I wanted to know what you think about this Pax thing.”
Alexander gave a mental shrug. “Hardly matters what we think, does it? We have our orders. . . .”
“The hell with that. Yarlocke is playing politics with you and the MIEF, and she’s going to get us all killed.”
“I think she has her own agenda.”
“Yeah. Big surprise. What is it?”
“Damned if I know. I think the important point, though, is that she has a lot of people on her side. Most of them well-meaning, whatever her issues might be. We’re on the front lines, you and I, and we tend to look at things in a rather black-and-white way. We exterminate the Xul, or the Xul exterminate us.”
“Isn’t that the way it is?”
“Maybe. Probably. But a lot of people in the Senate, and the people they represent, think that peace is the best option.”
Taggart snorted. “Peace is the best option . . . when it is an option. Do you think the Xul are going to go for this?”
“Frankly, I don’t think we know the Xul well enough yet to know what they’ll do. But the evidence of the past few centuries suggests that . . . no. They literally don’t know what ‘peace’ or ‘co-existence’ are. Hell, the xenosophontology people can’t even make up their minds about whether or not the word ‘sentience’ applies to the Xul. Did you see that last downloaded report?”
Taggart nodded. “Yeah. They think the Xul mentality may be a hive mind, intelligent, but without conscious volition. I don’t see how nonsentient beings could build starships, though.”
“It’s a matter of definitions. Semantics.”
“Like . . . how do you define intelligence?”
“Exactly. Or self- awareness. Ants, bees, and termites perform incredible feats of engineering and design, but as far as we know there’s no consciousness to it. Hell, we think we’re self- aware, but what does that mean, precisely?”
“I’ve heard the arguments,” Taggart said. “There’s still debate as to whether our own AIs are truly self- aware and sentient, or just putting on a very good act through their programming.”
“Right. And if that’s the case, if we only imagine our AIs are self- aware because we’ve made them to act that way, maybe the Xul are the same. Acting on programmed guidelines laid down millions of years ago, like an anthill or a termite mound, but not truly conscious in the same way we are.”
“In the way we think we are,” Taggart said, and he chuckled. “Some of the mind mechanics don’t think we’re truly self- aware, either. We just imagine we are. This whole mind thing is just an illusory epiphenomenon arising from our neurochemistry.”
“Too deep for me.”
“So . . . do we have an AI for the initial core probe?” Taggart wanted to know.
“Yes. Pappy.”
“The primary 1MIEF AI?”
“That’s the one. We’ve been reconfiguring him by merging him with Thoth, the Spymaster AI that brought back that intel coup from the Xul Nightmare.”
In fact, Thoth had been derived from Pappy in the first place, a copy of the original administrative software updated and expanded to meet the special needs of his Penetrator mission in Cluster Space. He’d returned from that mission with a great deal of specialized knowledge—experiences from within the Xul virtual environment—and that data could now be folded directly into Pappy’s expanded matrix. Thoth’s penetrator algorithms had been incorporated in the update as well, as had everything learned from the Spymaster mission in the way of Xul operating frequencies, data channels, and security routines.
“Pappy-Thoth?” Taggart asked. “Sounds like some sort of culinary masterpiece.”
“Well, at the moment we’re calling him Pappy 2.0. But the upgrade is serious enough that N-2 is suggesting a whole new persona.”
“A new
name?”
“Yeah. Athena. The Greek goddess of wisdom.”
“And with a bit of a martial air as well. I like it.”
“We’re readying a new Spymaster probe.” He opened a new link window for Taggart. “Here are the specs. We’re hoping to send it through as soon as we translate back to Cluster Space . . . say, in another week.”
“Sounds good. What do our friends in the Senate think of this?”
“Why should they even know about it?”
“I don’t know. This whole idea of treating the Xul nice. I presume being nice to the sons of bitches doesn’t include spying on them.”
“Our op- plan—the general op- plan we share with Congress, at any rate—includes site reconnaissance and gravitometric readings,” Alexander said with studied indifference. “We have to know about the area we’re entering. Gravity and radiation readings. Local stellar populations, planetary positions and masses, presence and locations of local technic infrastructures. Not knowing all that stuff before we send humans through is not an option. Hell, that’s one reason we have military AIs in the first place.”
“Scout recon then.”
“Standard operating procedure. And if the Warlock doesn’t like it, the whole operation is off. We have to know what the local picture is before we barge in there.”
“Don’t preach to me. I’m one of the choirboys. What happens if Yarlocke doesn’t like it and the mission is scrubbed?”
“We send the Spymaster through anyway. This is too good an opportunity to fill in the blank pages. We know so damned little about the Xul, about what they are and how they think. Liam, that Xul node at the Galactic Core may be able to provide us with a hell of a lot of answers.”
“And the Pax Galactica?”
Another mental shrug. “Hell, they can tag along if they want. Just so they don’t get in the way when the shooting starts.”
“You assume there will be shooting then?”
“Assume? I’m counting on it. We’ve been fighting the bastards for a long, long time, and others have been fighting them as long or even longer. The Eulers. The N’mah. The An. The Builders. We might not understand how they think, or even if they think . . . but one thing we do know is that peace is not a part of their philosophical worldview. When we step through that gate in Cluster Space and appear at the Core, it’s going to be like jamming a stick into a hornet’s nest. All hell is going to break loose.” He expanded the image of Earth, still hanging in his mind. The pinpoints marking personnel on shore leave were gone. What was left was Earth as it appeared now far beneath the SupraQuito Ring Complex, a bit less than half-full, city lights dusting the continental areas of the night hemi sphere, sunlight glaring off streaks and swirls of cloud on the day side.
“I just hope we have what it takes to see it through, to end the threat, the break the Xul, once and for all.”
“Well, one thing’s sure,” Taggart said. “One way or the other, Yarlocke will get what she wants. Peace, or . . .” He broke off the thought.
“ ‘Or?’ ”
“I was going to say peace, or an end to 1MIEF. But I’d hate to see Earth trying to hold out against what the Xul could send out this way, once we kick over the hornet’s nest.”
“No,” Alexander said, still looking at the impossibly beautiful, infinitely delicate blue and white apparition of the Earth. “No, I wouldn’t like to see that at all. . . .”
12
0407 .1111 Atlantis Grotto
Sunken Miami, Earth
0125 hrs, local
“Hey!” Garroway said, startled as the realization hit him. “Do you guys know what the date is?”
“Oh-four-oh- seven,” Armandez told him. “Why? You having a problem with your internal timekeeper?”
“The Fourth of July,” Warhurst said. He lifted his glass. “Happy birthday, United States of America!”
“United States?” Kath said, wrinkling her nose. “What’s that . . . like the Commonwealth?”
“Not quite,” Lieutenant Ramsey told her. “The original United States was the forerunner of the Commonwealth, yeah. After it grew to sixty, seventy-some states, though, it was getting too big and unwieldy to be easily governed. The Commonwealth was created as a kind of over-government for the old U.S. and for the new states and territories that were coming in, especially out-system. Eventually, the sovereignty of the U.S. kind of faded as the power of the Commonwealth grew.”
“The Marines still remember, though,” Garroway said. The alcohol was wrapping itself around his brain, he realized, bringing feelings normally deep-buried to the surface. If this continued, he thought, he’d have to kick in the sobering circuitry pretty soon. “The Fourth of July . . . and the Tenth of November.”
“What’s the Tenth of November?” Traci wanted to know.
“You’re hanging out with this character,” Garroway said, nodding toward Warhurst, “and you don’t know?”
“It’s the anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Marine Corps,” Warhurst told her. “The Corps’ birthday.”
“Yup,” Ramsey said. “This coming November the Corps’ll be eleven hundred twelve years young. So there, Mr. Forrestal!”
Garroway and Warhurst both chuckled. Nine hundred forty-one years before, during a fiercely contested battle on a volcanic scrap of an island in the Pacific Ocean called Iwo Jima, five Marines and a Navy hospital corpsman raising the U.S. flag atop a mountain named Suribachi had been immortalized in the act by a chance- snapped photograph. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, then on the beach at the base of the mountain, had turned to Marine General Holland Smith and told him that the raising of that flag meant that there would be a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.
The incident, experienced in sim by all Marine recruits, was a point of Corps pride. Five hundred years? The Corps had endured over twice that, now.
One hundred eleven years ago, there’d been a mammoth party throughout the Corps celebrating the Marines’ one thousandth birthday—a thousand years since the Marine Corps had begun signing up recruits at the Tun Tavern in Philadelphia, in the year 1775. There was talk of an even more enthusiastic Corps-wide celebration in fifty-nine more years, one thousand years after the raising of the flag on Suribachi.
Garroway wondered if he would still be here to join in the festivities. It was distinctly possible; he would only be eighty- seven then, and with nanoanagathics most people nowadays lived to be two hundred or more.
Most civilians, he thought, correcting himself. Unless he followed Gunny Warhurst’s example and retired, he stood a good chance of taking the Long Orbit—burial in space, assuming they’d recovered his body.
Of course, with the Xul threat, the same could be said of any one of the civilians here in the Atlantis Grotto. Earth and its delicate deep- space infrastructure and far-flung colonies remained horrifically vulnerable to a Xul strike.
He shook himself, thrusting the sudden and unexpected flow of gloom aside. He wondered if he should use his personal med implants to adjust his brain chemistry, then decided against it. Good friends and a pleasant eve ning out on the town should provide all the attitude adjustment he needed. He was actually feeling pretty good, though his new legs were sore. A full Earth gravity dragged at him, wore at his leg muscles, as the artificial gravity on board ship— usually set to around a half-G compromise between Earth and Mars—never did.
The six of them had come to the Grotto for a final eve ning together. Up- Ring transport had been so thoroughly snarled for the past thirty- six hours that there was no way they were going to make it to SupraQuito before noon tomorrow. They’d dressed up for the eve ning. Garroway, Armandez, and Ramsey were in Marine full-dress. Warhurst wore a pattern of fluorescent, animated tattoos, while Kath and Traci wore complementary, sensually shifting patches of liquid light.
The Atlantis Grotto, in keeping with the dinner, dance, and sex club’s theme, was murkily lit by shifting patterns of undersea color. The main dining area was a domed
transparency, some ten meters beneath the surface, on the coral- encrusted sea floor southeast of the central Miami pylons. Faux-Greek architecture had been erected around the dome— huge marble columns and pillars, many of them collapsed, and the eerie shadows of sunken temples, all lit from below by colored lights. By daylight, Garroway understood, the place looked quite different; at night, the light show was spectacular, but the subdued illumination meant that the light worn by the civilians was all the more brilliant. He could have read printed text by the silvery glow streaming off of Traci’s breasts.
High overhead, within the cavernous space beneath the dome, a focused and self-contained agrav field had been set up within a shifting, boiling sphere of green light. Couples, trios, and larger groups danced to the sensuous background music inside the sphere, or swam, or engaged in enthusiastically public sex. The figures twisted and turned and moved against the background of the aquatic glow.
Technically, Garroway, Ramsey, and Armandez were stranded. They’d tried to catch the up- Ring shuttle as scheduled on the 30th, and found the civilian transport had over- booked and they’d been bumped. Miami and Orlando, both, were crowded with Navy and Marine personnel trying to get back to the Hermes at Ring SupraQuito.
Yesterday, the Hermes had left the dock at SupraQuito and moved to L-3, a gravitationally stable zone at Lunar orbit, directly opposite the Moon from Earth. From there, she was beginning the time-consuming process of shuttling 1MIEF warships and transports back out to Cluster Space, three and four at a time tucked into her cavernous cargo bay.
“So . . . you think we’re going to get into trouble for being AWOL?” Armandez asked.
