Solaris Rising 2

by Ian Whates

“I don’t know!” Dale threw up his hands in exasperation. “I can only guess. But –” he nodded toward the laptop “– the fact that the most secure computer system in the world is still active but not letting anyone in tells me something. This isn’t a cyberattack, and I don’t think a hacker or terrorist group is behind it either.” He hesitated. “I think... I think it may have come out of Bluffdale.”

  Sharon stared at him. “Are you saying the NSA did this?”

  “No... I’m saying the NSA’s computers might have done this.” Dale shook his head. “They always said the day might come when the electronic world became self-aware, started making decisions on its own. Maybe that’s what happening here, with Bluffdale as the source.”

  The purring sound had become a low buzz. Sharon ignored it. “But why would it start killing people? What would that accomplish?”

  “Maybe it’s decided that seven and a half billion people are too many and the time has come to pare down the population to more... well, more sustainable numbers.” Dale shrugged. “It took most of human history for the world to have just one billion people, but just another two hundred years for there to be six billion, and only thirty after that for it to rise to seven and a half billion. We gave Bluffdale the power to interface with nearly everything on planet, and a mandate to protect national security. Maybe it’s decided that the only certain way to do is to...”

  “What’s that noise?” Harold asked.

  The buzzing had become louder. Even as Sharon turned to see where the sound was coming from, she’d finally recognized it for what it was. A police drone, the civilian version of the airborne military robots used in Central America and the Middle East. She’d become so used to seeing them making low-altitude surveillance sweeps of Minneapolis’s more crime-ridden neighborhoods that she had disregarded the sound of its push-prop engine.

  That was a mistake.

  For a moment or two, she saw nothing. Then she caught a glimpse of firelight reflecting off the drone’s bulbous nose and low-swept wings. It was just a few hundred feet away and heading straight for the balcony.

  “Down!” she shouted, and then she threw herself headfirst toward the door. Harold was in her way. She tackled him like a linebacker and hurled him to the floor. “Get outta there!” she yelled over her shoulder as they scrambled for cover.

  They’d barely managed to dive behind a couch when the drone slammed into the hotel.

  AFTERWARDS, HAROLD RECKONED he was lucky to be alive. Not just because Officer McCoy had thrown him through the balcony door, but also because the drone’s hydrogen cell was almost depleted when it made its kamikaze attack. So there hadn’t been an explosion which might have killed both of them, nor a fire that would have inevitably swept through the Wyatt-Centrum.

  But Cindy was dead, and so was Dale. The cop’s warning hadn’t come in time; the drone killed them before they could get off the balcony. He later wondered if it had simply been random chance that its infrared night vision had picked up four human figures and homed in on them, or if the Bluffdale computer had backtracked the satphone link from Dale’s laptop and dispatched the police drone to liquidate a possible threat. He’d never know, and it probably didn’t matter anyway.

  Harold didn’t know Dale very well, but he missed Cindy more than he thought he would. He came to realize that his attraction to her hadn’t been purely sexual; he’d liked her, period. He wondered if his wife was still alive, and reflected on the fact that he’d only been three hours from home when his car went dead on a side street near the hotel. He regretted all the times he’d cheated on her when he’d been on the road, and swore to himself that, if he lived through this and she did, too, he’d never again pick up another woman.

  The drone attack was the last exciting thing to happen to him or anyone else in the hotel for the next couple of days. They loafed around the atrium pool like vacationers who didn’t want to go home, scavenging more food from the kitchen and going upstairs to break into vending machines, drinking bottled water, getting drunk on booze stolen from the bar. Harold slept a lot, as did the others, and joined poker games when he was awake. He volunteered for a four-hour shift at the lobby barricades, keeping a sharp eye out for roaming robots. He saw nothing through the peep-holes in the plywood boards except a few stray dogs and some guy pushing a shopping cart loaded with stuff he’d probably looted from somewhere.

  Five days after the blackout, nearly all the phones, pads, and laptop computers in the hotel were dead, their batteries and power packs drained. But then Officer McCoy, searching Cindy’s backpack for an address book she could use to notify the late girl’s parents, discovered another handy piece of high-tech camping equipment: a photovoltaic battery charger. Cindy had also left behind her phone; it hadn’t been used since her death, so its battery still retained a whisker of power. Officer McCoy hooked the phone up to the recharger and placed them on a table in the atrium, and before long they had an active cell phone.

  Its screen remained unchanged, except that the number was much lower than it had been two days ago. It continued to tick, yet the sound was increasingly sporadic; sometimes as much as a minute would go by between one tick and the next. By the end of the fifth day, a few people removed some boards and cautiously ventured outside. They saw little, and heard almost nothing; the world had become quieter and much less crowded.

  Although Harold decided to remain at the Wyatt-Centrum until he was positive that it was safe to leave, the cops decided that their presence was no longer necessary. The hotel’s refugees could fend for themselves, and the city needed all the cops it could get. Before Officer McCoy left, though, she gave him Cindy’s phone so he could keep track of its ticking, slowly decreasing number.

  In the dark hours just before dawn of the sixth day, Harold was awakened by light hitting his eyes. At first he thought it was morning sun coming in through the skylight, but then he opened his eyes and saw that the bedside table lamp was lit. An instant later, the wall TV came on; it showed nothing but fuzz, but nonetheless it was working.

  The power had returned. Astonished, he rolled over and reached for Cindy’s cellphone. It no longer ticked, yet its screen continued to display a number, frozen and unchanging:

  1,000,000,000.

  BEFORE HOPE

  KIM LAKIN-SMITH

  Kim Lakin-Smith’s dark fantasy and science fiction stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including Black Static, Interzone, Celebration, Myth-Understandings, Further Conflicts, Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse, The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories By Women, and others, with “Johnny and Emmie-Lou Get Married” shortlisted for the BSFA short story award in 2009. She is the author of the gothic fantasy Tourniquet: Tales from the Renegade City, the YA novella Queen Rat, and the novel Cyber Circus, which was shortlisted for both the 2012 BSFA Best Novel Award and the British Fantasy Award in the same category.

  THE LIGHT RACK flicked from green to red. Lu De Lun felt a small judder as the lock rods sealed against the tank of the Eighteen Wheeler, pinioning the craft inside the parking bay. He punched the six engine stabiliser buttons into neutral, unharnessed himself from the driver seat and stood up.

  Stretching his legs, he felt his knees crack and his ankles pop as he took turns to circle his feet and bring back the circulation. Even inside the K01-461 planetary system, the satellites and 18 planets were millions of kilometres apart. A driver had to enjoy a life spent behind the wheel. Which was why the long haul business only suited loners and fugitives. Although, as Lu knew from his 21 years as a trucker, the latter never lasted long given that the Fuel Prospectors they did business with liked to supplement their income with the fat bounties offered by the People’s Armed Police. But Lu was happiest riding out among the stardust, the red dwarf that sustained the solar system an ever present reminder of Something Bigger. Bigger than him. Bigger than the PAP with their guns and Absolute Law. Bigger than the Fuel Prospectors and their corrupt management of the decaying planet he’d just landed
on.

  Right at that instant though, Lu was less concerned with the rights and wrongs of life outside the hangar than he was with filling his stomach and getting some fresh air.

  OF COURSE, THE notion of ‘fresh’ air was a misnomer on Twelve, as K01-461-12 was generally known. Having stripped down to a mandarin vest and gone with lightweight combats, Lu was still unprepared for the searing temperature inside the domed market of Man Fu. He was instantly soaked in sweat and badly in need of a drink.

  “How much?” he asked a passing Kool-Aid vendor.

  The man stopped and lifted the top container off a haphazard stack on board the cart.

  “Five newyen.”

  Lu dug around in a side pocket and handed over the coins. The man picked up one of the metal beakers that hung off the sides of the cart and filled it with garish yellow liquid. Lu drained the cup.

  “Labour Hall open today?”

  “Yes, sah. I can take you there. Fifteen newyen. Good price.” The vendor peeled back his lips, revealing one good tooth.

  “No thanks. I know the way.”

  Leaving the Kool-Aid vendor, Lu set off through the market. The outermost circumference of the dome was given over to food stalls – those pockets of death for a multitude of live vermin stacked high in cages. The cat meat stall offered an array of flambéed carcasses. Old women in folk tunics and headscarves sat behind tiny mountains of spices. It always amazed Lu that, despite the great girdered structure overhead, the ground inside Man Fu was still a sodden mess. A cockroach burst beneath his boot. The sticky air clung to his lungs.

  Stepping over a pool of slurry, Lu found a sync screen thrust in front of his face.

  “Credentials,” barked the officer holding the tablet. The regulation PAP visor made the man appear more cyborg than human. Lu suspected that was by design.

  A second officer kept a hand on the gun strapped across his body, a black keratin-shelled automatic. Standard issue.

  “Lu De Lun. Afro-Caribbean Asian male. Age 43. Employment: Fuel Transportation.” He reeled off his own data while inputting his signature code to the sync screen and scanning the birth bar at his wrist.

  “Specialist or Independent?”

  A Specialist transported one type of geofuel and was in the pockets of the corresponding Fuel Prospector. Often as not, they acted as middle men between the PAP and the Prospectors, adding another layer of corruption to Twelve’s feudal monopoly. Independents, on the other hand, paid fealty to no single Prospector or crop type.

  Begrudgingly, Lu admitted, “Independent.” Now came the wack bureaucracy and timewasting.

  “We’re going to need some more details,” said the sync screen waver.

  “All the necessary licences are there, linked to my signature code.” Lu flashed a sour smile.

  “Of course,” said the officer tightly. His partner stroked the automatic. “But there are still the quotas. There’s plenty of chicken waste to load. I’d strongly recommend you make your way to the slurry vats.”

  “Of course,” Lu mimicked. Stinking chicken waste, worth half the value of other loads like pokeberry, potato or citrus peel. He knew that he needed to get shot of the officers before they forced him to preregister for a chicken waste load via the sync screen.

  “I don’t suppose you gentlemen could direct me to the magistrate’s quarters?” He took a clip of dollar notes out of his back pocket and held it up. “I need to make a deposit of fifty US dollars.”

  While unable to see the officers’ expressions, he knew they understood the bribe well enough.

  The first officer plucked the clip from his fingers. “We will see the magistrate gets your deposit.”

  Lu waited. The men had accepted his bribe, but PAP officers could be bastards and they might opt to harass him anyway.

  In the end, it was the Robot Arena which came to his rescue. Standing fifty metres or so outside its wire perimeter, Lu could see the upper halves of the crop giants over the heads of the crowd. Most were the usual models – 9Z4s, P99Ps, couple of borers. The huge steel mechanisms were designed to withstand the ravages of Twelve’s geothermic landscape. But some lucky vendor had a new model on display: a Titan SLS. The crowd had thickened around it. Apparently the two officers were keen to take a closer look too.

  “Go on now.” The officer pocketed the money clip. With a swipe of a hand, the sync screen went blank. Both men moved off, their visors turned towards the Titan.

  Taking care to keep his distance, Lu joined the crowd at the opposite side of the arena. The older models of crop giants oozed smoke from the seals of their feed hatches. The stench was incredible; Lu was all too aware that the faeces of Prospectors and itinerant workers alike went into fuelling the things. The design of a crop giant was fundamentally basic. Lu knew how to repair one and how to take it apart. Colossal shears moved on pinioned arms. Bucket jaws delivered into thresher spools. Balls of revolving caterpillar tracks gave the robots their gliding motion. Mothers frightened naughty children with tales of crop giants abandoning the fields and acquiring a taste for blood.

  Lu had never seen a robot like the Titan. The head was black and gridded like a compound eye; in fact, Lu suspected the design was precisely that – a grid of stereoscopic cameras delivering 3D images of an entire field of crops. If the older robots were spiders, the Titan was a king crab, its kin dangling from hooks at chop bars or hissing inside stock pots. Six huge, harvesting arms were multi-axis and reticulating, doubling up as legs. Sonar booms served as antenna. A central jaw sat in a cradle of synthetic sinew. Traction engines were bolted beneath, alongside a complex bowel of cabling. The entire system was powered by a Cyclops 84 chip – so declared the neon data screen above the robot. ‘Titan is the first crop giant with surveillance mapping and a PAP-sanctioned weapons system.’ Lu noted the gas guns at the pivoting midpoint of each arm.

  “That will put the noses of the Yellow Scarves out of joint,” remarked a man next to him.

  “I’m yet to meet a machine the rebels couldn’t destroy,” he replied. Too poor to leave Twelve, many families found themselves entirely dependent on the dire wages offered by the Fuel Prospectors. Thanks to the increasing utilisation of crop giants, the workers were being deprived of even that small source of revenue. The Yellow Scarves fought for survival, and Lu understood why. But could they really take down the likes of the Titan?

  The man didn’t share his faith. “If the Yellow Scarves don’t take a shot to the belly from those guns, I reckon that machine can keep a grip on them until the PAP arrive.” He smacked his heat-dried lips. “Then it’ll be off to the Heat Zone for those they catch. Poor bastards.” Rolling his rheumy eyes, he seemed to squat down inside the sorrow of the thought.

  Lu moved on.

  LABOUR HALL WAS packed with workers putting themselves up for sale. Lu squeezed past men, women and children, aware of their bony limbs, leathered skin, and the stench of desperation. He made his way up the sweaty iron stairs to the hiring platform. Taking a numbered bat from a nearby table, he joined the twenty or so foremen on the platform. Each held the fates of those below in their grasp; raise a baton to indicate a job offer, keep it lowered to opt out.

  Lu scanned the crowd. He saw scores of faces and skins of every shade. China might have originally colonised Twelve fifty years earlier, but rubber stamped work visas and the promise of good wages had attracted a 10% US contingent. Finding the planet’s geothermal activity too unstable, China had pulled out. That was 23 years ago. Now the Fuel Prospectors lorded over their volcanic real estate and the workers were forced into the Labour Hall.

  A ramp led up to the hiring platform and another led down. The workers took turns to file past the foremen. The hour was allotted to ‘Unskilled Labour’; a neon sign ticker taping around the circumference of the hall declared as much.

  Poverty was the true equaliser, Lu concluded, watching the procession with his arms folded and a knot between his eyebrows. The younger men and women had the advantage when it ca
me to attracting a foreman’s eye. Those who were elderly or in any way disabled did not attract a bid.

  When the tickertape switched to ‘Apprentices’, the age of those in line dropped considerably. So did the number of potential employers. Lu joined four other men on the viewing step. He wasn’t entirely welcome in their company.

  “You don’t need to train a kid to join the long haul,” spat one out the side of his mouth.

  “Maybe he needs an apprentice to clean the ship’s toilet? Is that it, trucker?” said a second.

  “That’s it.” Lu concentrated on the children filing past. He needed a strong one. Own teeth wouldn’t hurt either. And then there were the eyes. His father had once remarked on the grit contained within a man’s eyes. “Look for the soul beyond the sadness,” he told him. “Those are the ones we can trust with our secrets.”

  “Come on, come on,” he muttered.

  “Eager to be on your way again, huh? I do not blame you,” said the man to his right. Guy in his fifties, Lu guessed. Big old boots that belonged on a soldier. Neatly darned tunic to his knees.

  “No one should have to live out their days in this stink hole, least of all the young.” He nodded at the girls and boys so desperate to find a trade. “Me? I can only help one of them today.” He raised his baton as a boy of twelve or so stepped forward. None of the foremen challenged his bid, not with so many youngsters to go around.

  “I’m offering a three yearer in chicken waste,” announced the man.

  “Oh shit,” said one of the mouthy foremen. The others shook their heads and laughed.

  The kid didn’t laugh. Instead he got the despairing look of someone who’d hoped for the best and heard the worst. But Lu knew the kid was in no position to argue or negotiate. The new apprentice and the man moved aside.

  For the next half hour, Lu watched the children come and go. Some were taken on as apple pickers, mulch grain sifters, gas pump operators or kitchen staff. The majority went home wanting.