There was some small talk as everyone arrived, but when we were all settled down in our armchairs, I said, “I want to apologise for that.”
“There was no way you could know he’d recognise you, Duke,” Connie said. “It’s been over a hundred years.”
“I might still have been able to wing it, but I panicked.”
“Enough, Duke. It’s done now. We have to decide what to do next.”
I nodded and looked at Karl, who said, “Right. Do you want the good news or the bad news?”
I said, “I’d like all the news, thanks, Karl. As straightforwardly as possible, please.”
He chuckled. “Okay. Well . . .” He pointed, and on the chimneybreast a window appeared that seemed to open into deep space. In the middle of the window floated Gregor Samsa.
“Okay,” said Karl. “The good news is that the mundanes haven’t come up with some new stardrive or magical stealth technology. This is Gregor Samsa a few seconds before it disappeared.” Suddenly the window was empty. “And this is Gregor Samsa a few seconds after it disappeared.” He made a twirling gesture with his index finger and the intruder reappeared. “Now watch.” We watched for a few seconds, then all of a sudden Gregor Samsa seemed to smear somehow. Then it was gone again.
We all looked at Karl.
“I’ve slowed this recording down . . . oh, a fantastic amount,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. That smudgy thing is Gregor Samsa leaving the building at an acceleration a hair over thirty-eight gees.”
“From a standing start?” said Karen.
“The dewline picked up some pretty esoteric physics going on around Gregor when it took off,” Karl told her. “It’s not hyperdrive, but it might be related. I’m still trying to figure it out. Anyway, his main motor’s an antimatter torch. That was pretty straightforward to work out.”
We all sat there for a while, considering this.
Karl took a drag on his cigar and said, “Let’s forget about his mode of propulsion, just for a second, because there’s a bigger issue here.”
“The mundanes have got antimatter motors to work and there’s a bigger issue?” asked one of the Twins, helpfully identified as Telifer by the simple expedient of One Potato drawing a Te over his head.
“There’s nobody aboard that thing,” Karen said. “They’d have been killed instantly.”
“Unless this ‘esoteric physics’ protected them,” Connie said.
“I’m not ruling that out,” Karl said. “But the simplest explanation is that the mundanes have cracked strong AI. Simeon is a computer program.”
“Bollocks,” said Ernie, adding to thin air, “No offence.”
“None taken,” One Potato said out of nowhere.
Artificial intelligence—true artificial intelligence—was a fiendishly complicated thing. It made hyperdrive look like an internal combustion motor. It had taken the Kids almost two hundred years to make any breakthrough at all, and it was generally accepted that nobody in the Settled Worlds was going to get on top of it any time soon.
“It gets better,” Karl went on. “I don’t think the Bureau have told him what he is.”
“Aw, Jesus,” muttered Shaker.
Karl looked at the end of his cigar. “I think they’ve drawn him into a virtual environment where he believes he’s a real person.” He waved a hand at the conference space around us. “They can tell him anything they want; how’s he going to know?”
“All of which makes Gregor Samsa a prize worth having,” said Connie. “Antimatter drive, weird physics, strong AI.” She looked at me. “If only to see what we’re up against.”
I sighed. “Where is he now?”
The image on the chimneybreast changed. Now it was the standard system schematic. A cluster of ruby-red dots was us, formed up at Rendezvous Point Two. The bright sapphire that was Gregor Samsa floated serenely on its own about fifty million klicks away.
“He’s decelerated below solar escape velocity again,” said Shaker. “Barely drifting along.”
“The Punch obviously worked,” Karen said. “His motors are dead. Otherwise he’d have popped out.”
“This is so obviously a trap, Duke,” said Ernie. “We should just kill him and get the hell out of here.”
That did have a certain appeal. On the other hand, Connie was right. Gregor Samsa seemed to be packed with every piece of cutting-edge tech the Bureau possessed, and some of it was weird and dangerous. It needed to be examined, analysed, countermeasures devised.
We had to take Simeon Bivar alive.
* * *
“That wasn’t very friendly,” he said. “Now my hyperdrive motors really don’t work.”
“So we’re dropping all that ‘ship in distress’ bullshit, are we?”
He smiled, there in the display. “You’re too smart for that, but it was worth a try.”
“I’m not that smart. It got me to approach you.”
He grinned. “You only wanted to help, Duke. Can I call you Duke? Everyone does, right?”
“My friends do, yes.”
One Potato, Two Potato and Gregor Samsa faced each other across about fifty kilometres of empty space, talking to each other by comm laser, which, considering some of the other tech we were collectively packing, was a little like having a conversation by writing things on paper aeroplanes and throwing them at each other.
“We got off on the wrong foot,” I said. “Perhaps we could have a time out and just chat for a while.”
He beamed at me. “Sure. I’m not going anywhere. By the way, that’s new, the thing you used to disable my hyperdrive. How does that work?”
“I’ll tell you if you tell me how you can accelerate at thirty-eight gees from a standing start without your ship turning you into a greasy red smear and then disintegrating.”
Simeon laughed. For a man—or a computer program which believed itself to be a man, at any rate—who thought he was stranded in a faraway system, he was in quite a good mood.
I asked, “Do you have any backup?”
He shook his head. “It’s just me. You?”
I shook my head. “Just me.”
He laughed again. “Come on, Duke. We’re just going to sit here lying to each other all day, aren’t we?”
I sighed. “There are twelve more ships around the system. Do you have any backup?”
“No, I don’t.”
“That doesn’t sound very likely.”
He shifted in his control couch. “Look, Duke,” he said soberly. “Shall we start at the beginning? Full disclosure?”
The Punch would have scrambled any qubit lattices he was carrying; he wasn’t going to talk to anyone, all he could do was run away very quickly for brief periods. I said, “Okay, Simeon. Full disclosure. Did the Bureau send that probe to find us?”
He nodded. “Yes. We’ve been sending them out to surveyed systems for almost a century now. It’s cheaper than manned missions and we can sell the extra data they send back.”
Waste not, want not. “You must think we’re pretty stupid.”
“I think that given the choice between lying low and letting the probe leave again without knowing what it might or might not have seen, and just shooting it down to make sure, you’ll shoot it down every time. The Bureau wins either way.”
I scowled. “Why did it take so long to follow it up?”
“We lose more probes than you might think, just from natural wastage. Malfunctions, collisions with other bodies, stuff like that. They all have to be checked out. This system was a ways down the list.”
I didn’t know whether to be relieved or offended. I said, “It’s been almost a decade, Simeon.”
He nodded. “We’re looking in lots of places.”
“It’s not just that, though, is it?” I was feeling my way around the edge of something. “It’s been almost five hundred years since Professor Potter stole that boat. Most of the ethics laws she broke were repealed centuries ago. Is she maybe not such a priority a
ny more?”
Simeon’s lips set in a thin, angry line. “Potter didn’t just steal a ship, Duke. She’s still one of the biggest mass-murderers in history. We don’t forget that kind of thing, and we don’t forgive.”
“What are you talking about, ‘mass murderers’?”
He tipped his head to one side. “Potter and her little band of madmen murdered the majority of the colonists she abducted and used the rest of them for experiments. There’s no statute of limitations on that.”
“Bullshit. Most of them decided to stay. We sent the rest back to you.”
“Come on, Duke. Does that even begin to make sense?”
“It’s bullshit.”
“It’s history. Documented history.”
I cut the connection.
“He’s lying,” said Karl.
“You’ve seen the footage of the colonists going back,” Connie said. “You’ve seen some of the interviews with the ones who decided to stay. I know you have, because I showed them to you when you first came here.”
“Toast him,” Ernie said. “Toast him and let’s go find the Colony. I’m sick of this.”
“He’s gone again,” said Shaker.
I looked at the displays, and Gregor Samsa was, in fact, nowhere to be seen. I sighed. “Where is he this time?”
It took the dewline a little while to locate Gregor again. When the little blue spark popped up in the navigation display it was almost halfway back out to the cometary halo.
“Could he actually make a run for it on his antimatter drive alone?” I mused.
“At that acceleration?” said Karl. “Sure; we can’t hope to catch him. The best we could do is jump ahead of him and get in his way. That would spoil his day pretty definitively.”
I sighed.
“Anyway,” said Connie, “that pretty much wraps up the AI thing. He just decelerated at thirty gees; there’s nothing organic aboard Gregor.”
“We’ve got to whack him,” Ernie said. “We can’t just keep chasing him around the system until a carrier full of Marines turns up.”
“Alternatively, we could just bug out now,” Bo put in. “The Colony got away and that was the whole point of the exercise.”
“It’ll just make the Bureau look all the harder if they know we were here,” Connie said. “We were hoping they’d give up one day.”
“It’s been five hundred years, Con,” Bo told her. “They’re never going to give up.”
“Also I’d really like to get my hands on that ship,” Karl said. “Probe. Ship. Whatever. It’s worth having for the drive alone.”
I sighed again. “One Potato, send a message to Gregor Samsa. Tell him to wait where he is and I’ll be over there shortly. Tell him I don’t intend to fire on him or otherwise harm him. I just want to talk.”
“Yes, Duke,” said the ship.
“Everyone else, hang back on the other side of the system. Let’s not crowd him until I’ve figured out what to do.”
* * *
I popped out of hyperdrive a respectful distance from Gregor Samsa and waited there, patiently transmitting friendship messages and feeling rather absurd for doing so, and eventually Simeon’s image popped up on the display.
“What did you do that for?” I asked.
“You cut me off,” he said. “I thought you were getting ready to fire on me. I’m not armed.”
And I believed that about as much as I believed in Santa Claus. I said, “I was consulting with my colleagues, that’s all.”
He snorted. “Colleagues.”
“We were discussing what the point was of you trying to convince me that Professor Potter killed the colonists.”
“Because it’s the truth?” he suggested.
“Look, Simeon, I know some of those colonists. They’re alive and well, I promise you.” Although not recognisably human anymore, but that was life in the Colony. “You’ve been fed a line. The Bureau’s been lying to everybody.”
He looked at me. “Where are your colleagues?”
“On the other side of the system. But they’re listening in on us and they’ll be here before you know it if you try something cute.”
“Try something cute? You’re the one who crippled my ship.”
That, at least, was fair enough. I said, “How long till you’re tagged as overdue and someone comes looking for you?”
“Not nearly long enough for your purposes, certainly. And anyway, if I just disappear the Bureau will suspect I found something in this system.”
“We can make it look like an accident,” I said in what I hoped was a threatening tone of voice.
“I’m sure you can. But they’ll still be suspicious.” He rubbed his face. “Doesn’t matter, anyway. You’ll be long gone and we’ll have to start all over again.” He blinked at me from the display. “Well. This is interesting, isn’t it? What shall we do now? Game of Scrabble?”
“I was rather hoping you’d see sense and let us try to repair your hyperdrive.”
“Why would you do that?”
“So you could go back and tell everyone the Bureau’s been lying to them.”
He shook his head sadly. “Duke, Duke,” he said. “I can practically hear you salivating at the prospect of a look at Gregor’s main drive.”
Personally, I couldn’t have cared less about the fucking thing, aside from how complicated it was making my life at the moment. “You can’t blame me for trying.”
“Oh, no. No, I can’t. I’d have thought a little less of you if you hadn’t tried.” He looked around the flight deck of Gregor Samsa—the simulation of the flight deck of Gregor Samsa—and shrugged a little.
I tried to arrange the situation in my head. Had he seen the dewline and decided to scout downsystem anyway? Had he sent a message out before One Potato even woke me up? Or had he popped into the system and missed any sign of habitation before I contacted him? Did it even matter? The dewline wouldn’t finish tidying itself up for another seventy years or so; he’d have been declared missing and someone sent out to check on him long before then. The best thing I could do was keep him talking until I could work out how to take his ship and all its juicy tech, then hightail it. My head hurt.
I said, “Simeon, listen. I have some bad news for you.”
He grunted. “My ship’s fucked, I’m all alone in a hostile system, and my comms are cooked, and you have some bad news for me?”
“We think you’re an artificial intelligence.”
He stared at me for a few moments. Then he burst out laughing. Not an appreciative chuckle. Not a brief belly laugh. A flat-out, doubled-over paroxysm of laughter that left him damp-eyed and pressing a hand to his chest while he tried to catch his breath.
I said, “Your ship’s about the size of a bus, Simeon. There’s barely room for life support.”
He wiped his eyes and chuckled. “Gregor’s stealthed, Duke. It’s supposed to look like that.”
“That’s pretty good stealth tech,” I told him.
He shook his head. “Oh, that’s priceless,” he said, “I’m not an AI. You are.”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, they must have you running in a pretty sophisticated environment and everything, if you think you’re a person,” he went on. “What’s it like in there? Is it nice?”
I cut him off.
“That was . . . unexpected,” Karl said.
“He’s hardly going to admit it,” Telifer said. “He thinks he’s real. He thinks anything he’s been programmed to think.”
“This is all getting just a little bit surreal,” I told everyone.
“Kill him,” said Ernie. “Just kill him. We’ve wasted enough time on this.”
I opened the connection again.
“That was an unusual thing to say,” I told Simeon.
“Says the man who just accused me of being an artificial intelligence.”
Fair point.
He leaned forward against his harness straps. “Time to get serious, Duke. We don
’t have a lot of time.”
“Don’t have a lot of time until . . . what, exactly?”
“I’m going to send you an image from my cameras. Will you accept it?”
“I’ll look at it; I can’t tell you whether I’ll accept it.”
“Okay. Here it comes.”
One Potato sandboxed the image, made sure it wasn’t carrying any nasty computer-related weaponry, and put it up on the display. It was a picture of a rock studded with thruster quads, hanging in space. It looked a little like One Potato, Two Potato, but if the quad nozzles were anything to go by it was too small. Much too small.
“Your Writers—yes, I know that’s what you call them, we’ll get to that in a moment—have been popping into uninhabited systems for almost five hundred years,” Simeon was saying. “They seed them with a bunch of Von Neumann machines that form a defensive grid, and then they move on.”
My head really was hurting; it was turning into a thudding headache. “Why?”
“Because they’re crazy, Duke. Potter and her pals are stone-cold crazy. They’ve got a grudge against the Bureau and they’ve decided to take their revenge by denying systems to us. Sometimes it’s systems like this, not worth much at all. But sometimes it’s useful, habitable systems. We’ve lost ships to the things they leave behind. Not probes. Ships. Full of real people. And every time we look for those lost ships, we find a shell of microsatellites around the system. And we find you.”
“Me?”
“The dewline—and yes, we know you call it that too—has massive computing power, collectively. That’s where you live, that’s what’s hosting your environment. I’m going to send you some video now, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Two hundred years ago a . . . a dissident, I guess you’d call her, turned up on Bellerophon. Bellerophon doesn’t owe the Bureau any favours, but when they saw what she was carrying, they got in touch. She said she’d had a change of heart, decided to make a run for it. Maybe she did; maybe she just had an argument with Potter, we never got to the bottom of it because she died. Potter and her friends had tweaked everyone so that their immune system relied on a certain genetically engineered substance only found in their travelling circus. Without it, the dissident’s immune system crashed and she died.”
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