Dead Space

by Kali Wallace

  “Fuck if I know what’s going on. I can’t find anything,” she said as she dropped down into the junction. She was carrying a sling of tools on her back. She looked at me and Adisa and explained, “Optical array is glitching. It happens all the time.”

  Sigrah’s narrowed eyes and thin frown suggested she wasn’t happy about a crew member telling a couple of OSD officers about Nimue’s problems, but she only nodded curtly and said, “Understood. Take a look again later, if you have time.”

  “Will do.” King hit the control panel on the wall to shut the airlock before heading into Res.

  “You have communication problems often, aye?” Adisa asked.

  Sigrah snorted. “You could say that. This is about the fifth time in two months Katee’s had to crawl out there to fix the optical array. But she’s better than the last electrician we had. That fucker sat on his ass for a year before he bought out his contract and took off. Katee spends half her time cleaning up the messes he left.”

  The sound of gecko boots came from the doorway to Ops, and a moment later a man stepped into view. “I’m certain we find your crew problems terribly fascinating, but perhaps we can stop wasting time now.”

  He was the Parthenope legal representative who’d come over with the investigation team. He hadn’t introduced himself to me during the journey over, nor had his role been included in the official briefing reports, but Ryu had told me he was Hugo van Arendonk, one of the lawyers Parthenope sent along when they wanted an embarrassing problem to go away quickly and quietly.

  “Apologies,” Adisa said, without a trace of apology in his voice. “Are we complicating your busy social schedule?”

  “Fuck off, Mohammad. I just spent two fucking hours waiting for the bloody CEO to crawl out from under her fuckboy to get surveillance access.” Van Arendonk’s accent was almost comically upper-class, the sort of cut-glass variety that you only heard in the loftiest echelons of Yuèliàng society, or in media doing its best to mock them. “So let’s watch the bloody vids and find out who did this. If the analyst doesn’t have more pressing duties?”

  He looked right at me, eyebrows raised.

  “The analyst is ready when you are,” I said. “Safety Officer Hester Marley.”

  There was a beat, a pause just a shade too long for comfort, before van Arendonk turned away. “I don’t care who you are. I only want to know who we pin this on so we can get the fuck out of here.” He glanced over his shoulder as he opened the door. “Please do come along, if you’re not too busy?”

  He strode into Ops without waiting for an answer.

  “I’ll be searching the victim’s personal quarters,” Adisa said. “Let me know if you find anything, yeah?”

  “Right. Of course.”

  “Don’t worry,” he added, when I hesitated. “He’s every bit as insufferable once you get to know him.”

  Sigrah laughed shortly. “They grow ’em that way on purpose.”

  Oh. Oh, shit. I hoped my face did not show my surprise. I had recognized the surname when Ryu mentioned it, but I hadn’t realized he was a van Arendonk of those van Arendonks. One of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the solar system. The van Arendonks had been among the first to colonize the Moon a handful of centuries ago, when Earth was roiling under a constant onslaught of floods, storms, droughts, plagues, and all the wars such disasters brought with them, and those with the means fled for their own private cities in orbit and beyond. The first families to claim territory on the Moon had tried a few different names for their nation before finally settling on Yuèliàng, with the city of Imbrium as its capital. Decades passed, then centuries, and the founding oligarchs still controlled nearly all of the lunar nation. Some of the old families faded away; others blended together; but the core group remained essentially unchanged.

  Which was, after all, precisely what they wanted. They wanted to remain as they were, ruling over their pale kingdom for as long as they could manage. They invested heavily in medical research for prolonging their lives, cloning themselves, genetically improving their children—all firmly outlawed on Earth. Rumors spread about experiments gone wrong. Employees being trapped in indentured servitude as broodmares and sperm donors. Babies stolen from their parents. Children designed to replace their forebears in every way.

  Eventually Earth took notice. New treaties and laws tried to put a stop to Yuèliàng’s medical experimentation industry, and the last few children to come from the shady old practices were born into the middle of an intense legal battle. But it all became irrelevant when rebellion broke out on Mars. The hungry Martian rabble became the enemy, the oligarchs of Yuèliàng allies once again, and everybody was busy making war.

  I wasn’t born when the war began. I came along after it had already been going for a few years, and my parents were academic pacifists who believed in Whole System governance. So I learned about those genetically altered lunar children as a sort of political footnote, a cautionary tale of territorial independence and the failure of scientific communities to ethically self-regulate. I never thought about the so-called Children of Yuèliàng beyond that.

  Not until I found myself standing next to one and wondering what bot had crawled up his ass and died.

  Hugo van Arendonk was tall, but not too tall, white, blue-eyed, fair-haired, and handsome enough in that bright-eyed, sharp-cheekboned way that probably appealed to people who were attracted to men, or lawyers. He was wearing tailored clothing that would have cost me six months’ salary; even his gecko boots were bespoke rather than standard-issue. His family was the power behind both the oldest financial institution and the oldest university on Yuèliàng. Their name was on the Artificial Intelligence wing of the Lunar Museum of History, where I had, as a schoolchild on an extravagant spring holiday trip, encountered my first true Zhao-type AI. Their influence was all over every law, every treaty, every agreement that regulated how governments and corporations interacted in the system. One of the family’s oldest living members—Charlotte van Arendonk, still the unrivaled grande dame of Yuèliàng politics in the beginning of her second century—had written key sections of the Outer Systems Disarmament Treaty, which had permanently banned private entities, corporations, and organizations from building their own personal armies since the end of the Martian rebellion.

  Which made me wonder why her great-great-whatever-grandson was working as a legal errand-boy and fixer for Parthenope in the ass-end of the asteroid belt. I wondered, but I didn’t even think about asking.

  “Why are you here?” van Arendonk asked, when I caught up to him in the corridor. “You knew the dead man. You’re a conflict of interest.”

  So he did care about who I was after all. “You’ll have to ask Safety Inspector Adisa. He approved the assignment.”

  “But you made the request.”

  “Yes, I did,” I said.

  Van Arendonk looked at me. He probably had a pleasant face when he smiled; he had let the skin around his eyes wrinkle, let the line of his fair hair creep back a bit, keeping him from falling into the uncanny valley that plagued both the genetically engineered lunar children and people rich enough to pay for new faces twice a decade. He was certainly not smiling now.

  I stared right back and waited. I had spent most of my academic life working alongside people who believed their ancestors had been shat directly out of William the Conqueror’s ass. I wasn’t about to let a snotty lawyer from Yuèliàng intimidate me.

  He didn’t challenge my answer. He just turned away and spoke as he kept walking. “We have approval to access surveillance for twelve hours before and after the time of death. Secondary Overseer contact through the systems room only. Any problems with that?”

  “No,” I said. “No problems.”

  In truth I was a little disappointed. The twenty-four-hour window I had expected, as it was standard in instances of suspicious death, but I had been hopin
g I might get a chance to look inside the brain of Nimue’s Overseer. It wasn’t necessary, not for reviewing surveillance data, nor would it have been normal procedure; only sysadmins had that kind of physical access. Just getting into the lift required a onetime access code, permission from HQ, full biometric scan and identification, and a unique circuit key that was itself kept under lock on the station. It also required, in many cases, agreement from the Overseer itself; they always had some degree of discretion about who was allowed to poke around inside their brains. I knew it was impossible and way, way above my pay grade.

  But it was still frustrating to be so close to a powerful AI, one that David had worked with and trained for months, and not have a chance to take a closer look. Overseer AIs were not particularly revolutionary in design, but they were smart and did adapt to work intimately with their sysadmins. I would have loved to see firsthand how David had been spending the last months of his life.

  The entrance to the systems room was at the far end of a long corridor. The Operations section of Nimue had once been a luxury transport vessel, and remnants of its former life were visible along the hallway: ornate light fixtures, decorative frames around the control panels, a geometric mosaic of polymer tiles on the floor. The pattern was white and gold and deep, deep blue, probably meant to imitate some ancient style from Earth and reassure the passengers they were traveling in luxury. It didn’t feel like a working asteroid mine—except for the bulky reinforced security door at the end.

  Van Arendonk entered his security access code, I entered mine, and we endured a few seconds of awkward silence before the door slid open. The interior was dark enough that I felt the tug of mental adjustment as my sharper artificial eye saw the scene more clearly than my natural eye, and my brain had a brief argument with itself trying to reconcile the difference. My first impression was of a deep, deep cold.

  My second impression was of a massive, encompassing presence.

  There was a pause—a heartbeat, no longer—and the lights came on, rising from the gentle gray of an early dawn to an eerie cool blue.

  The room was not particularly large, only about the size of standard solo quarters. Every surface I could see, from the walls to the ceiling to the floor, was polished and clean and shiny, but somehow it managed to avoid any single clear reflection. The effect was unsettling and disorienting. I didn’t know where to look, where to focus.

  Van Arendonk gestured for me to step into the systems room first. The door slid shut behind us. I heard the faint click of the locks engaging, then the hiss of the ventilation and heating system kicking in to accommodate our presence. The lights changed again, became warmer in tone, less harsh on the eyes. The Overseer itself—the actual brain of the machine—was built into what had previously been the cargo hold of the passenger ship, several meters beneath our feet, surrounded by a vast cooling system. There was an access lift in the room, behind yet another bulky security door. We didn’t have permission to go any farther.

  I took one chair, van Arendonk the other, and the screens came on.

  “Welcome, Hugo. Welcome, Hester. It’s good to see you.”

  The voice wasn’t particularly loud, but it surrounded us, smooth and mellow, from every direction at once.

  The Overseer asked, “What can I help you with today?”

  Like every artificial intelligence under Parthenope control, Nimue’s Overseer spoke with a woman’s voice, pitched high, with a forced politeness that set my teeth on edge. I wasn’t fond of AIs that defaulted to natural voice communication in the first place, as it left too much room for misinterpretation. I was even less fond of AIs whose corporate programmers or users had persuaded them to speak with softly subservient women’s voices. Such tones did not evolve naturally in an AI’s communication style. Somebody had specifically taught it that, because somebody in the company had decided that was what a faithful servant should sound like.

  I didn’t like it any better when the Overseer went on without waiting for us to answer. “Are you comfortable, Hester? I have noticed a slight imbalance in your stride that I believe could lead to chronic physical discomfort. If necessary I can—”

  “Stop verbal communication,” I said curtly. “Requesting authorization for security and surveillance data by Safety Officer Hester Marley.” I gave my investigative access code again.

  Van Arendonk did the same: “Requesting authorization for unrestricted security and surveillance data access by legal counsel Hugo van Arendonk.” He provided his own access code, then, after a second, he added, “Stop verbal communication.”

  The Overseer said, “I’m sorry you don’t want to speak to me, but I will do what I can to help.”

  It acknowledged our requests with text responses on the screen: access codes received, investigative request pending, security and surveillance subsystems responding. I was bouncing my leg nervously; I made myself stop. A few seconds passed, seconds I knew had to have been adopted by the Overseer because it had learned somewhere along the line that too-rapid responses actually made humans trust it less. Station steward AIs were designed to provide human comfort as part of their mandate, and human comfort often included pretending to operate on human timescales. It was another thing I disliked about working with Parthenope’s AIs. I didn’t care to be condescended to by a machine.

  A confirmation appeared on the screen: Limited access granted.

  “Right,” van Arendonk said, “let’s start with the visual . . . right. By all means, don’t let me stop you, Safety Officer Marley.”

  Nor did I care to have a company lawyer telling me how to do my job.

  I asked the Overseer to bring up the security and surveillance data from the day of David’s death, then narrowed in on employee ID tracking and medical reports. Parthenope watched its employees obsessively. In addition to the omnipresent cameras and audio recorders in public spaces, the company required a unique code every time we accessed a terminal, logged the embedded microchips in our wrists every time we passed through a monitored doorway, and constantly analyzed every action to flag those that ventured outside standard routines. There was an entire medical subsystem devoted to assessing the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of the crew.

  All of which meant that Parthenope employees had virtually no privacy in any aspect of their daily lives, but it also meant I would be able to pinpoint the exact moment when David died—and I could watch it happen.

  At least, I should have been able to.

  Something strange happened when I asked the Overseer for David’s time of death.

  The time it reported loss of contact with his internal tracking chip was 2400:00:00.

  Midnight. Exactly midnight. To within hundredths of a second.

  “That can’t be right,” van Arendonk said.

  I was glad I didn’t have to explain to him how improbable it was. I asked for the tracking and surveillance data for the time and location of David’s death.

  The Overseer answered: Data unavailable.

  “What? Why the fuck not?” I said, and my hands were already moving again, asking for a full surveillance report on David’s motions. My access only allowed me twelve hours of data prior to the recorded time of death, so I worked backward to find out what was available.

  The Overseer was quick with a reply.

  Just before 2300, David was tracked moving from Operations to the junction, from the junction into the cargo warehouse. That was the last recorded confirmation of his presence prior to his death at 2400.

  Between 2300 and 2400, there was no security, surveillance, or tracking data.

  Data unavailable.

  There was no medical data. There was no door or terminal access data. No cameras anywhere on the station had recorded anything during that time. No audio recorder had registered a single sound. There was nothing. Every possible record was nonexistent.

  A buzzing sound
grew in my ears. This should not be possible. I had the required access; the Overseer was not hiding anything from me. I checked and double-checked. Asked the Overseer to check. It was completely fucking impossible. Data unavailable, every time I asked, for every source I searched between the hours of 2300 and 2400 on the night of David’s death. It was all empty, empty, empty. Not only in Ops and Res, not only in the cargo warehouse, not only in the airlock, but everywhere throughout the facility. There were no surveillance and security data files from that hour. None. Even the exterior cameras positioned on the docking structure recorded nothing. The entire security subsystem had stopped recording at precisely the same moment, and one hour later it had picked up again as though nothing had happened.

  There was nothing but an hour-long gap of darkness and silence.

  “How is that possible?” van Arendonk asked. He leaned forward in his chair, staring intently at the Overseer’s output. “Is that possible?”

  I didn’t want to admit it, but I had no idea. Overseers did not stop monitoring their stations for any reason. It simply didn’t happen. The whole purpose of putting the surveillance system under the control of an AI rather than a fallible human crew vulnerable to threats and extortion was to protect it from such tampering. I didn’t even know how somebody might go about blinding an Overseer for a single second, much less an entire hour. Even station sysadmins weren’t supposed to have that kind of power.

  But the first step was to ask the Overseer itself, so that’s what I did. I didn’t know how the Overseer would interpret a direct query, so I dug into the commands that led to the surveillance and security blackout. I wasn’t terribly surprised to find that the command itself had been erased within microseconds of the system returning to fully operational, so I traced the origin of the deletion order. I looked specifically for any actions taken by Mary Ping, the other sysadmin. There were only twelve people on Nimue, and arguably only the two sysadmins would have even the slimmest chance of convincing the Overseer to close its eyes for an hour.