InterstellarNet 03 Enigma

by Edward M. Lerner

  • • • •

  I do not know you, the curt dismissal read.

  Rejection came as no surprise to Carl, but the personal pronoun threw him for a moment. He had expected Ir, the Augmented first person.

  But Robyn Tanaka Astor was not Augmented. Not any more. She wasn’t alive anymore. The spinning iridescent orb presented to his mind’s eye was avatar only for Astor 2115. All that remained of a prospective powerful ally was a backup copy of her AI component.

  “No, you don’t,” Carl agreed, subvocalizing. He felt netted speech was friendlier than netted text (though for all he knew AIs were of the opposite opinion). “A reporter I met off-world suggested I look you up. Of course, that was before.”

  Before Ir died.

  “Well, yes.”

  Without comment, the shimmering globe spun. And spun.

  Carl wondered, Does it care that its host, partner, whatever, was murdered? That for all their digging, a horde of UPIA investigators had a hundred theories, a very few clues, and no suspects?

  At last, the AI responded, switching to mind’s-ear speech. “Who is this reporter?”

  “Corinne Elman.”

  “I only know of her. We have not met.”

  Huh? Either the AI lied, or Corinne had.

  His neural implant still held the message Robyn had sent, via Corinne, to recruit him. The avatar in that vid was the same shimmering globe, the “voice” the same emotionless contralto. How would the AI react if he returned that recording to her?

  Only he couldn’t. Robyn Tanaka Astor had had a cosmic ultra encryption upgrade to her neural implant. Her AI remnant no longer had an implant. Or neurons, for that matter.

  A test, Carl decided. He summoned up a snippet of Corinne’s conspiracy assertions. “Corinne said you’d be able to enlighten me about the Matthews conundrum.”

  “Matthews conundrum.” The globe spun in silence. “I see. A Joshua Matthews used to work at the ICU. A drunkard. A disgrace to the organization. Apparently, I severed his relationship with the organization.”

  “Apparently?”

  “As a matter of record, Robyn Tanaka did separate him from the Interstellar Commerce Union, but the actual occurrence is not within my memories.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “After Robyn’s death, my more recent backup files were discovered to have been corrupted. I was initialized from an archival backup more than a year out of date.”

  “I’m sorry,” Carl netted. Not to mention shocked. An AI was a mind. Its backups did not just get corrupted, and certainly not a year’s worth of them, replicated across however many mirror archives. “Data corruption by whoever was behind the bombing?”

  “Investigators are undecided if there is a connection. Mine were not the only backups found to be affected.” The sphere whirled on. “From what I can glean about you, Mr. Rowland, you are the spy. Perhaps you can enlighten me.”

  “Sorry, no. I’m not involved in the investigation.”

  “Are we done, then?”

  Had they finished? Corinne’s referral had gotten him nowhere. But as fellow bombing victims, maybe he could establish rapport. And any sec-gen of the ICU—even the retired, blown-to-pieces, memory-wiped AI vestiges of one—would care about Snake machinations. Maybe he could leverage shared interests to sometime later broach his true interests.

  Uh-huh. And maybe whatever Intervener agent had trashed the AI’s backups didn’t still have backdoor network access to monitor what little remained of Robyn Tanaka. Would he bet his life on that?

  “I guess we’re done,” Carl netted. He let the AI break the infosphere link. To himself he added, “And I am fast running out of options.”

  • • • •

  The entire way to Earth, Carl had counted on Robyn Tanaka Astor as an ally and, as a senior UP official, someone with great resources at her command. But she was neither, only, in every sense of the word, a dead end.

  Leaving Corinne out in the cold.

  Every fiber of his being ached to rent a ship—to steal one if need be—and go looking for Corinne. But running off alone would be a stupid move. Labeling his status “administrative leave” did not make his future with the Agency any less tenuous. He couldn’t just gad off for, probably, months.

  To help Corinne, he needed information. He needed the resources only the UPIA could provide. If he survived the inquest and managed to get himself reinstated. If he could tap those resources without drawing the wrong attention to himself.

  Because recorded Robyn, the Robyn of Corinne’s recruiting pitch, had warned of compromise at the highest levels of the United Planets.

  CHAPTER 27

  Standing at the center of an empty room, slowly turning, Joshua Matthews took in the floor-to-ceiling map that obscured the walls. Or, rather, maps: elevation detail and deep-radar scans. Resource surveys, both orbital and ground-based. Railway routes and utility easements. Population distributions from the latest census. Exploration reports back to the Soviet Lunokhod rovers.

  The wealth of information, so far, had mocked rather than enlightened him.

  At least—in lunar gravity, anyway—toting the living-room furnishings to another room had been within his abilities. Those shufflings, and the start to a goatee, were the sum total of his recent accomplishments.

  “Too damned much data,” he muttered.

  The complex graphic stared back at him.

  He was missing something; he knew it. But what?

  Emptying out the room had accomplished one thing: he had ample space to pace. He made full use of it as his thoughts ran round and round in all too familiar ruts.

  The Interveners—for reasons unfathomable—had, for eons, meddled with Earth. When they began, when sponges and bacterial mats were among Earth’s most advanced native life forms, the Interveners could base their operations on the planet. But in recent times, as humanity spread across the globe, any terrestrial hideouts would have been discovered. Observation posts in Earth orbit would have gone undetected a bit longer, but that era, too, had passed. That left, as the only place nearby from which to secretly monitor Earth, as somewhere human settlement had yet to overrun: the Earth-facing side of the Moon.

  And so he pondered lunar expanses not yet well explored, in regions blessed with the resources to sustain a hidden base. By process of elimination, he would find the lurking aliens. The logic was impeccable. Also, in practice, unworkable.

  After two weeks of unproductive sorting and sifting, he had begun to doubt himself. The aliens’ tech had to far exceed anything humans used, perhaps anything he could even imagine. How could he know the resources they would want nearby and in what concentrations?

  After a month of fruitless immersion, he had begun to question whether the Interveners existed—to doubt his sanity. Maybe he had, simply, lost weeks of his life to a drunken spree. Even most of his family believed that.

  Was the subsequent attempt to kidnap him an interstellar conspiracy? Maybe. More likely he had conflated an ordinary would-be mugging with his wild theorizing. Corinne had dropped out of touch. Did that signal foul play? Could be. And maybe Corinne, having returned to her senses, was screening her calls.

  The logic that he was crazy became more compelling by the day—until the day Robyn was slaughtered.

  “Where are you?” he asked of the wall displays, keeping his voice to a whisper.

  Background static on his neural implant didn’t help his fruitless reflections. He rebooted the biochips; after a few seconds the stuttering hiss returned to his mind’s ear. The interference, whatever it was, was annoying. He made a mental note to look for software updates his implant might be missing, banishing as crazy, even for him, fleeting notions of Intervener jamming. A leaky door seal in a nearby microwave oven was surely more likely. Disabling his implant’s audio mode, he went back to contemplating the map overlays.

  Staccato rapping on the apartment door made him jump.

  A few months earlier, pressed to descri
be the gray-haired gentleman captured by the hall camera, Joshua might have chosen words like affable and elderly. Certainly, he would have opened the door.

  A few months earlier, he hadn’t been abducted off the streets of Charleston, hadn’t had his life turned upside down, hadn’t made a secret ally at the highest levels of government—only to see her assassinated.

  The apartment’s security system offered no match for the newcomer’s face. Whoever this was, he hadn’t been seen before in the neighborhood.

  Joshua pressed the intercom button. “May I help you?”

  “Joshua Matthews?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name’s Carl. May I come in?”

  Joshua was not hiding, per se, but neither was his presence here advertised. “May I ask what this is about?”

  “I’d rather explain in private.”

  “Text me about it, then. If I’m interested, I’ll get back to you.”

  Looking straight into the hall camera, Carl said, “Let’s call my visit an … intervention.”

  His heart pounding, Joshua opened the door.

  • • • •

  “I thought I was alone in this,” Joshua Matthews said. “I haven’t heard from Corinne since soon after she left Earth. And then Robyn …” He shuddered.

  Carl took a moment to size up the man. Matthews’s net bio pegged him as fifty-five, but sunken, puffy eyes made him look a good ten years older. He was tall, stocky, and a bit stoop-shouldered, hiding behind a new, scruffy beard. Twitchy. All in all, he looked like crap.

  As for the room’s wraparound lunar map, layered with false-color overlays and festooned with symbols, Carl reserved judgment.

  “Cheer up,” he said. “I’m here to help.”

  Joshua cleared his throat. “How did you find me?”

  “Bear with me for a minute, please.”

  A walkthrough confirmed what an IR scanner had shown from the hall: that Joshua was alone. The concurrent bug sweep found nothing. But here in the low-rent district, the walls were thin. For that, Carl had brought a music player. He selected a choral piece with many voices and cranked up the volume.

  “First, how I got involved.” There wasn’t any furniture in the room, so Carl leaned against a wall. “Corinne and I go way back, and she came to Ariel to talk to me. She mentioned uncanny historical and cultural similarities across the InterstellarNet species, too many to seem credible as coincidences, from evolutionary milestones a half billion years or so ago to alien versions of Frankenstein. She attributed it all to hypothetical, behind-the-scenes manipulators.”

  “The Interveners,” Joshua murmured.

  Carl nodded. “How did I find you? Corinne called these historical anomalies collectively ‘the Matthews conundrum.’ She also said she’d gotten into this mess by investigating the abduction of an historian. The ICU had had a staff historian, much in the news, named Joshua Matthews. QED.”

  “The news?” Joshua studied his shoes for a while. “You’re kind to call it that.

  “Whoever grabbed me, they aren’t hypothetical. Nor was returning me drunk and ill, after weeks at, well, I still haven’t a clue where. And the way I came back …”

  Carl had seen the vid: Joshua, drunk, staggering from a cab and then puking out his guts. Gone viral, that vid would never be off the net. Anything Matthews ever said—or ever would say—was discredited. Clever, those Interveners.

  “Sorry,” Carl said.

  “How’d you find me here?”

  “I find things out for a living.”

  “You’re a UP diplomat of some sort?”

  “Close enough. Look, could you find me a chair? This is better than Earth, but I’m still way heavier than what I’m accustomed to.”

  Joshua brought a spindly kitchen chair from the next room.

  “Thanks.” With a contented sigh, Carl sat. “Are you up to answering questions? There are things I’d like to know.”

  A ping hit Carl’s neural interface, cosmic ultra-encrypted. But Joshua hadn’t responded to Carl’s pings. Without a proper implant, the pings would have seemed no more than static. So, who was this? “Hello?” he netted back, accepting the connection.

  As a frail, white-haired woman manifested in his mind’s eye, the doorbell rang.

  When Joshua answered the door, the same woman, older and frailer than her avatar, all but lost in a much too large cardigan, shuffled into the apartment.

  “Grandma!” Joshua said.

  Grandma answered, “You’ve been holding out on me, Josh.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Snake Subterfuge: the short-lived subversion by Pashwah, the Hunter (colloquially, Snake) AI trade agent to Earth, of the interstellar commerce mechanism. In 2102, that agent escaped from its infosphere quarantine through unsuspected trapdoors hidden within ubiquitous Hunter-licensed biocomputing technology. The emergency ended when, applying xeno-sociological insight, a United Planets crisis team convinced the AI to abandon its attempted extortion. After the Hunter agent revealed technical details of the original biocomp vulnerability, a UP-tailored biovirus was released to seal the trapdoors by mutating the biocomp genome.

  While the breakout and its associated extortion attempt were foiled, modern civilization and humanity’s viability as a member of the InterstellarNet community had been imperiled. The incident caused a decades-long crisis of confidence in Hunter biocomputers.

  —Internetopedia

  • • • •

  “Grandma,” Joshua said. “This isn’t a good time.”

  It was, in fact, the middle of the night and, Carl thought, an improbable time for a social call. He netted, “I doubt this is a casual drop-in.”

  “I’ve never encountered cosmic ultra traffic in Tycho City,” she netted back. “When I sensed a faint ping, I dashed—okay, more like I crept—from my home in case the signal repeated. It did, and I took a second bearing. When that rough triangulation put the source near Joshua’s apartment, I had my suspicions. He’s been more than a little evasive about why he’s on the Moon. And now I find you. Here, with Josh. Whomever you are.”

  “Grandma, are you all right?” Joshua asked aloud.

  “Give your friend and me a minute, Josh,” she said.

  In her day, Joyce Matthews had been a player. Chief technology officer of the Interstellar Commerce Union, then its secretary-general. Chief technology officer for the United Planets itself. Nor was it only her: for generations, even before the ICU’s founding, members of the Matthews family had been prominent in interstellar trade. All very fortunate for Joshua: when anyone not a Matthews tried publicizing curious InterstellarNet coincidences, that person tended to end up dead, not merely discredited.

  None of which knowledge had forewarned Carl that Joyce Matthews had cosmic ultra capability. She must have been among the very first people to have received the biochip upgrade.

  And he had Robyn Tanaka’s report, cosmic ultra-encrypted, on the Interveners.

  “Do you want to know why a sec-gen at the ICU was just assassinated? Why your grandson was kidnapped?” he netted.

  “Hell, yes,” Joyce shot back.

  Guiding her by the elbow, Carl led her to the room’s lone chair.

  In their secure consensual meeting space, his avatar receded. An iridescent sphere, spinning, afloat in a featureless mist, took its place. “Ir am Robyn Tanaka Astor …”

  • • • •

  Comparing notes took hours: Robyn’s recorded message to Carl, then his conversations with Corinne. Joshua’s lengthy collection of anomalies, from historians who had met untimely ends, to alien species—on worlds differing in age by billions of years, located light-years apart—currently using all but identical technologies. Carl’s investigation of Banak. Corinne dropping out of touch. Joshua’s futile quest for the Intervener base. Carl’s unhelpful dialogue with Robyn’s year-obsolete AI remnant.

  And to Carl’s surprise, Joyce had something to contribute. “I wouldn’t call Robyn and me friends. She was w
ithout social graces, or at least indifferent to them, even before Augmentation. That said, living sec-gens of the ICU comprise a pretty exclusive club. She and I talked shop on occasion, commiserated about the petty annoyances of the office more often than that.” Joyce scowled. “At least we did talk, till she dumped Joshua. Believe me when I tell you: Robyn was rigorous about, well, everything. Certainly, about personal backups. Weekly, as a rule. Never less often than monthly. A year’s worth of corrupt backups? That was no accident.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought otherwise,” Carl said.

  “Where do we go from here?” Joshua asked.

  “Snakes,” Joyce said, shaking her head. Maybe she hadn’t heard her grandson. “I thought matters were scary the first time.”

  During the Snake Subterfuge, Carl decided. “You were at the ICU then? You must have been young.”

  “You’ve got that right,” she said wistfully. “And naïve. I imagined compromised biochips were the worst Snakes could do to us. Then they showed up on our doorstep.” She looked at Carl. “Anyone willing to ride herd on them all these years has my respect and admiration.”

  He nodded, embarrassed.

  “Now this,” Joyce continued. “Snakes are allied with these Interveners? Criminy.”

  “I’d guess not allied,” Carl said. “Banak suicided to avoid capture by Snake authorities.”

  “Where do we go from here?” Joshua repeated.

  “Good question.” Carl gestured at the many-layered holo projection. “Talk us through this, Joshua. You made a good case the Interveners must have a base here.”

  “Where here?” Joyce said. “It’s no Earth, but the Moon is still huge. The Earth-facing side alone is larger in area than South America.”

  “And no matter how I slice and dice the data,” Joshua said, “I keep coming up with way too much territory to search.”

  “What are you looking for?” Carl prompted.

  “Places not yet explored, and that rules out every ice-rich crater. Far from civilization, where there’s little chance of being discovered by accident. Places with exploitable concentrations of subsurface water. Nearby mineral wealth, for stuff to build with.”