The Best of Us

by Karen Traviss

  Solomon listened with increasing frustration and wished he could tell them everything. If Kim was a spy instead of a foreign scientist with a grudge, she might have accomplices out there, and Trinder could only do his job if he knew the truth — all of it, including Nomad, so he could understand how high the stakes were.

  “So what’s the worst scenario now?” Fonseca asked. “How many displaced people are left? It’s been what, four or five years since APS did the last nuke run to the north? If refugees or gangs were going to come here in any numbers, they’d have shown by now.” She looked up as if someone was standing over her. “Solomon, what’s the latest on die-back?”

  Solomon had no choice but to participate, but everything he omitted made him complicit. “Orbital imaging shows the barren areas haven’t expanded in the last quarter, but of course it’s winter so most plants are dormant anyway. People are staying put. Best estimate based on land and energy use is that there are between twenty-five and thirty million people still living within the old United States borders.”

  Trinder doodled on his personal screen, drawing rectangles with concentric lines like an inescapable maze. When he reached the centre, he’d tap to erase it and start again. “Let’s reconvene when we’ve got more information,” he said. “If Dr Kim’s arrival changes the security situation, Erskine will let us know.”

  Marc made that huh-huh sound at the back of his throat that was somewhere between a humourless laugh and disbelief. “I wish I had your faith, vicar.”

  “Put it in perspective — we’re still more at risk from an APS missile if someone thinks we’re carrying out hazardous research,” Fonseca said. “It’s not like they don’t know we’re still alive. They must be able to detect the shuttles from time to time.”

  “Well, Sol’s got that covered from the orbital,” Luce said. “Although we’d probably be charcoal a few minutes after he took out the first missiles.”

  “Beats sitting here and taking one up the tailpipe,” Fonseca said, pushing her seat back. “At least it would give us time to get below ground. Right, Sol?”

  Solomon could only agree. But they weren’t equipped to see off the might of the Asian and Pacific forces.

  “Right, Captain.”

  Fonseca and Trinder left. Luce helped himself to another coffee, chatted with Tev and Marc about the canteen menu for a few minutes, then headed out as well. The two Brits didn’t say anything for a while. Solomon wondered if they were waiting for him to announce that he was going to withdraw and stop monitoring.

  Tev shook his head. “It’s not the woman showing up that worries me. It’s the reaction. Way over the top. And if they won’t tell us, what’s going on? Unless they know she’s a spy, of course, and then I have to wonder why APS would bother sending one.”

  “Secrecy’s in their DNA.” Marc fiddled with a spoon, seeing how far he could bend it. “Ainatio’s still going to think like a big corporate bureaucracy even when they’re down to two old men and a dog in a potting shed. They love their silos and poxy little empires.”

  “Right now, I’d bloody well row back to England. It’s not like it hasn’t been done.”

  Marc did a drum roll on the table with his fingers. “Right. I’m going for a run. We’re late.”

  “Yeah. Good idea.”

  Solomon couldn’t follow them even if he wanted to. They went running every day, not in the well-equipped sports centre in the main building but around the perimeter, no matter how bad the weather. It was probably so they could talk privately. That meant they’d either intended him to hear the discussion about going home and act on it, or they didn’t care if he did. He wasn’t sure what they’d gain from that. Neither man did anything without thinking it through, so he didn’t dismiss its significance, but if they’d really wanted to go, they were skilled and resourceful enough to have found a way. Solomon got the feeling that Marc wanted to stay and Tev was reluctant to leave him on his own.

  “See you later, Solomon,” Tev said, closing the door.

  Solomon could hear them chatting about the building as they walked through the corridors, but once they were outside he could only watch as each perimeter camera picked them up and handed off to the next. They wore peaked baseball caps as they ran, heads down, so he couldn’t lip-read even head-on.

  Most of the staff seemed to have worked out his limited number of blind spots. Inconsistent human attitudes to monitoring always intrigued him. People generally seemed content to be tracked around the facility via a chip or a pass, and saw it as a convenience to open doors or find colleagues. They could tolerate and even choose to forget that he could watch them in every building, albeit for their own security and safety. But then some would suddenly become acutely conscious of surveillance and take steps to hide.

  It wasn’t their uneasiness that surprised him. It was natural for any animal to need a private space and to feel threatened by intrusion that it couldn’t even see. It was the human ability to forget it for a while that seemed odd. So he did his best to respect their privacy, even if they weren’t troubled by him, and left the cabins and bathrooms to the dumb AI systems that were no more than glorified smoke detectors. He tried to remind them of that as often as he could.

  When he routed back to the infirmary, Dr Kim was asleep, her room lights dimmed, and Erskine had gone back to her office. Knowing her, it wasn’t because she thought Kim needed some rest. She’d probably decided to withdraw while she worked out her next move. Her reaction suggested that she hadn’t known about Kim’s relative and the theft allegation any more than he had. He searched the company archives, looking for evidence that the research had been stolen, but if this really was industrial espionage, it was unlikely to have been recorded.

  And that’s why they wouldn’t tell me, isn’t it? Because everything I observe is a record. Perhaps I wasn’t told because someone thought I would moralise about it and refuse to help, or turn them in.

  But what about Bednarz? How could he not know?

  It didn’t pay to dwell on it. Solomon didn’t want to become like Erskine, unable to trust anyone around her. The immediate problem was whether APS knew about Nomad and what they’d do about it if they did. He couldn’t imagine them looking kindly on a failure to share FTL technology, and they’d definitely react if they knew Cabot was still in transit and heavily armed against the unexpected. He had to be ready to defend the mission if the worst happened.

  There was still so much that so few knew.

  Solomon hung around the private comms channels, waiting for Erskine to summon the ten people who knew about Cabot for a crisis meeting, but it looked like she was going to deal with this alone for the time being. She was still sitting in her favourite leather armchair, feet up on an upholstered stool, Ho Wai-On’s Sakura Variations playing in the background.

  Nobody else — not the security detachment, not the staff, and certainly not the people of Kill Line — knew anything about Nomad, just that there were four ageing ships gathering dust at the orbitals and not earning their keep. A great deal could be concealed from isolated groups. Even more could be hidden if a team of AIs did all the confidential work and controlled information. It just took a tweak in the cover story, that surplus food was being stockpiled and that the four ships were being maintained in case die-back finally overwhelmed Kill Line, that space research was continuing alongside the environmental remediation because that expertise was too precious to be lost... and it was all true. It just lacked a few pieces of information that made it a totally different story. That didn’t make Solomon feel any better. It was just a necessary sin. The question was how long it should have continued.

  I’m not programmed to follow orders. I could have refused.

  Solomon considered his task, the job he’d been created to do and encouraged to interpret in his own terms. It was the core of him. Tad Bednarz had told him he had to protect the best of humanity, even when
that meant overruling a human giving him orders, and that he’d need to be the project’s conscience. Any AI could run ships and construction. Only Solomon was designed to develop a sense of morality and do what could only be vaguely defined as the right thing. After a century, he’d seen enough to know what right was.

  It was a gut feel, and he had no gut.

  He could borrow limbs and sensation, though, and he could always lose himself for a while on Opis. While he wasn’t capable of taking his mind off something like a human would, he could certainly experience things that gave him peace and enjoyment to counterbalance uncomfortable knowledge.

  If Erskine decided to watch the Nomad feed, it didn’t matter. This was his world. He was entitled to upload to the remote quadrubot any time to check on progress. And when he went beyond the security cameras’ range, he didn’t have to transmit anything from the bot’s cams that he didn’t want her to see.

  Moving his primary focus between Earth, the orbitals, and Opis was no more than the blip of switching from camera to camera within the Ainatio grounds. He blinked and he was in the quadrubot again, seeing the hangar interior through its snakehead lens as it stood parked in its charging dock. When the dumb AI supervisor surrendered control of the bot, Solomon trotted past a huddle of cube-shaped surveyors, dormant for the night like a sleeping flock of sheep.

  He paused to check them, noting scrapes and dents. They should have been air-blasted clean before returning to recharge, but one of them had some dark-coloured debris lodged in its trim. Solomon zoomed in to study it and saw a fragment of feather. There was no other way to describe it. It had a central shaft and vanes growing out of either side, neat and meshed together. That wasn’t unexpected. There were a number of flying species here, and life tended to find the same solutions to engineering problems independently, time after time and place after place. Perhaps the bot had strayed too close to a nest and had been attacked. It seemed none the worse for it.

  Solomon extracted the feather with the precision grab and admired it in different lights from his headlamp. Under Pascoe daylight, it was a deep navy blue with a bloom of iridescence. He slipped it into the quad’s storage cavity and headed out into the brilliant, clear night.

  This was wonderful. This was beautiful. The sky was studded with stars and a crescent moon, and the air — 19.7 per cent oxygen at sea level, well worth the effort of ignoring closer worlds — was throbbing with sound, much of it beyond the range of human hearing. Flying, crawling, and skittering creatures that would take years to catalogue were hunting for food or mates.

  Erskine didn’t seem to be watching. Solomon switched his vision to adapt to the night as the lights from the base faded behind him. All he needed to do now was to disable all his onboard cams except the forward-facing ones to give himself the perspective of a four-legged predator on Earth.

  He had no fears about encountering a native predator here. The quadrubot frame could withstand anything, but surveys had found no big animals in the area anyway. The largest species near the base were the spiny, rat-sized creatures he could see scurrying for the cover of rocks and scrubby plants as he approached.

  Now he was ready. He broke into a loping run for no other reason than the sheer thrill of it, picking up speed. He was no longer an observer. In this body, anchored to the physical world through a narrow range of sensation, he was... alive. The limitations of a physical form intensified everything. He felt the hard ground almost rise up to hit the pads of his feet, sending shock waves through his frame. His field of vision jerked with the motion until he adjusted to hold his focus steady on a point ahead of him, just as a raptor or a cheetah would.

  That was it. He was a cheetah. The bot had transformed him into Earth’s fastest animal for a few precious hours. He’d never seen the creature in the flesh and had to rely on extrapolation from videos, but he was sure this was how it felt to sprint after prey. The world flew past him. The sense of movement when switching from camera to camera back at Ainatio was nothing like this.

  He could have kept up this pace for hours, but if he lost power out of radio range, he’d have to go into standby and wait here until Pascoe rose and recharged his solar backups. He couldn’t afford to be out of the loop for that long at a critical time like this, even if his lower functions would continue back on Earth without him. He slowed, swung around, and headed back at a canter towards Nomad’s distant lights. As he loped, he heard an occasional rush of air a few yards away, off to his left, then his right.

  Something was moving parallel with him.

  He debated whether to try to outrun it, or stop to see what it was. But he had to avoid using force. Being the first killer on Opis wasn’t a distinction he wanted.

  It can’t penetrate my casing. It can’t eat me. If it knocks me down, I can just right myself. I’ll probably scare it anyway.

  Solomon gave in to curiosity and slowed to a trot. The whooshing sound was still there. He didn’t turn his snakehead. He just activated the 360-degree cameras and looked around, caught some movement, then switched on all his lights at once.

  His two pursuers were blue-black, bird-like creatures between three and four feet tall, now standing upright with heads drawn back, frozen. One stared into his snakehead as if it was looking into his face, head turned slightly because its own eyes — bright yellow in the lights — were set slightly to the sides. Then it seemed to lose its nerve. It spread its wings — ah, that was where the dark blue feather came from, then — and scuttled for a few yards on the front edges like a pterosaur.

  No, they weren’t wing edges after all: Solomon could see front feet as well. It was moving on all fours.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m Solomon. Don’t be afraid. I won’t harm you. Why haven’t I seen you before?”

  He said it in the way a human would, aware that the creature wouldn’t understand but still unable to stifle the reflex to address something that could look him in the eye. But it stood on its hind legs and took off, alternating between flapping and gliding a few feet off the ground. Its companion rose over Solomon and vanished into the darkness behind it. Apart from the rush of air against feathers, they hadn’t made a sound.

  Did that qualify as first contact?

  Solomon stood listening for a while, cycling his sensors through different wavelengths to see if the creatures had just withdrawn to a safe distance to watch, but there was nothing out there now. They were gone.

  Wonderful. Just wonderful. I’m sure they’ll be back.

  Opis needed no terraforming or pressurised habitats. It was already alive, already so much like Earth that humans could step onto its surface and breathe its air right away. This was why Bednarz had gambled on a distant planet when less hospitable worlds were closer. And now, with little chance of starting over, the mission had to succeed.

  One shot.

  Solomon returned to the hangar, stood under the air jets to blow off the dust, and parked the bot in the charging dock. Tonight he’d been a cheetah, and he’d looked into the eyes of alien birds.

  Yes, it was worth the journey.

  03

  I’m placing my trust in you, Solomon. You’re the only one I can rely on who can’t be bribed, threatened, or corrupted, who won’t be warped by envy or ambition, who won’t lose interest or just give up because it’s all too damn hard. You can be better than me — better than us. I don’t want humanity exporting its failings. Populating the galaxy’s going to bring out the very best and the very worst in us, so I want you to define exactly what that best is, identify it, and protect it against all its enemies. That’s your mission. You decide who’s the best of us.

  Tad Bednarz, in an early development session with the prototype AMAI, Autonomous Moral Artificial Intelligence, code-named Solomon

  Transit Camp Guard House, Near Kill Line:

  Saturday, February 21, 0025 Hours

  “So you called him sir and e
verything, huh?” Jared’s shoulders started shaking, the silent beginning of a belly laugh. He poured the beer too fast and had to slurp up the overflowing foam. “Wow. You’re going soft, Chris. Did you salute?”

  “Nah. It was just my mouth on autopilot.”

  “One flash of gold braid and you’re offering to shine their boots.”

  “He didn’t have any braid. Just the black coveralls with rank insignia.” Chris gestured with the bottle. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him outside the wire. About six-two, forty or so. I couldn’t tell if he was grey or dark blonde under his cap.”

  “You’re still shit at recon, then.”

  “Maybe both.”

  “So how many are there?”

  “I only saw Trinder and the private on sentry duty. Well, I’m assuming her rank, because nobody else would be out there freezing their ass off.”

  “So you kicked his ass for not spotting her.”

  “No, I just suggested they put some sentry hardware along the river. Look, we’re the early warning system, and they’re close-in defence. That suits everyone. Keeps us fed, too. What’s the alternative? Drag everyone here out on the road again?”

  “Well, at least we know the girl wasn’t infectious.”

  “Yeah.” Chris held out his bottle and clinked the metal against Jared’s mug. “Nobody’s going to die. Not this time.”

  It was good to just slump in a seat, have a beer, and draw a line under the day. Chris had learned that the world was better taken in small doses. A long-term objective was great, and he always had a plan, but living hour to hour and being glad you’d made it that far was the secret to being happy, or at least not being miserable. Sometimes a whole day was too ambitious.

  “Got any leftovers?” he asked.