“I’ll see what’s sitting on servers that I can access, Director.”
“And Doug Brandt,” Alex said. “If Chris knows, he’ll feel obliged to tell Doug. It’s better coming from us.”
“Agreed.”
“I’ll call him. Solomon, do you want to handle Chris?”
“Certainly.”
“Good to see everyone’s suddenly so friendly and on first-name terms,” Erskine said. “Let’s make sure we don’t lose control of the situation. This mustn’t degenerate into a free-for-all if the camp tells other refugees.”
Alex’s eyelids lowered just a fraction, a sign that he was annoyed. “The last contact they had with other displaced ended with one of their men dead and three others wounded, Director, so I don’t think they’re in a sharing mood.”
“Well, let’s get this done. Thank you, everybody. Solomon, we need to iron out some details, if you could spare me a few minutes.”
Yes, I know what that means.
The others knew too. Solomon spotted the flash of eyebrows between Tev and Marc. Trinder just glanced at the wall speakers with a nod of acknowledgement. Perhaps this had made a tense meeting worse. It was much easier for everyone when Solomon transferred to the quadrubot and they saw him as a loyal, friendly canine than when he loomed over them like an invisible and judgemental deity.
And it’s a cheetah. Not a dog. Why does that matter?
Erskine’s office emptied. She carried on watching the Opis feed.
“Solomon, we’ve worked together a long time,” she said. “We’re not getting along like we should. Is there a problem? Do you want to talk about anything?”
“I have fewer problems to resolve now than I did a year ago, Director.”
“Then let me say this. Don’t you ever, ever go behind my back on policy and security again. Don’t you ever undermine me in front of others like that. And don’t ever forget that you work for Ainatio. You’re Ainatio property. You have no other loyalty. Do you understand? This is about trust.”
Shall I be conciliatory and just bypass her, or thrash it out once and for all? I’ve got what I needed. Everyone gets the chance to go to Opis.
“I understand why you find it hard when I disagree with you, but that’s my job.”
“Disagree? I’m starting to feel like this is a coup. You manoeuvred me into conceding today.”
“I did what needed doing in the interests of the mission, in accordance with my tasking.”
“Damn you, this is like talking to a lawyer. I’m the CEO of Ainatio. This is my company and this is my mission.”
Solomon would have to clear the air sooner or later, and now seemed appropriate. “I don’t mean to be callous, Director, but you’re also seventy years old, and won’t be around forever, whereas for all intents and purposes I will. This is part of why I was created. I’m beyond human limitations like lifespans and status. And I’m not here to tell you what you want to hear. I’m here to tell you what you need to know.”
Erskine was very good at long, unblinking silences, which took some doing when there were no visible eyes for her to focus on.
“I can’t argue with that,” she said. “But I do think your judgement might be clouded by other imagined loyalties.”
“My tasking wasn’t quite the same as yours.”
“Oh?”
“Yours is to ensure that Cabot lands its crew and that the follow-up missions take place. Mine is a longer-term tasking about humanity’s future.”
“That’s a very grand pronouncement. What makes you think I have no interest in the long term? Other than being senile and near death, of course.”
“My apologies. I really didn’t mean to dismiss you. You haven’t named a successor, though. You don’t have an official deputy, except perhaps Alex. People with visions want to know their legacy will be in good hands, like your father did.”
Ahh, that’s true. But referring to her father... no, that was a mistake. She won’t forgive that.
“Then let’s try not to thwart each other again, shall we?” Erskine somehow ignored the trespass onto the sensitive ground of her relationship with her father. Everybody knew never to mention him to her. “I don’t want to have to attempt this without your full support.”
Solomon wasn’t sure whether to take that as a threat of disconnection. She had to be aware that he wasn’t something to simply unplug or shut down, but he decided that mistrust was the safer option. He didn’t think she was a bad person. If anything, he felt sorry for her. She’d given up her planned life for one that her father had dumped on her in the full expectation that she’d drop everything else to do it. But she didn’t have the same goals as Solomon. He could see that their definitions of the best of humanity weren’t going to match up.
“The mission will always have my full support, Director,” he said. “You mustn’t doubt that.”
He withdrew into the system and wandered around the monitors, looking for allies. Tev, Marc, and Trinder were in the recreation wing, playing basketball. By the time he’d transferred himself into the quadrubot and walked down there, they were sitting against the court wall, cooling down.
“Only me, gentlemen,” Solomon said. “Good game?”
“Feeling our age,” Tev said. “Did you get a bollocking from Erskine, then?”
“We discussed our differences of opinion, yes.”
Marc wiped his face on a towel. “Sol, mate, you need to watch your step. The old girl’s going to bust you down to a coffee machine if you get too lippy with her.”
“I thought I was being polite.”
“You were, but you weren’t taking any shit from her either. Be careful. She’ll pull your plug and shut you down.”
“She can’t.”
“I don’t think you realise how much you’ve rattled her cage.”
“I do, but I meant that I’m designed to protect myself. I keep going when humans fail, but also when they change their minds. My creator didn’t want me tampered with.”
“Ooh-err missus.”
“He wanted me to stick to my original objective, no matter what.”
“Keep the faith, bro,” Trinder said.
Tev chuckled. “Anything can be destroyed if you try. What if she sticks a missile up your mainframe or whatever it’s called?”
“If there’s a power failure, an attack, or some fault, I move my core elsewhere, either in the system or to a separate device. Like this quad. It’s mobile and has its own power supply. As long as I have some means of transmission, I can run and hide. I might lose some of my more complex oversight functions, but I can rebuild those when I come back.”
“And use weapons,” Trinder murmured.
“Absolutely, if I can access them.”
“What if you go wrong?”
“What if humans go wrong?”
“Remind me never to piss you off, Sol,” Marc said.
“Yes, it’s just as well that I’m a moral AI.” That got a laugh from everyone. Solomon wasn’t joking, though. “My capability isn’t the kind that works well with ruthlessness.”
“Ah, always plan based on your enemy’s capability, not intent.” Trinder kept checking his pulse against his watch. “I think you are pretty ruthless. You certainly sounded it with Erskine.”
“I prefer to think of it as not being paralysed by programming. Moral choices don’t always mean that everyone gets what they want.”
That killed the conversation for a moment. Solomon wondered if he’d said too much and they were starting to think that he might regard them as acceptable losses.
“She just wants to create Boffinworld,” Marc said. “A planet of brainiacs, like the freakshow colonies on the lighthuggers, and all she needs Kill Line’s peasants for is cleaning the toilets. Who would you have recruited if the world hadn’t shot itself in the arse, Sol?
Nobel winners with Olympic golds and big biceps?”
It was time to tell them. They might not even realise the significance of what they were being told, but that was fine. They’d find out.
“Gentlemen, shall I tell you the only specific mission I was given by my creator?”
“I thought it was to make sure Nomad succeeded,” Tev said.
“That’s the means, not the mission.”
“Oh bugger, this is going to get heavy.”
“I was tasked to define the best in humanity, identify it, and protect it — those were the words — and I was left to decide how to do that. Over the years I’ve found that the best of humanity is always people who don’t realise that they are.”
That produced the baffled silence he expected, followed by slight frowns as they tried to wring some meaning out of it. Then Tev did that aha expression of revelation, mouth open, head slightly back, with a half-nod.
“Solomon,” he said. Tev came from a Fijian family, and Fijians knew their Bible. “Solomon the wise. The judge.”
“I believe that was Tad Bednarz’s thinking, yes.”
“King Solomon made a good start, but he went off the rails when he started hanging out with sleazy women and false gods.”
“As I’m immune to those two temptations, Tev, I may yet remain at the wise stage.”
They all laughed. Solomon enjoyed being able to amuse them. They’d proved again what he’d learned over the years, watching and listening and reading and talking to people, observing their actions and reactions, sifting the results and coming to understand what was good and bad, right and wrong, and shaping his plans for Nomad.
The best of humanity still couldn’t see themselves. Luckily, Solomon could.
09
If only history was just a matter of recording facts. In a thousand years, what are they going to believe really happened to us? Will they know how the things we did shaped their society? Will they understand why they ended up so far from Earth?
Dr Annis Kim
Kill Line:
two Days Later
A podium was a cold, lonely place to be when delivering difficult news. Alex looked around the packed council chamber, the biggest meeting room in Kill Line, and waited for the reactions.
“Questions?” he said.
For a few seconds, there was just the murmur of hushed conversations and the creak of wooden benches. Alex looked around to check that the screen behind him was switched on, just to fill time without having to look at those accusing faces. When he turned back again, he couldn’t read the mood at all.
Joanne, the mayor’s wife, raised her hand.
“Yes, Mrs Brandt.”
“So the crew isn’t dead? They’re all well?”
“Yes. I’m sorry we lied. We lied to them, too. But at the time, there was a real risk of other countries wanting to take military action if they found out.”
She smiled. She actually smiled. “That’s wonderful. Oh, I’m so glad. We were very upset when it happened. Everybody was.”
“They must have friends who mourned them and didn’t live to see this,” said a man in the front row. “Have folks been notified?”
Another guy chipped in. “Yeah, well, most people are dead now anyway, Harry, so there’s nobody to tell.”
Alex had expected to be driven out of town with torches and pitchforks, but all he got was this squeaky-clean happiness that the crew was alive. He felt like a total asshole. These folks were another species altogether.
“We want to keep it quiet, to be honest, because the Asian states still might see it differently and want to put a stop to it,” he said, dying of shame. “They can’t get at Cabot, but we’re kind of vulnerable.”
Oh, I didn’t even have to say that. What’s wrong with me?
The shine went off the evening as the townspeople started firing questions. At least the speech he’d prepared for a hostile reception wouldn’t be wasted now.
“Are we in danger, then?”
“Why would APS want to interfere? We’re not going to start a war with them.”
“What if they find out?”
“But you’ve got defences, surely. Orbital stations.”
Alex held up his hands for silence, trying to look relaxed. “I’m just being neurotic. We’re not in any danger. I spent so many years thinking the worst and being told to keep my mouth shut that I got paranoid. Everything’s fine. Nobody knows or cares that we’re here.”
Had that worked? At least that statement was true. He did another sweep of the hall and saw Chris Montello, a tall black guy, and a grizzled, unsmiling man in his fifties who was built like a brick wall, all watching as if they were waiting for him to make a run for it so they could head him off.
“I’d like to move on to the main business of the evening,” Alex said. “I’m going to show you something pretty amazing. It’s the planet Opis, the place where the Cabot crew will be landing and living, and over the next couple of years, we’ll start sending other ships to join them.” He took a breath, with no idea which way this was going to go now. “There’ll be room on those ships for anyone in Kill Line who wants to go to Opis and settle there.”
It was hard to read these people. Alex felt as if he was trying to give a talk in a foreign language that he thought he could speak like a native, only to find that he’d just baffled his audience with gibberish or insulted their mothers.
An old guy at the back broke the silence. “Is it like Mars?”
“See for yourself, sir. No, it’s not like Mars.” Alex stepped to the side of the screen for his big reveal. “It’s like Earth.”
He’d watched enough people see the Opis feed for the first time to know they’d be silent and open-mouthed at first, then they’d get that look of wonder, and then they’d start asking excited questions. But the silent phase here lasted longer than he’d expected. He scanned the faces in the packed hall. Did they understand what they were looking at?
Okay. Interpret it for them.
“Yeah, this is a view of the Nomad camp, built by bots,” he said. “Opis is fairly close to Earth in climate terms. The day’s about two hours longer, the year’s a few weeks shorter, and — this is the good bit — we can breathe the air. We know we can grow crops there, because we’ve done soil analysis and tested actual plants here under the planet’s conditions. That’s why it was worth the struggle to travel forty light years and pretty much shut down everything else the company was doing just for this.”
There was coughing and some creaking of chairs. Then a kid of about fifteen raised his hand.
“If the ship just got there, how did you get the images back so fast?”
Before Alex could answer, the barrage began. “Beats Mars,” one woman said. “I’d always be worried about leaky seals on the doors.”
“What’s the rest of the planet like, or is that the only decent part?”
“I bet you’ve got FTL, haven’t you?” That kid wasn’t giving up. “So why didn’t you use it on Cabot?”
“What happens to your site if we stay and you all clear out? Who’s going to maintain it? What’s going to break down and release contamination?”
“I didn’t think it was legal to introduce our plants to other planets unless they were in sealed units.”
Everybody was smarter and better informed than Alex expected. This was what happened when you locked yourself up with a group of people who were much the same and never got to talk to anybody who wasn’t. He started explaining about FTL comms and the payload limits, and showed satellite footage of Opis’s barren poles and equatorial forests. The townspeople asked about which crops they planned to plant and what they were going to do about livestock, and what kinds of vehicles they had for all this. They also asked when they could talk to the agricultural scientists.
It dawned on Alex one que
stion at a time that these people didn’t take anything Ainatio told them on trust. They wanted reassurance that a bunch of guys in lab coats with no experience of operating farms actually knew what they were doing. After die-back, he couldn’t really blame them for not putting their faith in science.
“I want to go, sir.” A little boy sitting next to the Brandts seemed enthusiastic. “I want to live on another planet. I want to fly in a spaceship. I haven’t even seen the ocean.”
Alex guessed whose kid this was by the look on Doug Brandt’s face and the way a guy in his thirties, who looked a lot like both of them, put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
At least I’ve sold it to the kids. Not a total disaster, then. Just ninety-nine per cent.
“Okay, folks, I’m open for questions, and there’s bound to be things you’ll want to ask when you’ve had time to think about all this, so you can get hold of me or someone in my department every day via the hotline in Mayor Brandt’s office. And I’ll come here to talk to you anytime you want.”
Alex stepped down from the podium, handed the video controller to Brandt’s grandson with the biggest smile he could manage, and started working the room. He found himself looking at people he hoped would agree to go, and those he hoped would refuse, and hated himself for even thinking about dividing them. He started to keep a mental tally of who wanted to do what. Attitudes were mixed. It wasn’t about age or gender, or anything that he knew how to identify.
A man in his thirties introduced himself as Liam Dale. “Can we take our stock? That’s farm animals.” The guy’s need to explain confirmed that Alex had scored zero on the local knowledge round. “Our farm took my grandfather a lifetime to build. Good pedigree animals. I won’t leave them.”
“Let me check how we’re dealing with that,” Alex said. Did we even consider their livestock? He scrawled reminder notes on his pocket screen. Yeah, that guy who’d spoken earlier was right: introducing terrestrial plants and animals was banned by treaty, but survival came first and there was nobody to stop them. “I realise I’m not as well-briefed on agriculture as I should be.”
The Best of Us Page 25
