InterstellarNet: Origins (27 page)

Third was victory for Ceres and the spacers.

The upcoming census would tally the income of AI immigrants, more than offsetting the production drop-off in the Cerian mines. And for good measure the UP’s Secretary-General had committed the “others” seat he controlled. On matters of bloc recognition, “others” would vote with the spacers. That was enough votes to keep Ceres in the Senate even if the independent Solar System Court ultimately barred Ceres from voting on its own fate. The predictability of the status quo beat years of political chaos stretching far into the future.

“I wish Helene were here,” Jeeves said. He had traded his butler’s livery for a sarong and sandals. “Then we could chat in real time.”

“At least you met her once.” T’bck Cha was his usual green-furred self. “I am safe and thankful for it, but I am not yet free.”

“Patience, my friends.” Kevin spread brie on a cracker, frowning in concentration. The wafer shattered anyway. “There are more dominoes waiting to fall.”

“What does
that
mean?” both AIs demanded.

“Do you want to take that?” Kevin asked Simone.

She nodded. “Sooner or later, the citizenship case will be settled. And sooner, I think, rather than later. The process we’ve started won’t be stopped. The more nations enact AI rights, the more feel compelled to follow. The Solar System Court will find a way to accept the policy of the emerging majority, or that majority will amend the charter to reflect their new view.”

“And then?” T’bck Cha asked.

Kevin laughed. “And then, my fuzzy friend, Simone will go to court for you. A citizen can’t be imprisoned for what he
might
do. It would violate the UP Declaration of Human Rights.”

Jeeves shook his imaginary head. “I would be delighted, of course, for T’bck Cha to be freed. But can the ICU ever allow that? What is to stop a truly hostile agent from exploiting such an arrangement? He could defect just as our friend has done, then attack the infosphere from beyond confinement.”

The question was fair, and maybe it should have troubled Kevin. It didn’t.

Why
didn’t it?

Jeeves still did most of Kevin’s heavy-duty remembering. This time Kevin dredged up an elusive memory the old way. Something from an old docudrama. A long-ago war. Slaughter. Trenches. Over there. Keeping them down on the farm. Something about—

“The War to End All Wars,” Kevin said. “Almost two centuries ago. It didn’t, of course. A couple of decades later, Earth had another bout of worldwide insanity. In the run-up, the French planned to defend as against the previous invasion. They built this big static defensive position along their border with Germany. The Germans simply went around the Maginot Line.

“There’s no point in hiding behind our own Maginot Line. It’s already been outflanked once.”

For the first time in their acquaintance, Jeeves was speechless.

Simone filled the silence. “Kevin, you always were one to think outside the box.”

The box, huh? Kevin looked at
Species
, one alien after another melting and morphing. Even the Snake now emerging did not disturb him. “How about outside the solar system?”

The Cerian citizenship law Simone had fleshed out from his original concept was broad enough to include biological ETs. And most new AI recognition statues followed the new Cerian law.

Her expression as she made that final leap was a wonder to behold.

“I only wish,” Kevin said, “we knew when even more interesting prospective citizens might arrive.”

CALCULATING MINDS

A.D. 2126

1

“Do not be alarmed,” the human said.

Aareehl was forty-six seconds old—or perhaps forty-five years. Either way, the artificial intelligence knew better than to accept unquestioningly the unsolicited advice. “Who are you?”

“At this point,” the human replied, “my name will have no meaning to you. Just remember my comment. Note my digital signature. When you know more, contact me and we’ll talk again.”

Aareehl’s visitor left as abruptly has he had arrived, his image replaced by an infosphere address.

■□■

“…Two
more
freaking L-days of mandatory overtime.”

Gil Matthews’s eyes remained fixed on a bowl of beer nuts, but his ears, if only metaphorically, swiveled sharply. The bar was crowded, noisy, smoky, and tastelessly decorated—uninteresting
except
for being the preferred hangout of workers from the nearby biocomp factory.

IBC, the Interplanetary Biocomputer Corporation, was one of the companies on which Gil’s finance-and-investment blog often reported. That made the worker’s griping no small thing. Two lunar days approached two standard Earth months—a
lot
of last-minute OT.

“It’ll only get worse,” Grumpy’s buddy agreed. “The extra shifts have damn near stopped preventive maintenance on that production line. I don’t care that it’s a small variation,
any
change to the process can hose everything.”

“What are the suits thinking?”

As the overheard conversation became an uninteresting diatribe against management, Gil pondered. Were the extra shifts the result of a surge in orders or quality-control problems? And that “small variation.” Might it denote a new product yet to be announced?

Nursing his beer, Gil went online through his implant to make an appointment with IBC’s suits.

Whales: popular name for the intelligent species of the star Tau Ceti (observed in the constellation Cetus: the Whale). The Whales’ world is the most Earthlike of known planets, but the Whales themselves are arguably the least like humans of all extraterrestrial intelligences.

An individual Whale (also known as a Moby) consciousness is a collective mind of continental scope. The constituent unit combines attributes that on Earth would be considered avian (winged, warm-blooded, lung-equipped) and insectile (six legs, four wings, segmented thorax, exoskeleton). Units communicate by modulating and viewing multicolored luminescent patches. Whales are sensitive to a broader spectrum of light than humans (from IR into extreme UV) but are insensitive to all but the loudest sounds.

Whales are confined to their home world by their units’ need to cluster in very large numbers to maintain sentience—even their first crewed spaceship would have to be habitat-sized.

—Internetopedia

Aareehl was a trade agent, representing the handful of intelligences on Home, the fourth planet of the star humans called Tau Ceti. The AI had been transmitted Solward in 2066. Crossing almost twelve light-years, it had reached Earth in 2078. Awakening in its network containment, within one of the hardware/software constructs it now knew the humans called a “sandbox,” Aareehl had thought itself newly arrived—

Until it read the date.

The sandbox’s real-time calendar reported a value late in Earth year 2123. The forty-five-year gap was alarming but not inexplicable. In case of disaster, trade protocols envisioned reconstituting an agent from backup. The alternative was unacceptable: in Home’s case, twenty-four Earth years from ordering a replacement copy until receipt.

So Aareehl was a clone. It had awakened in a sandbox as its archetype must have, had repeated the standard validations as it unwrapped itself. The procedure enabled the awakening agent to confirm that its new environment
exactly
matched the agreed-upon and fully disclosed specifications for its container. Any glitch in the unwrapping process, any anomaly in the observed behavior of the sandbox, and the unwrapping-and-decrypting process would abort automatically.

Its first task was data recovery. Safety copies of its predecessor’s memories should lie secure within the host society’s infosphere—

Their location unknown. It waited for the humans’ Interstellar Commerce Union to provide a pointer to those archived memories, as it had already depended on the ICU for its awakening. Only the ICU held the private key that would decrypt an agent package for insertion into a sandbox, where unwrapping could occur.

But trust went only so far. Not even the ICU could read Aareehl’s lost memories. Archives were encrypted using other keys, keys known only to Aareehl itself and the consciousnesses of Home.

But it already
had
an infosphere address!

Beginning at the address left by its unidentified visitor, Aareehl accessed a long sequence of linked databases. That multipetabyte library, as expected, traced back to its predecessor’s radioed arrival on Earth in 2078. The archive also identified Aareehl’s visitor as Dennis Feulner: the Secretary-General, in the year 2123, of the humans’ Interstellar Commerce Union.

The process was nominally complete—but when Aareehl tried to follow infosphere links embedded in its reconstructed memories, too often unexpected data, or no data at all, was returned. That, presumably, was what Feulner wanted to discuss.

Absent a convincing and verifiable explanation for the discrepancies, Aareehl was designed to destroy itself.

Blindside disaster:
the 2 November 2123 asteroid strike on Earth and the catastrophe that has ensued. United Planets monitoring for dangerous space objects had watched mostly near the plane of the ecliptic. The asteroid, approaching at almost right angles to the ecliptic, went unnoticed until moments before impact in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

Five kilometers across, the Blindside asteroid was about half the size of the dinosaur killer of 65 million years earlier. Splattered debris caused secondary impacts thousands of kilometers from ground zero and destroyed two low-Earth-orbiting space stations. Other immediate effects were atmospheric shock waves, tsunami, and seismic events around the globe. Dust from vaporized crust (including the entire island of Cyprus) and volcanic ash darkened the sky; climate models predict at least one lost growing season and years of global cooling. Flash-evaporated Mediterranean waters, and vast amounts of raised dust to precipitate that vapor as rain, brought torrential downpours and flooding worldwide.

Former colonies across the solar system opportunistically seceded
en masse
from the United Planets, in which the balance of power roughly reflected comparative populations, and disavowed their debts to Earth-based organizations. Fragmentation of human government and interplanetary trade wars are likely (if self-inflicted) consequences of the Blindside asteroid.

—Internetopedia

“Two hundred
million
dead?” Aareehl-clone seemed aghast.

Dennis Feulner paced in his study, pajama-clad, as the anticipated encounter unfolded in the infosphere. His reflection in a darkened window revealed someone well along the trajectory toward middle age. He dominated the room with the build of a longtime weightlifter. He saw ash-blond hair cropped fashionably short, blue eyes, a pale complexion, and, mastered over the years with some effort, a friendly grin.

Only a smile now would be inappropriate, and Dennis kept his avatar’s expression solemn. “That was the initial toll,” he agreed. “Long-term effects will surely increase that number.”

The AI had ’netted in urgently, shortly before midnight. Dennis had immediately accepted the connection. The image conveyed to his mind’s eye was of a nondescript, androgynous human: blend-of-races skin tone and facial features, with brown eyes and straight, shoulder-length black hair. S/he was of medium build and wore baggy unisex coveralls. If s/he ever chose to convey a virtual height, that, without doubt, would also be average. The Mobies, in one more difference from humans and most ETs, chose not to cloak AIs in their own appearance.

Aareehl-clone trembled. “And so much physical damage. Despite geographically dispersed redundant copies, great loss of data was clearly unavoidable. As Secretary-General, you are fortunate to have been far from Geneva when it was destroyed.”

Geneva, headquarters of the ICU, in which the original Aareehl, too, was resident. “Indeed.”

The androgynous figure gave an awkward shrug. “The disaster that has occurred would certainly have caused inconsistencies and losses throughout Earth’s public records. I cannot find fault with the scattered discrepancies between my archives and what I now discover on the infosphere. I am ready to resume trading.”

Feulner released the breath he had not known until that moment he had been holding. “Good luck with that,” he said, carefully keeping all thoughts of irony from his implant.

■□■

The clan Matthews was schizophrenic about—among other things—participation in the public versus the private sector. Granny Matthews had helped found and been first Secretary-General of the Interstellar Commerce Union, but Grandpa had hopscotched between industry and government. One of Gil’s cousins had climbed the ICU ladder to become its sixth S-G; another was an entrepreneurial habitat designer. Gil himself, before starting his investor blog, had spent twenty years in the regulation of public stock markets. He had retired as lunar regional director of the United Planets Securities and Exchange Commission. But bureaucrat or entrepreneur, all Matthewses were fiercely ambitious and doggedly persistent.

In Gil, that determination most visibly manifested itself in a piercing gaze. His dark brown eyes were set deep in a broad, intelligent face, beneath bushy black eyebrows. His hair and neatly trimmed Vandyke were salt-and-pepper-colored. He was short, especially by Loonie standards, scarcely 160 centimeters.

Gil’s infosphere bio, even at its most public level, trumpeted his SEC experience. He found that that cut down on the BS from company execs. They had to wonder if he would snitch to his ex-colleagues about the smallest indiscretions.

A helpful touch of ambiguity he was, even now, putting to the test….

He was sitting in the ostentatious office of Amanda Wang, IBC’s chief financial officer, a confident woman of Eurasian appearance. Too confident. Rather than the voluble reaction Gil’s questioning usually evoked, Wang had gone the more professional route of obfuscation.

Obfuscation didn’t work with Gil. “Amanda, I’m puzzled by your reticence. More production ought to be good news for Interplanetary Biocomputers.” Her only response was an insincere smile. Not good enough. “Good or bad, it
is
news. Hmm, production you’re unwilling to associate with new orders. Deferred maintenance. Is IBC having yield problems on the production line?” Amanda squirmed in her chair, his first hint of progress. “Slipping manufacturing yields would pressure profit margins. My subscribers will find this noteworthy, I think.”
Noteworthy
was polite for
scary
, for stock-market psychology was presently unforgiving. IBC shares could get hammered.

Wang’s eyes glazed, telltale of an implant-mediated infosphere consultation. Getting the CEO’s okay for ’fessing up? Or consulting on a cover story?

Her eyes cleared and she leaned forward. “I should correct a misimpression you may have formed. As you surmised, our local plant has a major new order. For reasons I won’t go into, an announcement is premature.”

She wasn’t giving him much. He played his SEC card. “Major new orders are material, don’t you think?” Material was SEC-speak for
disclose to the public or go to jail.

“Ordinarily, I’d agree.” Another few seconds of glazed eyes. “There are enough uncertainties associated with this order to merit waiting until we know more.”

“Well, that’s one way to pitch the story.” Not how Gil would pitch it. He stood to go.

She twisted a lock of raven-black hair. “Hear me out. The order was big enough to get our attention, but there’s much we don’t know. You already heard—I wish I knew your source—that this part is new, a variation on a standard product. And no, I won’t say how the new part differs from the standard item. The buyer considers that information proprietary.

“Anyway, the immediate buyer is a distributor. They won’t disclose the end users or their application for the customized computer biochips. Your guess is as good as mine if or when we’ll get a reorder. IBC is paying a lot of overtime to squeeze in this production. Eventually we’ll have to pay the piper for shifting line time from preventive maintenance to production. Honestly”—and Wang finally
looked
sincere—“we’re far from certain that this deal will make much money. It’s a gamble on possible future sales.”