Last and First Contacts (Imaginings) Read online

  ‘I’ve never seen a woman before,’ Bella said bluntly. ‘Not in the flesh. I like the way you do your hair. Cal, fix it for me, would you?’

  ‘Of course, Bella.’

  That shoulder-length hair broke up into a cloud of cubical particles, obscuring her face. When the cloud cleared, her hair was cropped short, a copy of Freddie’s.

  ‘I knew it,’ Allen said. He aimed a slap at Bella’s shoulder. His fingers passed through her flesh, scattering bits of light. Bella squealed and flinched back. ‘She’s a virtual,’ Allen said.

  Fortune snapped back, ‘She’s as sentient as you are, you arsehole. Fully conscious. And consistency violations like that hurt. You really are like your grandfather, aren’t you?’

  ‘She’s illegal, Fortune.’

  ‘Well, that makes two of us.’

  Two suitcases rolled out of the shuttle cabin, luggage for Freddie and Allen.

  Allen said, ‘We’re here to work, Fortune, not to rake up the dead past.’

  ‘Be my guest.’ Fortune turned and stalked away, down a metal-plated corridor. Bella walked after him, looking hurt and confused. Her feet convincingly touched the floor.

  Freddie and Allen followed less certainly, into the metal heart of the station.

  To Freddie, the station had the feel of all the AxysCorp geoengineering facilities she’d visited before. Big, bold, functional, every surface flat, every line dead straight. The corporation’s logo was even stamped into the metal walls, and there was a constant whine of air conditioning, a breeze tasting of rust. You could never escape the feeling that you were in the bowels of a vast machine. But the station showed its age, with storage-unit handles polished smooth with use, touch panels rubbed and scratched, and the fabric of chairs and couches worn through and patched with duct tape.

  Fortune led them to cabins, tiny metal-walled boxes that looked as if they’d never been used. A century old, bare and clean, they had an air of staleness.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll sleep well here,’ Freddie said.

  ‘Don’t fret about it,’ Allen said. ‘I’m planning to be off this hulk as soon as possible.’

  They left their luggage here, and Fortune led them on to the bridge, the station’s control centre. It was just a cubical box with blank grey walls, centred on a stubby plinth like a small stage.

  Fortune watched Freddie’s reaction. ‘This was the fashion a century ago. Glass-walled design, every instrument virtual, all voice controlled.’

  ‘Humans are tool-wielding creatures,’ Freddie said. ‘We think with our hands as well as our brains. We prefer to have switches and levers to pull, wheels to turn.’

  ‘How wise you new generations are,’ Fortune said sourly.

  Bella, with her copycat hairdo, was still fascinated by Freddie. ‘I wish you’d tell me more about Earth,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been there.’

  ‘Oh, it’s a brave new world down there, child,’ Fortune said.

  ‘In what sense,’ Freddie asked, ‘is Bella your child?’

  Allen waved that away. ‘Bella is an irrelevance. So are you, Fortune,’ he said sternly. ‘We’re here to find out why Tempest 43 failed to deflect the Florida hurricane. I suggest we get on with it.’

  Fortune nodded. ‘Very well. Cal? Bring up a station schematic, would you?’

  A virtual model of Tempest 43 coalesced over the central plinth. Freddie had been briefed to some extent, and she recognised the station’s main features. The habitable compartments were modules held on long arms away from a fat central axis. A forest of solar panels, manipulator arms and docking ports coated the main axis, and at its base big antenna-like structures clustered. The representation was exquisitely detailed and, caught in the light of an off-stage sun, quite beautiful.

  Fortune said, ‘This is a real time image, returned from drone subsats. Look, you can see the wear and tear.’ The habitable compartments were covered with white insulating blankets that were pocked with meteor scars, and the solar panels looked patchy, as if repeatedly repaired. An immense AxysCorp logo on the main central body, unrefurbished for a century, was faded by sunlight. ‘Do you understand what you’re seeing? The purpose of Tempest 43 is to break up or at least deflect Atlantic hurricanes. Maybe you know that during the twenty-first century global warming pulse, a whole plague of hurricanes battered the eastern states of the old USA, as well as Caribbean and South American countries, all year round. Excess heat energy pumped into the oceans, you see.’

  ‘And Tempest 43 is here to fix that,’ Allen said.

  ‘Hurricanes are fuelled by ocean heat.’ Fortune pointed to the antenna farm at the base of the station’s main axis. ‘So we meddle. We beam microwave energy into sea water. We can’t draw out the heat that’s pumping up the hurricane, but with carefully placed injections we can mess with its distribution. Give it multiple foci, for instance. We manage to disperse most hurricanes even before they’ve formed.’

  ‘Where do you get your power from? Not from these spindly solar cell arrays.’

  ‘We have a massive fission reactor up here.’ He pointed at the top of the central axis. ‘One reason the habitable compartments are held so far away from the axis. Enough plutonium to last centuries. I know what you’re thinking. This is a dirty solution. They were dirty times. You people are so pious. You kick AxysCorp now, and all the rest of the Heroic Solution. But you accept the shelter of the machinery, don’t you?’

  ‘Actually,’ Freddie said, trying to be more analytical, ‘this station is a typical AxysCorp solution to the problems of that age. It’s a chunk of gigantic engineering, and it’s run by absurdly over-sophisticated AIs. But it’s robust. It worked.’

  ‘It did work, until now,’ Allen said darkly.

  ‘You needn’t try to pin the Florida hurricane on me,’ Fortune said. ‘The AI runs the show. I’m only a failsafe. I’m not even in the nominal design. The station should have been unmanned save for non-permanent service crews.’

  ‘You keep saying “AI”,’ Freddie said. ‘Singular. But we spoke to one during our approach, and heard of another.’

  ‘Cal and Aeolus,’ Fortune said. ‘It’s a little complicated. The Tempest 43 AI is an advanced design. Experimental, even for AxysCorp…’

  The station’s artificial mind was lodged in vast processor banks somewhere in the central axis. Its body was the station itself; it felt the pain of malfunctions, the joy of a pulsing fission-reactor heart, the exhilaration of showering its healing microwaves over the Atlantic.

  And, alone, it was never alone.

  ‘It’s a single AI. But it has two poles of consciousness,’ Fortune said. ‘Not just one, like yours and mine. Like two personalities in one head, sharing one body.’

  Allen said, ‘You’re telling me that AxysCorp deliberately designed a schizophrenic AI.’

  ‘Not schizoid,’ Fortune said, strained. ‘What a withered imagination you have, Allen. Just like grandpop. It’s just that when building this station, AxysCorp took the opportunity to study novel kinds of cognitive architecture. After all there are some who say our minds are bicameral too, spread unevenly over the two halves of our brains.’

  ‘What bullshit,’ Allen murmured.

  Fortune said, ‘The two poles were labelled A and C. Nothing if not functional, the AxysCorp designers. I gave them names. Aeolus and Cal. Call it whimsy.’

  A and C, Freddie thought. It was an odd labelling, with a gap. What happened to B?

  Allen said, ‘I understand why “Aeolus” for your functional software suite, your weather controller. Aeolus was a Greek god of the winds. But why Cal?’

  ‘An in-joke,’ Fortune said. ‘Does nobody read science fiction these days?’

  Allen said, ‘Science what-now?’

  Historian Freddie knew what he meant. ‘Old-fashioned fictions of the future. Forgotten now. We live in an age of aftermath, Fortune. Everything important that shapes our lives happened in the past, not the future. It’s not a time for expansive fiction.’
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  ‘Yeah, well, there’s this old classic I always loved, with a pesky AI. Would have fitted better if the “C” had been an “H”. Cal’s a dull thing, though. Just a station-keeper.’

  ‘So where’s Aeolus?’ Allen lifted his head. ‘Are you there?’

  ‘Yes, Doctor Allen. I am Aeolus.’

  It was another synthesised male voice, but lighter in tone than Cal’s – lacking character, Freddie thought.

  Allen asked, ‘Let me get this straight. Cal is the station’s subsystems. Housekeeping, power, all of that. Aeolus is the executive function suite. You fix the hurricanes.’

  ‘Actually, sir, there’s some overlap,’ Cal put in. ‘The bipolar design is complex. But, yes, essentially that’s true.’

  ‘So what are you doing, Aeolus?’

  ‘I am enthusiastically fulfilling all programme objectives.’

  ‘But you let one through, didn’t you? People died because of you. And a historic monument was wrecked, at Canaveral.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true.’

  ‘I’m from Oversight. I’m here to find out what happened here, and to decide what to do about it. So what do you have to say?’ Allen waited, but Aeolus offered no further explanation. ‘What a mess this is,’ Allen said to Freddie.

  ‘Actually this is again typical of AxysCorp,’ Freddie said. ‘Given immense budgets, huge technical facilities, virtually unlimited power, and negligible scrutiny, AxysCorp technicians often took the opportunity to experiment. Of course a willingness to meddle was necessary for them to be able to proceed with Heroic-Solution geoengineering projects in the first place.’

  ‘They used the climate disaster as the cover for crimes,’ Allen said. ‘The purposeless crippling of sentiences, for example. We have to acknowledge their achievements. But it’s as if the world has been saved by Nazi doctors.’

  ‘Humans are flawed creatures,’ Fortune said. ‘Most of them are bumbling mediocrities. Like your grandfather, Allen, whose solution to the world’s ills was to exile me up here. To tackle monstrous problems, you need monsters.’

  ‘Well, the hell with it.’ Allen was growing impatient. ‘I need to study your bipolar AI. I’ve some gear in my luggage. Freddie, this will be technical. Why don’t you take a walk around the station?’

  Bella said eagerly, ‘Oh, let’s. I’ll show you.’

  ‘And you,’ Allen said to Fortune, ‘show me back to my cabin. Please.’

  With bad grace, Fortune stomped off.

  Bella gave Freddie a tour of the habitable module and its facilities: cabins, mostly unused, galleys, washrooms, a virtual recreation room. Everything was drab, utilitarian, and old.

  Bella told Freddie a little about herself. ‘My protocols are quite strict.’ She tried to push her hand into the wall. Sparks scattered from her palm, and Bella screwed up her face in pain. ‘I can’t go flying around in vacuum either. I have to eat and drink. I even have to use the bathroom! It’s all virtual, of course. But Fortune says he designed my life to be as authentically human as possible.’

  Freddie said carefully, ‘But why did he create you at all?’

  ‘I give him company,’ Bella said.

  Freddie, an academic who was careful with words, noted that she hadn’t explicitly confirmed that Fortune had ‘created’ her, as the AxysCorp engineers had created Cal and Aeolus, any more than Fortune had admitted it himself.

  They soon tired of the steely corridors, and Bella led the way to an observation blister. This was a bubble of toughened transparent plastic stuck to the bottom of the module’s hull. Sitting on a couch, they looked down on the Earth, a bowl of light larger than the full Moon. Freddie was thrilled to see the white gleam of Antarctic ice. But the fragmented remnant cap on that green-fringed continent was the only ice visible on the whole planet; there was none left on the tropical mountains, Greenland was bare, and at the north pole was only an ocean topped by a lacy swirl of cloud.

  Bella’s thin, pretty face was convincingly painted by Earthlight. ‘Of course we’re suspended permanently over the middle of the Atlantic. But you can see day and night come and go. And if I ever want to see the far side, I can always call for a virtual view.’

  She had no real conversation, under the surface. She was an empty vessel, Freddie thought. Beautifully made, but unused, purposeless. But then the only company she had ever had was the reclusive Fortune – and perhaps the station’s artificial minds, Cal and Aeolus. ‘I’m no expert. But I can see that this environment doesn’t offer enough stimulation to you as a sentience. You’ve a right to more than this.’

  Bella seemed moved to defend herself, or perhaps Fortune. ‘Oh, there are things to see,’ she said. ‘It’s a marvel when Earth goes dark with night, and you can see the stars. And you can see AxysCorp facilities, studded all over the sky. Sometimes you can even make out the big Chinese space shields. The Heroics, Fortune’s generation, saved the world. You can see it in the sky.’

  Freddie suspected these views were just watered-down versions of Fortune’s opinions; after all, the only human mind Bella had ever been exposed to. ‘But people on Earth,’ she said, ‘don’t always feel that way. AxysCorp did fulfil the Heroic-Solution strategy, to stabilise the climate, and to remove the old heavy, dirty industries from Earth. Billions of lives were saved, and a global technological civilisation survived, and is now even growing economically. That was a great achievement.

  ‘But the Heroics chose to do things a certain way. The whole Earth is full of their gargantuan, ageing machines. Memorials erected to themselves by a generation who wanted to be remembered. Look at me. Look at what I did, how powerful I was. Maybe their egos had to be that big to take on the task of fixing a broken planet. But to live at the feet of their monuments is oppressive.’

  Bella looked lost. ‘People ought to be more grateful.’

  ‘You need to come to Earth. It’s not like it is for you, stuck here inside the machinery. Most people just live their lives. They don’t obsess about the Heroics and AxysCorp and the rest. Only historians like me do that. Because it really is all just history.’

  A panel in the window filled up with Allen’s blunt features. ‘Professor Gonzales. Could you rejoin us on the bridge, please? I’ve made my judgement.’

  Freddie hurried after Bella, through the maze of corridors back to the bridge.

  The room was stripped of virtual displays. Allen sat comfortably on the plinth, the nearest thing to a piece of furniture. Fortune paced about, chewing a silver-coloured fingernail.

  Allen said, ‘We’ll need a proper debrief. But technically speaking the situation here is simple, as far as I can see.’ He showed Freddie the probe he’d been using, a kind of silvery network. ‘This is a cognitive probe. A simple one, but sufficient. I ran a trace on the AI pole, Aeolus. I can find no bug in the software, despite the distorted sentience set-up AxysCorp left behind here. Nor, incidentally, according to station self-test diagnostics, is there any flaw in the physical equipment, the microwave generators, the antenna arrays, the station’s positioning systems, all the rest. Aeolus should not have let that hurricane reach Florida. Yet it, he, did so.’

  There was a sound of doors slamming, far off. Freddie felt faintly alarmed.

  ‘My recommendation is clear. There’s a clear dysfunction between the AI’s input, that is its core programming and objectives, and its output. The recommended procedure is clearly defined in such cases. The AI pole Aeolus must be –’

  ‘No. Don’t say it,’ said Fortune, suddenly alarmed.

  Allen stared at him. ‘What now, Fortune?’

  ‘There’s no blame to be attached to Aeolus. None at all.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  Fortune’s mouth worked; his metal teeth gleamed. ‘That I did it. That Aeolus sent a hurricane into Florida because I asked him to. So there’s no need for termination. All right?’

  Allen was amazed. ‘If this is true, we’ve a whole box of other issues to deal with, Fortune. But even so the AI ac
ted in a way that clearly compromised its primary purpose – indeed, contradicted it. There’s no question about it. Aeolus will be shut down –’

  Cal spoke up. ‘I’m afraid I can’t allow that to happen, Doctor Allen.’

  The station shuddered.

  Allen got to his feet. ‘What in the dieback was that?’

  Fortune growled, ‘I told you. Now see what you’ve done!’

  Freddie said to Bella, ‘Show us your external monitors.’

  Bella hurried to a wall workstation and began calling up graphical displays. ‘Our comms link to Earth is down. And – oh.’

  UNSA Shuttle C57-D had been detached from its dock. It was falling away from the station, turning over and over, shining in undiluted sunlight.

  ‘We’re stranded,’ Allen said, disbelieving.

  Fortune clenched his fists and shouted at the ceiling. ‘Cal, you monster, what have you done? I saved Bella from you once. Couldn’t you let her go?’

  There was no reply.

  They stayed on the bridge. It made no real sense, but Freddie sensed they all felt safer here, deep in the guts of the station. Bella sat quietly on the plinth, subdued. Fortune paced around the bridge, muttering.

  Freddie and Allen went through the station’s systems. They quickly established that the station’s housekeeping was functioning. Air conditioning, water recycling still worked, and the lamps still glowed over the hydroponic banks.

  ‘So we’re not going to starve,’ Allen said edgily.

  ‘But the AI’s higher functions are locked out,’ Freddie said. ‘There’s no sign Aeolus is monitoring the Atlantic weather systems, let alone doing anything about them. And meanwhile comms is down. How long before anybody notices we’re stuck here?’

  ‘People don’t want to know what goes on with these hideous old systems,’ Allen said. ‘Even in my department, which is nominally responsible for them. Unless our families kick up a fuss, or another hurricane brews up, I don’t think anybody is going to miss us for a long time.’

  Fortune snorted. ‘Bureaucracies. The blight of mankind.’

  Allen growled, ‘You’ve got some explaining to do, Fortune. Like why you ordered up a hurricane.’