The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time) (9 page)

Trent had never been space sick in his life, but Deimos is tiny: Chandler’s house was effectively in free fall, and Trent’s stomach, abused by the anesthetic, the new skin, and the sudden appearance of six kilos of fat, kept threatening to rebel. He floated on the other side of the table from Chandler, sipping at a cup of black coffee, and waited for Chandler to finish.

“Another piece of bad news from Earth,” said Chandler eventually, starting in on the bread. “They’re pretty well on their way to taking control of Chandler Industries away from me.”

“Well, we knew that was coming.”

Savagery touched the old man’s grin. “Yeah, but the mechanism is cute. Turns out I’m incompetent.”

“Nothing political in that.”

“If I show up for the incompetency hearing –”

“You’ll never be allowed to leave Earth again.”

“Not with a working forebrain.” Chandler shrugged. “Saw it coming. The assets that can be moved, have been. The floating Credit, my art; I’ve purchased eighty or ninety rocks out in the Belt that look promising. What’s left on Earth and in orbit, factories and such, are beyond my reach. I’ll still ‘own’ them when they’re done, but ownership and control are far from the same thing.”

“Being rich is a bitch,” said Trent.

“You’re rich, now,” said Chandler.

“Nobody’s rich by comparison with you,” said Trent. “They say you’re a billionaire.”

Chandler laughed. “Yes, I am.”

“What’s funny about that?”

The amused look did not leave him. “When I was a boy, there were billionaires all over the place. Couldn’t take a leak without splashing one. Of course, those were billionaires in pounds, or dollars, or some such, not Credit Units.”

“Dollars and pounds,” said Trent doubtfully. “Those are like ozzes, right?”

Chandler said, “Ozzes?”

Trent said, “Ozzes. Like, a man would weigh thirty stone and eighteen ozzes?”

“No,” said Chandler slowly, holding a chunk of bread in one hand, “pounds were money. English money. Well, they were also a kind of weight –”

“Like ozzes.”

“Ounces.”

“Sure, those too.”

“An ‘oz’,” Chandler explained carefully, “was an ounce. It was an abbreviation for ounce.”

“Oh ... nothing to do with Dorothy, then?” Trent asked curiously.

“Not that I know of.” Chandler paused. “You could look all this stuff up, you know. In your case it wouldn’t be hard.”

“Sure,” Trent agreed. “But then what? There I’d be, with my head crammed full of useless information.” He shook his head, that was not crammed full of useless information. “Limited protein storage capacity, Frank. You have to keep these things in perspective.”

Chandler opened his mouth to respond, saw Trent’s grin, and changed the subject. “Never mind. So you report to the
Unity
, and then have to pass as this Yovia during the orientation interview with the head of Security, no?”

“Chief of Security, yes.”

“Think you can?”

“Pass as Yovia? I expect so. I’ve studied the man hard. Studied the staff he’ll be supervising, studied the work he’s done. I can do what he’s supposed to do.”

Chandler stabbed a bite of salad through the opening of his salad bowl, pulled it free carefully to make sure that no loose clumps of lettuce came with it, to float around in the air in front of his face, and then, chewing, spoke around the mouthful of salad. Trent watched the man’s casual attitude, watched the tossed-off question: “You have people inside the PKF, don’t you?”

Trent smiled at him. “I know you think I do.”

“Is there anyone in the System you trust, Trent?”

Trent was silent a long moment. “Denice.”

Chandler’s features lost expression. “Really.”

“That surprises you.”

Chandler looked down at his food. “The two of you are going in different directions, Trent. If you’re telling me the truth, you’re a fool.”

I know you think so,
thought Trent. Aloud, he said, “I wouldn’t lie to you,” and grinned at the man to prove it.

Chandler grinned back. “Wouldn’t you?”

Trent said swiftly, “Not without an excellent reason.”

Chandler nodded, and his grin faded. “You know,” he said hesitantly, “the Board of Directors thinks this idea, that you would go take care of the
Unity
, was their idea –”

“Of course they do.”

“Does
anyone
except me know how far you’ve gamed this out?”

Ring
, thought Trent, and said aloud, “Jesus and Harry, I hope not.”

9

THE SHIP WAS beautiful.

Even Trent found it so. It was a work of engineering, of sheer hubris, that touched him. Weapons can be beautiful: the
Unity
was.

Seven klicks, fore to stern. Larger than many towns on Earth. The largest vehicle ever constructed by humans. Trent’s ship, incoming, passed within three klicks of it: and it filled the sky, the single largest spacemark at Halfway. Sixteen fusion torches drove it; even so it would never see more than two gee acceleration. It bristled with laser cannon, visible even at the distance as small protrusions on the hull. It narrowed as one went forward, until, seven kilometers forward from the ship’s fusion engines, it ended in an awesome array of sensory devices and missiles, mingled in an apparently random fashion that Trent knew was anything but. Lights swarmed over the ship’s dark surface, the blinking warning lights of stationary tugs, the brief glares of fusion welding. Midway down the ship’s frame, a bay hung open, large enough for four full sized troop carriers – three times the size of the corvette that had hunted Trent – to pass through at once.

Even from three kilometers away the sheer sense of size was chilling. Trent had seen the
Unity
up close before, four years prior: today, closer to completion, the hull finally in place, it was both more beautiful and more frightening. The greatest work of engineering in history, Trent had heard newsdancers call it; and it was that.

Trent hated it with a passion that would have surprised even the people who thought they knew him well.

THE SWITCH WAS made at Chiricahua City, a donut built and inhabited by a group of native Americans, mostly Apaches. They were a long way from being Johnny Rebs – ideologically they were about as far away from the Rebs, with their nostalgia for the old American republic, as it was possible to get – but they shared a distaste for the Unification.

Eugene Yovia passed Trent in the corridor. Yovia had just cycled through the airlock of the shuttle that would take Trent to Halfway. They stopped in the corridor together, staring at each other – for different reasons, to be sure. They were virtually identical, so far as Trent could tell; identical suit, slightly out of fashion, shoes wildly inappropriate for free fall, a ring with black onyx and diamond chips on the ring finger of the right hand, barely perceptible pale band on the ring finger of the left hand where a white gold wedding band had recently been sported. Inskin jack over the left parietal lobe.

Yovia merely looked startled. “You’re –”

“I’m going to need that ring,” said Trent. He took the ring off his right hand, held it out to Yovia.

“What?”

“The diamond chips around the edge of your stone. Mine are larger. Somebody screwed up. I need your ring.” Trent held his copy of the ring out again.

“This was my father’s –”

“I know,” said Trent. “And your grandfather’s. Your grandfather took it out of a jewelry store in Liverpool during the Unification, after the store had been looted by Unification troops and the owner shot. Some symbolism there that frankly escapes me, and I don’t have time to argue. I need the ring now.”

“Will I ever get it back?”

Trent counted to five. He stared at his double and said, “Not likely.”

Yovia floated in the corridor, breath coming short. Trent knew that the man had never taken that ring off since the day his father had given it to him; Yovia’s psychometric had a spike the size of a spacescraper where that heirloom was concerned. It was the only thing he had left from his father, a man with whom he’d had a horrifically stormy relationship.

Trent counted to five again, and then one more time for good measure. “Please don’t make me take it from you, Gene. This is more important than my life. It’s more important than your father’s ring.”

With excruciating slowness Eugene Yovia worked the ring off his right hand and held it out to Trent.

Trent said softly, “Thank you. I know how hard that was.”

Yovia swallowed. His naked right hand curled and uncurled into a fist. “Are you who I think you are?”

“I am no one you ever heard of.”

“I am an incredibly great computerist,” the man said, “a brilliant coder, and if you’re not who I think you are, you’re in deep trouble.”

Trent said, “Have you talked to your escort at all?”

“No. I was told not to.”

Trent pushed past Yovia, into the shuttle airlock, wondering what else his people had screwed up.

A panel in the corridor, just beyond the inner airlock door, hung free; Trent squirmed through it, pulled himself up through the floor into the shuttle’s bathroom. The panel in the bathroom’s deck sealed itself, and Trent pulled a handwipe from the dispenser, wiped his hands with it, and touched the doorpad to open the bathroom door.

His escort, standing in the corridor outside the bathroom, watched as Trent stuffed the handwipe into the trash receptacle. “You took your time about that,” said the Elite in French.

“Never did get used to those damn zero-gee toilets,” Trent explained, pushing out in to the corridor and making his way down the aisle to their seats. Trent’s seat was next to the wall; he pulled himself back into it and buckled his his seatbelt.

The Elite seated himself next to Trent, grunted, “You had better get used to them. That’s all they have on the
Unity
.”

Speaking French with his precise, practiced British accent, Trent said, “Well, I’ve been there before, haven’t I.”

HALFWAY, IT’S BEEN observed, does not look particularly impressive. It was not built so much as grown, donuts and tumbling slingshots and bolos and free fall modules of all sizes and shapes linked together by a maze of tubing: newsdancer Terry Shawmac once described it as a bowl of noodles that had just been dropped, headed for the ground. Inside that bowl of noodles lived some two million plus inhabitants, almost a quarter of them Halfers, natives: homebrews. The name was taken from the day when Halfway’s single biggest industry was the production of alcohol brewed in zero gravity.

Halfway is unlike any other large city in the System: built by and for people comfortable in free fall, it generally lacks the local vertical indicators of space dwellings intended for downsiders. Halfers, like SpaceFarers, believe that people who get disoriented without a local vertical have no business being in space in the first place.

Administration Central is an old building, as Halfway structures go. It’s a huge, mostly white cylinder, rotating to provide one tenth gee at the rim, connected to the rest of Halfway’s core structures by free-standing pressurized walkways mounted at Central’s hub. The InfoNet Relay Station, the first and largest of the Relay Stations without which the InfoNet would not exist, floats not far from it, following Administration Central in its ceaseless circuit of the Earth.

Trent the Uncatchable arrived at Halfway Administration Central late on Saturday, March 8, 2080.

It was the day before his twenty-ninth birthday, a birthday that Trent was not entirely certain he would reach, if anything went disastrously wrong.

THE HOLO AT Airlock Nineteen said, “Welcome to Halfway.”

The Halfer saw Trent glance at the sign. A solid metal plaque, it was bolted to the wall immediately beneath the welcoming holo:

Once you reach orbit, you’re not just halfway to the moon; you’re halfway to
anywhere
.

– Robert A. Heinlein

“Escape velocity,” the Halfer said politely. “Escape velocity for Earth is about half that of the Solar System as a whole.”

“I’ve heard that,” Trent said.

The Halfer was tall and thin; but where some Halfers seemed painfully gaunt to Trent, this fellow had muscles. He looked as though he could have played center on a basketball team downside, or rover on a Halfway dropball team, and he reminded Trent of a young Reverend Andy. He guided Trent and Trent’s Elite escort through a maze of sunpaint-lit corridors to a bank of elevators.

Trent found the surroundings half-familiar; only four years prior, during the TriCentennial rebellion, he and a group of SpaceFarers had briefly taken over Administration Central.

They took an elevator down to Cylinder One, the tenth gee outer cylinder. Trent noticed with some interest the structural reinforcements apparent in every corridor: they were preparing for combat, combat that might reach Halfway itself. When Trent had last been in these corridors, back when Tytan Manufacturing had still been running Halfway under the guidance of the Unification, they had been only thin shells of metal and plastic. But Tytan Manufacturing had not had control of Halfway since the TriCentennial: Halfway was in its fourth year of PKF-run martial law.

Their Halfer guide left Trent and his escort at the Security Chief’s outer office; a Peaceforcer sat at the desk beside the Security Chief’s door. Trent’s Elite escort handed a packaged chip to the Peaceforcer, laid his palm flat against the logpad on the desk’s surface, and then also left, without saying anything and without looking at Trent again.

Trent seated himself in the chair facing the Security Chief’s door.

The Peaceforcer’s eyes, half-lidded against the overhead sunpaint, studied Trent briefly as Trent’s escort left. After a moment the Peaceforcer slid the chip package beneath one of the half dozen restraining springs on his desktop, closed his eyes and went back to work. The oversized, special model traceset mounted at his temples gave Trent the man’s occupation: PKF DataWatch. DataWatch had stopped forcing its officers to accept inskins close to a decade ago; they were at best difficult to upgrade, and with the state of the art continually advancing, some officers chose to work through tracesets and MRI headsets, which were themselves improving with the passage of time, rather than accept an inskin that would be obsolete within a decade of implantation.

Trent understood the reasoning. The NN-II inside his own skull had been upgraded twice. The upgrades had been expensive, even by Trent’s standards, and the second one had been slightly dangerous. They’d been necessary, though, particularly the second one, which had removed slight calcification from around the growing nodes of his biochip inskin, while improving the bandwidth between the native protein circuitry – Trent’s brain – and the biochip circuitry growing within him.

Trent could not decide if the fellow was watching him or not. Finally the Peaceforcer said in English, “It will probably be half an hour before you get to see the Chief.” Strong French accent; not surprising, in DataWatch. The power of the French might have declined within the Unification, but DataWatch remained predominantly French, and the Elite themselves entirely so. “Feel free to play a sensable or audit the newsBoards while you wait.”

The temptation that struck Trent was immense, burning, an addict suddenly beckoned by his drug: the Crystal Wind vibrated, sang to him, beckoned from just the other side of Interface. He had been away from the Wind except for a few days during the TriCentennial, and before that, since fleeing Earth in ’69 – the Crystal Wind called to him, the man generally conceded to be the greatest Player of his era: to go into the Wind, to dance the net –

When he had not seriously tested himself against the net, against other Players and the AIs who swarmed the other side of Interface, in over a decade.

The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life.

It was the Player’s Litany, the saying that dated to the first appearance of real Players in the Net, not many years before Trent’s birth. It reflected the Player belief that life was nothing but a data construct. Information was an abstraction of data, and Truth an abstraction of information: and Players believed in Truth.

Trent said immediately, to the DataWatch officer who sat two meters away from him, wearing his traceset, “Thank you, ’Sieur. Not now. I’ll wait.”

The man nodded once and returned to his work.

SITTING, WAITING.

Eyes closed.

Floating in geosynchronous orbit, falling free around Earth, around the cradle.

Pulled toward the deck by a gentle tenth gee, Trent spun in a circle around the center of Administration Central, as Administration Central itself advanced onward around Earth, through death pressure toward a destination it would never reach –

As tides tugged at him, Earth’s tide, Luna’s, the sun’s, Luna locked one-face to the Earth, one revolution equaling one rotation, and Earth and Luna fell together around the sun, carrying with them the debris and clutter of an ambitious group of monkeys Gaea had produced over the course of billions of years: a mess of plastic and metal, stone and ceramics on one side of Interface, of electrons and photons on the other. Sol itself making the grand progression about the center of the galaxy, which fled outward from a thirteen billion year old explosion, a destabilization of nothing into something –

You like to believe that what you’re doing is important,
the voice whispered to Trent.
We matter, you have been known to tell people: we are inherently worthwhile, you and I and all that lives and breathes and feels.
Chattering to the other monkeys during your brief flicker of existence, your small moment in the sun. The grand pinnacle of billions of years of evolution: a monkey with biochips built into his brain, too complex to understand itself.

Trent the Uncatchable, holy man. The man who walked through a wall with his enemies watching. Half the System says so –

– and none of them have the vaguest idea who or what you are.

Trent the Uncatchable, liar and thief. So say the other half.

And none of them have the vaguest idea who or what you are, either.

The price of being misunderstood,
Trent thought.
They call you a god or they call you a devil.

The DataWatch officer’s voice penetrated as though from a great distance: “The Chief will see you now.”

Trent had not shut his eyes, he had merely stopped paying attention to his optic nerve; now the world appeared around him as though a holograph had been generated, and he stood and went through the Security Chief’s door as his door curled opened.