Owner 03 - Jupiter War (7 page)

‘All this has got to go.’ Ghort gestured to the partially completed new floors. ‘He wants a clean rim, so all those extensions you guys had started on now have to be dismantled.’

‘I guess he knows what he’s doing,’ said Gladys, her voice subdued.

‘More so than any Committee bureaucrat,’ remarked Akenon contemplatively.

Since he had first met them Alex had noticed how Akenon and Gladys always talked in hushed tones when the conversation turned to Alan Saul – the
Owner
. However, Ghort’s attitude was rather more difficult to pin down. The man seemed to continue working dutifully, as instructed, but his expression closed up when the Owner was mentioned, and he became hard faced and acerbic whenever the conversation turned to politics, any hazy concepts such as freedom or any speculation on what their future might hold.

They passed through the airlock two at a time and, once inside, Ghort delivered the welcome news that the place was fully pressurized, which apparently meant no food paste or metallic-tasting fruit juice from their suit spigots today. After they removed the helmets of their heavy work suits, Akenon popped open the case he had lugged in. Taking out Thermos flasks of hot coffee and individual boxes of pasteurized and sealed sandwiches, he handed them round. Sipping coffee through a straw, Alex headed over to the windows and gazed across the face of the rim. Gladys shortly came up to stand beside him.

The rim face extended for hundreds of metres inward, at which point the station enclosure rose up in a slope for just over two kilometres to the jutting prominence of Tech Central. Over to the right of that, the rest of the station, along with a truncated view of an extended smelting plant, lay silhouetted against the rusty brown face of Mars.

‘Never seen it like this,’ she said, gesturing to the scene before them.

‘Well,’ said Alex, ‘I suppose it looks a bit different to Earth.’ He nodded towards Mars.

‘I don’t mean that,’ she said, and stabbed a finger, ‘I mean the robots.’

It seemed that the enclosure was another item that ‘had to go’, because large areas of plates had already been stripped away, while yet more were being rucked up, like fish scales, and carried off. Both there and around the rim, the robots swarmed like steel ants, and the station seemed to be dissolving in some areas and re-crystallizing in others even as they watched.

‘What’s that about robots?’ Ghort asked, moving up beside them. This interruption reminded Alex that Ghort, though trained in construction before a delegate had spotted his talent for thumping people, was not an old hand like the other two. Alex would have expected seniority issues to arise from the order delivered from on high that Ghort should become foreman of this small team, but the other two seemed perfectly happy with having him in charge. Alex also sensed that this wasn’t down to sheer luck, but to a certain individual’s ability to slot personalities together with the ease of Lego bricks.

‘They were never this integrated before,’ said Gladys, still watching the robots. ‘We’d get work orders, a specific job to do, and that would get slotted into the system of a team of robots, and they’d set to work. We had to iron out any errors, sometimes stop them working and ask for reprogramming to include stuff they weren’t programmed to do.’

‘The robots are more efficient now,’ suggested Alex.

‘Nah, the robots were always fine if they were programmed right. The problem was everything behind them.’

‘Crap in crap out,’ said Akenon, round a mouthful of sandwich.

‘Never seen them running this fast,’ continued Gladys. ‘They just ain’t stopping. The bloody things are even
anticipating
now, and covering stuff that shouldn’t be in their programming. I saw one stop halfway through a job to repair some weapons damage to a beam junction. If one of them ran into anything like that before, it just shut down to wait for its new instructions.’

‘It’s him,’ Alex suggested, noting a brief and quickly suppressed flash of anger in Ghort’s expression.

‘Yup,’ Gladys agreed, ‘it certainly is.’

As he later walked out to start the next six hours of their shift, feeling buoyant after solid food and hot coffee, Alex considered how he was now part of something awesome and thus understood the attitude of his co-workers to the Owner. As he began work once more, he was thinking again about nothing beyond the next bolt to wind down, and then how best to apply the diamond cutting wheel Ghort had begun instructing him on how to use, and how best to make sure he didn’t slice a hole in his suit. The time seemed to flash by till, when Ghort called a halt, Alex stuck his tools to the deck with a feeling of weary satisfaction.

‘It’s only eight beam ends ahead,’ said Akenon. ‘That’ll do.’

Another small victory in the human–robot race, with the necessary handicap applied.

Back inside the station, Gladys commented, ‘The new boy didn’t slow us down.’

‘The new boy done good,’ said Ghort drily, slapping Alex on the shoulder.

Alex was amazed at how happy he felt to be complimented on performing such simple tasks so ably, and puzzled too because he felt the urge to cry.

Everybody seemed to be working at a frenetic pace, so it should have come as no surprise to Hannah to find tasks queued up in the station’s system for herself, too. In her personal queue she found the names of everyone aboard the station listed in order of importance under ‘neural tissue samples’, though with a vague proviso in there of ‘scheduled when available’. On top of that it turned out that a long production floor, provided with power and plumbing points but no equipment, beyond the sealed door adjacent to her clean-room, was to be opened to her. It seemed that this was where she would be growing those tissue samples in aerogel matrices and setting up production of the cerebral hardware and bioware required to link those people the samples were taken from to their backups.

Hannah sighed. She had always preferred focusing on research and did not enjoy the work involved in mass manufacturing the product of such research. However, she couldn’t really fault Saul in his aim to give the people here a chance at a form of immortality.

Investigating further, she found that this was not the last of it. He wanted her setting up artificial wombs and other related devices and, by the look of the list, this meant human cloning. She was uncomfortable with that, but saw how it related to the growing of neural tissue samples: backups for both body and mind. Neither was she comfortable with the plug-ins: exterior hardware that made a link between the internal bioware in their skulls and their backups, and which also enabled limited access to the station’s computer systems and its robots. That gave her pause as she realized that Saul wanted the people here to take some steps up the same ladder he himself had climbed, but did not want them to climb too far. She could see that, with this setup he would always remain in control: able to shut down that exterior hardware and boot people out of the system at will. Was that moral? Was it right? She didn’t know, but recognized that it was certainly a precaution she would also take, were she in his position.

There came a knock at her door as it opened, and in stepped Le Roque. Hannah gazed at him in puzzlement. ‘I don’t often see you down here.’

He frowned at her. ‘Well, that being the case, you shouldn’t have scheduled me to come here. I was about to get something to eat and then catch some sleep. Apparently you want to take neural tissue samples from everyone aboard the station, so you can repair brain damage like you did with Saul.’

It was to be a gradual dissemination of the knowledge: let it spread throughout the station rather than announce it. Don’t actually conceal it but don’t make an effort to let everyone know. This was the kind of news that could cause extreme reactions, both positive and negative. Being able to live forever was a dream of humanity, but never being able to die could be the most extreme of nightmares, especially when your entire experience of life until now had been under the Committee. This could result in people clamouring at her door either to demand immortality or to lynch her. Tell them before you take the sample, had been Saul’s message, therefore give them the choice.

‘True,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t expect anyone here just yet – the scheduling is automated.’

‘You’re not ready? I can always come back another time.’

There was no point in opening up her surgery for this task, since it was a quick clean anaerobic operation – inducer to numb the nerves then a narrow-gauge drill needle straight through the skull to take a small biopsy. In her experience, people hardly felt it, though it was always best to go in through the back of the head so they saw neither the drill needle nor the operation itself.

‘No, we may as well get it done now.’ Hannah waved her hand towards her laboratory’s surgical chair. ‘But you need to understand the implications of this, and I have to give you the option to refuse.’

Le Roque stared at her. ‘I know all I need to know: this increases my chances of staying alive should I get a head injury.’

‘It’s more than that,’ Hannah explained, ‘and the possibilities are more extensive. I grew samples from Saul’s brain in an aerogel matrix which he connected to via the bioware in his skull. This gave him a backup to his entire mind.’ Hannah did not continue, because she could see that Le Roque now understood.

‘Immortality,’ he said, wide-eyed, excited. ‘You’ll be setting up artificial wombs and a cloning facility . . .’

‘I’ll divide the samples,’ said Hannah. ‘Some will be used for tissue repair if required. If the damage is too extensive then I see no barrier to the possibility of download into a cloned body.’

‘So when do I get this bioware?’

‘When your backup is ready,’ Hannah replied.

‘Is this only for a select elite?’ he asked, now starting to see the drawbacks.

‘For everyone, but in order of their importance to Saul.’ Hannah paused. ‘Do you want this, then?’

‘Of course I do – I’d be a madman not to want it.’ Le Roque went over to the chair and sat down decisively. Hannah eyed him for a moment, then stepped over to get her equipment out of a nearby cupboard. She also retrieved a powered sample case with nutrient feeds to fifty temperature-controlled glass sample tubes. She would check the system again, but reckoned she had a busy time ahead of her.

She was not wrong.

After Le Roque, Rhine paid her a visit, then came the Saberhagens. The next person to arrive after them she waved straight to the chair, which worried the man because he had merely come to unseal the door leading through to the adjacent production floor. Between sampling operations, Hannah also began to track down the equipment she would need, some of it held in stores and some of it in closed-off laboratories or other facilities scattered throughout the station, and put through the necessary orders for it to be relocated. Not everything was available, however. The boxes of aerogel with their micro-tubule feeds and other support mechanisms required a special order to various sections of high-tech manufacturing aboard the station and would have to be assembled here.

I need more staff
, she thought, and immediately felt a tightness at the back of her throat and tears welling behind her eyes. Her assistant James had been, in the short time she had known him, one of the best. Now he was lying out in the rim morgue. No backups for him; no second chances for him. She allowed the unfairness of this, of life, circumstances, all of it, to wash over her, then she let it go. In this moment she was at the start of something that could stack the deck on the side of humanity, or at least those aboard this particular station. So she got back to work.

Where Are They?

Enrico Fermi posed the question ‘Where are they?’ and, being a man of his time, felt sure that the aliens had wiped themselves out with nuclear weapons. And now, long past those innocent nuclear years, in an age of cynicism and self-knowledge, we can think of a thousand answers to his question. They screwed their planet and died, or their planet changed and screwed them. They killed themselves with a whole range of weapons: nuclear, biological, robotic, nanotech or something we’ve yet to think of – but will. They found the perfect EMR frequency to fry their brains or disrupt their genome. A solar flare, meteorite, close nova or some other astronomical event took them out. The exigencies of evolution turned out to be that brains don’t breed, which would surprise no one. Their society was taken over by some self-destructive meme: they started to fear their sun, so built orbital shields and froze to death; they feared the next ice age, so built orbital mirrors and cooked; or they feared overpopulation, so used mass sterilization and died out. But, of course, all of these are a few numbers in Frank Drake’s equation to calculate the number of alien civilizations out in the universe, and it is probable we won’t know those numbers until we can go out there and start counting – we’ll never know the answers until we’ve survived them.

Earth

The darkness had lasted for days. Serene Galahad did nothing, ignored all enquiries, ignored all demands on her time, and just stewed in depression. But that was passing now and at last she had begun taking an interest again – glad to discover that everything she had put in motion had not stuttered to a halt without her. There was, she decided, something to be said for delegation. Though, annoyingly, the new tactical team located just across the estate from her seemed to be delivering very guarded assessments with unacceptable error bars.

Now, at last, she had begun to widen her focus – no longer contemplating how nice it would be to activate the Scour in every ID implant on Earth, sweep all the pieces off the board and let it return to a state last seen just after the last major extinction event.

As she strolled out onto an upper sun deck extending from her Tuscan home, Serene was now thinking clearly enough to be puzzled by some of the retrospective data delivered from Tactical. The crew of the
Scourge
had put their ship on a course back to Earth, and Tactical had no clear explanation for that. Serene agreed with that, even though she had more data than the tactical analysts themselves. The timings were all wrong, for the
Scourge
had separated from Argus Station before the Scour had begun killing the assaulting troops and the crew. Perhaps Alan Saul had warned them that they were about to die? Even that didn’t really make sense, because surely they would have assumed he was lying. Like the analysts, they didn’t know that the virus came directly from their ID implants . . .