Shine (11 page)

There was a small noise in the storage compartment behind her. Ani started. "Jun?"

Her wriststream heard the request and pulled up Jun's feed; he was still kissing his wife goodbye.

"Who's there?"

Silence. Smooth, velvet science. Then, almost at the threshold of hearing: a rapid scuff, and an intake of breath.

"Who's there!" Ani levered up out of the seat to open the storage compartment door.

It was Nils. Curled into a ball, head down, as if to make himself invisible.

"Nils!"

"I... wanna go with you!" he wailed. He jumped out of the compartment and clung to her, hugging tightly.

She smoothed his messy hair. "You can't."

"Why not?"

Because I probably won't come back.
Which meant Jared might actually have to learn something about being a parent, rather than just sticking to calculations.

But she couldn't tell him that. And, looking at his tear-streaked face, she started crying.

Nils pulled back. "Why are you sad?"

"Because..." Ani began, but her voice stopped in her throat. Because she just realized how stupid she was. She couldn't go off on a suicide mission to an insane world.

I have a kid! On the moon!

Ani took her handscreen and put together a party line with all the Primes, and Jun. "I'm countermanding my own order," she told them. "I now recommend we don't waste the Last Resort on a trip to Earth."

Combined shock and relief. Jared laughed; in the background were the unfinished living areas and throngs of people. Ani noticed a lot of young people in the crowd, older kids who'd been among the first to be born on the moon. Kids fifteen and sixteen and seventeen years old. Some even younger.

"They were just voting on the same thing," he said. "We would've had a supermajority to stop the launch in another five minutes."

Relief flooded through her. "You're not upset?"

"I know a fool's game when I see one," Jared said. "And these kids are pretty adamant."

"Can we launch a comms package to Earth instead?"

Jared nodded. "We can mod an asteroid probe. Launch in a few days."

"We could even put a bottle of wine in it."

"What?"

"To make it symbolic."

"We could." Jared sounded doubtful.

"And load it with photos of all the children. Show them our potential."

"We could do that."

"Then that's what I want to do."

There was a murmur behind Jared. Jared looked around. "They're not thrilled about revealing ourselves to Earth."

"We aren't revealing ourselves. Even our inference software says they know about us."

"They're not happy."

"Run the vote."

Jared turned around. She switched to the stream from the cavern. It was packed, standing room only. She waited while Jared explained her decision to the room. In two minutes, over 95% of the vote came back. 45% didn't want to send the comms package. But 55% did.

"You won," Nils said.

Ani hugged him, long and tight.

"Yes," she said, through tears.

Roy Parekh lived on a tiny island off the coast of the Phillipines. Like many of its kind, it had no name. He liked it that way. It made him feel invisible. It was the farthest he could be from the modern world and still have the connectivity he needed to run Intelligent Risk.

But he wasn't invisible. In the last decade, he'd had five visits from Unified Sustainability. Every time, they'd been very civil, very polite. Nari had come once. Thom had come another time. They'd had drinks and talked about the old days, and they'd admired his midcentury-style house in the distracted tones of people used to living on palatial estates.

And every time, they had asked for a little more. Lower costs. Less total fuel used. Lower compensation for his nonessential personnel. Lower compensation for himself, even though he was in the bottom 10% of the CEO echelon. Each time, he had given them almost everything they'd asked.

Everything except changing his schedule of launches or the circumlunar trajectory. Even though they'd put an end to all deep space exploration after the successful Europa lander and its bizarre signals, they still maintained instrumentation at Lagrange points; he argued that it would be too costly to reengineer his fleet to service only the Lagrange instrumentation; they suspected he was eavesdropping on the Europan signals, hoping for another string of primes or some other indication of intelligence.

But they let him be, and he kept giving them what they wanted. For the moment, the equation was in balance.

Roy spent the next hour in his office fully immersed in virtuality, interviewing new potential citizens of Hermes.

Their software found fewer and fewer candidates these days, as people with multiple talents and high drive were snapped up early in their careers by Unified Sustainability or one of the other transnationals. Many more had skeins. Roy wanted nothing to do with skeins. There was no telling how smart a skein was.

And then there were the genetically compromised. People outside the transnational-sponsored inoc-ulations were known to sometimes have long bouts with the flu and come out of it thinking, well, a little differently. Being more content with their lives. Or maybe just unable to reproduce. Rewriting some of the old aggression responses, genetic sterilization--they were old tricks, but they worked.

And he knew what the transnationals would say. It is necessary. We had to do it. Too many people. Too few resources. Look at the population curve. We're blunting it. We're ensuring a future for mankind.

And the needle keeps skipping at the end of the record
, he thought.

On a whim, Roy called Jasyn Torres, his head of household staff. His house was automated and intelligent and as biomimetic as possible. It didn't need a staff. But two years ago, US had made him take one household staff member per 100 square meters of floorspace. He usually let them fish the reefs; that seemed to be what they wanted to do.

Jasyn came into the office. His face was slack, free of affect.

"Do you know what a record is?"

Jaysn looked at him blankly for a moment, then smiled. "A record is an entry in a database," he said. "Or, considering your age, you may be referring to an analog music storage medium."

"Did you just read that off the net?"

"Standard ambient context-based search," Jasyn said.

"Can you talk to me like a person?"

"I am speaking to you like a person."

"No. Not with everything filtered and mediated. Can't you just talk to me, one on one, without everything going through your skein?"

"No," Jasyn said.

"Can you--be you?"

Jasyn's expression went blank for a moment. Roy envisioned data flowing through the nanonetwork grown into his head, bouncing to the mainland and back, carrying many answers.

"Yes," Jasyn said. "Most definitely."

"Aren't you sad?"

"No, not at all. We're living in the best times of the human race. We have reached post-scarcity. There is plenty for all."

"But we aren't moving forward!"

"Post-scarcity is stability," Jasyn said.

"But this isn't post-scarcity."

"Enough for all is post-scarcity." Smiling.

Roy forced himself to mimic Jasyn's smile. "Thanks. You can go."

Jasyn nodded and left. Roy sat at his desk and stared out into his large, brilliant house, seeing nothing.
Beware the best of intentions. Especially when they make too much sense.

"Skip, skip," he said softly.

The
Peace Pipe
entered orbit around the Earth quietly and without drama, and began reporting its progress to the moon. It was a smart piece of equipment by Hermes' standards, smart enough to try to communicate with any network it could find. Despite its sophistication, many of the communications protocols were beyond its capabilities, impenetrable and alien. Most never even acknowledged the
Peace Pipe'
s overtures. Some rejected it outright.

But a few did. And a few of those said,
Talk to us.

The
Peace Pipe
told them of Hermes and its thirteen hundred inhabitants. It sent pictures of the children. It offered a single bottle of lunar wine, if the people of Earth would come to orbit to collect it. It promised peace.

The protocols listened intently, acknowledging every packet.

"Someone is hearing us!" said the kids. The adults, including Ani, shook their heads. Acknowledging wasn't hearing. And even hearing wasn't understanding.

But when Jared went to stand in front of the stream and rail at them, Ani said, "No."

"Why not?"

"It's their time. Don't discourage them."

"They don't understand! They think everything can be fixed with more work."

"What else has ever fixed anything?" she said, softly. In the last week, the teens had stepped up. They'd worked extra shifts in the farm. They'd gone to Jared's labs to help. They'd hit the old problems lists with a new eye, and they'd suggested a lot of things they could do. Most of which probably wasn't workable. But to discover that there was still enthusiasm--it was thrilling.

Jared was silent for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was unusually quiet. "Why did you come here?" he asked her.

Ani shrugged and looked away. "I don't know."

She could feel his gaze, hot, on the back of her neck.
You don't throw your life away on an 'I don't know
,' that gaze said.

"Why did you?" Ani asked.

Jared laughed. "Anyone with half a brain knows that. Because I'm an asshole. I poke holes in things. Everyone hates me. Of course I'm here."

Ani sighed. "I don't know," she said, finally.

"What do you mean, 'I don't know?'"

"I mean, I don't know. I didn't have a terrible childhood or get raped by my boyfriend or screwed out of an inheritance, or any of those easy answers. I just--I've just always wanted to do something just, well, incredibly crazy."

"You could've picked skydiving."

Ani shook her head. "I always wanted to make something, something important."

"I can't believe it's that simple."

"Why not?" she turned back to him. "Why can't there just be something in our genes that makes us want to see what's over the next ridge? Why does it always have to be some trauma? My dad, he did genetic research on plants. Corn. He never believed me either. Said, 'Genes aren't programs.' But if it isn't that, what?"

"What are your specialties?"

"Chemical engineering, functional physics, and American literature."

Jared nodded and said nothing.

"What are you thinking?"

"Just how amazing we all are."

Ani shook her head. "I don't think we're amazing. I think we're what we have to be. And I think our children will be what they have to be. Which will probably be a lot more than we are."

The next morning, they lost the link with the
Peace Pipe
. There had been no indication of a malfunction. It was just suddenly not there.

She imagined a tiny flash, blooming over Earth.

And wondered what the kids would do.

Unified Sustainability came to get Roy Parekh in the same way it always did. Two men, one small and soundless boat. Except this time it wasn't business suits and briefcases. They walked into his office holding small, silver guns. In his retinal displays, the two men had no names, no tags.

"Is it that time?" he asked.

The two men blinked and paused. One of them said, "Your statement suggests a certain level of awareness of your crimes. Do you wish to state them?"

"Will it assist in my trial?"

"There will be no trial."

"Then why would I want to talk to you?"

A pause. Then: "Unified Sustainability hereby seizes all assets and operations of Intelligent Risk. Roy Parekh, you are charged with crimes against humanity, specifically, the redirection of an unspecified but significant amount of engineered resources for the purpose of constructing an extraterrestrial base of operations."

And that was it. Some algorithm had coughed up red, or Nari and Thom and the rest had just had a bad day, or some Anonymi were shouting about the moon again. Whatever the trigger was, it was over. It was done.

In Roy's retinal screens, he saw SOLR wake up. His software, his Solution of Last Resort. He blinked an okay-to-deploy, and watched as Intelligent Risk's dashboard began blinking red.

The two men jumped. "What are you doing?" one cried.

Roy smiled. SOLR wasn't subtle. It wasn't a worm or a virus. It was just a good old-fashioned trigger, wired into good old-fashioned explosives in his most sensitive datacenters. And in his launch facilities in New Mexico and Ecuador. And into his launch vehicles. He imagined the explosions and the flames.

There was a sharp thunderclap and Roy was thrown backwards. He flew over his desk, marveling for an instant at the reproduction Wright chandelier. He landed on his back and looked down at a large bloody hole in his chest. He laughed and saw bubbles popping in his own blood, like lava. He felt nothing.

I'm sorry I can't say goodbye
, he thought, thinking of all the people on the moon.

Faces flickered in front of him. So many determined people. They would not fail.

"Hello, iPod," he said, and died.

Ani Loera didn't believe what she was seeing on the streams, so she went down to the chamber that housed the Europan Explorer and its half-built twin, Jove's Dream. The chamber was never meant to be pressurized, so she slammed through putting on her surface suit as quickly as possible.

When she stepped into the chamber, her breath caught.

Standing in ranks in front of the Europan Explorer were over a hundred spacesuit-clad figures. Their names scrolled on her wriststream. Almost all of them were eighteen or under.

Which meant they made the spacesuits themselves
, she thought. Making suits for kids still growing was an amazing extravagance--not unknown, but not usual.

They made the suits themselves.

Ani could see no faces behind the silver visors, but names were sewn neatly onto their chests. She walked up to one of the tallest, whose name was James Kinoshita. Dr. Kinoshita's son.