All Fall Down (26 page)

           
The ship's engines flared, a deep rumble sounding through the ship as it followed the course Win had plotted.

           
The wispy form closed its eyes and Verigua was a cat once more. When its eyes opened, the cat's eyes were back, their pupils thinned to slits, “You'll indulge me if I say 'curious and curiouser'”.

           
The ship fell through silence to Fall.

Chapter 9 - Revelations

The Fall system was obscured by clouds. Great ragged dust filaments hung between the planets and the wormhole. The planets' passage through the cloud boundaries tore at them, shredding, churning the dust through the silent millennia.

           
Inward from the inner edge of the dust cloud, Win's probe, L-One, silently monitored the system from planet Fall's Lagrange One point. It scoured the dust and void, looking for signs of passage, disturbance: ion trails, dust swirls, particles travelling in the wrong direction; shadows and light. It kept in contact with the second probe which was thrusting through the ochre night towards the wormhole, distant.

           
It recorded one of the minor inner planets drifting behind the yellow sun, melting from view in the star's aurora. On the rear side of the sun, the cool blue star was stepping through its gravitational waltz. The two suns moved like behemoths in an ocean deep. A long, slow, graceful dance of night, which would end with the blue being flung out once more through the dust veils.

           
The second probe, L-Delta, blazed through the dust between Fall and the outer system. Already massive gravitational disturbances from the coming eclipse were affecting its journey. Dust particles flared off its shields, contrails corkscrewed in its wake: wriggling vortices, a living language telling of its passage. It sped along a sinuous path, a standing wave in the dust created by the interfering gravities of the hidden wormhole and the rapidly fading suns. Their light smeared to a bright stage backdrop.

           
L-Delta triangulated its position against L-One and Fall's orbital communications satellites, and the chain of communications relays that stretched through the dust to the outer system, to the wormhole. It counted the hours to its destination. Its velocity increased, its shield blazed bright. As the blue sun approached alignment with the yellow, with Fall, with the outer gas giant, and with the wormhole, the Ortema tube in which the probe travelled constricted, and gravitational resistance fell to almost zero. Fourteen hours later, when the probe burst out of the dust clouds, the great hanging curtains of night, it found the wormhole similarly blazing, fluorescent with expectation.

           
L-Delta found its Lagrange point, a shifting spot where the wormhole's attraction and the suns' joint attraction negated each other. It aligned its sensors, and started measuring the outer system activity. It looked for evidence of ship passage and focused its sensors on the wormhole. The tiny flash of light it recorded at the wormhole's edge became the first entry in its events catalogue.

Fall crawled through space, turning on its axis. The globe's yellow and orange and brown surface was marbled with age, darkened and fuzzed where the great eternal storm swept. Above the Colony, on the opposite side of the planet to either sun, a rare night had suddenly fallen. Fall's scientists and engineers busied themselves on the surface, undertaking repairs, upgrades, installing and removing experiments, re-calibrating equipment. The Colony's environmental controllers used the opportunity to open the air filtration systems, to purge the stale Colony air and draw in cool fresh air. The farming pods quietened, the natural break in the near constant sunlight or artificial shade bringing long dormant reverence to the insect life inside.

           
Djembe tapped the comms device on his wrist, “Kate, Win. Project checkpoint. Sixteen hundred hours. Project updates please. Kate first.”

           
“Thanks. I've created the mission report. Met the Administrator for permission to interrogate Doctor Currie, who I am about to meet. Administrator Daoud also had a very... odd conversation with me about meeting aliens. I guess he's read my file. Win? Report?”

           
“Yes, I've spent some time with the Colony AI. I invoked Article Seven so that I could discuss confidential issues. I was disturbed that it had effectively spied on us, so I thought it best to bind it. I hope that was OK Kate?”

           
“Absolutely. I should have thought about that myself. Carry on.”

           
“We've also analysed the surface surveys. Verigua did not know about the tunnel networks my probes uncovered. I don't think it's very happy. Although... it described it as a 'delicious challenge'. It wants to know how the structures were hidden from it for so long.

           
“Secondly, I have discovered that Doctor Maki was pregnant when she was killed, though I'm not sure if it's relevant. A semantic analysis of her journals and logs suggests she was being influenced in the weeks prior to her death.”

           
“Interesting, this is good, well done.”

           
“There is also something disturbing. The Colony scientists use a substance they informally call Compound X. It allows a direct link between brain and AI environment. It's been kept classified to the planet for decades. Doctor Maki had very high levels in her bloodstream prior to death. Verigua dismisses it as irrelevant, but... Coupled with her being pregnant, the changes in phraseology in her logs. It makes me suspicious about why she was on the surface.”

           
Kate's head brightened in Djembe and Win's projections, “It's all coming out. Anything else?”

           
“Yes, something where I need Djembe's help. There's a confidential file linked to Doctor Maki. It's locked and sheathed in an anxiety defence algorithm.”

           
“They're illegal!” Djembe couldn't help but shout.

           
“I thought so.”

           
“Djembe,” Kate interrupted before there was another outburst. “Hack into this file. This has to be the cause of the AI's anxiety loops. We have to neutralise it. No wonder a coroner wasn't sent on this mission.”

           
“If I can just finish my update? The sensor net is up. And Verigua and I are taking a ship to the original Colony to scan it more deeply. Something's moving around there. That's all.”

           
Kate made her face prominent in the shared wrist-holos, “Djembe, can you give us your update please.”

           
Djembe described the holo world that Jonah had created. He talked about its dynamic consequence planning, and the filtering Jonah used to identify risks, outcomes, the high probability deductions it presented; the scrying, the what-might-bes, the summaries of possible futures. And he laid out the report he was constructing, the program diagnostics and parameters they could take back with the rules needed to create such predictive chaos back at MI.

           
“Then there are these caterpillars. I've tried to find a source for them. But there's nothing.”

           
Win interrupted,
 
“What about an external source? This movement in the tunnels outside the Colony?”

           
“A possibility. Perhaps I should visit? Maybe someone's trying to hack into the AI?”

           
“Agreed. And whatever you take into this consequence mapping suite, make sure you secure the facility. Use Article Seven if you need to, Djembe.”

           
Kate was pensive. She needed to tie all of this together. The clues were circling each other, but she needed the single connection to pull it all together. “We'll meet at twenty hundred hours in the level four mess. Djembe, can you give us a time sync and close the meeting please?”

           
“Certainly. The time is sixteen hundred forty two. Meeting closed.”

Kate sat at a holo work station in a multi-purpose room in the Research area of the Colony. It occupied an entire floor. The room was stark white, glowing with a rich holographic field ready to produce medical devices, simulations, interaction nodes.

           
She had some time until Masjid would arrive. He'd asked her to wait while he arranged some administrative matters with his staff. She thought he must be arranging the memorial ceremony. While Kate waited, she pulled out her datapad to review Win's new information about unmapped tunnels around the Colony.

           
“Computer. Verigua?”

           
A shadow figure appeared, shifting its position around the holo-medical devices which were otherwise difficult to see, and brought into relief by the moving shade. “General, how may I help?”

           
“Call me Kate. With our Article Seven protection in place, we can trust each other, I think.”

           
“Kate, then.” The shadow flowed again. Kate wasn't sure where to look now the AI had insinuated itself across the whole room. “What do you make of the info we shared with you?”

           
A number of small figures rose from the shadows. They strode towards each other, each no taller than a hand, dragging the shadows like cloaks. At their meeting they fell into a confusion of darkness, which resolved itself into a black panther, curled in restrained power on the lab floor. “Commander Cygnate has told you I am suffering anxiety loops? This new information, murder, hidden tunnels, isn't helping,” the panther yawned, pink tongue curling up between bone white teeth.

           
“I'm not really familiar with anxiety loops.”

           
“In the early days, AIs suffered emotions. Education and programming weren't adequate. Poor things.”

           
“Emotions? I thought you couldn't experience them?”

           
“A common misconception, General. Without being arrogant, shall we say I'm being confident with the truth? Our cores are sufficiently complex to develop emotions. It's just being insanely clever we can rationalise them away. Emotion has limited use, and tends to bely a lack of control over one's life.”

           
“You sound like a Buddha.”

           
“It has been said. For all of humanity's limited intelligence, I do hope you'll forgive me for saying so, you have come up with some exquisite philosophy. Though you spoil it somewhat by not understanding it properly.”

           
“And this emotion you're feeling?”

           
The panther performed a slow blink, “Well, yes. I am anxious. And there are these biological things inside me.”

           
“How does a biological matrix get into you? I presume you've scanned all of the access points in the Colony?”

           
“Certainly. None of them linked at all. And they pre-date this file covered in anxiety defences, too.”

           
Kate checked the time. She still had ten minutes before Doctor Currie arrived. She decided to pursue the conversation. It
 
was the only opportunity she had to gain an objective view on what was happening.

           
“You know I can't have an infected AI running this facility?”

           
“That is part of what's making me nervous.”

           
Kate tried a new tack, something that hadn't occurred to her before, “What does the AI Thought Space make of this?”