The Callisto Gambit (45 page)

Kiyoshi had no idea where he was going, but that had never deterred him before and it didn’t now. He took his gecko boots off and carried them in the invisible coverall’s left sleeve pocket. It had hanging sleeves like a Japanese kimono—very handy. The material made no chafing noises, and it stretched so easily he could have forgotten it was there, if not for the sensation of terrycloth covering his nose and mouth. Flowing legs with interior toe-loops hid his bare feet.

Silently, he ghosted through bare corridors and peered through the windowed doors of offices. People sat working at screens, or performed weird tai chi-like dances, manipulating immersion-based work environments he couldn’t see. Even on Pallas, an office was an office.

Strange that no alarms had gone off.

Stranger still that no one was chasing him.

Maybe this invisibility shit really worked.

Even so, what about infrared? He wasn’t overheating, which meant the coverall wasn’t even trying to hide his heat signature.

If it ain’t broke, don’t worry about it.

He pushed the questions out of his mind. He had to find Legacy. Where, in this hive of offices, did the bastard hang out?

He turned a corner—and froze.

Just ahead, the corridor ended in a solid steel wall equipped with biometric locks. A human security guard, like the one Andrea Miller had shot, stood in a slovenly posture, studying his fingernails.

Kiyoshi retreated a few paces and waited.

After a short time, rainbow light flowed around a door-shaped part of the wall. It slid away. The security guard recoiled, as surprised as Kiyoshi was by what came through.

A person in head-to-toe green armor, or else a phavatar
made
of head-to-toe green armor. It looked like a man-sized insect.

It held a laser rifle of the make Kiyoshi used to have, a HabSafe™, guaranteed to go through flesh, but not through walls.

“Intruder located and verified. Hands up, motherfucker,” ordered a distorted voice.

Red crosshairs hovered in the air over Kiyoshi’s heart.

★

Because of the extreme sensitivity of the yottabytes of information housed in InSec Center’s fleet of supercomputers, and because the ISA—more than any other agency—understood the risk of emergent hostile behavior, they did not allow advanced mechanical intelligences on Pallas. The closest things to artificial personalities they tolerated were the flamingo-like bots which acted as servitors, and those, frankly, were about as smart as flamingos. Of course the staff had to have software-based MIs to help with their tasks, but an intricate system of firewalls prevented any of these entities from knowing the configuration of the information management system, much less its contents.

Only humans were allowed to do that.

On the same principle, InSec Center’s defenses balanced human capabilities against MI capabilities in a contingently evolving framework so structured that neither people nor software could ever get the upper hand.

Butterfly Net, the first-responder drone flock that had malfunctioned, was autonomous, but non-lethal.

Militia was lethal but non-autonomous.

Thirty phavatars, armed with non-integrated weapons, had issued from lockers throughout Sectors A, B, C, and D. Each of them was being operated in real time by an employee who’d been yanked away from his or her work to carry out this important secondary duty. The operators were all volunteers. Some of them were keen, others less so.

Legacy virtually peered over the shoulder of the kid who’d found Kiyoshi Yonezawa. A split screen on Legacy’s desk showed him the kid, frozen in his immersion cubicle, and what the kid’s phavatar was looking at.

A skeleton with a dagger in its hand.

Blurring.

Lunging.

“Shoot him!” Legacy shouted.

★

Kiyoshi lunged sideways, dodging behind the human security guard. The man was only just beginning to react to the situation. No one would ever know what his reaction would have been. The phavatar’s laser rifle drilled a hole in his throat. Blood pumped out in a red fountain.

★

“I killed the security guard!” The phavatar mirrored the actions of its operator, clutching its face with both hands, doubling over in shock. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!”

“God preserve us from amateurs,” Legacy snarled. He overrode the kid’s log-in and took over.

★

The phavatar dropped its rifle and covered its face with its green claws. Distorted moans issued from its speaker. Kiyoshi thought about grabbing the rifle, but it was too long, wouldn’t fit under his coverall. Instead, he snatched the dead security guard’s PEPgun from his holster. He dived through the security door and ran.

★

Legacy, now in control of the Militia phavatar, blasted away at the fleeing man. The phavatar could ‘see’ in the infrared and X-ray spectrum. Yonezawa looked like a living skeleton surrounded by a penumbra of heat. White-hot laser pulses hailed around the bony ghost. Hot dimples speckled the walls and floor.

His rifle ran out of juice.

The skeleton lay unmoving on the floor.

“Got him,” Legacy grunted. He walked the phavatar towards the body.

Halfway there, the phavatar’s hydraulic legs seized up.

“SUIT COMMAND: Proceed!”

The phavatar did not respond. A quick diagnostic scan revealed an error in its wireless charging settings. It hadn’t been charging at all, and its onboard power pack had run out of juice. It could no longer move.

Legacy forwarded the results of the diagnostic scan to his fellow executives. “This piece of scrap has failed, but the job’s done. I’ll dispatch a recyling bot to pick up the remains. I recommend evacuating this sector until that’s taken care of. We don’t want any of our special snowflakes stumbling across a corpse.”

His recommendation was seconded and carried.

“What about Miller?” said someone else.

“Militia will find her and eliminate her. Hopefully without another balls-up. For future consideration,” Legacy added, his voice choked with anger, “I propose a soup-to-nuts sweep of the entire system. We have
got
to get rid of these gremlins.”

Seconded, carried.

Another executive added that they should also reconsider Militia. Yes, it had worked—or at least
half-
worked—but not thanks to the volunteers.

“Some things never change,” Legacy said. “If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself.”

Backgrounding the executive channel, he cleared the image of the Sector B corridor from his screens and returned to the task that really interested him.

“Tell me more about Mars,” he invited the thing in the sandpit.

★

Andrea Miller didn’t have a BCI. She’d had one implanted when she was a well-off teenager on Luna, but she’d had to have it removed when the ISA tightened up its anti-spam protocols a few years back. The same went for everyone in the Agency, from the top executives down to the lowliest … actually, Worldhouse Project wardens pretty much
were
the lowliest people in the organization.

But they weren’t as stupid as the secret squirrels seemed to think they were. They’d compiled a map of InSec Center, based on what they saw when they occasionally visited. And precisely because Andrea didn’t have a BCI, she had a functioning memory. She followed the map in her head. When she needed to get through the biometrically locked doors between sectors, she just waited for a person or a servitor bot to come along, and squeezed through behind them.

She was hurrying along a corridor in Sector C when a security phavatar bounded around the corner. Its insectile bulk horrified her. She’d never actually seen one of the Militia phavatars before.

“Hands up!” it yelled, sounding a bit frightened.

Adrenaline racing, Andrea decided to wager her life on the squeamishness of the phavatar’s operator. She plucked her power bow out of her sleeve. In portage form it was simply a six-inch grip. Her thumb pressed a stud. The arms extruded from either end of the grip, pulling the bowstring taut as they reached full length. She plucked an arrow from the thigh pocket of her coverall. This, too, started off small. As she nocked it and pulled it back, the shape-memory alloy shaft lengthened and stiffened.

“Hands up!” the phavatar yelled. “This is your last warning!”

“I don’t understand,” Andrea cried, buying herself another micro-second, and loosed.

The arrow flew down the corridor. Its artificial diamond head bit deep into the phavatar’s head-mounted sensor array.

“I can’t see!” the phavatar howled.

Andrea sprinted past the machine. Then she went back to snatch its rifle. You could never have too many weapons.

The next phavatar wasn’t such a pushover, and she was glad she had the rifle. After that they came at her in waves. She dodged into an office, where the phavatars could not shoot for fear of hitting their own innocent colleagues. A second wave of the grotesque armored robots piled in on top of the first wave. Andrea rolled under a desk, rolled out near the far door, and ran for it. There was no point trying to be sneaky anymore. She burst out of the office and charged into the park in the middle of InSec Center.

Gemstone-cobbled paths, lawns shaped like the ISA logo, hydroponic towers inviting you to pick your own strawberries or tomatoes. It was all so bloody bourgeois. And it was full of employees eating lunch.

Andrea carved through them like a meteor. Bounding high over a hedge, she hurtled towards a seemingly impenetrable thicket of rhododendrons. She knew it was actually a wall. She didn’t know where the door was—until a phavatar burst out of it.

She bounced off the wall, nocked an arrow, drew and loosed.

The phavatar clutched its head, which now had an arrow sticking out of it. She was getting good at this.

Out of the same door stepped two human security guards, a man and a woman. Unlike the volunteer phavatar operators, these knew what they were doing. One dived right, the other left. PEPgun charges seared into the shrubbery.

Andrea stood her ground. It wasn’t a huge risk. In the last archery competition she’d scored a personal-best time of 0.6 seconds.

Her first arrow burrowed into the female security guard’s eye.

The other guard looked to see what had happened. That took a split second off his reaction time, and her second arrow buried itself in his stomach.

Blimey,
she thought,
I didn’t want to kill anyone,
and then she was in, slamming the door behind her.

She screamed at the terrified employees, “Is this the writers’ room?”

★

“Oh, so now we have a hostage situation,” Legacy said. “That’s just great.”

“Yes, sir,” said the chief of security.

“Well, who’s in there? Just writers?”

“Yes, sir.”

The executives had a quick consensus-building chat. During these sessions, they did not necessarily communicate via voice or text messages. They shared their thoughts, literally. Using the same brainwave-mapping technology employed for telepresence, they could beam ideas and feelings straight into each other’s brains—or at least into the slimline headsets they all wore. It felt like one’s own ruminative process, sped up by several orders of magnitude. The big cheeses on Earth were very enamored of this decision-making method, describing it as AI without the tears. The premise, of course, was that many heads were better than one. Oliver Legacy doubted that. But then, he wasn’t a perfect fit for the ISA.

“Do not take any action at the present time,” he told the chief of security, speaking for the group. “Secure the exits of the room. Sever their comms, of course.”

It felt like his own decision, but he was pretty sure it had
not
been his decision. And he was pretty sure it was a bad one. But he could no longer articulate why, and
this
was why he hated consensus. Your own thoughts ended up getting lost in the logic of the majority.

“Sir,” the chief of security said. “Do you have any further instructions regarding the loss of surveillance inputs from the Worldhouse Project?”

“No,” Legacy snapped. “I’ll just remind you that those are our people, and whatever is going on, fragging them from orbit is NOT an acceptable solution.”
That
was his own view, and getting it in felt like a small victory.

But he needed more than small victories today. The snowballing chaos here on Pallas reflected and magnified the Ceres crisis. If not properly managed, this could be a disaster for the ISA.

He reminded himself that others were working on it, and returned to the thing in the sandpit.

“Your answers are not satisfactory,” he told it.

“I have answered every question put to me.”

“You have not answered my questions about the Martian nanites.”

Silence.

He rephrased that as a question. “What are the long-term risks of infection with nanites?”

The thing began to enumerate a list of side effects ranging from skin rashes to possible death. ‘Good’ effects—resistance to cold, amazing stamina, the ability to store oxygen in enlarged blood vessels around the heart—mingled with definitely-bad ones. Legacy had heard all this before, both from the thing in the sandpit and from the Star Force scientists who’d been studying the nanites ever since the first ground troops landed on Mars. It was at once too much information and not enough.

He interrupted, “The nanites were developed by the PLAN, an artificial super-intelligence implacably hostile to humanity. Now that we have defeated the PLAN, is there any risk that the nanites could
reproduce
the PLAN, given access—through their human hosts—to the appropriate hardware?”

“The PLAN believed it was a god,” the thing in the sandpit pointed out, and fell silent. It apparently believed that to be an answer. On the verge of expostulating, Legacy realized it
was
an answer.
In the Christian mythos and others, gods were things that came back from the dead.

And yet the UN had paid very little attention to the PLAN’s warped self-mythologizing. It was as if, with the war won, all that could be safely forgotten. The prospect of adapting human beings to the vacuum—a long-sought goal of the UN’s expansionist faction—remained. The PLAN had died and left them its staggeringly advanced nanobiotechnology. So they’d decided to try the nanites out on the captive, 230-million-strong population of Ceres.