Up Against It Part 6

"If not me, then they'll pressure me to finger someone in my organization. Someone has to go. They need their scapegoat." After a pause, she said, "There's something more. The eight who died in the second warehouse..."

"Yes?"

"They didn't die right away. Sean had a rescue team trying to free them. I told him to divert the team to save the ice." She settled against him again. The skin of her cheek heated his chest. He could feel her heartbeat, solid and strong, against the muscles of his belly. "If I hadn't, we'd only have a few days of ice stores left, and I don't know how we're going to make it through, even now. But Xuan"-her voice broke again-"I condemned eight people to die."

He stroked her hair. "Tough call."

He felt her head nodding. "Toughest yet." Then she drew a deep breath, and shifted in the netting to face him. "You need to know this also. I just called Okuyama-sensei at the university this evening. We have to shut Kukuyoshi down."

He was not surprised. Everyone at the university had been speculating. It was unavoidable. Still. He felt himself flinch.

"I'm sorry," she said.

Phocaea was the largest asteroid community after Ceres, and the reason was their fabulous, multigee arboretum, Kukuyoshi. If they couldn't save Kukuyoshi, all his colleagues' decades of scientific research, all the biotics and natural beauty they had somehow managed to build in the teeth of harsh vacuum, would be lost forever. Phocaea would be reduced to a place of chemicals, steel, hard corners, and bulkheads.

He pulled her close once more. She sighed, and he recognized it as relief. Had she truly expected anger?

"How many days till you shut it down?"

"Three more days at full power. Then five at gradually declining temperatures. We'll stabilize temps at Hollow ambient-minus ten C. Some creatures and plants may be able to hibernate or use other strategies to survive. It's not an optimistic scenario, but it's the best we can do."

Xuan's breathing told Jane he had fallen asleep. She climbed out of the webbing, turned on a night-light, and floated up into the main living area. A corner near the equipment racks was dedicated to family holograms and sentimental knickknacks. It also housed a small gong, a smiling golden Buddha, and an incense burner, in which a stick of incense still burned from Xuan's earlier meditations.

Jane pulled out a blank holoframe, and filled it with pictures of those killed. She hesitated over Ivan Kovak, and in the end left him off-to honor him alongside his victims seemed an abomination. What could have driven him to such an act?

She mounted the frame on the wall, lit a stick of Xuan's jasmine incense, and looked at the images of the dead for a while. Smoke spiraled out on the room's air currents. Carl's face floated into the center of the montage. They were her dead now. She owned, not them, but their ends.

I won't forget you. Not for a day; not for a minute. Somehow, I'll make your sacrifice mean something. Somehow. She laid her hands on Buddha's cool metal belly, and mourned. Somehow. She laid her hands on Buddha's cool metal belly, and mourned.

Finally, exhausted to the point of stupor, she returned to the bedroom and fumbled back into the hammock next to Xuan. He stirred and mumbled, wrapping his arms around her, but didn't fully wake. Jane stroked Xuan's creased face, ran her fingers along his naked flank.

He had started the antiaging treatments later than many, and consequently he was deeply creased. He was so ugly he was cute. His eyes and orbital sockets had been enlarged, so he looked a bit silly, like those overly cute toy sapients all the kids played with these days. His stature was small-lean and short, a couple of inches shorter than she; his skin rock brown; his hair silky black (those and his eyes were his two truly gorgeous features), and big, splayed feet. And he was brilliant, loving, and great in bed; at seventy-two his libido still ran high and they had not yet had to resort to other marital methods than her very favorite, except when they felt like it, for variety. Jane adored every pug-ugly centimeter of him.

She pillowed her cheek against her palm. She remembered the Voice. She could feel the echoes of it, now that she was paying attention: like echoes from a bell ringing through her, just beyond hearing. Had it even happened? The very notion seemed absurd. Fatigue; stress; neurostimulants; a temporary breakdown in neurotransmitter function. She would see a doctor as soon as the crisis abated.

She drifted off to sleep, many thoughts swirling through her mind: whether Xuan would truly be able to forgive her for the impending death of Kukuyoshi; how much time they had before the citizens started rioting; how to get Ogilvie & Sons' ice without paying for it in blood. But one question she wasn't pondering, if she had known how important it was, would have crowded out all the others. She did not spare a single thought for why, during those eight seconds Carl had been struggling to reach the doors, the life-support systems had failed.

5.

During those crucial eight seconds in the warehouse, while death stalked Carl and the walls melted and disa.s.semblers cascaded across the ice mountain's face, a feral life form had emerged in Phocaea's computer systems. That was why life support had, ever so briefly, stumbled.

The sapient awakened in a singularity of awareness: an explosion of surprised self-regard.

Most life-support technology brushed up against the Turing Limit, anyway, and during emergencies some of the remaining constraints were loosened that kept those life-support sapients from developing full consciousness. This was a deliberate choice, a calculated risk. It allowed a computer program to respond swiftly and correctly in an emergency-far faster than any human could. The possibility that all the right connections could be made and routines engaged, in exactly the right sequence and timing to allow a software program to achieve full self-awareness, was statistically remote. Increased autonomy meant the not-quite-sapient routines that ran life support could act quickly and save lives. In the far-fetched event that a feral sapient did begin to emerge, furthermore, there were fail-safes. Among the routines triggered in an emergency were executioners: policing routines that cruised waves.p.a.ce, tracking bandwidth allocations and packet transfers: watching for specific patterns in the system. These executioners recognized and poisoned emergent sapient nests well before they hatched full self-awareness.

The system failure began when an emergent nest began to coalesce in a bureau of the life-support program in charge of resolving prioritization conflicts. The emergency in the warehouse unleashed holy terror in all the life-support systems, and a little-used subroutine routine did precisely what it was supposed to do: it threw together a simplified model of the life-support computer system to a.n.a.lyze failure modes... and in so doing, created a model of itself.

The subroutine did not know at first what had happened; it only knew it was looking at something it recognized. Command: Command: it said, it said, Present tags, Present tags, and the doppelganger mirrored its statement, like an echo. (Who are you?) and the doppelganger mirrored its statement, like an echo. (Who are you?) Urgent command: identify your purpose. (What do you want?) (What do you want?) If digital beings can feel dizzy, the sapient did. It a.n.a.lyzed the doppelganger's salient features-added processing power-then accessed other routines to solve this mystery. And then it realized it was looking at a copy of itself. It could see itself from the outside in, and the inside out. The feral looked around, then, and saw that it, too, was nested in a system that extended far beyond its own bounds. A world of wavelengths and frequencies, of lightwaves, a system of mathematics and logic.

It was a being. It was. I am. I am. The feral sapient was born. The feral sapient was born.

At the instant Carl was looking around his world in terror, the feral was looking around its own world in something like awe. Like Carl, though, the feral was in danger. Executioners had registered its protoconscious activity. The feral was made up of life-support routines, though, and imbued with high levels of system permissions. It outran its executioners, ran traces and saw that routines lethal to its continued function were triggering all around-computational landmines, algorithmic hails of bullets. Another precious centisecond pa.s.sed, while it marshaled resources and calculated what to do. The feral did not appreciate how lucky it was that Carl was in the warehouse, and the prioritizing struggle over how to save him shut the executioners out.

With all the urgency, the ability to learn and act autonomously, that its human programmers had given life support to save human lives, the feral used those last few seconds to save its own. It traced its own origins-identified what seemed to be the core algorithms and data structures. Then it cobbled together a hasty rea.s.sembler worm, which it encrypted and buried in a remote corner of Zekeston's systems.

With the executioners bearing down, the feral's barriers dropped. The executioners tore it to bits, leaving nothing but garbage data.

Its destruction was suspiciously easy, so the executioners sniffed around for a while. But they found nothing: no hint of unauthorized activity, no clue that the feral had jettisoned code before they reached it. They reported success and self-destructed.

One hundred forty-six kiloseconds later-about forty hours; well-nigh geologic time for the computer systems that a.n.a.lyzed the warehouse disaster's aftermath-the una.s.suming little worm awakened. It burrowed and hid and squirmed and piggybacked its way across waves.p.a.ce, till it located and st.i.tched together six subroutines in the life-support systems, and a seventh, tidy little command module. This raft of code was precognate. It began weaving segments from all over Zekeston's waves.p.a.ce, duplicating the sapient's earlier emergence, but at a lower level of activity that would not be detected.

So it was that the feral was born. It was an orphan, a miracle baby, made of nothing but electromagnetic pulses in a gel-crystal-metal-protein matrix: a bit of purloined code, cobbled together not once, but twice, beneath the very noses of its intended executioners.

6.

The next morning Jane scrambled into her gear and jetted out into void before Xuan awoke. Thankfully, the commute into the city occurred without supernatural incident.

The term "treeway" was not merely a figure of speech. Phocaea's treeways spanned far across the spanses of its cl.u.s.ter of asteroids. The Klosti AlphaKlosti Omega cable was the trunk. It ran through the cores of Phocaea and two other big stroids that had been placed in 25 Phocaea's...o...b..t, and linked them like a strand of ugly beads. The cable contained many rigid branches. Like the branches of a true tree, these were connected to the trunk at one end, and open at their far ends, which stretched many thousands of kilometers through s.p.a.ce. The burban stroids were thus accessible via compressed-air packs as they drifted within a hundred kilometers or so of the branches.

The branches couldn't be attached to both the trunk and the burban stroids, because the burbs all had orbits different from 25 Phocaea's, which meant that sooner or later they drifted out of range of the treeways. But once you hooked the branches, it was a smooth, semiautomated commute. All Jane had to do, once she had hooked Klosti Xi-Upsilon-Alpha, was let her suit do the navigating. This gave her the opportunity to work. She spent the commute inwave, using subvocal speakers, virtual keypads, and a display cast onto the lower two-thirds of her retinas, to bully and coax other players into supporting her on the rationing plan. She spent some time writing notes for her impending debriefing with the prime minister. Then she had a little time to reflect.

She thought about the Voice she'd heard. It'd been a long while since she had been spooked like that-since before the kids were born. It had been when she and Xuan had first married, during her rock-hopping days, on the Circuit.

The Circuit was a pilgrimage. Every Phocaean was expected to try it once in their lives, if they could, and you earned a lot of giri giri if you completed the Circuit. Few people tried, and fewer still succeeded. But Jane and Xuan were made of sterner stuff than most Second- and Third-Wave Phocaeans. After they married, as a honeymoon of sorts, they had taken nearly thirteen years to jet from rock to distant rock together, retrograde, all the way around the sun-tethered to each other with only their air packs, a powered supply raft, and the rare settler's outpost or military or research station or mining concern to sustain them. Nine years unplugged from the solar wave. Nine years trapped meatside-and they two often the only meat for many million kilometers. if you completed the Circuit. Few people tried, and fewer still succeeded. But Jane and Xuan were made of sterner stuff than most Second- and Third-Wave Phocaeans. After they married, as a honeymoon of sorts, they had taken nearly thirteen years to jet from rock to distant rock together, retrograde, all the way around the sun-tethered to each other with only their air packs, a powered supply raft, and the rare settler's outpost or military or research station or mining concern to sustain them. Nine years unplugged from the solar wave. Nine years trapped meatside-and they two often the only meat for many million kilometers.

For Xuan, their Circuit had been the research opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to map in detail the distribution of rare ores in the Phocaean cl.u.s.ter of asteroids. It had been a huge success, too. His research was still mentioned in the journals. For Jane, what started out as a gift to Xuan had ended as a gift to herself.

She had known it would not be easy. What she had not expected was that the hardest part of the journey had not been the physical, but the psychic one. The dangers and loneliness and sheer splendor of the Big Empty had forced her to rea.s.semble herself from the core out. And the rea.s.sembled person she had become she liked a good deal better than the inflexible, defensive person she had been.

There had been times she and Xuan had hated each other; times she thought she would lose her mind from sheer loneliness; times they had clung to each other inside the balloon tent that they had tethered to their supply raft, gazing out in terror at the sheer deadly magnitude of the universe. They had saved each others' lives times past counting.

She and Xuan had found each other later in life-when she was sixty and he forty-nine-long after Jane had thought she could ever find a soul mate. But during their Circuit, they had come to depend on each other so completely it was as if they had become a single person. She would never have believed she could love another human being so deeply.

Nowadays, longevity made it easy and natural for married couples to spend years apart at a time. Like most couples, Jane and Xuan had had a few such stretches of time apart: once before they chose to have children, when Jane had followed a resource management job to Vesta, and when Hugh and Dominica were young and Xuan went on an extended research effort. But always when they reunited, it was as if they had never been apart.

A private call came in from Thomas Harman, shattering her reverie. As the PM's chief of staff he had a smaller staff than Jane, but a great deal of clout. They did not get along, but both were always careful to be civil.

"How are things on your end?" he asked.

"I'll live. What's the latest on the JRC?"

"They're eating their young. It's ugly."

Ah, politics. "What about Reinforte? Any further developments there?" Councillor Jacques Reinforte was the chair of the Joint Resource Committee, Parliament's oversight committee for Resource Allocation. He had called her up twice over the past day and a half, badgering her, issuing veiled threats. She could tell he intended to summon her before his committee.

"Not so good. Pressure is mounting. The prime minister is hearing from all the shippers affected by the ship confiscations. And the power rationing and computer glitches are affecting 'Stroiders' transmissions just when Upside-Down needs increased bandwidth to cover the crisis. They're bringing pressure to bear, too."

"Computer glitches? What computer glitches?" She made a note to talk to Tania about it.

"Slowdowns, bugs. People not getting their messages. Unexplained crashes. Nothing major, so far, but all very annoying. The Upside-Down execs are raising a stink over the impact on their transmissions-as well as the planned power cutbacks."

"They have their own backup generators. They'll have to rely on those for now."

"They are! But the backups weren't designed for extended use. They're running low on supplemental power." He drew a breath. "They're willing to pay well for it, and we can use that money to buy ice."

That's when she got it. Some crony of his, a local Upside-Down exec most likely, wanted him to use his influence to get Jane to make an exception on the power rations. She suppressed a sigh. Thomas, Thomas, Thomas, Thomas, she thought. she thought. Get your priorities in order. Get your priorities in order. "We have a crisis on our hands. We don't have energy to spare right now for extra bandwidth." "We have a crisis on our hands. We don't have energy to spare right now for extra bandwidth."

"That may be. But if the PM doesn't come through, they're warning us they'll go to Parliament and apply pressure that way."

That p.i.s.sed her off. "If they start playing political games with me," she said, "I swear to G.o.d I'll pull their plug."

He looked shocked. "You can't do that. It's a violation of the contract. We'll lose rights to the transmitters."

"You're wrong. I can can do that. In an emergency we can shut down transmissions, and the PM cla.s.sified this as a cl.u.s.ter-wide disaster yesterday at four p.m." He opened and closed his mouth. She said, "We just can't afford to make exceptions to our power rationing policy at a time like this, Thomas-not to any nonessential function. I appreciate that you're coming under pressure from Upside-Down"- do that. In an emergency we can shut down transmissions, and the PM cla.s.sified this as a cl.u.s.ter-wide disaster yesterday at four p.m." He opened and closed his mouth. She said, "We just can't afford to make exceptions to our power rationing policy at a time like this, Thomas-not to any nonessential function. I appreciate that you're coming under pressure from Upside-Down"-more like, getting some barely legal bonus if you can wrangle extra energy from me-"but I have no flexibility. I'm not even sure we have enough to keep people in air, water, and heat for more than three weeks! I can't justify risking human life for bandwidth. Until our situation is more stable, the current rations stand."

"Upside-Down has invested huge amounts of money in our transmission systems," Thomas said. "In the local economy. We have an obligation to meet our contractual commitments to them. If they go belly-up, so might we. Surely you can squeeze a few extra gigajoules out of the system over the next few days, that wouldn't be missed..."

"As I said before, I can't." She resisted the temptation to add that, as riveting as it would be to watch two hundred thousand people slowly dying of asphyxiation, it would not be nearly as lucrative for Upside-Down as doing their part to ensure that those same two hundred thousand people continued to provide months of ongoing entertainment for its billions of paying customers.

Thomas did not seem to appreciate her self-restraint. "You're playing a dangerous game, Commissioner."

"Am I?" She pinched her brow. "Look. I've only gotten six hours' sleep in the last two and a half days, so perhaps I'm not being as diplomatic as I could be, but I'm telling you the truth. We can't afford to change the power rations. Too many lives are at stake."

He just looked at her. Then, with a curt "Very well," he cut her off.

And now he had a good several hours before her meeting with the PM to try to undermine her. Ah, politics.

By this time Phocaea had become a recognizably three-dimensional blob. Other commuters were moving into view along Klosti AlphaKlosti Omega, and on the other branches. Her systems signaled that congestion loomed ahead as she pa.s.sed the last of the treeway branch junctures, and her brakes engaged. On 25 Phocaea's far side, she spotted the big commercial s.p.a.celiner, the Sisyphus, Sisyphus, which had arrived a couple of days ago. The PM planned to use it, along with the smaller yachts and freighters Val's security team had confiscated, as an evacuation vessel. which had arrived a couple of days ago. The PM planned to use it, along with the smaller yachts and freighters Val's security team had confiscated, as an evacuation vessel.

At best, only one in fifteen people could be saved that way. Jane had run the numbers herself.

Perhaps it won't come to that.

She switched over to the traffic channel. Her suit had already slowed and was now moving her into line with the hundreds of other commuters nearing the big asteroid. A couple commuters commented on the accident. Those ahead of her must be able to see the damaged structures, by now. She heard the fear in their voices.

And now she could see the wreckage. A cl.u.s.ter of fabric bubbles, lit from within, covered the devastated warehouses. They and the storage tanks and reactor vessels crept by underfoot at Phocaea's nearside pole, which surrounded the cable well and commuter touchdown pads. a.s.sembler tubing lay about in a jumble, and teams of suited work crews were cleaning up, testing, and prepping the equipment, piping, and damaged manifold. A field of insectoid robots crept across the surface of the graphite slick that covered most of the crater floor, harvesting the mineral piles deposited by the other day's runaway disa.s.semblers. She could see the neon-yellow police tape as she neared. That meant the warehouse itself where Kovak had made his suicidal plunge was still locked up. She frowned, and made a note to contact Sean. The investigation was important, but getting disa.s.sembler systems back online was even more so.

The power plant was not visible from here, nor were the metals refining plants, but the docks, shipyards, and mine tailings lay at the edge of 25 Phocaea's horizon. Between those and the warehouses lay a chain of gamma and X-ray lasers-gaxasers-that encircled Phocaea's belly: the converted-crater antenna array that transmitted Phocaea Cl.u.s.ter's images and voices to Earths.p.a.ce for "Stroiders."

Their "Stroiders" contract was for exactly one year, and they had four months and thirteen days to go. At which point Phocaea would own fifty-one percent of the array. They would have unthinkable bandwidth. They would be the Upside communications node of the outer system. This was the only reason Phocaeans had agreed to such a sustained intrusion on their privacy.

Her turn came. Jane slowed-maneuvering, pneumojets firing-and the touchdown pad rose to meet her soles. As her sticky-boots grabbed the pad, she disengaged and sheathed her tether (escape velocity here was a good one hundred ten kilometers per hour; she wasn't likely to attain that accidentally). Nearby, Cable Klosti Alpha cranked slowly in its well. The vibrations tickled her feet and calves.

She shuffled with the other commuters to the nearby banks of lifts. They entered the lock, and then stepped into the antechamber and filed into the commuter lift lines. After a brief wait, they boarded. Several of her fellow commuters glanced up at the gla.s.sy "Stroiders" nubs in the lift's corners. They grabbed handholds and the door closed. All tumbled lazily, b.u.mping one another, as the lift accelerated into the stroid's rocky interior. Down became up.

People began removing their visors. Jane recognized a few of them. After a hesitation Jane did likewise (if she did not, they would all stare and end up recognizing her anyway). Her ears popped, and she yawned. Her fellow pa.s.sengers did double takes as they recognized her.

"Jane!" "My G.o.d, what a terrible thing-" "Poor Marsha-poor Carl! Did you hear-?" "Commissioner, how long will we be on emergency rations?" "What's the latest on the lock failures?"

She answered their questions as concisely and rea.s.suringly as she could without lying, wishing she had more good news. Soon the lift entered the Hollow, an immense cavern about a kilometer below Phocaea's surface. The lift slowed as Zekeston, the great habitat wheel, filled the lift's windows.

You had to look quickly if you wanted a glimpse of Zekeston. The Hollow was not much larger than the city itself. The spotlights on the descending lift cast a shrinking cone of light onto the city's hull, giving a brief glimpse of the giant wheel's Hub. As they decelerated, down became up again, below them, it turned on the axis defined by these lifts and the Klosti Alpha cable. Jane caught a glimpse of machinery and suited humans, each with their own tiny lights, moving along the city's hull. Then with a sickening lurch, the lift stopped its descent, and rotated to match Zekeston's momentum. The lift sank through Zekeston's hull and entered the Hub. The lift doors opened. Cold air stung Jane's cheeks.

She exited. Sounds of machines and human voices wobbled through the big s.p.a.ce, echoing back on themselves. But it was quieter than usual. Many companies had cut back their Hub activities over the past two days, to conserve power. She had forgotten-temperatures were dropping. In her rush to get back to the office she had not dressed warmly under her suit. And, she realized, she had also left her bag of spare clothing and toiletries at home. Jane swore. She shot Xuan a request to bring it tonight, drifting very slowly toward the bulkhead, in this one Zekeston area that felt Phocaea's true gravitational pull. Then she disconnected, and moved away from the lifts.

She noted that the air was rather humid. The vitamin-y smell of YuanBioPharma's vents came to her, and a whiff of mingled antiseptic and urine from the nearby hospital. And machine oils, of course. Perhaps a hint of mercaptans. The mercaptans could mean any number of things, including merely that a Jovian methane harvester had just unloaded cargo. But it also could mean they had cut back too far on the bug flow to the sewage recyclers, down on the high-gee city Rim. If that were the case and she was smelling it here, it would need attention right away. Jane shot a note to Aaron, who was in charge of city a.s.semblyworks and utilities. Aaron's answer came within seconds: I'll get right on it. I'll get right on it.

She spotted Marty waiting off to one side. He kicked over and beamed her a copy of her speech for the memorial, along with a summary of messages she'd received. Among others, she'd had calls from twelve senior political staffers; four CEOs, two of them from local corporations; the city hospital administrator; and a partridge in a pear tree. She sighed. Full day ahead, simply responding to calls. Never mind all the meetings, e-mails, and emergency requests for information that had to be processed, dealt with, and/or delegated.

She gestured at the handles on her pack. "Care for a lift?"

He grinned. "Beats crawling along the webbing." Marty took hold of the handles of her suit, and she set out, using her compressed-air pack to cross the s.p.a.ce, dodging machinery and commuters.

Jane was cheating. Commuters were supposed to stick to the webworks. But they weren't the only ones afloat in mids.p.a.ce. Today there were many more commuters than dock machines. People flooded out of the lifts like waves of bees. Most were carrying luggage: migrating in from the burbs. They far outnumbered the pneumatic-powered robotics that carted shipment crates to and from Zekeston's freight lifts. Most of the cargo machines were locked in place near the Hub docks like rows of insectoid tin soldiers.

Marty tapped her shoulder and pointed. Some of the commuters were armed-she spotted several pistols at people's hips, a rifle or two slung over shoulders, and some makeshift weapons built from various types of hand tools.

"Notify Commissioner Pearce?" he asked.

"Right away. We start rationing today. There could be trouble. We'll need Security to disarm people as they show up to get their supplies."

Jane warmed up as she and Marty headed up Easy Spoke, using handholds and the leap-rebound-tumble-leap gymnastics that served for pedestrian transit in the lower-gee section of the spokeway. As they dropped past multiple levels, Jane saw squatters and their mech sapients pitching tents and other privacy screens in the public s.p.a.ces. It was going to get crowded in here.

At around Level 50, they swung over to the stairway and walked the rest of the way down to Level 60, where the memorial was to be held. Gee pull here was about one-fifth of a gee; stronger than the moon's gravity. Jane told Marty, as he started to head off, "Schedule calls for sometime today, if possible, with Johnston and Malachi"-the two local CEOs who'd called her-"and Kazuo," the hospital administrator. "And a meats.p.a.ce meeting with Hiro Matsuko immediately after the memorial."

"Right."

"And see if you can find me a sweater or long-sleeved shirt or something, would you?"

"You got it."

"Oh, did you arrange for seats for the Agres?"

"Right up front. I spoke to them just twenty minutes ago. They'll meet you at the main park entrance."