InterstellarNet 03 Enigma Page 8

  “Earth and Haven share the Frankenstein fable. The result? By InterstellarNet standards, humans and Centaurs were both slow to develop biotech. Humans licensed modern gengineering, eventually, from the Wolves. And we needed the help! Adapting proven methods to Earthly biology was faster and cheaper—and more acceptable to the public—than playing catch-up. The Wolves had nothing resembling the Frankenstein story until long after their biotech was well established.”

  “True,” Tanaka Astor said. The usual flat delivery made the word sound grudging. “Ptask Syn Frnch”—the local AI representing Wolf 359 interests—“confirms that. It also appears plausible that Leo and Aquarian instances of the same fable discouraged their development of gengineering.”

  “Literary analysis as market research,” one of the S-G’s heretofore mute aides offered. “Useful, perhaps. What does it have to do with drunken disappearances or the Cambrian Explosion?”

  Joshua ignored the gibe. “The pattern recurs in robotics. Those species with an early R.U.R-type legend were slow to develop robotics, or had to import it. Some still shun robots.

  “It’s not only human legends. Four InterstellarNet species have variations of the Nepath story. None developed, nor will any adopt, neural implants.” He pointed elsewhere in the holo. “Neither humans nor Snakes have the Nepath legend. Snakes developed implant technology, and humans were quick to license it. Meanwhile Snakes dread nanotech, seemingly based on a fable of their own. They won’t touch Centaur nanotech.”

  The lack of implants should strike close to home, Corinne thought. No implants meant no Augmented.

  Eyes glazed on Tanaka Astor and her aides: an intense private consultation. “Ir confirm the analysis,” Tanaka said. “Recurring myths. Technologies impeded or suppressed with strong correlation. Ir must consider this hitherto unsuspected pattern among InterstellarNet member species.” Hints of wholly human frustration somehow managed to escape. “Ir do not understand what it can mean.”

  Friendship and gut instinct offered Corinne the same advice: give Tanaka Astor a final shove. Commit. “There is a deeper meaning here, Madame Secretary-General. Time and again, we see technologies discouraged by fables. The stories vary. The technologies differ. And yet these circumstances have something in common.

  “Gengineering, nanotech, robotics, computing itself—these are the technologies that could render people extinct.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Triple his normal weight pressed Joshua deep into his couch. He appreciated the free ride on the ICU courier ship as far as Geneva—but not the takeoff. Commercial flights took things much easier. Maybe the Augmented took no notice of acceleration.

  Ping! Gasping, Joshua accepted the connection. It was Tanaka, from an adjacent seat. Piloting and three gees must have been insufficient to occupy her. “Yes, Madame Secre—”

  “Robyn,” she interrupted. “It’s more efficient.” She didn’t wait for him to parse the sudden informality, or that Corinne, also aboard, remained unlinked. “Joshua, you discovered something very important. For that Ir thank you. The interstellar pattern of cautionary fables is significant—no matter that its meaning remains obscure.”

  “Thanks,” Joshua managed. Even netting was a struggle, what with his brain trying to burst out the back of his skull. Still, he sensed that a very large “but” impended.

  “The problem, Joshua, is that you see connections that don’t exist. That can’t exist. And what if they did? Shared fables don’t prove there is a narrative, the Matthews conundrum, that anyone would want suppressed. Shared fables caused neither your disappearance nor the Cambrian Explosion. Shared fables cannot make credible a plot half a billion years old, or that any society, any species, could even survive that long. If somehow a civilization has, its resources are surely not limited to waiters and a taxi.”

  Acceleration ended abruptly.

  Joshua’s gorge rose. Somehow, he kept his breakfast down. Corinne’s surprised yelp almost made him smile. His stomach lurched again, and he clutched the padded arms of his couch for whatever good that might do. He refused to puke in front of Tanaka Astor.

  He would have seen it eventually—space sickness only brought everything together sooner. The question had been gnawing at him: why a waiter? “Of course,” he said aloud.

  “Of course, what?” Corinne snapped.

  “The waiter is the key.” As though in affirmation, Joshua’s stomach rumbled again. “The doctors say I ate crab. The waiter supplied it.”

  Robyn swiveled to face him. “You ate crab before reappearing. Are you remembering seeing the waiter there—wherever there was?”

  Joshua shook his head. In micro-gee, that was a big mistake. He tried to ignore the bubbling in his gut. “I’m going to ask you to think outside the box.”

  Robyn netted a question mark.

  He remembered a long-ago pillow fort, and Worthington’s confusion. Metaphor was a human skill. Perhaps a wholly human skill. “Imagine the goal is to discredit me. A bit of crab can make me almost instantly nauseous. It makes me violently ill within the hour. Hence, I never eat anything with crab. Living in Charleston, crab-stuffed dishes are everywhere. I learned long ago: always ask about crab. I don’t take chances. I distinctly remember asking at the party what was in several of the hors d’oeuvres.

  “The way to get crab into me—however briefly—is to lie. The caterer claims no record of a waiter, yet one was at the party. In that very specific context, he was an authority figure. So: feed me crab, hustle me into a cab when my face starts to puff up, and then disappear me.”

  Corinne squinted. “I don’t see—”

  The words tumbled out, unstoppable. “To Robyn’s question: I don’t believe there was a there. Everyone says I was gone for four weeks; my allergy says I was away for maybe an hour. Take your pick of improbabilities.

  “One, I dropped off the grid so completely that no one can find a trace of me for four weeks. I slipped up and ate crab a second time. Entirely coincidentally, the Matthews conundrum points us to inexplicable interstellar synchronizations half a billion years ago and a few hundred years ago.

  “Or two, these events are related. The enigmas share an explanation. Time travel.” He waved off their questions. “Embody the mechanism in the backseat of a cab. Or drive the cab into the time machine. Shift me four weeks into the future—hence, my disappearance without a trace. The crab remains in my system.

  “And on a larger scale, maybe only time travel can explain meddling that spans eons.”

  • • • •

  In the crowded skies over Europe, reentry and terminal approach demanded even Robyn’s full attention. Conversation halted until she landed the ship.

  First metaphor blindness, now an upper bound on her abilities. A few failings could make even an Augmented seem human. Even one who still doubted him.

  Joshua made no comment when Robyn summoned an ICU limo rather than take a cab from the spaceport, or when she dismissed the AI driver to operate the limo herself. Or when, as the limo wended its way to ICU headquarters, Robyn insisted upon a second layer of encryption over their net links.

  “Time travel is not the answer,” Robyn resumed the conversation without preamble. “Or rather, Ir am loath to accept it. There is no known theoretical basis. To the contrary, granting the hypothesis would raise countless cause-and-effect paradoxes. You could as well attribute everything to magic.”

  And yet, Robyn continued to discuss it. Corinne, in contrast, appeared numb. Joshua challenged, “Do you have another explanation?”

  “Time dilation.” Robyn peered out of the limo into the distance. “Special and general relativity alike would permit slowing the passage of time. Maybe there are other ways.”

  Joshua twitched. Her matter-of-fact manner somehow conveyed profound confidence. Had he been oblivious to a consultation among Augmenteds? “So time froze in the back of that cab. Or time braked to a crawl. Like time travel, that would explain why my neural implant has no memories of those
weeks and no record of having shut down. It had become too slow to connect to the infosphere.”

  “Crab affects you within an hour,” Robyn netted. She gave no indication of a subject change.

  “As a rule.” Joshua didn’t see where she was going.

  Corinne did. “You were missing a bit over four weeks. Call it seven hundred hours. The crab didn’t bounce until you got home. Also, you remember parts of the cab ride. If slowed time was involved, the effect was active for just part of the trip. All in all, seven hundred hours elapsed in subjectively less than an hour. That’s time retardation on the order of a thousand to one.”

  The limo stopped in front of the tallest office tower of the parklike ICU headquarters campus, in and out of whose main entrance people endlessly streamed. “Wait in the car,” Robyn netted without explanation before sinking into an Augmented trance. And then, “A thousand to one. That ratio almost makes this believable. At that compression, the Cambrian Explosion was only a half-million years ago. Maybe Ir can believe a society lasting that long. And maybe they can slow time even more when they choose.”

  Only who were they?

  Beyond the tinted limo windows, past a manicured lawn, yachts bobbed on Lake Geneva. Workers out for fresh air and sunshine wandered the grounds or lolled on the lakeside benches. Fat, honking geese waddled along the shore, demanding, and often getting, scraps from picnickers. It was all so … normal.

  They.

  An unknown force who wielded planetary disasters to drive evolutions. Who had meddled in at least eleven solar systems—and in the affairs of eleven intelligent species. Who worked in timeframes, as humans measured time, anyway, that exceeded a half-billion years. Who nonetheless took notice of his vaguest intimation of their existence.

  “Maybe I am crazy,” Joshua netted to Corinne. “Considering the alternative, my insanity seems so much for the best.”

  Corinne shivered. “Such power. Such an inexplicable thirst for secrecy. And if we’re not all delusional: the ability to pass as human, or, at least recently, human agents.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Why are we sitting here? Corinne wondered as the minutes passed. People strolled by the limo, glancing in vain at its tinted windows. But Joshua seemed almost happy. Despite his protestations, it must be a relief to know he wasn’t insane.

  Corinne caught herself whistling tunelessly. It had been far too long, two decades ago, creeping sunward in an overcrowded lifeboat—but she knew this feeling. She was giddy with relief, with danger escaped—

  With being a reporter again!

  Vid specials took form in her mind. Frankenstein across the stars. Mysterious aliens whispering in the ear of a young Mary Shelley. Entire societies shaped by the myths imposed on them. She had a story, by God! An epic. The mother of all scoops. A certain second Pulitzer. And better still—

  “Joshua,” Corinne burst out. “It’s over! Once this news is out, any further move against you would only intensify public interest. We’ll lay low for a few days, while I make discreet arrangements before—”

  “No.”

  A single syllable, but it made Corinne flinch. That was Astor speaking, no longer the briefly approachable Robyn. Timbre, subtle harmonics—something—about that short word resonated in Corinne’s brain. It was no mere opinion or recommendation. This was a command, more intense even than the usual focused attention of an Augmented.

  Did all Augmented have this power over normals? “I don’t understand,” Corinne managed to get out.

  “There can be no story.” Beneath Tanaka Astor’s stare, Corinne felt like a bug under a microscope. “In a way, because you are correct. They would take note. They would gain an inkling how much we have discovered. And that must not happen, for these others are no mere storytellers.

  “Let them have a name: the Interveners. ‘The Matthews conundrum’ had been obscure. It appears all that has befallen Joshua revolves around suppressing that story. That being so, ask yourself: how did the Interveners learn of his interest? How did they come to know so much about him, down to his allergy to crab?”

  “My family knows both,” Joshua netted. “And the people I worked with …”

  “Correct.” Tanaka’s emotionless delivery suddenly rang sinister. “Agents within the ICU itself. Where better? InterstellarNet allows trading of mature, proven technologies. The old cautionary tales lose their ability to frighten after all the dangerous experimentation has been done light-years away. Now every argument ever made in the ICU against a technology deal becomes suspect.”

  “And every untimely illness,” Corinne added. “Every accident. Every death. Thousands of employees for nearly 175 years. That’s a lot to investigate.”

  “Agreed,” Robyn netted. “But first Ir must check out the two longtime aides, sworn to secrecy, Ir left doing busy work in Australia.”

  • • • •

  In recent centuries, working across light-years, the Interveners had segregated intelligent species by technology. In an earlier—much earlier—epoch, the Interveners had shaped the many-times-removed ancestors of ancestors of ancestors of those same species. And between: made what other interventions, as yet unsuspected?

  Perhaps more than bad luck had lobbed an asteroid at the dinosaurs.

  “Tip of the iceberg” fell woefully short as a metaphor. The Interveners had set their plans into motion long before the first animals crawled onto the land, on Earth or Haven or nine other worlds. On Earth, before there were fish to attempt the ascent.

  Plans to accomplish … what? Joshua’s imagination failed him.

  Robyn netted, “In time, this story will be told. Ir promise, Corinne, you will be the first to tell it. In time. For now, we dare not reveal to the Interveners that we have learned of them.”

  “That’s why we’re still in the car. You can’t be seen with me.” Joshua shrugged. For a moment, at least, it sufficed to be believed. “I must remain disgraced so that you can hunt unsuspected for moles.”

  “You deserve better.” Tanaka Astor’s voice hummed once again with that eerie power. She meant them to believe her. She reverted to the encrypted link. “Both of you. Regardless, discovering the Intervener agents comes first. We must do nothing to alert them. Even as we—very discreetly—find ways to work together. To do what? That, Ir do not yet know.”

  We. Not the Augmented first person. Joshua netted his private, heartfelt thanks.

  Tanaka opened her door. “Once Ir am in the building, summon a driver to return you to the spaceport.”

  “The Interveners.” Corinne trembled. “They raised us from the level of jellyfish.”

  “True.” Joshua found his eyes drawn to Robyn, found confidence in her calm self-assurance. “And it’s about time they learned we’re not jellyfish anymore.”

  CHAMPIONSHIP B’TOK

  CHAPTER 15

  By the directed stimulation of neurons, virtual knight captured imaginary pawn.

  “Crap,” Lyle Logan netted. Many thousand championship games uploaded into his neural implant—and not one of them anticipated that gambit.

  “Mate in five moves,” Corrigan confirmed. “And, by the way, Betty will arrive before lunch.”

  Lyle banished the game from his mind’s eye. Likewise, his opponent, with the perpetual devil-may-care smirk. Wearing a snug leather helmet, its chin straps dangling, and aviator goggles. Seated in the open cockpit of some dawn-of-flight biplane. As AI avatars went, that wasn’t especially ironic. Corrigan might have been out walking on his virtual wing.

  Lyle told himself, yet again, that there was no shame in losing at chess to an artificial intelligence. Even to an AI who specialized in piloting, not games of strategy. Even in losing over and over, more times than Lyle could remember.

  Doubtless Corrigan remembered.

  “Good game,” Lyle said. The measure of his boredom was that he spoke aloud when neural interface would have been faster. One measure, in any event. Should anyone ever ask, he had spent the entire trip at two
gees, without a break except the few minutes at turnover, for the miserable-duty pay.

  Why did a roboship never break down within a billion klicks of civilization?

  With a thought he retrieved the current view through the ship’s telescope. 2182 DV189 finally presented a recognizable, if battered, profile. On that Phobos-sized, stippled snowball, one speck was the autonomous mining ship he had been sent to repair. He was close enough, at last, for sensors to detect its low-power, self-contained, traffic-control transponder. The mining ship was otherwise unresponsive, whether queried, commanded, or sent a master reset.

  Of course, a multibillion-sol ship going mute was why Lyle had been dispatched into the outer darkness aboard a very fast ship.

  “How soon can you set us down?” he asked Corrigan.

  “Forty minutes.”

  He had wondered for days what could have gone wrong on the miner. Something unusual, for sure. Any AI had too many levels of redundancy, too many fail-safes and fallback modes, to have gone silent without warning. And yet this miner had. Rumor had it, others, too.

  With nothing better to do, Lyle tried, once again, to make contact. Nada. For the hell of it, he cranked up the beam power from his comm laser. Still no response, but the vapors boiled off the snowball revealed water, oxygen, and lots of hydrocarbons. Even metals.

  “I’ll suit up,” Lyle announced. Sooner started, sooner finished. And sooner on his way back to civilization. Or, though he hoped otherwise, sent across hell-and-gone on another service call. The Kuiper Belt was big, and no way, no how, could human crew accompany every ship.

  “We have robots to make the initial survey.”

  Yes, they had. Perhaps he would even end up delegating the repairs to bots. But he would diagnose the problem faster, because the bots weren’t all that bright. Had they been half as smart as Corrigan—