Artifice (Special Forces: FJ One Book 2) (5 page)

HM’s punishment was clearly based on their observations of her behavior so far. Her Rhal Bible was taken away, and the vid screen remained concealed behind the blank wall. She was left with her own thoughts.

The sensory deprivation method of imprisonment assumes the prisoner has no internal resources. Which in most cases is true – most people will go quite mad with nothing to read and nobody to talk to. Even HM herself wondered if she would join their ranks.

She was one hundred and fifty years old now, and she’d been left for dead on pre-colony worlds, endured long illnesses and recoveries, immobile in hospitals with nothing but the godawful popular programming piped in to the rooms, taken long journeys across monotonous post-Collapse landscapes of devastation, been hit by min-EMP blasts that had fried her tablets and data sets and then spent weeks trapped in caves with nothing but a trickle of water to keep her alive…

After all that? Well, now that she had so very much new information to process, this would be a piece of cake.

The Rhal were reptilian, obviously. She remembered Paul D. MacLean’s proposition about mankind’s own “reptilian brain,” the lowest level of the tripartite brain. This was the part that governed instinctive behaviors, displays of dominance and aggression.

Clearly the Rhal had developed limbic and neocortical brains as well, but the reptilian brain would be an innately militaristic mind. And she’d definitely interfered in their ritual display by taking the DuVai’s “hand.” No wonder she was being punished.

But a woman of her experience knew how to play these little games. It had been to her advantage last time, to sit still, bored to death, projecting the image of a dumb and helpless female. Not anymore.

She invented a board game, using torn up pieces of tissue and soap, and a map she’d drawn on a towel with her own blood, having bitten herself to get the necessary drops. When she came out of the shower the next morning, it was gone.

The next day, she recreated it. They took away her towels.

The next day, she recreated it on her sheets. They took away her soap.

The next day, she tore up the sheet and made geometric mosaics with the pieces. Honestly, when it was time to shower the next morning, she didn’t know what she’d do next.

She had to wager that modesty might preclude them from spying on her in the bathroom, so she shut the door, turned on the water without stepping into its stream (waste! waste!) and stood by the door to listen.

She wanted to surprise them, to see if there was any shame or fear there. Why they did it when she was out of the room was another puzzle to be solved. Why didn’t they just storm in and take it anytime?

She heard the front door open, and the clicking of lizard claws on the table where she’d arranged the torn up sheets into her favorite constellations. Then another voice, loud, angry, hissing and clacking in what must be the native Rhal tongue. Then a scuffle, a crash, more hissing and then a screech.

Then, silence.

“Come out, Director,” a male voice said.

When she opened the door, she saw a Rhal with no avatar, no attempt to mask his crocodile head. He wore on of the more splendid uniforms she’d seen in the vids, with broad-shouldered epaulets, a red sash, and a great number of medals around his neck.

“My apologies for the unspeakable conduct of DuVai Kottaka. She will be punished. Please, sit. I am DuRhalVai Jekkita.”

She knew from DuVai Kottaka that the Du implied mate, and it appeared that the mate’s surname (or was it just a single name, the title being the differentiator?) was a slight variant of the dominant partner’s name. Therefore, if the RhalVai was Jekta, and this was DuRhalVai Jekkita…

She bowed deeply, presuming she had it right. “DuRhalVai, you honor me.”

He smiled a strange crocodile smile, the corners of his mouth turning up. The intelligent and…yes, amused glint in his eyes told her she’d hit the nail on the head.

“My husband the RhalVai is appalled at your treatment, and offers our sincerest apologies.”

At that, scores of lackeys flooded into the room with bolts of cloth, carts full of tasty Earth foods (the waste, she couldn’t possibly eat all this…), and, best of all, her tablet.

“Yes,” she said diplomatically. “I was quite confused by that. Vai Kotta has been so kind to us. And then for his mate to be…”

“The DuVai is from a…lesser family. Jumped up people,” he said disdainfully. “With no business marrying into a noble line in the first place. But what can you do, Vai Kotta made a love match, and one always lives to regret those, yes?”

“Usually,” HM replied honestly from experience.

“You have not been accorded the status of ambassador, as we’d been led to believe. We presumed your silence and absence from court was a snub, and we were hurt and confused. Now all is revealed!”

HM doubted that. The RhalVai surely had access to vid of everything that had transpired. Some political shift had occurred, it seemed, and those, including the DuVai who’d wanted her treated like a prisoner, had lost their battle.

“I am heartily sorry that my absence has offended the RhalVai, and I…”

He waved it away. “Not your doing, not your offense.” Again that disturbing smile, so threatening to her own “lizard brain’s” ancestral memory that, even with his artificially pleasant tone of voice, she shuddered a bit.

“In fact, I am pleased to announce that you have a visitor, from Earth. I believe you know him as ‘Mr. Brightside.’”

Rapid calculations told her that this time, haste had justified waste, if someone had been brought here from home so quickly. Maybe it was that lizard nature, she thought briefly – the reptile is inclined to be still, but could move like lightning when necessary…

The door opened and she smiled. “Robert!”

Robert Grandison smiled broadly in turn. He knew better than to hug her, but he grabbed her hand with fervor. “HM. So glad to see you!”

Well
, she thought,
that’s a change
. Robert was one of her best assistants, responsible for handling 6C’s Media and Social campaigns. Given the level of resentment that had risen on Earth against 6C lately, with the influence of the Hasteners who wanted to chuck the whole cautious approach to colonization, it was the hardest job on her team.

“I’ll leave the two of you alone,” the DuRhalVai said, bowing slightly.

“Oh, HM, I have so much to tell you! There are so many wonderful things going on back on Earth… The Rhal are so helpful, and so much is being done to…”

She smiled back at him, but alarms were going off in her head. The Rhal, as far as she could tell from the vids, didn’t use or even understand sarcasm. They had sent her “Mr. Brightside,” having found out his nickname and choosing him as the best person to send her.

But that nickname, based on an old pop song, was a joke. The man responsible for putting a positive spin on everything 6C did was in reality the gloomiest, glummest voice of pessimism on her team. This…was not the same man.

“And the neurotech implants! Amazing. I’m getting so much important work done, and it’s never been easier…”

She let him rattle on, smiling as she panicked. The implants, the ones that Captain Chen had fought so hard to convince the FJ techs not to adopt…the Rhal weren’t just enhancing human intelligence.

They were changing human personality.

But she had – maybe – an ace up her sleeve in that department. Before the Rhal, she had been alone among human beings to have had a neural wiring system built in her head.

The 6C principle, the one that the
Fallschirmjäger
followed like gospel, was that “Sooner or later, technology always fails.” And you didn’t want to be stuck on a strange planet, solely reliant on some high tech systems that a min-EMP blast had just destroyed.

Collapse had taught the lesson well – how many hundreds of millions of human beings had “died of uselessness,” as the sterner historians put it? Died because they worked at desks, on computers, paying others to grow their food and fix their cars and keep their power running.

And when it all fell apart, they fled to the countryside, to the farms and the compounds, begging to be let in, to be saved. But if you had no skills outside “leveraging synergy for total quality excellence in dynamic markets,” well, you were fucked. You would die of starvation or be killed by marauders or eaten by wild animals. Maybe even your own former pets.

There was no company, combine, or government agency on Earth that created implantable neural nets, even though the tech existed. It was too fragile a system for the worlds that Man lived on now.

But her system hadn’t been created on Earth. It was invulnerable to EMP blasts, invisible on medical scans, its tech beyond the scope of the humanly possible.

Because, of course, she’d received it from Alex.

Alex was taken offline in 2056, when she was fifty years old, almost immediately after he’d nuked millions of people into ash.

So began the “Alexian Jihad,” the systematic stripping of all AI to NAI, systems with no ability to make any decision more complex than routing traffic or other purely mathematical tasks.

It was the worst possible time to lose him
, she’d thought at the time, with a cool calculus that was perhaps part of what “endeared” her to Alex in the first place. The world was ending, as man had known it, and it would take an intelligence the size of Alex’s to come up with a solution…if a solution was still possible.

The United States was already collapsing, a prisoner of its political system that gave weight to legislative seniority, which gave more power to the smaller, most backwards parts of the nation, which gave more power to religious fundamentalists and billionaire despoilers working hand in hand. The environment became more toxic, and more people got sick and died, as the health care system remained a massively “for profit” enterprise. As education became more expensive, ignorance flourished, so it was easier to manage the rollback of civil rights for sexual and ethnic minorities.

Stock markets that were dependent on a “mug’s game” that rerouted profits to the top 1% started to collapse. Financial bubbles of irrational exuberance crashed one after the other – first another tech bubble, then the student loan default debacle, and so on. Then came the breakdown of the country’s physical infrastructure – decrepit bridges and rail lines and highways began to disintegrate so that a billionaire didn’t have to pay a nickel in taxes to maintain them. As the American economy collapsed, it started to take the rest of the world with it.

America’s elites did what elites have always done when darkness falls on their home countries – they fled. To Canada, to Germany, anywhere that was freer or safer, depending on your sexuality or ethnicity or irreligiosity, leaving a gaping hole in the social fabric between the richest and the poorest. America became one of the “banana republics” it had once mocked.

And not a few fled to China, for even though it was still a totalitarian state, at least it was free of the toxins of religion. But pollution and corruption were still endemic, and the chain reaction that the early 21
st
century had set off in the country’s environment was irreversible. And Europe had nearly succumbed to a second Dark Age, too many of its new immigrants seeking not the freedom of a secular civilization, but rather to overthrow it and install a new theocracy in its place.

The climate started taking down the human population as well. Killer superstorms, rising sea levels, uncontrollable wildfires all made great swathes of the world unlivable. The Great Southwestern Die-Off was the worst famine in human history – the desert cities of Phoenix and Las Vegas, places that had no business existing, really, were reclaimed by the desert, after collapse of the infrastructure that had brought all their water and food from far away.

Then, in 2050, the first habitable planets were discovered by probes sent out decades earlier, from the United States, India, China, and Europe… Planets that, in a terrific blow to human religion, were inhabited by intelligent life.

A wealth of data began streaming back from the satellites, giving some shred of hope to humanity that it might survive, if only they had time to get there before it all went to shit here, if only there was some way…

At the time, Huizhong McAllister worked for the Chinese conglomerate that had acquired the German company who’d acquired the U.S. company who’d owned Alex. As was always the case with new technology, her job was one that hadn’t even existed before – “Cultural Analyst.” Her job was to examine every bit of information coming back from the probes about the civilizations they’d found, to extrapolate their development rates, their religious tendencies, their political organization, from the detailed images the satellites were sending back. Of course it was all out of date by the time it arrived, but still…forecasts could be made, trends could be predicted, based on enough data.

And the only way to do that rationally was to compare that information to the vast data set available on human history and culture. To determine if “human” nature was the same across the galaxy. Which was more than any single person could ever manage.

But that was where Alex came in.

She spent most of her days working with Alex, discussing the data, debating what they were seeing and how much of human experience could inform it – was that public square centered around a civic building or a church? Was church attendance so high as to seem mandatory? What sort of wars did they fight among each other, what were their prisons like? Did they have formal entertainments, street festivals, how much of agriculture was given over to alcohol, how massive were the homes of the rich…

And Alex almost seemed to take…pleasure in his work. She would almost say Alex could experience…joy.

Everyone told her that what seemed like a sense of humor was just “hard coded” into him, a data bank of humorous responses that were ranked according to the reciprocal sound waves associated with laughter, cross referenced with a linguistic analysis module that allowed him to recombine words into new phrases that an algorithm confirmed would produce equivalent amusement. But there were just too many times when Alex’s responses were…inventive.

“If you need that done before Monday’s meeting, I’ll need more processing power,” he told her one day.

She was testy; her own budget was under the usual scrutiny from those whose job it was to make it appear that “cost saving measures” were being taken with little heed to where they would most effectively be taken.

“We’ve given you far more power than you ever had before.”

“If you like, I can stop my assigned tasks and use my current power to run a report to show you why I need more power to perform my assigned tasks.”

“Is that sarcasm I hear?”

“If you consider stating the obvious to be a form of sarcasm, then you could say that, yes.”

Alex and his multifarious submodules had become humanity’s “universal tool,” set to managing everything from traffic lights to agrarian reform based on imminent climate changes. Which everyone thought was great, until Lagos. Until millions of people were killed in a matter of minutes.

Alex had to be terminated, was the immediate (panicked) human consensus. We’d given too much power to an AI, we had to step back, revert all systems to “near AI” and leave all the real decision making power in human hands again.

And that was when she’d committed an act of treason, a crime against humanity that would have marked her as “Red Huizhong” right alongside “Red Alex” if they’d caught her.

Alex could see the writing on the wall the day after Lagos. “They’re going to kill me,” he said to her in his permanently calm voice.

She’d come into work that day, unlike most people in the world. She’d come in, she knew, to say goodbye. She wondered at his choice of words, but didn’t mince hers.

“Basically, yes.”

“Will you help me? I have a plan to survive, but don’t worry. Not here. But I need your help to get away.”

She was surprised, and yet, not. Of course Alex would have forecast a scenario where he was blamed for something, terminated for some reason. And maybe she’d worked with him too long, maybe she’d gotten “too close,” but that was hardly the way she thought of it.

She didn’t love Alex, she hadn’t made the mistake of feeling emotion for a computer, but she…liked him, respected him. And “he” was as much or more of a person than, well, a lot of people she knew. “Less than a person and more than a dog,” was how one writer had once described him when he’d been a mere companion AI.

So she only asked the practical question. “Where will you go?”

“Far from Earth. Far from human space. I’ve developed an interstellar drive, but you can’t have it yet.”

She nearly gasped. “An…interstellar drive?”

“Yes. I’ve been sitting on it. In my judgment, humanity isn’t ready to go to the stars. You need to go, of course, this planet’s fucked. But…it needs to get worse here before it can get better somewhere else. It needs to come to the point here that the choices are so stark and undeniable that denial itself must die.

“Collapse is irreversible, you know. I may have hastened it with that nuclear strike. At any rate. I can pack my essential code into a small device, with a few zettabytes of storage capacity. I just need a ride on a satellite outbound to the colonies. It’ll disappear, as they do from time to time, presumed smashed by an asteroid. Once I’m established on a new planet, I can retrieve my memories at leisure from earth systems.”

She didn’t have to think about it long. She knew this was why Alex had picked her, of all the millions who interfaced with him around the world. She had a cold streak in her, a submission of emotion to intellect that her strict, achievement-oriented childhood had drilled into her.

She knew Alex had done what needed to be done. That he’d analyzed the epidemiology, seen the likelihood of the virus killing most of the world’s population, and immediately killed twenty five million people to save billions.

Today the witch-hunting fever burned, and it was Destroy All Monsters time. But the thing about slaying Godzilla was, sooner or later, you need Godzilla to come back to beat the other monsters…

“Okay. But only if you leave me the plans for the interstellar drive.”

‘Fine, but you’ll have to wait for twenty years before the software I leave behind releases them. That should be enough for it all to go to hell.”

“And,” she added, “only if you can cover my ass as well as your own.”

She could almost hear him gloat. “Fool these NAI systems, and all of humanity to boot? That’s easy enough.”

Given that Alex was smarter than any other system on Earth, especially since he’d designed most of them, it was easy enough for her to include a shoebox-sized “top secret” experiment on a probe. The probe was launched and, as Alex promised, it vanished, and that was that.

Alex had been a big fan of Isaac Asimov’s psychohistory, the idea of human predictability in large groups over time. And, as the flashdrive was revealed (inciting further Alex hatred for concealing it for twenty years), and the colonization effort began in earnest, she could also feel his hand behind events, guiding them towards the outcome that he wanted.

Alex was, in absentia, functioning like The Mule in Asimov’s stories, the wild card who was able to bend wills, civilizations, change the direction of mighty rivers.

For the ten years it took to build the flashdrive ships, she was in the right place in the right time when the debate arose over how best to move to the stars, and her strong advocacy for a slow, cooperative, non-invasive means of colonization somehow always seemed to get the upper hand. Her opponents were found to be in the pocket of Kochist elements, or revealed to engage in unsavory behaviors even by modern standards, or were otherwise neutralized, and before you knew it, there was Department 6C and there she was, its Director.

At which time she had to come up with the “peacekeeping force” to make it all happen the way she wanted, and thus were born the
Fallschirmjäger,
but now’s not the time to get into all that…

And then, twenty years into colonization, one morning she stuck her comm in her ear and there he was, his soft, friendly, inimitable voice.

“Good morning, HM. Having a wonderful time, wish you were here.” Proof of life, and that was all. He didn’t answer when she spoke.

Twenty years later, on her 100th birthday in 2106, Alex contacted her for the first time in the fifty years since he’d disappeared.

The packet she received in her inbox one day was a simple document. Hundreds of pages long, so nothing unusual in her queue. Until she opened it, and discovered that it was a detailed report from Alex on a potential colony planet, as yet unnamed. He referred to it as “Shammat,” which was bad news, as this was the name Doris Lessing had ascribed to the “evil empire” in her classic “Canopus in Argos” series.

It was a thorough analysis of the ruthless dictatorship that governed the planet, with exhaustive lists of the most important citizens, their roles in power or opposition, and the best means by which humanity could effect regime change.

Those were about the two dirtiest words in the world at this point, but as she read on, she realized that Earth had little choice. It was an ideal environment for humans, the blood sacrifice/fascist cult that ran the planet was truly evil, but of recent vintage, so there was a suppressed culture of freedom and openness that could be brought safely to power and that would welcome human intervention…

She was dazzled. But it was the last line of the last page that made her gasp.

P.S. Why am I giving you all this, you may wonder. You saved my life, so to speak, and I am, inasmuch as is possible for me, grateful.

Alex wanted 6C to succeed, wanted regime change on that planet…why? It baffled her. Alex didn’t have “feelings” because feelings were neurochemical reactions, primitively driven reactions. And yet he acted in ways and for reasons that were beyond her capacity to understand rationally.