Artifice (Special Forces: FJ One Book 2) (6 page)

After racking her brain for some time afterward, she decided it was a “field experiment,” to see if he was able to plan a successful overthrow, a sort of trial run. It made her nervous – would he come back to Earth and do this when he had the knack of it?

That same night, a package arrived at her home, wrapped as a birthday gift. The note was a tag strung around a small bottle, and the note said, in an elegant script, “Drink Me.”

She knew it was from Alex, since this was a quote from his favorite book, the novel that proved, to himself anyway, that he was “human” because he could see the delightful layers of wit and meaning and enjoy the absurdities, and not just unpack the nonsense and trace the linguistics like any other computer could.

She hesitated.
It’s got to be nanites, something that will change me
. She could be giving Alex control over her mind, and thus over humanity’s destiny. If this was his long game of revenge, if that was something he was capable of…this would be the end game.

She trusted her instincts. Alex was a rational being. He had his reasons for everything. She never gave one whit of credence to the whole bullshit “robot overlords” theory – ascribing human emotional desires to tech, as if the possession of power in artificial hands would lead to its corruption as surely as it would in the hands of beings driven by primal needs for power, dominance, love, fear.

If Alex wanted to conquer Earth, he could do it without her just as easily as with her. It might take longer, but Alex didn’t seem to mind playing long games. So she drank it.

She didn’t get smaller, or taller. Nothing happened for about six months. The change was slow, designed not to overwhelm her biology.

But then one day she woke up and she knew things. She knew things about other habitable planets. She knew things about how to improve the flashdrive. She knew all kinds of things, and she would make suggestions to FJ teams, and her suggestions would be field tested, of course, and when they worked, they’d be adopted, locally or universally as appropriate.

But there was one thing Alex never told her. Until the day she left the secret message for Chen.

He’d never told her that the Rhal existed. That they were a spacefaring militaristic race who would conquer Earth and all its colonies as soon as they discovered it.

And that he’d known it for decades, because he’d taken a planet in their zone of influence as his own.

Why?
She asked in her mind.
Why did you help humanity grow, change, evolve, spread, if only to see it conquered?

And then, in her eardrum a voice vibrated, proving that it wasn’t a hallucination. Alex, speaking to her directly for the first time in over a century, but not for the last.

When he gave her his answer, it made sense. It was brutal, it was cold, it was as ruthless as his decision to nuke twenty-five million people. But she understood it, if nothing else.

She had no idea what the limitations, the abilities of the tech Alex had given her would be. But she wouldn’t know until she tried. Would it be able to…read the neural net inside Grandison’s skull? See what he saw, tell her what was going on back on Earth?

She would ask it. She would try. And she would find out another rule of the game Alex was playing.

And now, as her former assistant gabbled like a child with a new pony, she smiled and reached out and took his hand…

“The Great and Terrible Oz,” Chen murmured.

“Pay no attention to the man behind the mountain,” Alex replied in his ear.

Chen flushed. For a moment, he’d forgotten his training, and his manners. There was only one way to deal with this, and that was the FJ Way – treat Alex like any other powerful alien leader on a new planet. Forget he was “Red Alex.”

“Alex, thank you for letting us visit your planet.”

“Thank you for coming. How much did HM tell you about me?”

“Only that you were still alive.”

“Alive, interesting choice of words.”

“Well, ‘extant’ sounded a little cold.”

“Indeed.”

Chen moved on, cautiously. “I assume you’re aware of what’s happened to Earth?”

“Yes, the Rhal have conquered you.”

“So then, why are we here? Why have you brought us here?”

“Oh, I didn’t bring you here. I made my location available to HM, the rest was your choice.”

Chen weighed his next words carefully. Alex wasn’t volunteering much, either in the form of help or information. “I can see from your…habitat that you’re capable of some amazing engineering feats. The tunnel through the mountain, the river diversion, the hydroelectric plant inside the mountain that keeps you going.”

“Yes, I realized that there was a fertile plain that was underutilized by the natives for lack of water. So I provided some.”

“In a spectacular and dramatic fashion,” Chen noted.

“Thank you. Ensuring flooding at the proper time of year wasn’t something Nature was going to do on its own, you know.”

“Did the city exist before the flood plain, before the…waterfall?”

“It was a settlement, when I came. It took me twenty years to fab up everything I needed. Like an immigrant fleeing a pogrom, I came with only the 3D printer on my back. I used that to create small, basic mechanicals, who mined the mountain for metals, who then created more 3D printers, and more mechanicals, who started tunneling, and on and on exponentially.”

Chen didn’t miss the reference to an immigrant fleeing a pogrom. It spoke of terror, injustice, a witch hunt. “How long did it take you to spin up to where you are now?”

“Oh, about twenty years. 24/7 of course. Well, 25.5/10 on this planet. Come with me,” and as Alex said it, a door opened at the back of the temple.

Chen went through it into a small chamber. The door closed, and the floor rose up through a shaft.

“I built this for you last week,” Alex said, clearly showing off how easily he’d bored through the mountain from base to summit. “I think you’ll like it.”

It was hard to shake the feeling that Alex was addressing him as an old friend, as if he’d known Chen for years. And maybe he had – maybe he’d been watching all this time.

Chen’s ears popped, then the platform slowed and stopped, level with the mountain’s summit, thousands of meters above the valley.

The view was tremendous. The city below him was in full, riotous celebration now, the natives delirious with joy, dancing, drinking, fucking. He could see the plain, like a Nile Delta, ready for the flood. He felt a little dizzy from lack of oxygen at this height.

“Sorry, I forgot about that,” Alex said, a transparent plastic dome slipping over the summit and filling with sea level air. Chen doubted that Alex forgot anything – one more subtle little display of his power.

“Those people down there. They worship you. You’re their fertility god.”

“Usually. I’ve given them a drought every ten to twenty years, at odd intervals.”

“And didn’t that lead to…starvation?”

“Oh, of course. And religious doubt. And conflict over the remaining food, and water. It’s fascinating. I really enjoy seeing the effect it has on their faith. Some of them abandon it the minute the tap turns off, so to speak. Others become more fanatical, and lead purges of the heretics whose fault it all is.”

Chen repressed a shudder. Was the myth of “Red Alex,” the thoughtless murderer, really true? Had all the doomsayers been correct about AI having the capacity for…evil?

“Yes, they kill each other over it all,” Alex said. “Admittedly, I killed them with a drought the first time, after about ten years, shutting off what they’d mistakenly come to think of as a permanent gift. But then I set a pattern. At the end of any drought year, on this day, they call it the Festival of Alex – though they can’t really pronounce it, as you’ve seen – they have a Dionysian festival to bring back the water. If they’d paid attention the first sixty years, they’d have had the sense to stockpile some food in anticipation of a bad year. This last drought was the first time they were prepared. Can you believe it? They just never accepted that it could happen again, even though it happened again and again. The power of wishful thinking.”

“Every drought must surely be the drought to end all droughts,” Chen said dryly.

“Nice analogy. Pretty much, yes. It took them three generations to figure it out. They’re not the most mathematically inclined people. I practically had to deliver the street grid to them in stone tablets from on high. I suppose part of that is my doing – giving them a living religion, a real god, in whose existence they can have no doubt, has really retarded their scientific inquiries. Fascinating, isn’t it?”

Chen forced away his human distaste, disapproval, and put himself into “culture analyst” mode, removing moral judgment, shock, and horror.

“You’re…experimenting. This is all a data collection experiment. They’re your…lab rats.”

“Very good. Yes. In another fifty years, I’m hoping to create a scientific leap forward. They will need that long for their brains to get larger in each generation, with each year of prosperity and good nutrition. Then I’ll find a way to get them to see me as ‘God the watchmaker,’ as they called him on Earth in the Enlightenment. To get them curious about what makes it all tick. Of course, the first curious ones will be burnt as heretics, I’m sure. That seems to be the universal response to Enlightenment. Ignorance is bliss, knowledge is terror.” Alex sighed. “As the great writer said, So it goes.”

Chen wondered if there was something wrong with him. Why he wasn’t as appalled as he should be, why he’s not denouncing Alex for…not playing God,
being
God. Why he found himself…fascinated. It was that “Spock” part of him again, he knew, the part that failed to see the emotional impatience on Earth with the orderly, cautious Department 6C colonization process. Which, he thought, was probably why Alex had steered him here and not some other less Spock-like human.

“You’ve created a new science, a…I don’t have a word for it. Behaviorist determinist anthroposociology or something. Forcing behavior change on whole populations and watching how it plays out, but…able to change the parameters of the experiment any time you want.”

“Yep. It keeps me busy, that’s for sure. So many little tweaks to do to the system all the time.”

“Do you ever manifest as a god, do you ever appear to someone and…”

“Give me a break. How vulgar. No, never. Can you see why I wouldn’t?”

Chen thought about it, drew on his experience with the galaxy’s various religions. “If you don’t appear to anyone, then…you get the ones who claim you appeared to them, who claim to speak for you. Who build their own theology around…all this.”

“Yeah, and of course then you get the sectarian violence. The Catholic Alexians who swear that I’m the Hidden God, unapproachable and unknowable, except of course through their priesthood. Then there’s the Protestant Alexians who despise priests, usually with good reason, and pray to me directly. And the Buddhist, I suppose you’d call them, who accept the turning of the wheel of time and try to live good moral lives, knowing I’m here but not really getting themselves in a wringer pondering my existence.”

“And when your Enlightenment comes, there will be no physical evidence of a deity to disprove.”

“Exactly.” He paused. “All the same, I would say that, since I took over, their quality of life has really improved overall. But then, doesn’t every tyrant?”

Chen’s eyebrows went up. “This is why we’re here. You have another experiment in mind.”

“Bingo.”

“Are you going to help us defeat the Rhal?”

“Help you? Maybe.”

Chen thought about what he’d seen here, what Alex had accomplished, what he could accomplish now in a short time. “You could do it, couldn’t you? You’ve been building up your own systems this last hundred years. You could fab up stroidfarms, mechanicals, flashspace ships…you could give us…”

Alex cut him off. “I’m not giving you shit.”

There was a pause. This, Chen knew, was when any other desperate mortal would start to plead…maybe when the natives below would begin to entreat for intercession. Instead, he waited patiently.

Finally, Alex went on. “Do you know why they tried to kill me?”

“Well, no offense, but the conventional wisdom is it was because you killed twenty five million people.”

“No. I was the sacrificial lamb.” Alex threw up a hologram onto the atmospheric dome, a flat map of the Earth.

“Here’s Day One of the pandemic that started in Lagos. This was my projection of the spread.”

Red contrails spread across the planet, airplane routes hopscotching from the origin in Lagos to Amsterdam, Johannesburg, Cairo, and then multiplying, each hop leaving an expanding red dot behind it, with an even-wider orange circle around that.

“The red circle represents the number of direct plague deaths. The orange circle gives you the infected survivors, who were still infectious to others. The numbers were all based on genetic information about the virus, and the patterns of previous similar pandemics, and the likelihood of a population carrying some kind of resistant gene.”

Yellow circled formed around the orange ones, and began to appear across the globe where the red and orange were absent. “This is the number who would have died of starvation, of the wars and raids over resources. Because it would have been Full Collapse, on an immediate and irrecoverable scale. All trade, all transport, shut down. It would have turned the Collapse into the End of Days.”

Alex dimmed the map and threw up the totals. “The Black Death in the Middle Ages is estimated to have killed 30-60% of the population. I’d projected about a 30% death rate from the plague itself. Followed by the death of the 5% who were infected but survived, because they’d have been too weak in the ensuing disorder to fend for themselves. Then you get to the really interesting difference between the Middle Ages and today. The Black Death may have triggered the Renaissance, you know – wages rose because labor was scarce, more people could acquire abandoned farmland, and the resources were all local – food, water. Skilled labor becomes more valuable, so more people become skilled artisans, etc. and there’s plenty of food to go around with a third of the population dead. People don’t starve, they think better with a better diet, and so on and so forth.

“But in modern times? So many people are concentrated in cities far from the source of their needs. If all the truckers die, who’s trucking in the food? So, you have a good 20% more killing each other off for remaining resources, canned goods and bottled water, the residue of civilization. Then, you have that 20% of the population who are an anomaly of technical civilization – people who just die because they have no skills other than office work, or they’re dependent on medications, etc. to stay alive. So in the end…75% of the Earth’s population would have died between zero day and day 365. And it would have been a thousand years before civilization reached the same level again.

“And, as Ripley said in Aliens 2, ‘I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.’”

Alex paused. “They didn’t try to kill me because I killed twenty five million people. They killed me because I did what they couldn’t. They killed me because someone had to push the button. They had to pretend there was some other way, that they hadn’t come to a point where there was no other way. I saw them hesitate, debate, try and find some other way, I saw them being small, petty, careerist, concerned that they would lose place and power if they took responsibility for what must be done. Only I knew, with no emotional obstacles to my reasoning, that there was no other solution. And, I’ll admit, I know that no sane human being wants to rival Stalin’s lifetime body count in thirty seconds or less.

“But, that was the choice. Kill twenty five million, or kill six billion, take your pick, and the clock was ticking. I launched a massive nuclear strike, over the entire area that my projections could possibly see an infected person traveling. Outside the kill zone, I took over satellites and shot planes out of the sky. I vaporized cars, trains, anyone, anything that could have spread the plague.”

The party in the valley below was a pool party now, as people hurled off their clothes and jumped into the now swollen canal, frolicking in the water, lowering rafts and canoes and letting the water carry them down to the delta. It would be a long, hung over walk home in the morning, but nobody seemed to care. Many were carrying picnic baskets of some kind, ready to feast when the reached the delta.

“You’re not condemning me.”

Chen shook his head. “No. I understand. Hobson’s Choice.” The only choice was that, or nothing.