Crystal Rebellion (8 page)

Rising from the bunk, she stepped behind a privacy shield at
the foot of the bed and changed into her everyday clothes—sky-blue work scrubs
and a pair of all-purpose deck slippers. She glanced over at him sitting at the
foot of her bed. Her act of modesty was sincere, though she knew it made no
sense to be shy in front of a projected image.
That isn’t him.
The real
Criss monitored billions of feeds all the time and even now was watching her
change from a dozen different directions.

Her cabin doors whispered shut behind her as she walked the
short passageway to the scout’s workshop. Resting her hand on the back of the workshop
chair, she slid behind the sleek custom tech bench.

A seamless interface of mechanics, electronics, physics, and
chemistry, the tech bench stood as a craftsworker’s dream. Developed by Criss
for use by his leadership, he’d added such a high level of automation, she
could sit and watch it create if that were her desire.

He’s probably already built the locus.

But she counted on him knowing that she needed to keep busy.
Work was her therapy.

Criss stood at the far side of the tech bench wearing dark blue
work scrubs cut in a more angular style, waiting as she situated herself in the
chair. Comfortable, she caught his eye and nodded. Plans for the locus
projected in front of her. Studying the display, Juice arranged pieces on the
bench top in a proper order for assembly. One of the items she handled was a
small jewel case lined with black cloth.

With a certain reverence, she opened the lid and lifted the
tiny chip out of the case.
Crystal from flake.
Holding it up between her
fingers, she delighted in watching the light diffuse through the rare material,
emerging as a sparkling rainbow dancing in front of her.

Assembled atom by atom, this bit of structured beauty gave
Criss his wide open door. Through it he could travel unimpeded, projecting his
awareness at full strength to wherever it rested.

“It’s a pretty one, Criss.” She held the bit of crystal
under one eye and marveled as everything in the room took on a colorful aura.

Then she placed the chip back in the case and looked at him.
“What do
you
think I can learn from a tour that you can’t from the
record?”

“Alex knows things he doesn’t know he knows. His thoughts
and ideas aren’t in the record. You can get that information by asking him
questions.”

She picked up the thin, flexible casing that would hold the
crystal chip and supporting components. Positioning the small sheath in different
places around her body, she sought a spot where it would be unobtrusive and
unlikely to be disturbed.

She settled on the shallow valley between her breasts. “I’ll
carry you next to my heart.”

“Forgive me for saying this, but your relationship with Alex
may not rekindle. Either way, we still need you to learn from him.”

“I get it. It might turn out that he’s not interested. Or
maybe I’ll find that it’s me who’s not interested. The mission comes first.”

She lifted her hand and swirled a lock of hair around her
index finger. After a few loops, the swirl built up so much that it spilled
loose. In classic fretting behavior, she repeated the twirling process over and
over without being conscious of any of it.

“I just want to know if he and I have a chance. Is that so dumb?”

“No, Juice. It may be that your desire to know is what saves
humanity.”

Alex’s nose crinkled as the acrid
smell of ozone invaded his senses. Moments later, a click and a distant snap signaled
the end of the power-up–power-down test run.

“Thanks. That’s it for today.” He waved and nodded to a
white-coated tech in the booth on the other side of the sturdy window. During
powered testing, the booth tech monitored the fabrication facility, ready to
intervene if indicators drifted outside of normal range. With the day’s tests
concluded, the window transitioned to the color pattern of the wall around it, seeming
to vanish.

“I still don’t get it,” Alex said to Larry, who stood next
to him in the four-gen fab facility located down the hall from his office. “It
seems so…reckless.”

With his hands on his hips, Alex ignored the sophisticated assemblage
of mirrored metal and glazed white panels comprising the crystal growth chamber.
Instead, he centered his attention on the implant conduit. As thick as his arm,
the polished conduit ran out the top of the chamber, turned at an angle so it
ran parallel to the floor, and disappeared over a movable partition.

Alex knew what was on the other side of the temporary barrier.
He’d helped build it. But now Ruga was bringing in someone else to run it.
Reckless.
He shook his head.

A four-gen AI is created in three fundamental steps:
fabricate the crystal lattice, embed the cognition matrix, and awaken the new entity
into the world. All three steps were vital to success. And all were coordinated
phases of a seamless technical symphony.

Yet out of the blue, Ruga had reorganized project
responsibilities. He let Alex remain operations lead for steps one and three, but
his new plan was to bring in someone else to embed the intelligence.

I know everyone on Mars. Who does he have in mind?
He
shook his head again.
I wonder what Juice will make of this
.

He’d come to realize that expecting a visit from a special friend
without knowing her date of arrival made for an exhausting wait. He now paid
extra attention to his grooming every morning in case this would be the day
Juice landed. He also made an extra pass through his apartment, and especially
his bathroom, to clean a bit before leaving for work. And here in the fab
facility, he dragged his feet on the integration tests in the hopes she could witness
the unit in operation before the big day.

He stared at the point where the polished conduit
disappeared over the partition. It ran to the four-gen Intelligence and
Cognition Embedding Unit—the ICEU—which now sat in its own cramped space in a
corner of what had been a single big production laboratory. The ICEU, pronounced
“I.Q.” by the staff, performed
the
prestige step in creating a sentient
AI.

Sure, step one, fabricating a flawless crystal with a
perfect four-gen symmetry, was a big technical challenge. And step three, awakening
a sentient AI—a being of disconcerting power—was fraught with peril. One
misstep could send the emerging intelligence into a spiral of psychosis or,
more concerning, into an aggressive rage.

But step two, cognition embedding, was the step where
inspiration could make a difference. The injection of the AI matrix into the
crystal—its deployment rate, the orientation in the lattice, the order of
unfolding—required hundreds of decisions, some during the embedding process
itself. Alex saw it as an art form.

And if he were to choose a place to sabotage the fab process,
someplace where he could make a slight change without anyone knowing, he’d pick
the ICEU. The right tweak would start a cascade of errors and propagate to fabrication
failure. In fact, he’d identified two points during embedding where such a
tweak might be made without anyone seeing.

Ruga must know.
Why else would he take this step from
me?
Feeling exposed, he turned away from Larry to hide his worry.

Ever since that conversation with Marcus about the
interchangeable nature of synbods, Alex’s relationship with Larry had changed.
He now kept the synbod at arm’s length, limiting their discussions to work-related
topics. And he took to studying the synbod, looking for behavioral quirks and changing
mannerisms.

From this, Alex concluded that Marcus had it wrong. The same
Larry worked with him at the tech center every day.

The day after he and Marcus had that conversation at the BIT
garden, Alex had studied Larry’s face and noted a small imperfection on the synbod’s
left temple. Less than a scar, not even a blemish, a tiny brown spot dwelled at
the cusp of his hairline. He’d seen the spot every day since.
It’s the same
Larry.

But every so often, Larry’s personality shifted from the
staid and circumspect project partner to a chatty character who tried too hard
to be clever. Alex concluded that while the body stayed the same, the
personality inside changed.
Marcus needs to know.

Alex used a simple logic sequence to figure out who manipulated
Larry. He started with the list of everyone who had the authority to use
synbods as puppets.
Verda, Lazura, and Ruga.
He combined that with
everyone responsible for colony security.
Ruga.

The more he thought about it, the more it made sense to him.

Then he made a word slip that revealed his suspicions; the
first such slip as far as he knew. Turning to face the synbod, Alex nodded
toward the partition. “You’re asking me to proceed blindfolded.”

His cheeks flushed when he realized his mistake. Everyone
knew that it was
Ruga
who had ordered the partitioning of the ICEU from
the rest of the lab, not this synbod.

“Not you personally, Larry.” Waving his hand in a vague
swirling motion to show that he meant a broad audience, Alex made a stab at
rescuing the situation. “I’m talking about the members of the Tech Assembly who
approved this arrangement.”

He didn’t wait for Larry or Ruga to respond but instead cast
about for a way to change the subject. Walking to a worktop along the wall, he
bent forward and studied the crystal flake sparkling in the jar.

“That last shipment gave us a nice cushion.”

Colony agents bought old two-gen crystals on Earth’s black
market, ground them up into flake in an unlicensed lab, and smuggled the pure crystal
to Mars. When the Union of Nations discovered the practice, they passed a law
declaring that they alone had the right to possess this precious Kardish material.
In a classic governmental tit-for-tat, the Triada took the unusual step of developing
legislation to make a specific act lawful: “The transportation of crystal flake
from Earth to Mars is a legal act.”

Alex agreed with the colony position because, like food,
energy, and water, flake was a resource for humanity to share.
Who are they
to tell us we can’t fabricate AIs?
And because colony agents had been so
successful in securing scarce two-gens, Alex now had enough flake to make a
four-gen with a modest margin to spare.

One crystal.
He’d lied to Juice when he told her
about mass production. He’d wanted to make sure she’d come.
But this isn’t
her battle.

His brewing resentment brought his thoughts back to the
allocation of duties. “I haven’t finished configuring the ICEU,” he said to
Larry/Ruga. “There’s a good two days of work before we’re ready. Who should I
coordinate with?”

Alex held the table when he heard the answer.

“Juice Tallette will be operating the ICEU. I’ll give you
access when she arrives.”

* * *

Standing in the scout’s common room,
Sid turned one way and then the other as he viewed the image of himself
standing in front of him. He smoothed the brown material of the tunic and
nodded. His image did the same.

His image dissolved to reveal Cheryl looking at him, a smirk
on her face. “Pleased with ourselves?” She looked spectacular in her modest
yellow frock. They both were trying on outfits Criss had made for their first colony
mission.

“We land here,” said Criss, pointing to a spot on a floating
display of Mars. “The scout will be safe on pad ring two.” Criss’s finger
swirled above a launch ring in a field far from the dome. “Nothing in this old
section has been used for more than a year.”

Criss’s display zoomed out and resolved to an aerial view of
the Ag Port complex. Sid marveled at the remarkable geodesic enclosure that
gave humans access to sunlight while protecting them from the unbreathable
atmosphere, extreme temperatures, and unforgiving sandstorms of the Mars
surface.

Like a huge faceted jewel, thousands of gleaming clear
plates edged together in an intricate geometric dome that stood as a testament
to human engineering. And outside, on the Mars surface, a horseshoe arc of eight
space launch rings wrapped around one end of the Ag Port dome.

Colony shuttles, the boxy kind used to carry people and things
between the surface and orbiting ships too big to land, occupied two of the launch
rings. Luxury corporate craft took up four more. Their small size relative to
the main structure gave Sid a sense of scale.

“It looks busy,” he said.

Criss gestured toward the company ships. “They’re delaying
their departure so they can participate in Cheryl’s trade meetings. That’s
helpful because it adds to the number of strangers milling about in the colony.”

“Everyone will be strangers to us,” said Juice, leading with
her cup of water as she squeezed in between Criss and Cheryl. “Except Alex.”
She took a sip.

“But the colonists aren’t strangers to each other,” said
Criss. “This is a small, closed community where everyone knows everyone else. Strangers
are intruders, and that’s a challenge for us. Remember that our posture has
been that the scout doesn’t exist. As far as Mars knows, we officially arrive
on a Fleet ship a week from now.”

Challenge
. Sid’s ears perked up at the word. Cheryl and
Juice lifted their heads at the same time. He let his impatience show. “Get to
it, Criss.”

“Arriving on a cloaked ship offered interesting advantages
when we were investigating authoritarian leaders and the mass production of four-gens.
But with the Kardish and a sentient crystal now in the mix, blending in with the
population moves from difficult to impossible. They will see us.”

“They’re going to see us at some point,” said Sid.

“True, but if we reveal ourselves before the
Venerable
arrives, then how did we get here? The unusual nature of our arrival will bring
scrutiny. A cloaked ship will be an obvious explanation. And if the Kardish
start a concerted effort to find the scout, we’ll be pushed into a defensive
posture.”

Sid nodded. “I’m definitely an offense guy.”

The image display zoomed out and continued pulling back
until it was as if they were looking down from orbit. Then the focus swung
outward in a movement so realistic, Sid felt the lightness in his stomach he
associated with flying his sport plane back home.

When the movement stopped, Mars appeared as a rust-orange
crescent floating to the left, the blackness of deep space lay straight ahead,
and to the right, a small dot floated that, after more zooming, became the nose
of a rather large spaceship.

“The
Explorer
, the new vacation cruise ship from
Kwasoo Space Industries, arrives in orbit less than two days after us.”

“Wow,” said Cheryl, bending forward to place the hovering
image of the
Explorer
at eye level. “Can we take a tour?”

The display expanded and zoomed to show a close-up of the luxury
cruise ship. They all stepped back to get a proper view as the vessel floated
forward.

“Criss, remember we almost bid on this project?” She was referring
to her other life of a couple of weeks ago where, with Criss’s help, she ran SunRise,
a company focused on space commercialization.

“Of course. Passengers and crew of thirty-one.”

The ship floated forward in a smooth motion, and the
exterior transitioned from bright and festive at the front to dark and industrial
toward the rear. The tail section came into view, and Cheryl commented on the huge
engine port ringed with uniform spheres like perfect black pearls. “Look! They
went with a Paulson drive.”

Sid, interested in understanding Criss’s plan, got them back
on task. “So we board the ship, then mingle with the passengers and enter the
colony with them?”

“I believe that mingling with them at the arrival gate is
more practical, but that’s the general idea.”

“And the Kardish won’t figure out we don’t belong?” Juice’s
skepticism reflected Sid’s own doubt.

“We can get inside under cover of their commotion,” said
Criss. “But then we’d have to lie low and limit our interactions with the
colonists, including Alex, until the
Venerable
arrives.”

“What other options do we have?” asked Sid, having heard
enough of this idea.

“The other alternative is to land and wait
outside
the dome for the
Venerable
to arrive.”

The image in front of them dissolved back to the surface of
Mars. The projection showed the Ag Port dome from the vantage point of pad ring
two.

“Why land?” asked Cheryl. “It seems safer to stay in orbit.”

Criss looked at Sid when he answered. “Because we should be
able to move around inside the colony on a
very
limited basis
using our personal cloaks.”

Sid mulled the choices Criss had presented—hide inside the
colony or wait outside in the scout. The fact that Criss presented them as
options meant he saw them as equal alternatives from an operational view. The
final decision came down to the preference of the group.

“I say we land and stay outside the colony on the scout,”
said Sid. He took the silence to signal acceptance and left the room, ending the
impromptu meeting.