Halo: First Strike (9 page)

sensor rings and five extensors of black fibroid and jointed

chrome.  It glided atop a thick network of fiber stalks that

hissed beneath it as it moved toward him.

The sam asked, "Can I be of assistance?"  Like most robots

designed for common human interaction, it had a friendly, gentle

voice, near enough human in timbre and expression to be

reassuring, different enough to be easily recognizable as a

robot's.  Designers had learned to avoid the "Uncanny Valley": 

that peculiar region where a robot sounded so human that it

suddenly appeared very strange.

"I'm just looking around," Gonzales said.  The robot didn't

respond.  Gonzales said, "I couldn't sleep."  He said nothing of

how, sweating and moaning, he had come awake out of a nightmare in

which the guerrilla rocket got there, and he and the ultralight

pilot who launched it burned to death in the night.

The sam said, "Much of Athena Station has been closed to

unauthorized entry.  Would you like me to accompany you?"

Gonzales shrugged.  He said, "Come along if you want."

Without more negotiation, the sam followed Gonzales,

periodically announcing rote banalities in a small, soft voice:

"Athena Station was once humankind's most forceful and

successful venture off-Earth.  Here many of the tools for further

population of the Earth-Moon system were developed:  zero-gravity

construction and fabrication techniques, robot-intensive mining

and smelting procedures.  Now projects such as Halo command

attention, but they were made possible by the techniques developed

at Athena "

        Gonzales let the sam natter.  As the two passed through the

corridors, he was reminded of old airports, hotels, malls.  He saw

that most of the station had become dingyworn plastic flooring

and walls, scuffed and marked, unpolished metal trim.  These

dulled and scarred materials and scenes had been meant to be seen

and used only when new, fresh from architect's plan and builder's

hands, never after having suffered the necessary abrasion of human

contact.  All around were logos of vanished firms (McDonald's,

Coca-Cola), along with those of famed multi-nationalsLunar-

Bechtel's crescent, SenTrax's sunburst.

Gonzales felt a ghost-story chill as he realized that this

entire endeavor, indeed all others like it, had been conceived out

of late-twentieth century corporate and governmental hubris, and

so, necessarily, should be regarded with suspicion, as should

anything from the days when it seemed humankind had turned on all

living things like an insane father coming into the bedroom late

at night with an axe.

The stories were part of every schoolchild's moral and

intellectual catechism.  Toxic chemical and radioactive wastes had

bubbled up from the ground and the seas as lame efforts at

disposal foundered on the simple passage of time.  Stable

ecosystems had been altered or destroyed without thought for

anything past the moment's advantage, and species died so quickly

biologists were hard pressed to keep the recordswrite in the

Domesday Book now, mourn later.  Temperature norms and

concentrations of vital gases in the atmosphere had fluctuated in

alarming manner, as though Gaia herself had been taken to the

fever point.

Historians marked the Dolphin Catastrophe as the breakpoint,

the year 2006 as the time of the change.  More than ten thousand

dolphins floated onto the Florida coast near Boca Raton.  Crippled

and twitching, they nosed into the surf and beached themselves in

front of horrified sunbathers, and there they died, as doctors and

volunteers watched, weeping and raging against the chemical spill

that was killing the dolphins, millions of gallons of toxic waste

carried on Gulf Stream currents.  Along with the thousands of

volunteers, most of whom could do little but mourn the dead, info-

nets around the world converged on the scene, and billions

watched, asking, why all together?  why now?  And to most it

seemed that the mammals had come together in intelligent, silent

protest.  Finally, shamed and guilty, humanity had looked at its

planet like a drunk waking up in a slum hotel and asked itself,

how did I get here?  The conclusion had been plain:  unless

humanity really had lost its collective mind, at some point it had

to agree:  enough.

Standing in the shadowy corridor of a space station more than

thirty thousand miles above Earth's surface, Gonzales thought how

difficult it all remained.  Though all nations served the letter

of international laws that put Earth's welfare before their

interests, and Preservationists roamed all of the world's

habitatsthey had "friends of the court" status in all nations

and served as advocates for endangered speciesthe war to save

Earth from humankind was not over.  Grasping, corrupt, self-

centered, the human species always threatened to overwhelm its

habitats and itself with careless, powerful gestures and simple

greed.

However, though this station, like most all of humankind's

settlements aloftthe settlements on the Moon and Mars, the

Orbital Energy Grid, Halo Cityhad been conceived in the bad old

twentieth century, they were sustained as products of New

Millennium consciousness:  contrite, chastened, careful.

He walked on.

#

The junction just ahead of Gonzales and the sam was marked by

blinking red lights.  From around the corner came the sounds of

scurrying small things.  "What's up?" Gonzales asked.

"Follow me," the sam said. "We must not cross the marker, but

we can stand and watch."

A large group of sams, identical to the one next to Gonzales,

filled the hallway beyond.  Some tried to work their way through

informal mazes of furniture and stacked junk, coils of wire and

angle-iron and the like; others worked to assist sams that had

gotten tangled in the sections of the maze.  Still others shifted

pieces of the maze to one side.  Amid clicking extensors and

banging metal, the sams labored patiently, mostly unsuccessfully. 

Gonzales was reminded of old twentieth century films satirizing

assembly lines, robots, machines in general.

"A nursery," the sam said.  "This group nears completion of

its education.  This"it pointed with an extensor toward the

struggling robots"is the prerequisite to training.  As small

children must mature in their development, they must learn the

essentials of perception, motion, and coordination.  At the same

time they memorize the ten thousand axioms of common sense, and

then they can develop their linguistic capabilities; at present

they have a vocabulary of approximately one thousand words of

SimSpeech."

"What about thinking?" Gonzales asked.  "Where do they learn

to do that?"

"That comes later, if at all.  For sams as well as humans,

thinking is one of the least important things the mind does."

The two watched for some time, then Gonzales said, "I don't

need any company," and walked on.  When he looked back, he saw the

sam remained motionless, fascinated by the progress of its

fellows.

Gonzales returned to his small room, where a night-light

glowed softly, and returned to bed.  He fell asleep quickly, oddly

comforted by thinking about the robots busy at their school. 

8. Halo City

Blue jump-suited Halo personnel led Gonzales and Diana

through the micro-gravity environments at Halo's Zero-Gate, then

to an elevator at the hub of Spoke 6, where Tia Showalter,

Director SenTrax Halo Group, and her assistant, Horn, were waiting

for them.  The shuttle had arrived at Halo an hour before, late

afternoon local time, and its passengers had waited impatiently as

it went through docking and clearance procedures, all eager to

leave the ship after a week spent climbing the long path from

Athena Station to the city.

Showalter was just under six feet tall, and had green eyes

above broad Slavic cheekbones, a wide mouth and pointed chin.  Her

fine brown hair was cut short in a style Gonzales later discovered

was common to many long-term Halo residents, for convenience in

micro-gravity environments.  Gonzales knew that as director of a

major SenTrax operation, she had to be wily and tough.

Horn    was a tight-lipped, sallow-skinned man in his

fifties, skinny and anxious, with iron-gray hair pulled tight

against his skull in a kind of bun.  The man spoke some variety of

New YorkeseGonzales didn't know which, but he could feel the

harsh nasal tones beneath his skin.

The warning gong sounded, then the elevator's vault-like

doors slid closed with a great hiss, locking in more than a

hundred people for the trip from axis to rim.  Above their heads

the wall screen read SOLAR FLARE CONDITION GREEN.  The elevator

dropped into one of the city's spokes like a shell into the barrel

of a gun, down a tube a quarter of a mile long and into a well of

increasing gravity.

Against one wall, a group of sams were clustered around a

charge-point, black leads extended to the aluminum post.  They

stood silent and motionlesstalking among themselves? Gonzales

wondered.

Horn saw where Gonzales was looking and said, "We'd like to

assign each of you a sam for your stay in Halo."

"Really?" Gonzales said.

Diana said, "No thank you."  Quickly.

Right, Gonzales thought.  No point in putting ourselves under

surveillance.  He said, "I'll pass, too."

Horn paused, looking a bit miffed, as if he wanted to argue. 

He said, "Very well.  Then be sure you always wear the

communication and i.d. module you were given when you came off the

shuttle."  He held up his own wrist to show the small bracelet, a

closed loop of plain silver that bulged just slightly with the

electronics inside.  "If you have a problem, just yell and help

will be on the way.  Or if you have a question, just state it. 

Someone will answerAleph or one of its communications demons."

Gonzales asked, "Yeah, they told us that.  Are we monitored

at all times?"

Showalter said, "Yes.  In fact, there's a real-time hologram

in Operations that shows everyone's movements, not just visitors

but residents as well."

"Seems an invasion of privacy," Gonzales said.

Horn said, "We don't look at it that way.  If you can't

accept such simple necessities, Halo will be most uncomfortable

for you."  He smiled.  "Not that you're likely to be here for

long."

Gonzales said, "I can't imagine people putting up with total

surveillance for long, frankly."

Horn said, "It seems to us a small price to pay for an

unpolluted world shared to the benefit of all."

Showalter looked from Horn to Gonzales.  She said, "We are a

far island in a hostile place.  We cannot afford some of your

illusions:  the independence of the self, unconstrained free will

 those sorts of things."

A shutter retracted from a window ten meters square as the

elevator entered the living ring's inner space.  Far below lay

sun-lit valleys thick-planted with trees and shrubs and flowers,

broken by one barren space where grayish slurries squirted out of

huge pipe ends to flow across scarred metal.

"Our city," Showalter said.

#

Eight people were gathered around a u-shaped table of beige

silica foam.  Showalter sat at the center of the u, with Horn to

her immediate right, Gonzales and Diana beyond him.  To her left

were a youngish woman, then two men in late middle age, one white,

one black.

At the open end of the u, the table fronted a screen that

covered its entire wall, floor to ceiling.  The screen had been

lit when Gonzales and Diana arrived, showing another room where an

indeterminate number of people sat on couches, chairs, or slouched

on cushions on the floor.

Showalter said, "Let me introduce you all to one another. 

Everyone has met Horn, my assistant.  Next to him are Doctor Diana

Heywood and Mikhail Gonzales, who arrived yesterday."  They both

smiled and nodded.

"Lizzie Jordan," Showalter said, pointing to the woman to her

left.  "Hi," Lizzie said.  She was blonde, thin, with high

cheekbones; she had a smear of gold dust inset below her left eye

and wore rough beta-cloth overalls gapped to show part of a tattoo

between her breastsa twining green stem.  Showalter said,

"Lizzie heads the Interface Collective, and thus will be the

person you'll be working with most closely.  The people you see on

the screen are also members of the collective.  They have a

proprietary interest in all matters pertaining to Aleph and Halo

and have the right to be present at inter-group meetings, and to

speak to whatever issues are entertained there."

Diana said, "I understand."

Gonzales nodded.  He knew from Traynor's Advisor that

communal decision-making was the norm at Halo, but he hadn't

imagined it would be so thoroughgoing.

"Next to Lizzie is Doctor Charley Hughes," Showalter said. 

"He will be doing the surgical procedure to upgrade your neural

sockets, Doctor Heywood."  The man said, "Hello" and looked

intently at Gonzales and Diana.  His sparse gray hair stood up in

spikes; his face was pale, thin, deeply-lined.  He had been

smoking constantly since they arrived, one hand cupping a

cigarillo, the other supporting the smoke-saver ball at the

cigarillo's burning end.

"And Doctor Eric Chow," she said.  The black man next to

Charley Hughes smiled.  Chow was a big man with hands the size of

small shovels; he had a round face, very dark skin, a broad nose

and big lips; he wore his hair cropped short.  Showalter said, "He

heads the Neuro-Ontic Studies Group and is Doctor Hughes's primary

consultant on the treatment planned for Jerry Chapman."

She paused and turned to the screen showing the IC members.  

A window opened at the left side of the screen, and a figure

appeared.  Its arms and torso were clothed in gold; its face

shimmered with a formless brightness.  Around its head and

shoulders, a nimbus flared, red, blue, yellow, and green.

"Hello, everyone" the figure said.  "And welcome, Doctor  and

Mister Gonzales.  I am a localized manifestation of Alepha

simulacrum for your convenience and mine."

Gonzales noticed that next to him, Diana was smiling, while

all around him there was silence, as all in the room and on the

screen were intently watching the screen.

#