—Why hasn’t the mud dried up? It’s like an oven out here.
“That’s a good point, Red,” Constantine muttered. He crouched down and reached one hand toward the muddy surface.
—Careful. There’s something moving down there.
Something broke the surface fast, just as Red spoke; the edge of a silver cylinder flashed brightly in the powerful sunlight before dipping beneath again. Now that he looked closely, Constantine could see that there was a constant bubbling motion just below the mud’s surface. Hundreds of identical cylinders busily crawling all over each other.
—VNMs, confirmed White.—We’re looking at some sort of bounding tank, I think. The mud layer must extend beneath the ground for some distance. It’s acting as a nurturing area for the machines.
—Like a fish tank, said Blue.
—That’s right. It’s a clever idea. It delimits the area upon which the machines can act. It stops them from escaping or converting something that they shouldn’t.
—Do you think it might be a good idea to get off the duckboards? asked Blue.
“A very good idea,” agreed Constantine. He didn’t like the idea of being converted.
—Hold it, said Red.—Something’s happening.
There was a slow sucking noise, and something large and rectangular emerged from the reddish mud. An oversized yellow plastic refrigerator, by the look of it. The door swung slowly open.
—It looks like an elevator. I think you should get in.
Constantine shivered. The interior of the yellow box looked cramped and dangerously short on air. He preferred to stand out here in the blazing sunshine. Nonetheless, he knew that Red was probably right.
“All right, I’m going,” he muttered.
—Rather you than me, said Blue.
Sitting in a chair in the large conference suite, a glass of chilled water at his elbow, Constantine had to admit that it was a clever idea. Building the research center right in the middle of the VNM construction site guaranteed privacy. It wouldn’t be a secret, of course, in today’s world very little was, but anyone wishing to approach the center uninvited would have to go through a tank of hungry VNMs. And anyone trying to slip a stealthy spy leech up close to the center would quickly find that their resources had been converted into building blocks for the new DIANA Arcology. Blue had approved wholeheartedly. The setup did have a certain poetry about it, he suggested.
—And there is something else as well. Did it occur to you that there is a certain Eastern aspect to our deceptions? Lies within misdirections within frauds. We sit here within what appears to be a construction site for an arcology, ostensibly to discuss its real purpose as a Space Colony Preparatory Center, and all the while we are plotting our own deeper schemes.
—Recursion, said White.—Each lie calls for another lie. How far do we have to go until the final deception is revealed?
—And will we ever know that what we find is not just another lie? said Red.
—How trite, Blue said rudely.
Grey, as ever, said nothing.
The meeting began without ceremony. Each member introduced themselves in turn.
“Marion Lee. Chairperson.” A red-headed woman in a severe grey suit, she blinked rapidly as she spoke.
“Gillian Karajan. Oort cloud.” She was an elongated woman with a spacer’s fake tan that somehow managed to complement her fashionable white shift. Silver and gold bangles decorated her arms.
“Constantine Storey.” Constantine added nothing else. He noted Gillian Karajan looking at him inquisitively. The other members of the group showed no surprise at his reticence.
—She’s the one, said Red.—She’s the outsider to this group. Look at the way she’s sitting, nervous, as if she doesn’t belong. I wonder what they told her to get her here?
The introductions continued.
“Masaharu Jones. Mars.” A young man barely in this twenties, full of complacent self-confidence.
“Jay Apple. Orbital.” Another tanned spacewoman, this time with a broad grin and clear, piercing eyes that swept around each member of the group in turn. Introductions over, the group nodded to each other. Marion Lee began the meeting.
“Good morning. For obvious reasons, this meeting maintains no record. Everything that is said must exist in our memories only. Nonetheless, I hereby state that we are now quorate.”
Constantine felt a mixture of excitement and relief. It was true. The moment had finally arrived. His two long years of being alone were coming to an end. Marion had paused for effect. Now she continued:
“I now remind you. The quorum will meet three and only three times. The final decision must be made by the end of the third meeting. That was deemed necessary when plans were first laid down over two years ago. There can and will be no variation from this course of action.”
Constantine found himself nodding in agreement. He had been part of the original meeting: it had made perfect sense then and it still made sense now. The longer the plan existed, the greater its chance of discovery. They had all agreed that speed was of the essence. Two years had seemed such a short time in which to achieve anything back then; it seemed an eternity now.
“Gillian Karajan will begin with a brief summary of progress out in the Oort cloud.”
Gillian nodded. She was blinking quickly; Marion’s words had clearly meant nothing to her and she was trying to conceal that fact.
“Hello. As I already said, my name is Gillian Karajan.” She twisted one of the bangles on her wrist nervously for a moment and then gathered herself together. “I work at the superluminal research center. Superluminal, for those who don’t know, means faster than light.” She took a deep breath, gaining confidence. “We’ve hit big-decision time. It looks like warp drive works….”
She paused for effect, looking round each member of the group in turn, then continued in self-important tones, “…but only up to a point. Our robot ships are vanishing into deep space, they’re just not coming back. The AIs are saying that we’ve almost cracked the drive mechanism; a few more weeks and we’ll have ships that can make the return journey. The question is…”
Again, she looked significantly at each member of the group before finishing. “…should we trust them?”
Silence. Constantine half raised his hand. “A working hyperdrive? That’s not what I heard.”
Gillian Karajan frowned at Marion the Chairperson, who nodded at Gillian to answer. She shrugged.
“Obviously we don’t advertise our progress to our competitors. Capability estimates suggest that only three companies are currently working on
warp
drive.” She stressed the penultimate word in the sentence, pointing out Constantine’s incorrect use of terminology. “They are the newly merged company 113 Berliner Sibelius, Imagineers, and us. We believe that we have had the edge on them throughout the development period, but that advantage has probably been eroded while we sat around wringing our hands and wondering what to do next.”
She turned back to face the group at large and opened her mouth to continue. Constantine interrupted.
“Sorry, but I’m interested in something you just said when you mentioned ships vanishing but not coming back. You asked if we should trust the AIs?”
Jay Apple grinned and raised her hand slightly.
“I’ll take this one, Gillian.” She turned toward Constantine, slouching comfortably back in her chair.
“It’s like this, Constantine. The AIs sketched out the basic design for a hyperdrive; the problem is, no one can understand it. The concept is far beyond human understanding. You want to hear an explanation I was given? Start by imagining a four-dimensional section of an eleven-dimensional sphere. Now deform that section over any non-Euclidean space…I mean, I won’t go on; you get the picture. The human mind can’t contain the concepts. Anyway, the AIs say, “Okay, let’s build a warp drive first. After all, it was a human mind that first formulated the equations for a warp drive. Let’s build one of those.” And so everyone says, fine, we’ll do that. But the warp drive doesn’t work, and the AIs say, “Well, just give us a little more money, and maybe it will work.” And so we put in a bit more money and it gets better, but it still doesn’t do everything it promised, so we put in a bit more. You get the picture? Soon a four-billion credit venture has ended up costing one hundred billion with still no end in sight. And then people get to thinking: If these AIs are so intelligent, why didn’t they see this to begin with? And of course the answer comes back, maybe they did. Maybe they’re just stringing us along to get what they want. Which gets a person to thinking, in that case, just for whose benefit are these AIs working? You get the idea?”
“Oh, yes,” said Constantine.
“Oh, yes.” Jay grinned. “And then people get really paranoid. I mean, we’ve got these warp ships disappearing off to heaven knows where and not coming back. And people are saying, well, where are they going? Maybe there’s something waiting out there and the AIs are using the ships to carry messages to it. And if they’re sending messages, what do those messages say?”
Jay gave a huge yawn and leaned back again in her chair.
“Or maybe we’re just being paranoid. So, that’s what we mean when we say, ‘Should we trust the AIs?’ Are you up to speed now, Constantine?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
—Except we didn’t want her opinion. I want to hear what Gillian has to say. She’s the one who was out there in the comet belt with the extra-solar AIs. See if you can get her to speak, Constantine.
“I’ll try, Red,” muttered Constantine.
Gillian looked from Jay to Constantine. Her eyes narrowed as she watched his lips move. After the briefest of frowns, she took up her report.
“Ms. Apple is broadly correct in what she says,” Gillian said carefully. “The AIs are helping us to construct warp drives. Principally, they are helping us shape exotic matter into the necessary form for warp drives. A working warp drive appears to be within our reach. We have seen the evidence. Ships are vanishing. So, I’m here to help decide: What happens next? If we decide to do nothing, we run the risk of the other companies getting ahead of us. If we decide to press ahead, we always have the question hanging over us: Just who are we really working for? Ourselves, or the AIs?”
She paused, leaving the question hanging in the air.
Marion Lee spoke. “Okay, thank you, Gillian. Now that Constantine and Masaharu understand the AI problem, perhaps Jay could let us know a little more about her work in orbit.”
—Look at Jay’s attitude, said Blue.—Relaxed, arrogant. Look at the way she holds her hands behind her head. She’s part of this. Not like Gillian. She didn’t trust you. She’s not high enough up in the company to have heard about ghosts.
Jay yawned. “Well, what can I say? We’re one hundred percent ready. Have been for eighteen months now. As soon as this place is completed, we can get the volunteers in here and we can start training up our colonists. To be honest, we’ve done so well up in the Orbital that we could probably launch them now.”
Jay winked at Constantine. “We could have launched already, and no one would have known.”
She glanced across to Marion. Marion nodded and looked to the Japanese man, who had been sitting patiently, waiting his turn.
“Masaharu, any news from Mars side?”
Masaharu had lined up his console exactly with the edge of the table. His glass of water was placed behind it. His hands rested neatly on either side. He gazed down at the table as he spoke in a soft voice.
“We have nothing new to report. The Mars factory retains, so far as we can ascertain, one hundred percent integrity. Everything in the Orbital is of one hundred percent Mars manufacture, as Jay can confirm.”
He lapsed into silence, one hand reaching out to move the glass slightly closer to the console.
Marion turned to Constantine. “There we are, Constantine. Do you have anything to add?”
He paused for a moment in case any of his extra intelligences had something further to say. Nothing. Was this finally it? Was the work of the past two years nearly done? He took a breath, ready to speak. Someone interrupted him.
“Hold on. I don’t like this. Why are we deferring to this man’s opinion? He hasn’t told us who he is yet.”
Gillian’s eyes burned with anger. Her skin was orange with a spacer’s anti-SAD tan, her accent a result of that strange polyglot that evolved when international teams lived in close proximity for extended periods.
She turned and pointed an accusing finger at Constantine, bangles jingling and jangling.
“The question I’d like answered is, what are you doing here?”
Silence fell as four pairs of eyes gazed at Constantine, but he felt no urgency to answer just yet. He ran his finger along the dull grey metal of the tabletop, conscious of the austerity of his surroundings; bare, grey metal walls, red plastic molded chairs, the black rubberized surface on the floor. Everything in the room had been built the old way, with no attempt at VNM construction. It couldn’t be risked; no hint of circuitry that might act as a transmitter or listening device could be allowed into this room. Was it safe to speak? As safe as it could ever be, he guessed.
“Well?” demanded Gillian. Constantine sat up a little straighter.
Jay laughed suddenly. “Oh, Gillian. I can see that you spend too much time on your job and not enough engaging in office politics. Someone has paid for you to travel millions of kilometers across the solar system, booked a shuttle so you could get Earthside just in time for this meeting, and you seem to think so highly of yourself you don’t find this unusual.”
Constantine felt a funny little stirring in his mind. He tilted his head, feeling for it, but it had gone.
Jay continued. “When you get summoned to a meeting where a mysterious stranger keeps asking questions, it can only mean one thing. You’re in the presence of a ghost. Just how far away
is
the Oort cloud?”
She waved a dismissive hand at Masaharu, who had looked up at her rhetorical question.
“I didn’t want the answer in kilometers, Masaharu. Listen, girl, you’ve obviously got some talent to have got this far. Someone clearly likes you. They don’t send just anyone to one of these meetings, but if you want to rise any higher in this organization, you’ve got to learn how people operate.”