The Great Symmetry (10 page)

What would a reasonable pilot do?

Mira improvised. “So I might have another passenger.”

“Not on your manifest yet. Who is it?” Denison was being oddly persistent, trying to get this ride. Surely he had other choices.

She wanted nothing more than to just let go of the edge of the pool and slip back under water. “Not sure yet
. Just an inquiry.” How could she make this any clearer? “But it’s a private request. If it comes through, I need to honor it. Private conveyance.”

“That’s not exactly a yacht you’re driving there. I hope you let your party know that.”

“Oh, yes
.” Mira was sure that her passenger knew all about the condition of the shuttle.

Finally he appeared to give up. “Well, let me know if anything changes,” Denison said, and dove in.

Mira ducked below the surface
and watched Denison arc down through the water, bubbles breaking free of him and heading toward the surface in a bedraggled cloud.

She loved being able to see clearly underwater without any aids. That was her biggest purchase ever, the eye surgery. Some of the features were useful in her line of work. Independent focusing on objects that were differing distances away. Auto-damping of extreme light. The zoom
. The camera, still and video. But the very best was still seeing underwater. She looked up, seeing the distorted outlines of people and objects in the rippling surface. It was a glorious thing.

Under the water, she took census for her usual sociological assessment. There were a wide variety of body types and levels of fitness. She had observed that the more confident a person was in their fitness, the less they wore. The clear correlation was evident once again, in this pool.

Mira felt really great about her fitness.

She surfaced for a breath, and then dove again.

Being surrounded by water was just perfect. Floating, she felt at home. A short lease until it was time to surface and breathe once again, but so worth it. It made Mira wonder why she lived on Kelter. There were planets that were covered entirely in water.

There was one place on Kelter. Or in it, rather
. She had been away for far too long. When this adventure was done, she would return and experience it one more time. And complete some unfinished business.

An alert on her wrist caught her attention. She was cleared!

Mira stroked back to the surface and climbed out of the pool. She headed for the pool exit via the lockers.

Once she was clothed and walking down the hall to her ship
, Mira consulted her status in more detail. The next reasonable window was in forty minutes. Should she go or should she wait?

She should wait. Fly casual.

She saw Denison’s charter request. But there was more. Within a minute of her clearance, her shuttle had received four other requests.
Two were full charter. People really wanted to leave Top Station, even in her conveyance.

This was a real problem. She could not leave the station empty. It would stick out like a sore thumb. The algorithms found anomalies like that, and brought them to the attention of their humans.

There was only one answer. “Call Denison,” she told her phone.

“Hi Mira, changed your mind?”

“As a matter of fact I have. Be at my lock in five minutes.”

“You got it! See you there.”

She could not wait. Every fiber in her being screamed that it was time to leave Top Station, and full charter could justify some extra fuel use.

And as for Denison meeting McElroy, she would just have to handle that, somehow.

Mira hoped Evan was doing okay, holed up in the intake. Most especially, she hoped that he would stay where he was, for just a few minutes more.

Pushing The Envelope

“Drs. West, Merriam, Ravi, thank you for coming here on short notice,” Lobeck said. “Skylar, please provide an update, from the top.”

Sonia chose not to say how little choice had been provided to them. She had negotiated one concession, a big one, for her domestic family, but she knew that it was all in the context of being drafted for whatever this was.

Lobeck and Skylar were an odd pair. Lobeck was tall and strikingly handsome. His deep voice conveyed confidence at every turn. His look was of the kind that women, and men as well, swooned for. Skylar, by contrast, resembled nothing as much as a fish, stranded on land, propped up and forced to function.

“We have begun running the encrypted message through the provided private keys,” Skylar started. “We have run about 20 million of the private keys, and have 80 million to go. No useful hits so far. We’
re also applying some petaflops to brute force decryption. By one path or the other, we expect to have the message decrypted within three to five days.”

“Next, examination of the ship remains,” Lobeck ordered.

“Other fleet elements are still gathering up small pieces, sweeping along the trail of the ship’s velocity at the time of impact. Nothing greater than one kilogram in the last four
hours. We still have not recovered the body, but in aggregate we are within two hundred kilograms of recovering everything.”

“So that’s mostly the body and the EVA that are missing.”

Skylar brought up a set of graphics, showing the remains of the runabout. “We’re continuing our examination of the parts that we have here, especially the black box. It’s missing some data due to the missile impact, but we have been able to confirm from voice transcripts that McElroy was in the ship when it arrived insystem. Here’s the timeline.”

She pointed to another graphic, newly appeared above the table. A broad horizontal stripe ticked off the hours, while notable events were shown on parallel tracks. “It appears that he attempted to EVA to get to the sled, in order to cast off in the sled and avoid the missile impact,” Skylar told them. “
However, the body was not in the sled when we recovered it. Either the missile impact ejected him from the sled, or he was not in it.”

“He might have fallen from the ship,” observed Lobeck. “Let’s look at the entire flight history of the ship after it arrived.”

A flight chart appeared. “Look, there. The ship changed its acceleration at 0542, instead of just heading straight for Kelter
. Have we swept that course as well?”

“Yes, but not at a high resolution,” Skylar replied.

“Shift priorities,” Lobeck said. “That is the course on which we will find the body. Now, let’s shift to public communications. For our distinguished visitors, this is the main reason why you are here.”

“I hope you will fill us in,” replied Sonia. “All this tactical stuff. It’s so transactional
. You figure all of that out. We can’t help you.”

Lobeck was tall even when he was sitting. Sonia felt his scrutiny as though he was scanning through every known fact of her life. “I agree, Dr. West, on one level. But there is another element in play that directly concerns your work.”

‘We’re all ears,”
she said.

“We all know why we are in the Kelter system. Our new asset will only provide its full value to the Affirmatix Family if nobody else is aware of its existence. Overall, I believe that we have contained the explicit expression of the data, despite earlier serious errors in the Aurora system. Our next challenge is erasing the secondary effects, including
the ripples from our own actions. And that is where you three come in.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Here is the question,” Lobeck said. “What information might cause people to believe, or speculate, in the discovery of our asset or something like it? For example, several writers picked up on the sudden arrival of all of our ships through a glome that had not been identified before.
That begs for an explanation. We need to provide explanations or suppress the question. The articles in question have already been removed, but we must be vigilant for their recurrence.”

“You need a True Story,” Sonia said. “That’s a task for the Marcom Team, right?”

“
It is, but they need help. It’s essential that our True Story should not only withstand scrutiny, but also that it should not direct anyone toward our discovery. I need you three to evaluate scenarios. Suggest courses of action, and evaluate those that we provide to you. Above all, we must preserve the exclusivity of our asset.”

“What’s your valuation target?”

Lobeck brought up the image that Sonia knew so well. “The best case scenario, of course. Ninety-nine percent.
Dr. West, I have read your work carefully. Over the course of the next forty years the Affirmatix Family of companies can gain a controlling interest in ninety-nine percent, by value, of all
business entities and assets that exist or come into existence between now and then. Affirmatix will own ninety-nine percent of human civilization. We can do that, if and only if we keep a lid on the Versari discovery.”

Sonia could have recalled every detail of the graphic with her eyes closed. Graceful gradations between ribbons of color
, textured in the form of three-dimensional nets to provide substance and demarcate the outcomes. Three axes were shown: the passage of time, asset value, and probability. The ribbons represented various courses of action, starting as thick trunks at the present moment and then branching into fine filaments of future choices.

In the very top right corner, a thread glowed with incandescent emerald.

Hearing Lobeck state his goal, Sonia
was floored. In the clouds of possibility, that was an outlier. The ninety-nine percent value outcome presumed the absolutely most aggressive, the most ruthless measures by Affirmatix, not just to retain the secret but to exploit it. Beyond ethical questions, that scenario ran on the ragged edge of harsh reaction by others.
How far would the other six of the Sisters let themselves be pushed around?

She protested. “Mr. Lobeck, I am not sure you fully understand the uncertainties in that scenario. It involves taking huge risks−”

He swept her words aside. “Risks we are prepared to take. Anyway, as we might say, that question is above your pay grade. We will provide scenarios, and you will evaluate them.”

How could she make him understand? “
We only include scenarios of that type in order to delineate the cloud. And there are some serious ethical questions−”

Lobeck held up a big hand, almost in Sonia’s face, until she stopped speaking. “Ethics is also above your pay grade,” he said. “We provide so many services, so many goods, so much benefit, to tens of billions of people. Every year,
we offer more value. It is our duty to make Affirmatix products available to as many consumers as possible. And I expect everyone here to embrace that duty.”

“Isn’t it a little extreme to go killing people, as you did to Mr. McElroy?”
Sonia felt herself flush as she realized too late that she might have said too much. This was not someone to challenge so directly.

Lobeck, however, seemed unconcerned. “We all know that it was self-defense,” he told her. “Any court in the land would back that up. The moment he left our facility on Aurora with information critical to us, he became an infoterrorist. He doubled down and redoubled, leaving the system, partially revealing the fruits of the discovery by travelling through a new glome
, and then sending a message whose content we don’t yet even know. Make no mistake – McElroy has endangered everyone in civilization. If he is dead, we are fortunate.”

Lobeck surveyed the room.

Silence.

“Now, let us focus,” he resumed, “on the actions we need to take to achieve containment and to protect our asset.”

Somehow Sonia managed to make it through the rest of the meeting. Jennifer and Simone. Yvette. Jennifer and Simone. She would take care of them. She could do this.

Do Something

Evan knew that something was very wrong. Too much time had gone by, over two hours. They should have lifted by now.

Mira had insisted that it was necessary for her to stay docked to Top Station until the next optimal flight window arrived. To save fuel. And get lunch, of all things.

He would be glad to pay for the fuel, as much as she needed. That is, after he was officially not dead any more, and was able to provide credit
. He had enough assets. At least, he did when he was alive.

But Mira was right. Rushing from Top Station would have created a bogey. The algorithms would have noted it.

Evan was slightly crouched in order to stay entirely hidden in the intake, and that was a bad thing. Initially it had been okay. Then he had felt the need to stretch. To move, even a little bit. He found himself doing a series of tiny maneuvers, just to get into some different kind of muscle position.

The EVA
suit didn’t help. It was bulky, designed for comfort and functionality while operating in open space. By himself, he could easily have fit into the intake with plenty of room to move around. But with the EVA, he was stuffed in like toothpaste into a tube. This was not going to work for long.

He had grown tired of asking the suit what time it was, so he had a display showing the time
. It incremented every second, the prior red digit seamlessly replaced with its red successor. Every sixty seconds, the minute incremented
. That was even worse than having to ask the time, but Evan did not shut it down. He was done talking to the suit, for a while.

As another hour went past, Evan contemplated his options. He could clamber out, go over to the next lock, and go into Top Station. He could find out what was going on.

It was a really bad idea, and he knew it. Still he fought the imperative to do something, anything.