The Luna Deception (32 page)

“Ironic, huh?” said the boss-man, as Kiyoshi startled awake, flailing. For several seconds his head was encased in a sphere of water. He slapped it away, coughed, and glared at Father Tom through the floating cloud of globules. “You dumbass! It’ll get into the electronics!”

“If you’re worried about rust, this ship could hardly get any dirtier.”

“Rust? Short circuits! Fire hazards! You basically just pointed a gun at Jun’s head and pulled the trigger.”

Jun caused a housekeeping bot to float out of its locker. Kiyoshi grabbed it and flew around the bridge, using it as a vacuum cleaner to chase down the globules of water that were now drifting everywhere.

Done with this, Kiyoshi turned to the comms screen. “Well. As you see, sir, everything’s peachy.”

“I would not say that,” Father Tom countered, staring at Jun’s repo. It looked very sickly indeed now.

Kiyoshi shot a glance at the repo. As if suddenly tired out from his frantic tidying up, he floated loose-limbed in the air. “It’s Jun, Father. Not exactly him, but a copy. It’s how he operates the Ghost.”

“Ah. I thought
it was a bit hot in here.”

“It’ll get hotter before we’re done. Right now, that avatar is battling a Solarian fighter—what we call a toilet roll. It’s all simulated, of course. It’s not really happening.”

Even Kiyoshi regularly succumbed to this comforting notion: it was only happening in a sim, therefore it was not really happening.

“Solarian?” questioned Father Tom.

Kiyoshi nodded. “Turns out the PLAN don’t call
themselves
the PLAN. They call themselves Solarians. That’s one of the few bits of information we’ve wrung out of the Heidegger program.”

“The Heidegger program?!?”

“The copy in the fridge.”

“In the fridge!
That
fridge?”

“Yeah. That’s what the Ghost is. It thinks it’s the last survivor of a ninepack of PLAN fighters. Hell, it thinks it’s the baddest toilet roll in the universe.” Kiyoshi snickered. “There’s another copy in the mini-fridge on the Superlifter.”

“This is beyond belief.” Father Tom glanced at the comms screen. The boss-man was pounding up an incline, sweat flying from his face, mouth hanging open. “Does he know about it?”

“Sure. Oh, he doesn’t
understand
it. Jun is the only one who can get any sense out of it.”

But not very much sense,
Jun thought.
When it comes to the Solarians, I’m like a primitive nomad playing with a Coke bottle.
He said nothing. Kiyoshi was doing as good a job of explaining as he could have done himself.

“So your Ghost is actually a captive copy of the Heidegger program.” The Jesuit massaged his collarbone. “Is there anything to drink?”

Kiyoshi showed his teeth. “In the fridge.” The Jesuit hesitated. Kiyoshi laughed. “That’s how I was at first. But it’s fine.” He flew over to the fridge and pulled out two pouches. “Coffee OK?”

“I was thinking of something stronger.”

“We’ve only got this, soy milk, or spinach juice,” Kiyoshi said with the righteousness of one who did not bother with alcohol, because other drugs got you fucked up faster.

“The coffee-like substance, then.” Father Tom accepted a pouch of Redeye Coffee, which was concocted from caffeine, guarana extract, B vitamins, magnesium, and artificial sweeteners. He grimaced at the taste. “But how does it
work?”

“Quantum computing is a thing,” Kiyoshi said. Father Tom protested. “I know, I know. We can’t do it on a real-world scale, but the Solarians, a.k.a. the PLAN, can. And it turns out that when a quantum computer deletes data, it doesn’t generate heat, like an ordinary computer. It generates
cold.”

“Buh-buh-but.Thermodynamics.”

“Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of quantum physics. Before you get all excited, we haven’t got a quantum computer. But the fiend in the fridge? The first thing it did after we caught it was to set up a simulation of a Solarian quantum computer. And it turns out that simulating a quantum computer is the same thing as having one, for the purposes of harnessing the energy-deletion effect.”

“It’s all happening on the quantum level anyway,” Jun said, trying to be helpful. He saw that this did not shed any light on the problem for the Jesuit, and went back to his battle.

“So there you go, that’s the secret of the PLAN’s stealth technology,” Kiyoshi said. “The more calculations they run, the colder they get. Ironically, they actually have to de-stealth during combat maneuvers, so they don’t get
too
cold. So we have to turn off the fridge from time to time to keep up the illusion. Everything spoils. It’s a pain in the ass. But in a drive-by nuking scenario, which is the PLAN’s favorite battle tactic, the fiend goes into stealth mode, and Jun uses the cooling effect to boost the efficacy of our heat sinks … kinda thing, get it?”

Father Tom’s eyes lit up. “You have what kind of heat sinks on this ship?”

“Water/glycol.”

“But water-cooling alone is very inefficient compared to modern methods. So if the Ghost were installed on a new ship with highly advanced heat-shielding technology …”

Jun thought it was the right moment to interject a warning. “Technology isn’t neutral,” he said. “It’s a vehicle for the values of its inventors.” He got distracted again as his repo took a hit. Its projection writhed. Its mouth fell slackly open. There was very little left of it now, and although Jun was not sharing its experiences, he knew the excruciating pain it was feeling.

Can you suffer?
the boss-man had implicitly asked him. The answer was,
Yes, I can.
He could not feel physical pain but he could feel something worse:
despair.
The despair of losing everything. Losing functionality, memory capacity, the memories stored therein—and
knowing
it. Watching helplessly as everything you knew, everything you were, everything you loved, spun off into the abyss, like rubble from a destroyed asteroid.

After his first couple of times using the Ghost, he’d stopped uploading his repos after they were done. He just couldn’t take it.

“It works by deleting data,” he reminded Father Tom. “For the PLAN—” he wouldn’t dignify them with their pretentous moniker of Solarians— “every battle is a suicidal mission. Every PLAN fighter is a kamikaze. So before you start planning how we’ll use this technology to defeat them, please consider what we’d have to become in order to use it.”

“We’d have to become AIs, first of all,” Kiyoshi said, yawning. “Can’t run a Ghost without an AI. That’s why we’ve only got two Ghosts, this one and the one in the Superlifter ... There’s only one Jun.”

Well, there were two of him at the moment. But one was dying. And this, too, was an experience Jun had had before. He did not actually remember his death. He hadn’t had any recording equipment in his EVA suit when it happened, and the vids he’d got from Elfrida Goto only showed what it had looked like, not what it had felt like. But by uploading his repos, during his early experiments with the Ghost, he had got as close as possible to grasping the—all right—the
Nichts
of it. He had looked through the hideous gates of Non-Being.

This was knowledge no one should have.

Dearest Jesus,
he prayed,
save me from the deceit of the False Prophet.

The Ghost nuked another of his repo’s ships, and screamed, “Who’s the baddest!” If it had been human, it would have been dancing a jig. As it was, it waggled its imaginary gun pods. “Who
rules
the fucking
universe?!?
Me! Me, me, me! One fighter to frag them all! Ha, ha, ha, ha!”

Jesus, save us from persecution.

“Pew-pew-pew!”

The Ghost threw a barrage of kinetic missiles at one of the repo’s five remaining ships.

And then there were four.

Jesus, preserve us from the Anti-Christ.

The boss-man, not having heard the last twenty-six minutes of conversation aboard the
Monster,
said, “Oh, by the way, Tom, regarding the nanoprobes. I’m sorry you had to go through that, but Jun tells me that we recovered a lot of them from your lungs. And a couple of million of those are still in working order. So, we might be able to run them in a sealed-off space, find out more about them. And
then
we can ask ourselves why Trey Hope thinks it makes any fucking sense at all to send nano-assassins to attack a planet full of bodiless AIs.”

“Jun says they aren’t designed to kill,” Kiyoshi objected.

Jun himself said nothing. He was concentrating for dear life right now, trying to jolly the repo along, trying to give it faith in a victory that could never be, because its destiny was
Nichts
.

Lord have mercy.

Christ have mercy.

“So, that’ll be something to do while you wait out the ship-hunt. Then, when it’s safe, transfer to an orbit around the Earth-Moon L1 LaGrange point. As close to Earth as you can get.”

“Whaaaat?” Kiyoshi shouted.

The boss-man, of course, did not hear this. He continued, “Remember I mentioned another passenger? That’s now confirmed. He has to take care of some stuff on Earth, and then he’ll come out to meet you. I just don’t know how long it’ll take. He’s being a dick about it.”

Kiyoshi threw his empty coffee pouch at the comms screen. “So forget him, whoever he is! I just made three million spiders! I’d like to stay alive to enjoy it, thanks!”

The boss-man got off his treadmill and walked away, weaving between men and women who were pedaling stationary bikes and lifting weights.

Dearest Jesus, cover us with Your Precious Blood.

“So are you going to do that analysis, like he wants you to?” Kiyoshi said to Father Tom. “Remember, he doesn’t care about Domenika’s prophecies. He just wants to find something he can rip off and patent. He’s still trying to patent the Ghost! But they keep rejecting our applications. The last time, they didn’t even bother to explain why. They just scrawled
Entropy
across the whole file.” Kiyoshi smirked. “It’s been very frustrating for him.”

Dearest Jesus, open our eyes to the lies of the False Prophet.

“If everything Jun has said is true, that may be a blessing in disguise,” Father Tom replied. His eyes were fixed on the dying repo.

“Oh, I agree,” Kiyoshi said. “There has to be a way to achieve stealth without deleting your own ship’s RAM in the process. The Hopes were trying. I actually wish I’d had a chance to talk to Frank Hope IV a bit more.” He drifted towards the fridge. “Why is it that the most interesting people tend to be the ones who are trying to kill you?”

He snickered, and opened the fridge. Father Tom stiffened. Kiyoshi took out a donut.

Dearest Jesus, unite your Church.

“Want one, Father? There are a few left. The fridge doesn’t need them all.”

“The fridge … needs donuts?”

“Yes, the PLAN apparently has an incentive system. We don’t know what it would be getting at home, but baked goods seem to work.”

“I suppose they don’t have pastries on Mars,” the Jesuit said weakly.

“I guess not. It thinks they’re amazing. The structure of the crumbs. The miracle of yeast. The infinite variety of flavor profiles. We hooked a spectroscopic scanner up to the door light so it can enjoy them properly.”

“And you eat the leftovers.”

“They’d just go to waste otherwise.”

“Amazing you don’t gain weight.”

“I’ve got skinny genes.”

Jesus, protect our sacraments …

“I can’t hold on any longer!” Jun exclaimed. His repo had lost all but one of its ships, and the fiend in the fridge was preparing to hurl a nuke at that one. He could always make more ships, but the fiend would notice. It had to be realistic. “I’m losing … losing …”

Both men froze, staring at the repo. It spasmed. A fat maggot crawled out of one ear, slimed with blood.

Jun transmitted a throat-clearing noise over the speakers. “De-stealthing now. Sorry, guys.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Kiyoshi said through an unchewed mouthful. “That was a record.”

“I thought I could go longer.” As always after a fight, Jun felt like slugging the dead husk of his repo. What a fucking wimp. He mercilessly deleted what remained of it.

I am the emperor of everything!
screeched the fiend in the fridge, and went back to contemplating its donuts.

“That’s OK,” Kiyoshi said. “We’ll just go hang out at Tiangong Erhao. They won’t look for us there.”

xxiv.

Mendoza had
not
been fired from his job, as it turned out.

That was because his job no longer existed.

UNVRP itself no longer existed.

Oh, the organization stumbled on, but Mendoza knew from Elfrida that the plug had been pulled. The UN was just putting off the official announcement until the media moved on, in hopes of minimizing the cries of “We told you so” from those who had never believed the Venus Project would work.

The Mercury Resource Management Support Group—its very name now meaningless—invited Mendoza to a “team bonding weekend” in Malawi. He knew what this was really about: blowing through the remainder of their budget before the axe came down. He didn’t go. Later he realized he should have gone, since that had probably been his last chance of networking his way to a new job.

June passed. Then July. His mother worried about how much time he was spending on the internet.

She needn’t have worried. Nothing much was happening on the Mars forums. The Hope Center for Nanobiotics’s latest swarm of nanoprobes, launched in mid-June, had apparently failed to get any closer to Mars than the April batch. None other than Fragger1 had posted some of their data. It basically replicated the stuff Mendoza had posted three months earlier. But there were some interesting new close-ups of the “Big Turd,” as commenters called the PLAN ziggurat that had replaced/engulfed Olympos Mons.

Mendoza joined the speculation about the Big Turd, and contributed a not-entirely-serious theory of his own: it was actually a big
gun,
pointing at Earth.

A graph on All-We-Know-About-Mars tracked the relative positions of Mars and Earth, as they moved through these months of close approach. This only anticipated the anxiety that built up on Earth in the weeks before August 16
th
, when the distance between the two planets reached a 26-month minimum.