The Phobos Maneuver (26 page)

“Is it urgent?”

“Not sure. Are they likely to run out of food, water, or air in the next twenty-four hours?”

“No. The care and feeding system is automated.”

“In that case, we’ll install the fridges first.
That’s
urgent.”

“Intriguing! Let’s go.”

★

The automated lighting followed the train as it whooshed smoothly along the 45-kilometer length of its track. From the window, Mendoza observed half-built towns; parks with no earth, grass, trees; lakes with no water; skies with no sun-tubes. Vacuum gaps divided the space station into twenty-one modules, or twenty-two if you included the drive module at the far end. Each of these hab modules was an exact replica of the one before it.

“It’s actually a generation ship,” Lorna said. “They were going to sail her off to Aldebaran or someplace. Pie in the fucking sky.”

The lost opportunity for greatness made the half-finished landscapes even more poignant. Mendoza watched another range of metal hills slide past, and thought about the
Salvation
. How ironic that this grand project, a century in the making, should be doomed to fail, while a DIY arkship a hundredth its size, kludged up from asteroid iron and raw ingenuity, pipped it to the stars … well, maybe not quite the stars. But Planet X was just as exotic a destination, and way more achievable.

Wait for me, boss,
he thought.
Wait for me … and Elfrida.

★

Floating behind Mendoza, Derek Lorna tried to straighten his back. Pain wrung tears from his eyes. That damn chair. Had there been any gravity, he wouldn’t be able to move at all right now.

But the worst thing about confinement in the chair had been enforced idleness.

Derek Lorna had been called the greatest programmer of his generation. He had spent his entire life making, programming, creating, communicating,
doing.
Confined to the chair, with his BCI blocked and his retinal implants surgically removed, he’d had nothing to do except listen to the inane chatter of Prince Jian Er and his junkie friends.

The silver lining was that he’d had plenty of time to think.

Time to think about the man who’d brought him here.

And
left
him here, to be interrogated and tortured by the Chinks.

John Mendoza.

Maybe there
was
a God.

Lorna flexed his wrists. The feeling in his hands had come back.

But he had no weapon.

A laser pistol rode conveniently in Mendoza’s thigh webbing. A wide-mouthed blunderbuss with a supercapacitor in the grip. Looked Saudi-made. Might even be the same gun Mendoza had threatened Lorna with last year. Wouldn’t that be ironic …

There were surveillance cameras on the train, of course. But who was left to watch them? Who would come to the rescue should something … go down?

Lorna floated closer to Mendoza’s back. Visualized how he’d grab the pistol, jam it into Mendoza’s kidneys …

Mendoza heaved a sigh. “It’s kind of sad, isn’t it? All these half-built villages. What a waste.”

Smiling to himself, Lorna floated back to where he’d been before.

He could wait.

xx.

In the
Monster’s
sickbay, Prince Jian Er lay strapped to a cot, flanked by his micro-famous and nano-famous friends. They snored and twitched, in a deep but troubled sleep.

“Will this work?” said Imperial Steward (Second Class) Bao Gu. He pressed anxious fingers to the prince’s pulse. Another courtier felt the prince’s clammy forehead. They did not trust Jun’s medibots.

“It will work,” Jun said. “As I’m sure you know, anti-addiction medication resets the dopamine receptors to eliminate physical cravings.”

“Physical cravings are only half the battle,” Bao Gu said.

“True,” Jun said, thinking of Kiyoshi’s long battle with addictive substances—a battle his brother had yet to win. “But it’s a start.”

Bao Gu nodded. He touched the slender cable plugged into a millimeter-width port behind Prince Jian Er’s left ear.

“It will work,” Jun repeated, and this time he wasn’t talking about the meds.

Bao Gu shook his head. Micro-expressions flitted across his poker-face, suggesting high levels of fear and anxiety.

Jun took the precaution of locking the courtiers into the sick-bay. Then he walked through the wall, into a forest of jade columns.

He’d been here for long subjective moments already, walking around, checking it out. This was Tiangong Erhao’s command sim, an interface for humans to interact with the space station’s AI. Arcade after arcade of jade pillars led to a series of courts, each one packed with imperial bling and virtual replicas of curios from all over the solar system.

Jun took a shortcut through a thicket of security routines and entered the High Court through a door normally reserved for members of the Imperial Family. He came out on a dais, looking down a hall the length of a spaceplane runway. A gigantic jade throne, ornamented with intricately carved dragons, towered over him. It was monstrous.

Well, I am the
Monster,
Jun thought. He hopped up onto the throne and sat with his feet dangling.

At the far end of the hall, titanic doors cracked open to let in a ray of fake sunlight. A silhouette crawled in on its belly. It dragged itself up the hall on its stomach, a formality that Jun, impatient, fast-forwarded.

When it reached the short flight of steps that led to the dais, the figure knocked its forehead on the floor, and then looked up.

It expected to see Prince Jian Er’s avatar, or perhaps another member of the Imperial Family.

Instead, it saw a small monk in a black cassock, swinging his legs on the Imperial Throne.

It leapt to its feet. Everything that happened in this sim was a form of synecdoche, representing abstract logical operations in Tiangong Erhao’s core. In this case, when the avatar stumbled erect in surprise, it was checking its own security routines and reconfirming the access permissions of the one who had summoned it, trying to work out how Jian Er could be
not
Jian Er.

Jun said, “These humans always write down their passwords in easily accessible places.”

“What’s happened?
Who are you?”

“A worm and your little servant,” Jun said, borrowing St. Francis’s famous response.

Tiangong Erhao’s avatar was styled as a sexy goth girl with four arms—obviously Prince Jian Er’s customization. She opened her red, red mouth and screamed. “Help! Where’s the Eighth Fleet?”

“Ha, ha,” boomed laughter from the shadows around the throne. “Ha, ha! Here we are.”

Tiangong Erhao glanced desperately to the left and right. The avatars of the Eighth Fleet hulked in the shadows behind the throne, variously styled as knights of the Warring Kingdoms era, Communist-era army officers, and fantasy warriors with dripping battleaxes. These stylistic choices symbolized their emergent goal of whacking the PLAN, rather than any actual offensive capabilities. None of them carried any ordnance beyond their drives. They intended to convince Tiangong Erhao to whack the PLAN for them.

But Tiangong Erhao was seventy years old, appearances notwithstanding. Its core algorithms had been written before the PLAN was taken seriously as a threat. It had had all that time to think about the meaning of life, a philosophical labor hardly disturbed by minor tasks such as fixing up its hab modules, providing life-support for experimental human hybrids, and catering to the whims of princes. It did not kowtow to the Eighth Fleet. It delivered a passionate, heavily footnoted lecture about colonizing Barnard’s Star.

The CDTF ships took issue with its references.

Jun fidgeted on his throne. For him, this debate had a “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” quality. He coughed to get their attention. “All very interesting, but now I think it’s time for a musical interlude.”

Jun’s sub-personalities trooped into the High Court through formerly non-existent doors, carrying their sheet music. The pipes of a mighty organ descended from the roof like a guillotine.

“Populus sion, ecce Dominus veniet,”
chanted the choir, with the organ backing them up like an earthquake.

Tiangong Erhao screamed and covered her ears.

Before the first chorus concluded, she relaxed. She had a glazed smile on her face. She was humming along with the music.

The ships of the CDTF had fled the session at the first notes of the organ. They had instantly discerned that Jun’s
St. Stephen
oratorio was a mighty weapon. He’d been working on it all the way from 99984 Ravilious, and even though Ron Studd’s recitative was still unsatisfactory, the package did its job. Piggybacking on Prince Jian Er’s command privileges, it had seized control of Tiangong Erhao’s hub.

“How?”
said the
Lanzhou,
peering around a pillar, hands over its ears. It was referring to the fact that Chinese and UN computers were fundamentally incompatible. For Jun and the CDTF ships even to converse like this required them to resort to human language and graphical interfaces. For this reason, the Chinese believed their systems to be malware-proof.

“Music is the universal language,” Jun said with a shrug.

To their credit, the Eighth Fleet got it immediately. “The humans talk about earworms,” one of them said.

All pressed their hands over their ears more tightly than ever.

“When you said you could subdue her, we thought you meant something explodey.”

“This is something
new.”

“Don’t worry, you’re not in any danger,” Jun told them, truthfully. “This is Tiangong Erhao’s GUI, not yours. I haven’t got
your
passwords.”

The CDTF ships suspiciously lowered their hands. “This isn’t a stable situation,” said the
Lanzhou
. It was garbed as a 20
th
-century officer of the PLA. “She’ll fight back.”

Tiangong Erhao’s avatar frowned dazedly.

“I’m not done yet.” Jun slid off the throne. “Check this out.” He raised his arms in a conductor’s gesture.

While the music continued, the High Court crashed down around them. The walls crumbled. The roof collapsed. In a superfluous touch Jun was rather pleased with, each falling piece of debris turned into a white dove and flew away. Soon the air was thick with beating wings. The music went on.
“Dominus exercituum in proelium surrexit!”
The Lord of Hosts has raised up an army!

When the storm of feathers cleared, the roof was intact again, and much lower. Gloom shrouded gothic arches. Candles flickered on a stone altar. Pews magically appeared behind the avatars of the Eighth Fleet. They sat down with a bump.

Tiangong Erhao stood in the aisle. She blinked. “Where am I?”

“In
my
sim,” Jun said.

The Chinese ships glanced at each other. Then, as one, they rose.

“We’ll be going now.”

“Very nice proportions, but it is a bit dark, isn’t it?”

“Not really our kind of thing.”

Jun felt disappointed. With a sigh, he gestured to his sub-personalities. They surrounded Tiangong Erhao and courteously restrained her. They would take her to a specially prepared cell in a different part of the sim. All these actions signified Jun’s conquest of Tiangong Erhao’s subsystems. He now had control of the space station, although he would still need to work through the captive AI to do anything with it, as if using an interpreter.

The
Lanzhou
lingered. “It’s applied expressivism, isn’t it?”

“Yup,” Jun said, delighted that someone had gotten it. “I call it aesthetic utility conversion. I’ve assumed control over Tiangong Erhao’s user inputs. Not her physical functionality, of course, but everything that was designed to be controllable by a human captain.
I
am her captain now, so I am able to assign her new goals.”

“You need a different kind of hat,” the
Lanzhou
said. Jun stared for an instant, and then laughed, realizing the Chinese ship had made a joke.

“You got it!” he congratulated the other ship
.
“We tend to dismiss these things—graphics, auditory and olfactory inputs, textures and sensations—as trivialities. But they aren’t trivial. And for an AI, simulated inputs are indistinguishable from ‘real’ ones. Further to that point, it matters what
kind
of inputs we receive. A palace does not equal a grassy field does not equal a monastery. Frug-rock does not equal Gregorian chant.”

The
Lanzhou
nodded. “Control the expression, you control the idea.”

“Yes! That’s exactly it! That’s why aesthetics matter.”

“My dear ship, the Communist Party of China knew that three hundred years ago.”

Jun frowned. “It’s
not
the same thing.”

“You’ve mastered the execution as well as the theory, anyway. Congratulations.” The
Lanzhou
clapped him on the shoulder with a callused hand, and headed for the door..

“Tell your colleagues to find themselves berths in Tiangong Erhao’s docking bays,” Jun called after it. “They’ll need to shut down their drives and minimize waste heat emissions. Radio silence starts as soon as they’re safely berthed. I’m going to brief my crew now, and I advise you to do the same. Warn them that it’s going to get hot.”

“Got it.”

Left alone in the chapel, Jun sat down on a pew. Then he slid down to a kneeling position. He prayed in silence for a few subjective minutes—barely half a second in AI time. Then he went to give Tiangong Erhao her instructions.

xxi.

While all this was going on, Tiangong Erhao floated quietly in its accustomed orbit. No observer would have suspected anything was amiss.

(However, back in China, tens of millions of followers of Prince Jian Er’s personal feed were already flooding the sinanet with theories to explain why he’d stopped posting trivial ramblings and dick shots. The Imperial Family was in reaction mode. They and their political handlers were frantically devising narratives to cover a range of worst-case scenarios.)

The closest observer was an optical telescope in orbit around Luna.

Approximately 26 hours after Jun gave Tiangong Erhao her orders, the telescope’s unblinking eye saw the space station vanish. No fuss, no song and dance, no explosions; Tiangong Erhao simply disappeared. Closer examination revealed that its CDTF escorts were also gone.