The Luna Deception Page 16

  “And?” Mendoza said impatiently.

  “This version of the Heidegger program has incorporated databases belonging to Wrightstuff, Inc. Lots of stuff in there about American history. Lots of propaganda about how the United States was screwed over by the Chinese. The program has made that stuff part of its identity. So now it wants to fight World War III over again. And get it right this time.”

  “No one will fall for that,” Mendoza said, but as he spoke he thought about all that “real” history he’d learned, growing up in Manila. About the miasma of rage that pemeated Filipino politics and culture. Rage at the Imperial Republic of China, which jackbooted all over its neighborhood. Rage at the unfairness of history. Of course, being Filipinos, they laughed it off, but …

  “Revenge is a powerful motive,” he conceded.

  “Revenge will eat humanity alive,” Jun said, “if this thing spreads. We have to stop it from getting off the planet.”

  Fr. Lynch interrupted. “What’s that?”

  Mendoza wallowed through the air to the astrogator’s workstation. The Jesuit indicated the gravmap that displayed Mercury as a mesh sphere, their orbit as an ellipse. There was a blip on it.

  “A ship! It must have been hiding behind the planet while we approached.”

  “Yup,” Jun said. “Looks like one of the Star Force Heavycruisers that was stationed here. There were two of them, but the other one left a couple of days ago. This is the Crash Test Dummy.” Gone was the gloomy prophet of war. Jun arrowed across the bridge, cassock flapping. “Grab onto something, guys!” He settled into the captain’s couch, which Kiyoshi Yonezawa wasn’t here to occupy anymore.

  Mendoza floated back towards the comms workstation. The main screen flashed. “They’re hailing us! What should I say to them?”

  “Nothing!”

  Subject-line text stitched across the screen. WHAT’RE YOU CHINKIE FUCKERS DOING?

  “They’re accusing us of being Chinese,” Fr. Lynch said.

  “I’ve had people make that mistake,” Mendoza said.

  A new message. WELL??!? NO SAVVY ENGLISH, GOOKFACES?

  “Do not respond!” Jun said. “There’s no one left alive on that ship!”

  The bridge suddenly filled with rapid-fire Japanese. The bristles on the back of Mendoza’s neck stood on end. He seemed to be surrounded by invisible men barking in a dead language. Jun, calm and confident in the captain’s couch, issued orders.

  The Monster reared and fell sideways. Mendoza and Fr. Lynch fell the other way. Strictly speaking, they stayed where they were while the wall accelerated towards them and hit them.

  Pinioned by thrust gravity, Mendoza watched all the screens strobe, throwing up chunks of data too fast for any human eye to process. For an instant he seemed to see ghosts manning the bridge, men in long white smocks, floating at right angles to what was now the floor. Nausea gripped him. Then a cheer went up. “Banzai!”

  The ship stabilized. The g-force dissipated. The invisible crew fell silent.

  “Got the bastard,” Jun said in tones of quiet satisfaction.

  Fr. Lynch murmured to Mendoza, “Do you get the feeling we’re just in the way around here?”

  Mendoza nodded.

  “I don’t know whether to worry about him or not,” the Jesuit muttered. He untangled himself from Mendoza and drifted away.

  “So that was a space battle.” Mendoza was shaking, his body charged with adrenaline he had no use for. “I thought it would last longer.”

  “Orbital combats are quick-draw contests,” Jun answered. “The Heavycruiser was in a lower orbit, moving faster than us. So I threw a couple of nuclear warheads into its path. It couldn’t dodge, because there’s already a kiloton of debris down there. It returned fire, but I evaded its missiles successfully.”

  “I think we have a problem,” Fr. Lynch blurted. “Something else just popped up on the radar.”

  Jun whipped around, inhumanly fast.

  “Looks like another ship. And now there’s a lot more debris in orbit, isn’t there, Jun? Think we can dodge it? Or should we shoot first?”

  Jun’s face relaxed. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve seen that ship before.”

  Twenty minutes later the Monster’s operations deck airlock valved open, and out floated Kiyoshi Yonezawa in an EVA suit.

  “Thought you got rid of me, huh?”

  “It was fairly peaceful without you around,” Fr. Lynch said, slapping him on the shoulder.

  Kiyoshi scanned the vestibule. Mendoza followed his gaze. Fitted in between chunks of machinery, the small vestibule was shaped like a hollow wedge. Jun’s projection floated in the thin end, appearing to brace its arms and legs against the walls.

  “What the fuck?!” Kiyoshi bellowed. “You sold the fucking Superlifter! You know who bought it? Some kids in a band! They would have been stuck in there with the Ghost! By the time they reached the Belt, there’d have been nothing left of them but bones!”

  “I’ve been working on my predictive modelling,” Jun said. “I knew you’d steal the ship back.”

  “You didn’t know crap! You guessed!”

  “All right, but I guessed correctly, didn’t I?”

  “That doesn’t make it OK.” Kiyoshi stripped his EVA suit down to his heels, kicked it off. Mendoza had an impulse to get between him and the projection. But Kiyoshi did not make any violent movements. He folded his arms. He looked different, somehow, from when they’d left him at Midway. “I saw some shooting. Was that you?”

  Jun nodded.

  “You know you’re not supposed to mess with my guns.”

  “He saved our lives,” Mendoza said. “What should we have done, sit there and get fragged?”

  Kiyoshi gave a one-elbowed shrug, dismissing Mendoza’s contribution with an indifference that made Mendoza’s blood boil. He stared up at the projection. “Don’t you ever, ever try to predict my behavior again.”

  “I won’t,” Jun said.

  Kiyoshi narrowed his eyes suspiciously.

  “I can’t. Can’t predict your behavior. I got it wrong.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I predicted you’d be so angry you would take the Superlifter and go home. Somewhere else. Back to the Belt. I wanted you to go away from here, Kiyoshi! I wanted you to be safe!”

  The raw emotion that flashed across Kiyoshi’s face was too much for Mendoza to handle. He turned away, and heard Kiyoshi saying, “You tried that before, little brother. Didn’t work then, and it isn’t gonna work now. I guess you aren’t that intelligent, after all.”

  “I guess not,” Jun said softly.

  Fr. Lynch filled the silence. “So what happened to you on the Rocking Horse, Yonezawa? We waited for hours, but you never showed. Were you sprawling in some drug den, loved-up to the eyeballs? Getting away from it all with a little help from Dr. Headjuice?”

  “No.”

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. If there’s anywhere in the solar system that could drive a man to relapse, it’s Midway.”

  Kiyoshi patted his upper lip, and Mendoza realized what was different about his appearance. He was now clean-shaven. Also— “I went to get a haircut. A haircut, OK? And when I get back, my freaking ship’s gone, and there’s a frug-rock band painting torture porn on my Superlifter. I’m telling you, I cannot catch a break these days.” They all laughed. “So what’s the deal?” Kiyoshi said. “Anyone left alive down there to rescue?”

  “We’re not sure yet,” Mendoza said, at the same time as Fr. Lynch said, “God have mercy on their souls, but we fear they’re all dead.”

  Kiyoshi kicked off. Mendoza followed him out of the vestibule. “How were you going to rescue them, anyway?” Kiyoshi said to Jun. “The Chimera, I mean the Monster, can’t land on the surface. You need the Superlifter for that.”

  The operations module of the Monster was a house of many mansions, most of them filled with stuff. There were no transit corridors, so they had to pass through this floating obstacl
e course to reach the bridge. Mendoza bumped into a cloud of liquid textile sacks. One of them caught on a stanchion and split. ‘Mellow Mauve’ liquid gushed out, forming wobbly globules that went everywhere. The Yonezawas flew on ahead. Mendoza heard Jun saying: “… the launch site.”

  Mendoza floated among globules of Mellow Mauve. He thought: They aren’t really interested in rescuing Elfrida. They’re after something else.

  Screw that.

  He caught up with the Yonezawas on the bridge. They stared at his mauve-splotched face. “The sim,” he panted.

  Kiyoshi said, “The World War III sim? Jun’s been telling me about that. We’re mapping the source of those signals right now.” He wedged himself into his nest. “I’m doing the shooting this time.”

  They were planning to locate the Heidegger program’s computing platform, and frag it from orbit. Mendoza’s blood ran cold. “There might be a—a different way.” He caught back a better way. He’d already learned that Kiyoshi Yonezawa did not take kindly to being challenged on his own turf. “That sim is based on something I made. What if we could get into its back-end? We could destroy the Heidegger program’s identity. Reprogram it.”

  “No access,” Jun said. “I’m running a brute-force attack right now, but it could take years.”

  “I’ve got access. When I put together the MOAR ART package, I, well, I put in some easter eggs. I guess I wanted to sign my work.” It had been a stupid, sentimental impulse. He was glad of it now. “I made some jizo statues ...”

  “Jizo!” Kiyoshi said. “Those stone idols they used to have in old Japan?”

  “Yeah. I … I was thinking of Elfrida. She’s half-Japanese. I put them in for her.”

  “And?”

  “And Dr. Hasselblatter’s campaign staff were in a hurry, so they used Mendoza’s graphics as-is,” Jun finished for him. “The jizo are still there. Yes, I see them.”

  “Well, there’s a back door embedded in the graphics. I thought I might want to get in later, for some reason.”

  “Give me the access info.”

  Mendoza did.

  Jun’s projection vanished.

  The lighting on the bridge dimmed.

  “He’s going to throw every erg of computing power at it now,” Kiyoshi said. He glanced sourly at Mendoza. “We found the supercomputer the thing is running on. It’s on the dayside; it must be a portable. I was all set to drop a nuke on it. Flash, bang, problem solved. Goddamn AIs; wedded to the elegant solution.”

  Mendoza examined the mauve smears on his fingers.

  “When did you guess?” Kiyoshi said.

  “How could I not guess?” Mendoza said presently.

  “What was the giveaway?”

  “Oh, I dunno. The stealth technology that shouldn’t exist, according to the laws of physics?”

  “It doesn’t break the laws of physics. I’ll get him to explain it to you, if we survive. He didn’t invent that, anyway. Was that all?”

  “And, well, he just acts so human.”

  “Yeah. Not always, but in general, yeah.” Kiyoshi picked an immersion headset out of his freezeblankets.

  “How long have you known?” Mendoza said.

  “Me? Oh, a few months.”

  “And you’re OK with that?”

  “With what?”

  “The fact that your ship’s hub is an AI!”

  There were only two honest-to-goodness AIs in existence, going by the definition of true AI, or AGI—Artifical General Intelligence. AGI was defined as human-equivalent intelligence, but it was also a threshold marker. Once an entity reached the AGI tipping point, it could go FOOM—recursively improving itself, getting exponentially smarter. So, in practice, every AI would sooner or later turn into an ASI: an artificial superintelligence.

  One such ASI was the PLAN. The other was its offspring, the original Heidegger program.

  And now there were three.

  “He’s still my little brother,” Kiyoshi said.

  Four, Mendoza corrected his thoughts. Four ASIs.

  The third was Jun Yonezawa.

  And the fourth was Derek Lorna’s new iteration of the Heidegger program.

  Kiyoshi settled his headset on his angular new haircut. “Want to see the show?”

  “I don’t know. Do I want to see the show, Yonezawa?”

  “You might as well. I’m going to watch. If we’re about to be killed by an ASI with a grudge against East Asians, I want to see it coming.”

  “Killed?”

  “Hell, yeah. If Jun loses, that means it grabs his resources.” Kiyoshi slapped his workstation. “This ship.”

  He tossed a wireless headset at Mendoza, who put it on.

  ★

  “Welcome to our sim,” said a fat, merry-faced Japanese guy, He stripped off his white monastic habit and began to put on armor.

  Mendoza gazed around the bridge. In this sim, it looked newer and cleaner than it did in real life. Also, the pilot’s workstation had turned into a kind of throne, gold with dragon finials. Way over the top. Kiyoshi slumped on the throne, vaping a cigarette and watching the crew tool up.

  “He’s not coming,” the fat guy said. “He thinks sword-fighting is silly. You can tag along, if you want.”

  The fat guy was one of the virtual entities Mendoza had glimpsed during the battle earlier. There were a dozen more. All but a couple of them looked Japanese. They appeared to be monks, although a couple wore retro-chic ship’s uniforms instead of habits. Mendoza figured them for secondary personalities that Jun was running on the hub of the Monster.

  “We call her the St. Francis,” said the fat guy. “Oof!” Another monk had just braced a boot in his back to fasten the buckles of his breastplate. They bantered in Japanese. The fat guy turned back to Mendoza. “Goes back to the turn of the century, when we set out from Earth, hoping to found a new stronghold of the Faith, to spread the Gospel through the solar system. Well, it didn’t work out that way. And now here we are on Mercury, fighting the same old fight again. But at least we’re not running away this time.”

  “The same old fight?”

  “The same old Enemy.”

  The monks donned plate mail, splay-horned helms, and surcoats that opened in the front and tied at the waist. Their shields depicted heraldic lions. In the middle of the bridge floated a dozen swords, wickedly sharp, glittering like fragments of a star. One by one, each knight floated towards the virtual arsenal and selected a blade.

  Like the knights’ armor, the swords represented an imaginative melding of Japanese and European styles. They were two-handers, with slightly curved katana-style blades. Each had a differently-shaped pommel and quillons. They glowed from within, filling the bridge with a luminescence like candlelight.

  The fat knight held Mendoza back. “You don’t get a blade. Sorry.”

  “Why not? They’re beautiful.”

  “They’re tools. Applications designed to infiltrate operating systems, install rootkits, exploit black-box feedback loops, and basically fuck up the enemy’s day.”

  “I want one.”

  “You wouldn’t be able to use it.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re not a computer. Eh, Jun might let you have a peek under the hood, if we come out of this alive. I’m Peter Akagi, by the way.”

  Akagi dumped a bundle of folded silk in Mendoza’s arms.

  “Studd! We got any armor that’ll fit him?”

  Clad in mail, with the bundle strapped to his back, Mendoza followed the knights off the bridge. The headset gave him audiovisual feedback only. He heard armor jingling, the murmur of prayers being said in Japanese.

  Fear dried his mouth, turned his joints to rubber.

  The sub-personality named Peter Akagi cast open the airlock like a door—a physical impossibility. Mendoza recoiled from the void. Mercury looked back up at him from the bottom of its gravity well. A warm breeze seemed to kiss his face, as if rising from the baking dayside of the planet.

  He wren
ched his headset askew, blinked his contacts off.

  He was still floating on the bridge. Kiyoshi slumped in his nest like a dead man. The air recirculation system blew warmth on his face.

  Relax. None of this is really happening.

  But in another dimension, the dimension of raw information, it was happening. And that dimension could ravage this one as easily as (Mendoza had been taught as a child) demons and angels could intervene in human lives, to kill or to save.

  He jammed his headset back into place. Space yawned at his feet.

  Far below, parachutes speckled the face of Mercury.

  Mendoza tightened the buckles of his own parachute and jumped.

  xvi.

  He landed on a battlefield.

  On a stony desert, beneath a red sun, the crusaders from the Monster battled an army of grunts. The knights’ helmets shone in a sea of old-fashioned desert camouflage. The grunts had the crusaders surrounded and outnumbered. Muzzle flashes sparkled. Yet the knights were holding their own. Their blades flashed, scything down dozens of soldiers at a time.

  In this battlespace, Mendoza realized, swords did not underperform relative to guns. It was a battle of symbols—a meta-battle, fought in programming language, expressed in high-level metaphors whose potency was measured by their hold on the human civilization that both AIs, by default, drew their cognitive schema from.

  He had time to think that much, and then the grunts rushed him.

  He had no sword. His armor seemed to be deflecting their bullets, but he didn’t have that much faith in its ability to protect him. He turned and ran.

  Ahead of him rose a low cliff. On top of it, silhouetted against the setting sun, stood his jizo statues.

  There was a hole at the bottom of the cliff. Shovels lay cast aside, as if the soldiers had been in the middle of digging.

  Mendoza dashed past the hole. The cliff looked unclimbable. He tried to climb it anyway. Unexpectedly, his feet found invisible footholds. He fumbled at the cliff-face, grasped unseen protrusions of rock. Hauled himself up.