The Venus Assault Read online

  “”They’d probably have decided it was God’s will.” Dos Santos shrugged. Just like that, their moment of easy chit-chat was over. “Getting back to 11073 Galapagos. It was auctioned off as part of a job lot, purchased by Eisenwasser GmbH. But they never did anything with it, either, and I’ll tell you why in a moment. That brings us up to the present day. Kharbage, LLC recently found out about 11073 Galapagos and took it off Eisenwasser’s hands. Now they’re offering it to us.”

  Dos Santos flipped a file over to Elfrida’s screen. It opened to show a much better picture of the asteroid than the survey images in the database. Shaped like a squid, 11073 Galapagos boasted what appeared to be a scaly metallic surface. Accompanying text explained that the ‘scales’ were photovoltaic mesh. The entire asteroid was skinned in a vast solar array.

  “Wow,” Elfrida said. “How big is it?”

  “Only five kilometers at the long axis. But if you believe Kharbage’s estimate, which allegedly is based on self-reported data from the colonists themselves, there are thirty thousand people in there.”

  “Thirty thousand,” Elfrida repeated numbly. “Ma’am, isn’t this a job for, I don’t know, the peacekeeping forces?”

  “Send in the blue berets on some trumped-up piracy warrant, and hope they find enough evidence of wrongdoing to deport the whole colony to Ceres?”

  Guiltily, Elfrida nodded.

  “No, Goto. The peacekeepers have too much power out here as it is. I refuse to pander to creeping authoritarianism. On a more practical level, this job is obviously within the competence of the Space Corps, and I believe you’re capable of getting it done. That’s why I recommended you to Dr. Hasselblatter.”

  “But I … why me?”

  Dos Santos folded her screen down and reached over to fold Efrida’s, too, so that they were confronting each other without anything between them. The field director’s expression was warm, but there was an uncompromising glint in her brown eyes. Elfrida felt an inappropriate twinge. “Are you backing out, Goto? You can, you know. It won’t affect your career. I’ll just tell Dr. Hasselblatter—”

  I’ll just tell Dr. Hasselblatter. Those five words galvanized Elfrida. They were a guillotine blade suspended over her career and her dreams of Venus, no matter what dos Santos said. “No,” she blurted. “I’m happy to do it. I just feel like I need to know more … more …”

  “Well, I’m sure Dr. Hasselblatter will fill in the details.” Dos Santos’s folded-down screen pinged. “Oh God, here he is.”

  The executive director of the Space Corps appeared in 2D on their screens, as was customary for VIPs transmitting to remote locations, rather than suffer the indignity of wearing a generic phavatar. Far from providing more details, he merely retrod the ground of dos Santos’s pre-briefing, minus the jokes. He closed with an invitation for Elfrida to submit follow-up questions, but warned that she must use the same format he was transmitting in: real-time DNR (Do Not Record), with quantum-level signal encryption and an embedded auto-delete protocol, ensuring the transmission would evanesce if it were intercepted by anyone other than the intended recipient.

  “I’m sure you understand why we have to take these precautions. The colonists on 11073 Galapagos are said to be pureblooded pre-Fuji Japanese.”

  Elfrida clutched the arms of her ergoform. They thinned out to spindles in her hands. You couldn’t have a proper freak-out in one of these things. That was the point, of course.

  “This is potentially problematic for UNVRP. Of course they’d like to acquire the asteroid. It offers excellent ROI. But Space Corps believes it’s potentially unethical to leave these people at the mercy of a profit-focused corporation like Kharbage. LLC. We must find a good solution that is in keeping with UNVRP’s high ethical standards.”

  Dr. Hasselblatter logged off, leaving Elfrida with absolutely no clue whether she was expected to recommend the purchase or not.

  “What did he mean?” she wailed. “I don’t understand.”

  Dos Santos’s gaze was sympathetic, but her voice was crisp. “He meant that you’re expected to make an objective assessment and a recommendation that takes into consideration ethical as well as material factors. You’re well-qualified with plenty of experience. You’ll be fine.”

  Later, Elfrida tried to recall the number of times Dr. Hasselblatter had used the word ethical during his transmission. She counted at least twenty. But she didn’t know what that meant, either.

  With UNVRP’s interest in the asteroid confirmed, Kharbage, LLC sent over a file titled ‘11073 Galapagos CONFIDENTIAL.’ Elfrida confronted the materials with a feeling of hopelessness that changed imperceptibly, as she ploughed through them, into something resembling her original excitement.

  Even the asteroid’s new owners, who might be presumed to have the best data on it, knew less about its inhabitants than they did about the dark side of the moon.

  This would be an adventure.

  iii.

  “Oh, it’s you again,” said the captain of the Kharbage Can.

  Elfrida sighed. It was not surprising that she should be hitching a ride to 11073 Galapagos on a Kharbage, LLC ship. UNVRP relied heavily on its private-sector partners for transport, since the UN’s own Star Force had better things to do than chauffeur community liaison agents around the solar system. Kharbage, LLC operated several barges such as the Kharbage Can, but it only kept one at a time within effective-zero latency range of Botticelli Station, the same volume that 2934 Kreuset had lately vacated.

  What was surprising was that the captain had recognized her in a different suit. “How did you know it was me?” she said.

  “Body language. The way you twirl your hair. The fact that you honored us with your company at this lavish feast.” The captain gestured ironically at the blue berets and trekkies sitting hunched over the mess tables, snorkeling up rehydrated nutriblocks. “Most phavatar operators don’t bother to do that.”

  “Oh.” Elfrida felt a bit stupid. “Well, since we’re old friends, have you got any advice for me?”

  “About what? Pretending to eat without giving yourself away? Try chewing instead of just forking it down the disposal hatch.”

  Elfrida thought the captain’s own men and women could usefully take that advice. Then again, nutriblocks were better not tasted. “I’ll practise,” she said. “But I mean about these people on 11073 Galapagos. You’ve been there before.”

  The captain’s face, as dark and shiny as anthracite, turned serious. “Never inside. They’re exclusive. Think everyone’s out to get them.”

  “They sound like typical squatters.”

  “Except,” the captain said, “they’re right, aren’t they? Just because you’re paranoid …”

  “What?” Elfrida didn’t get it. “I’m not paranoid.”

  “It’s another old quote,” the captain said. “Joseph Heller.” He added, “Maybe you should be.”

  The captain was Nigerian, she thought. His name was Martin Okoli. He ate another chunk of nutriblock dressed up as beefburger.

  “Nice suit,” he added.

  “This old thing?” Elfrida riposted, flicking a realistic fingernail against the forearm of her new phavatar. It had slim feminine wrists. Its skin even had pores.

  “What is that, a stross-class?”

  “Yeah.” Elfrida had been assigned the new phavatar for the 11073 Galapagos job. It had been customized to mission specs at the UN’s Luna plant and secretly delivered to the Kharbage Can by a Hyperpony fast courier. “It’s the absolute last word in telepresence. It’s even got taste receptors. Which, to be honest, I could do without. This burger tastes like regurgitated seaweed.”

  “Cut us some slack, Agent. We’re just a recycling company, trying to make ends meet without the advantage of unlimited taxpayer funding.”

  That remark got Elfrida thinking about money. Money for rocks … money for recyclables … It was common knowledge that recycling outfits like Kharbage, LLC profited handsomely from UNVRP’s busines
s, regardless of whatever Martin Okoli said. Rumors of all sorts had swirled around the asteroid capture program since its inception, including the persistent one that it was a massive kickback scheme to benefit a) Ceres b) the private sector c) illegal AI research; pick one or all of the above …

  She shook her head at her own wandering thoughts. Captain Okoli was talking to her again.

  “I didn’t know the stross-class had even been rolled out yet.”

  “This is one of the first units. It’s so special it’s even got a name of its own: Yumiko Shimada.” Elfrida made the phavatar roll its eyes.

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “It introduced itself while you were sleeping the sleep of the just.”

  “Oh.” Of course. Yumiko Shimada was the name of the onboard MI assistant as well as this spendy chassis. Elfrida was still getting used to how smart the MI was. It could cover for her while she was not logged in, and also give her operational support while she was. In fact, it was trying to get her attention right now.

  ~I recommend that you watch out for this guy, it said in a soft, breathy voice that Elfrida, on her couch, heard through her headset. ~He’s trying to pump you for information about me. My specs are classified, so please don’t tell him anything he shouldn’t know.

  ~I don’t know your specs to rattle them off, even if I wanted to, Elfrida told the MI coldly.

  She disliked working with assistants, always had. But given the sheer scale of interplanetary distances, there was no alternative to MI-assisted telepresence for sensitive missions.

  Robots had been indispensable to the human colonization of space from the very beginning, and now were even more so. These days, machine intelligences (MI) were required by law to operate below the threshold of autonomy. That constraint, however, admitted a vast speciation of competences. There were housekeeping bots, self-driving cars, and wholly-automated mining rigs that could propel themselves through space and dismember an asteroid in 24 hours flat. There were robotic pets, sexbots, drones, sprites, phaeries, and climate daemons that seeded Earth’s clouds and moved her solettas around. There were armies of software-based MIs with no physical existence, such as tutors, secretaries, and paralegals. And then there were phavatars, a coinage from ‘physical avatar,’ which combined robotic and MI capabilities. They could either support human telepresence or function independently in the capacity for which they were designed.

  ~You can log out if you like, Yumiko suggested to Elfrida. ~It’s almost time for your break, anyway.

  She did have a legally mandated exercise break coming up. And she wanted to grab something to eat that didn’t taste like regurgitated seaweed. ~OK, she subvocalized. ~Be nice to Captain Okoli.

  ~Ha, ha! The MI’s laughter sounded realistic. ~I’ll try, but if he keeps prying, I might be just a tiny bit rude.

  ~Just be yourself. Joke, joke, Elfrida subvocalized. She logged out and went in search of a cheese sandwich.

  As the Kharbage Can coasted towards 11073 Galapagos, she had to rely more and more on Yumiko to manage her interactions with the ship’s personnel. Sometimes a two- or three-second lag was perfectly acceptable. Sometimes you had to react faster. Yumiko proved adept at stalling, utilizing her repertory of temporizing phrases, until Elfrida transmitted her reaction. Alternatively, she could react without reference to Elfrida, based on her growing dossier of Elfrida’s quirks and speech mannerisms. This function creeped Elfrida out. She would rather not have used the assistant at all. But 11073 Galapagos was presently twenty light seconds from Venus. She would have to get used to working with Yumiko Shimada. Did they have to give it a surname, too?

  iv.

  They even had conversations.

  ★

  Elfrida had grown up knowing that she was half-Japanese. Her father took a melancholy pride in it. Over her mother’s objections, he had insisted on immersion lessons that allowed her to experience life in the country she would never see, because it no longer existed.

  In 2235, Mount Fuji had erupted. Actually, to call this event an eruption was a severe understatement. The flood of lava from the volcano buried Tokyo. The accompanying earthquake broke windows in New York. Buckling the earth’s crust, it triggered a tsunami that inundated the archipelago. When the sea retreated, only the tops of the Japanese Alps remained recognizable. The rest of the country was a graveyard.

  “I was five years old,” Elfrida’s father, Tomoki, had once told her. “My parents both worked for the UN. We were living in Zululand. I remember my mother screaming, lying down on the floor. That’s my first memory, actually.”

  Elfrida, only five herself at the time of this conversation, had glanced worriedly at her own mother. Might Mom scream and fall on the floor without warning?

  “Don’t frighten her, Tommy,” Elfrida’s mother said.

  “She needs to know that the world is a frightening place … Hora! Don’t cry. It’s all right, it’s all right. It happened once, but it won’t happen again. They say it was a once-in-ten-million-years eruption.”

  When her mother had gone to work, Elfrida pestered him for more. After some prodding, Tomoki Goto began to speak of ghosts.

  “They’re still there. Seventy million of them, still trying to get away. If a Japanese person visits the islands, a ghost may attach itself to him and leave with him on the airplane.” Tomoki touched his torso, under his ribcage.

  “Don’t go to Japan, Daddy!”

  “I won’t. There’s no reason for me to go. My whole family is dead. My Baba and Jiji—my grandparents, your great-grandparents—my aunts and uncles, everyone.”

  Elfrida met some of those ghosts a year later in her immersion lessons. Tomoki Goto, a software artist, had tailored the off-the-shelf program using old vid data of his family. For an hour a day, she lived with Baba and Jiji—eliding a generation, she called them that—in Tokyo circa 2015. Of course, Baba and Jiji themselves had not even been born in that century. But it was the earliest setting the software supported, and Tomoki had blithely inserted his family into that era, preferring quaintness over accuracy.

  ~Didn’t he think about the effect it would have on your developing psyche? Yumiko asked her.

  ~What effect? Elfrida subvocalized. ~When I applied for this job, I passed my psychological evaluation on the first try. I didn’t even need any therapy.

  ~You learned to love the past, to see it as a safe and welcoming place. It wasn’t! In 2015, there were no less than seven wars going on. The death toll from the Arab Spring was nearing half a million. The annexation of Taiwan was only ten years off. Climate change and species-level extinctions were accelerating. The population of Earth was larger, sicker, and unhappier than it had ever been before.

  ~Well, it wasn’t like that in Japan.

  Yumiko remained silent for a few moments. Then she changed the voice Elfrida could hear in her headset to one as contrite as an MI could produce. ~Sorry if I offended you. It’s just that I get a bit passionate about these things. So many people have a rose-colored view of the past, and it just wasn’t like that. But I want you to know that I really do value your diversity. It gives you a perspective I think is incredibly useful in our work out here.

  Elfrida bristled at the patronizing bromides, and particularly that our. Yumiko often spoke as if she were an actual employee of the Space Corps, when in fact she had just rolled off the production line with a memory crystal full of pre-digested opinions.

  ~That’s fine. I just want to draw some boundaries here, Elfrida said. ~Respect my privacy, and I’ll return the favor. A weak joke, a peace offering. They had to work together.

  ~Deal, Yumiko said, without seeming to get it.

  ★

  In fact, growing up half-Japanese had been tougher than Elfrida let on. Every time the Gotos moved, the Chinese kids would try to recruit her, only to reject her, as if she were the one at fault, when they found out that she wasn’t half-Chinese but half-Japanese.

  Fuji had wreaked considerable
havoc on China’s urbanized east coast, adding a new grievance to the Middle Kingdom’s oft-replenished stock of grudges against its island neighbor. It was averred on the sinanet to this day that the Japanese had somehow done it on purpose.

  Incidental to that, reactions to Elfrida’s parentage generally fell into two camps: embarrassed silence, or pity. The latter was harder to bear. She rarely even dared to try and imagine what it must be like to be her father, a pre-Fuji pureblood.

  Pureblood.

  The term carried a complex charge of revulsion, envy, and mockery. History’s tangle had knotted it together with the fate of the Japanese, who’d preserved their ethnic homogeneity like a blind community preserving their treasured defect, right up until their extinction.

  ★

  ~What do you know about the Mars Incident? Yumiko asked her.

  ~What everyone knows. It happened in 2140. The AIs running the UN colony on Mars went berserk and killed millions of people because they’d read too much German philosophy.

  Yumiko laughed appreciatively. ~More or less. It was a nanoengineered tectonic event. The death toll was in the low five figures. And Mars was run at that time by the United States, not the UN.

  ~The United States?

  ~Of America. Oh, and it wasn’t just any German philosophy—

  ~I know that, Elfrida interrupted, but due to the signal delay, she still had to hear Yumiko saying Heidegger, a bad word—thanks to the philosopher’s role in the Mars Incident—that Elfrida had purposely avoided saying.

  Wanting to shut down the topic, she subvocalized brightly, ~ And that, boys and girls, is why we have restrictions on AI today.

  ~Ha, ha! I’m not that smart. Or, maybe you could say I’m smart enough not to waste my time marinating in Teutonic nihilism. Anyway, the reason I brought it up—

  Before the last words reached Botticelli Station, Elfrida had interjected, ~I’m also half-Austrian. My Viennese relatives are the happiest people I know. Not nihilistic at all.