The Luna Deception Read online

  Jun’s projection materialized on the darkened bridge. It did not bother to give the appearance of coming through the door, since no one was observing it. Strictly, there was no need for the projection at all. But if free will didn’t mean the freedom to be a little bit picky about aesthetics, what did it mean?

  In his former life, Jun had helped to build a cathedral. They’d decorated its spires with statues of saints, out in the vacuum. Electroplated them with gold. It didn’t matter if no one ever saw it. It mattered that you did it. To magnify the glory of God.

  Booted toes dangling, the projection drifted towards the sleeping man. It hung over him for a subjectively long time.

  Kiyoshi did not stir.

  Grief etched the projection’s face. Turning in the air, it floated over to the refrigerator in the corner. It gave the fridge a kick, a typically human expression of loathing. Its insubstantial foot made no impact at all, of course.

  The silent messages sent from the hub of the Monster to the refrigerator’s smart core did have an effect.

  Wakey wakey, Jun chanted tiredly. Combat stations, you fiend in fridge’s clothing.

  ~Being withholds itself to the point of absence, sniffed the thing in the fridge.

  ~Yeah, whatever. I know you. How well he did know it. Each byte of knowledge bought with new and bitter experiences of loss. You’re always up for a fight.

  ★

  “So, let me get this straight,” the boss-man said. “You raided a space station belonging to Hope Energy. Stole one of the shuttles they were using to deliver the nanoprobes. Tangled with some daredevil Mars explorers. Got shot at, nearly got Father Tom killed, and wound up destroying the space station. Yeah, OK, I understand that that technically wasn’t your fault. You’ll still be blamed for it. And on top of that, Kiyoshi ransomed the shuttle back to the Hope guys for a paltry three million? You haven’t even got the fucking thing anymore?”

  “That’s right, sir,” Jun said.

  “I am completely fucking speechless. Every time I think Kiyoshi has settled down, he goes and does something even crazier than the last time. This is why I love the guy. Let me talk to him. I’d like to congratulate him myself. I hate Trey Hope. I’m only sorry his son didn’t manage to fly off to Mars and get himself killed. I saw on the news that he broke his back, quote, in a skiing accident, unquote. So put Kiyoshi on.”

  “He’s sleeping.”

  “Yeah? Or are you covering for him, Jun? Is he back on the junk? I’ve noticed a certain look in his eyes lately.”

  The conversation was proceeding at a leisurely pace. Twenty-seven light minutes separated the speakers. This inconvenienced neither of them. The shaggy-bearded man known to his followers as ‘the boss’ was running on a treadmill in a centrifuge on an asteroid 430 million kilometers from Earth. Jun was overseeing a vicious virtual combat between the Ghost and a version of himself.

  Not wanting to discuss Kiyoshi’s drug use, he said, “Just to update you on our present status, sir. Twelve hours have passed since the destruction of the space station. We’re idling at these coordinates [attached], employing the minimum thrust necessary to maintain a libration orbit around the L2 Earth-Moon Lagrange point. At our current velocity we will complete one orbit in two weeks. Pretty much every Star Force ship that could be spared from the Mercury salvage operation is scouring this volume for the destroyer of the space station. Thousands of sprites and drones have also been dispatched from Luna. You may have noticed some media speculation that it was a PLAN attack. That’s why the overkill. However, they won’t find us. I have the Ghost engaged. Transmitting like this technically breaks our stealth, but I thought it was important to let you know we’re OK. I’m 98% confident that our signals will be overlooked amid the muck of signals emitted by the ships and machines engaged in the search. But just to be on the safe side, I’ll enforce radio silence after we finish this conversation, and I will continue to operate in stealth mode until the search is called off.”

  When he heard this, the boss-man raised his eyebrows. “Can you do that, Jun? Operate the Ghost continuously? I thought it was only for run-like-hell scenarios.”

  “Yes.”

  The monosyllable was all he could spare for the boss. His repo’s imaginary combat with the fiend in the fridge had flared up, requiring a greater allocation of resources.

  What does it take to distract the attention of an ASI? This: a space battle in a single-use sim so detailed as to pass for the actual universe; a battle which must be just different enough from the last one to allay suspicion, but which, like the last one, you must lose.

  Jun’s challenge this time was to lose incrementally, buying more time than ever before. Time during which the searchers could not find the Monster.

  In the astrogator’s couch, his alternate self (a lite version, but sentient in its own right) scratched at open sores on its face.

  The boss-man’s gaze tracked to the repo, as Jun called these alternate selves (short for repository). “That’s fucking disgusting, Jun,” he complained. “Why do you do that? The projection. It’s not strictly necessary, is it? I mean, it’s all happening—” he gestured vaguely— “somewhere in there; in that trillion-core processing array we bought you. So why the graphic depiction of suffering? Does it mean something?”

  “If freedom of will doesn’t mean the freedom to indulge in superfluous aesthetic flourishes,” Jun answered, “what does it mean?”

  “Oh Christ, forget I asked.” The boss-man’s gaze jumped about. “Let me talk to Father Tom, anyway. I’d like to verify that that mad Irish bastard is in one piece.”

  Father Tom came onto the bridge, still a bit gray in the face, but on the mend. “Thank God for modern medicine.”

  “Thank Derek Lorna,” the boss-man responded. “His Leadership in Robotics Institute holds the patents on a lot of the medical technology that saved your life. Ironic, huh?”

  During the time it took for Father Tom’s remark to reach 99984 Ravilious, and for the boss-man’s response to reach the Monster, Father Tom—less indulgent than Jun—had been attempting to wake Kiyoshi up. He’d first tried speaking to him sharply. Then waving a donut under his nose. Then pulling his blankets off. Jun had warned the Jesuit that he was liable to tear his sutures. But Father Tom had not given up. He’d fetched a 10-liter jerrycan of the water that Jun had recycled for his plants, and emptied it over Kiyoshi’s head.

  “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 c
all 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 Fat
her 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 …”