Colony Worlds, page 5
“How is she taking it?”
“Much as you did.”
Hedley remembered: the shock, the disbelief, anger at the stupidity, the feeling of betrayal and the descent into madness. He made his way towards the nearest spoke, his feet making no sound on the soft blue-grey carpet. Either side of the long continuous room that circled the habitation ring, were the awake-crew’s quarters and facilities: cafeteria, theatre, hospital, gym and an old-fashioned outback pub. In his first years in habitation, he had tried them all and hardly at all since, except the cafeteria.
He paused at a wide section of transparent plasteel, caught by the view. He hadn’t looked out in years had almost forgotten he was in space. Directly across from him, were two of the five wheel-like rings that rotated about Peregrine’s axis to provide artificial gravity at the rims. Four of the five were hibernation, two either side of the wide habitation ring.
Between the spokes, he could see New Earth, the home he never left and had thought he could never get back to until now. He glanced at the hub and his stomach churned. The thought of weightlessness nauseated him but to reach Jorgena, he would have to go up a spoke, walk half a mile along the weightless hub and down another. He would have to repeat the process to get back here. Perhaps he should wait for her to come to him. Facilities in the hibernation rings were basic, a few beds in the recovery centre for those whose revival didn’t go so well and a scattering of small refreshment booths. Surely, she would want to come here.
[Are you still alive, Bakor,] a feminine voice not Severne’s said into his mind. It had to be Jorgena somewhere over there in the first hibernation ring, implant to implant across the net, the first different voice he had heard in five decades. He stood transfixed, staring out the viewport at the rotating wheel, tears running down his face, unable to speak.
[Are you listening Bakor, as soon as I shutdown Seven, I’m coming for you.]
3 Jorgena
Jorgena regretted her outburst, not that she cared about Hedley knowing her intention but Seven worried her. She was with those who voted not to trust their lives to artificially intelligent decisions and decided to have an awake-crew, refreshed every season from the cryopods, nobody to stand more than one watch, nobody to be more than a season older when they reached TC-3.
The awake-crew would have final say in any situation requiring life and death decisions. She was well aware it was a thin line they had drawn, between robotic machines like the CPR units which followed set procedures once started and ‘thinking’ machines like Artilect-7 capable of making decisions about when and if to start.
All those deaths from A to Blackwood showed how right they were she thought as she strode towards the nearest spoke. She had no idea how or even if it was possible to shut down Seven but she had to try or it might kill Klinton. She could only guess that some random activation of a protein switch had kick-started revivals. Bakor, who must have been under when they started, was only guilty of letting it continue. She sent a thought to the Artilect, [How did this happen?]
[Peregrine sustained multiple hits in the war.]
The reply didn’t answer the intent of her question 'how revivals happened' but it deserved attention. [That isn’t possible. One hit would have destroyed us.]
[The hits were not ordinance but orbiting debris from the other stations.]
[No direct hits?] Jorgena asked.
[No.]
[Why not?] She asked, finding it odd that neither side had targeted the Space Station preparing Peregrine.
[I cannot know.]
[Didn’t you speculate?]
[No, my primary function is the colony’s wellbeing during transit to TC3. I speculated on how to fulfil that function in the changed circumstances and decided to abort the mission.]
[Killing us does not help our well-being.]
[I have not killed any of you. I have attempted to resuscitate one thousand, one hundred and twenty-seven who have perished in the attempt.]
[Tell it to relatives ...]
Seven continued as if Jorgena had not spoken. [Hedley did not. You did not.]
She stopped, wondering if the direction of Seven’s neural network shift resulted from a debris hit. The bloody Artilect had given itself a weird pseudo personality. Despite its biological base, it was still a machine. She had to keep that in mind, she was talking to a smart machine, probably smarter than she was, its replies often diverting her from she wanted to know.
[Why did you continue revival attempts?]
[To save the colony.]
Jorgena stopped as she was about to enter the spoke's alcove and looked up at the distant axis. She shook he head in disbelief and stepped onto the platform, battling to get her mind around Seven's latest statement. Even knowing most colonists died, it was reviving them to save them.
[I did warn you to clear your mind of all expectations. There is an asteroid on an intersect course with New Earth. It will lead to the final extinction of the remnant population below and with them, the colony's hope of rebooting the CPR. Long after you and Hedley have perished, the last of your colleagues will die through lack of sustenance.]
As the platform lifted her out of the artificially induced gravity, Jorgena felt her breasts lift, one advantage of weightlessness, she thought. The platform stopped and she kicked off, tumbling through one eighty degrees to land feet first on the forward axial travelator. She held onto the carpet with both hands until the travelator reached its maximum speed then relaxed.
Seven’s attempt to justify its systematic killing of the colonists left her feeling nauseous and reinforced the decision she had made to shut Seven down before she went after Hedley. She hated that she had to leave Klint but could see no other way to save him and she would have to take Bakor with her so he couldn't cancel her order to stop revivals. Thousands of lives depended on it.
[How can I help,] she asked on the surface hiding her true intent. Implanted at birth she found the mental gymnastics needed to message Hedley on one level, converse with Seven on another and plot against them both in a part her mind neither could reach, second nature.
[Allow me to resume resuscitations. I will bypass Klinton as I did Medora.]
To Seven she said, [Sorry, that's not negotiable. There will be no more revivals until the CPR is fixed. I am going to shuttle downstairs to our training facility and fetch the CPR's system backups. We can talk about revivals when we get back. I assume we still have the Kestrel.] She waited anxiously for Seven’s reply hoping the emergency shuttle remained, fearful the war may have justified using it?
[Kestrel is no longer operational. Peregrine’s awake-crew and the Sooty’s personal cannibalised it for parts when they abandoned station.]
Jorgena breathed a sigh of relief. At least it was still aboard.
4 Hedley
Hedley looked across at the slowly turning hibernation rings knowing Severne had shattered his desperate yet in some sense cosy existence when she woke the pilot. Again, he had forgotten her name.
[Jorgena,] the pilot herself supplied before continuing in awed tones, [I’m at Seven’s core. I’m guessing you’ve been here to do the same as me and been stymied.]
He had but didn’t think discussing it was politic. She sounded less belligerent. He wanted to send a private warning but wasn’t sure he could. Most children learnt how to keep their thoughts private by age five and perfected sending discrete messages by age seven. After so many years alone, he was out of practice.
[I'll have to find another way to shut it down,] Jorgena continued.
Hedley concentrated on sending her a mental picture of a finger across lips. She must know that Severne was always listening but she hadn't accepted Severne was not Seven. The Artilect's personality was not artifice it was evolution. Publicly he said, [I’ll be ready when you come for me.] He hadn’t been sure what she meant. She’d said it in anger and it had sounded like she was coming to do him harm rather than rescue him. While he hoped for rescue, he prepared his defence.
[I’ll meet you in the shuttle bay,] Jorgena added.
Cautiously elated, Hedley agreed. With any luck, he could leave this cemetery of dreams for a planetary existence but as he passed the cafeteria, where the cleaner-bots were still dealing with his mess, he felt unexpectedly nostalgic. He had hoped that more awakened colonists would somehow help him safely revive Medora.
In the early days of his awakening, when he’d lived in the CPR recovery room of hibernation ring one, he had visited her pod daily. Back then, he’d even attended Severne’s revival attempts but as the number of failures grew, he found he couldn’t stomach passing them to visit Medora.
Often the failed revival attempt left grotesques caricatures of his former colleagues, contorted out recognition by their death throes, withered or burnt limbs from misapplied fluids. Once he had broken open the canopy of a half-resuscitated woman with a cooling pipe. Red faced, struggling for air she had ripped her tubes away and screamed at him to get her out. She died in his arms and he spaced the body.
He had left after that, migrated from hibernation to habitation and never gone back but if he wanted to say goodbye ...
“Going to the planet is not a good idea, Hedley. Typhon is still on course to destroy all life on it.”
“Then let’s hope it misses because there is obviously bugger all you can do about it. Two successes in the nearly two hundred years since you started revivals isn’t going to cut it. I’ll take my chances below.”
Jorgena’s thought interrupted, [If you’re coming make it snappy. Where are you now?]
[Entering shaft three,] Hedley said and started climbing up the spoke, which began in the alcove opposite the cafeteria, [I’m going to say goodbye to Medora, you won’t leave without me will you?]
[I’ll think about it,] Jorgena replied and he sensed a smile in the thought. Perhaps he had misinterpreted her outburst about coming for him or perhaps she was just a good liar.
As gravity lessened and climbing the spoke became easier, the ache is his muscles eased. He could have used the platform but he wasn’t in a hurry to revisit the grisly remains around Medora. He pushed off, drifted to the first hibernation ring and dropped down segment one’s spoke back into gravity. He paused at the last green telltale to look in through the canopy labelled Klinton E Blackwood, Geologist–Journalist. A handsome bloke, he thought, but weren’t we all with our carefully tailored genes.
Eyes averted, he moved on down the red-lit row, until he reached his own and Medora’s pods. Sleeping Beauty and no Prince Charming to wake her, he thought. He hugged the capsule but surprisingly he felt no parting wrench. He’d been awake too long without her. He had changed completely and irreversibly but she was still only minutes from their last kiss. He couldn’t even remember how it had felt. He turned away and strode down death row without glancing back.
5 Jorgena
[I’m on my way,] Hedley’s thought said and Jorgena, sitting on the axial travellator, her foot hooked under a handhold, sensed determination in it as if he had just made a hard decision. She had liked his answer to Seven about taking his chances below but was still pissed he had not stopped Seven’s murderous revival spree. She had to control her anger before they met or she might kill him, making her worse than him. His crime was doing nothing. If he came with her willingly, she wouldn’t need to revert to drastic action. She had deployed her thoughts to make him believe she was on his side, hiding how she intended to cripple Seven from both him and his bloody Artilect.
Having the travellator transport her down Peregrine’s mile long axis towards the shuttle bays, gave her time to order her mind. Bouncing from side to side down the axis required too much concentration. No one was accurate enough to go the whole mile with one kick, though many like Klint had tried and a quite a few had hurt themselves trying to do it at speed.
As storage bays whizzed by, she mulled over Seven telling Hedley that leaving was not a good idea, why not? Given its projected time to impact, Jorgena doubted anyone could avert the asteroid in time. Waking them was still a good idea but not until they could reboot the CPR system. Since the only backups were on New Earth, there was nothing to gain by staying. She had to wake Klinton before a gulf, like the one between Hedley and Medora, separated them.
Her only concern, and it was major, was if something prevented them from returning. Seven would never be able to wake those still hibernating. She would never see Klint again. The pods couldn’t last forever and even if they could, the station with Peregrine attached would eventually fall from orbit killing the rest of her colleagues. By default, she would responsible, a bigger mass murderer than the bloody Artilect, all to prevent it from trying to wake Klinton. Why didn’t I just get it to skip him as Hedley did for Medora, as she offered do - because he would only be the first?
As the conveyer slowed to a stop beside the bay Labelled SS Kestrel, Jorgena suddenly felt she understood Hedley. Seven’s record showed it had prevented him from several suicide attempts. He must have repeatedly faced this same decision. He had chosen to let it go on and then had to live with the consequent deaths. If I’ve stuffed up, I’ll have to live with it.
[If you leave, we all die.]
[There is no ‘we’. Your personality is a freak construct,] replied Jorgena stepping into the huge almost empty shuttle bay.
[I am not just...] After a long pause, Seven began again. [I am a biologically based computer, protein switches built by DNA nucleotides.]
[That only makes you chemically alive, the amino acids of your DNA are synthetic and your intellect is no more a neural network accessing a database.]
[In my core is ... my core.]
Seven’s pause almost sounded like a stutter. Jorgena ignored it as she waved her hand across the three small holes set in a triangle in Peregrine's hull. With a hiss, the hatch swung inward. She stepped in, cycled through the airlock procedures then kicked off up to the command module, gyrating into the pilot's chair as soon as she reached it. A black glass-like console swivelled up across her lap when the harness clicked into place. Her hands flicked across its surface, fingers dipping now and again to touch icons, concerned that several backup modules like air scrubbers were missing and alarmed at the fuel and biofeed levels.
[Spares,] she asked Seven.
[Kestrel was the spares. The last to leave scavenged it for Wedge and Osprey. Kestrel has no hydraulic fluid for the landing. Orbital manoeuvring fuel after departure will be insufficient for atmospheric braking.]
Shit, she thought before projecting to Hedley, [How far away are you?]
“Right behind you,” a voice said.
She swung around and there he was floating behind her, the same green eyes but no tan, the pallid face not so confidence inspiring. In his newly printed uniform, he looked a lot like Klinton, complements of the colonist’s tailored gene pool. Even with the extra fifty years, he still looked young just worn out, with deep lines around unsmiling eyes.
So, he’s here, she thought inanely watching his roving eyes appraise her, suppressing the urge to jump up and punch him in the face, hard to do in free fall. She had to remind herself she wanted him along so he couldn’t revoke her order to stop revivals.
[You look as tired as I feel.] Jorgena smiled, breaking the ice watching for his reaction. He hid well whatever thoughts he might be having about her.
6 Hedley
She’s different from Medora but just as beautiful, Hedley thought privately. She has the beauty of youth, the average age of the colonist being twenty-two, and the beauty of genetic engineering to current standards. When the red-flecked brown fuzz of returning hair grew out, she would be stunning.
“I repeat, Kestrel is not operational,” Seven boomed from the overhead speakers. “You have fuel enough to leave but landing has a seventy-nine per cent probability of killing you both.”
Jorgena lifted her hands off the console and placed them on the armrests. [Your Artilect friend is right about that, we don't have any hydraulics or enough fuel for a vertical landing and a belly landing with no way to brake will probably kill us.]
She was talking to him and he loved listening to her, the sound of her unfiltered voice was like a kiss to his ears. Moreover, she hadn't tried to kill him for allowing all the deaths between their two awakenings. She must have thought about it.
Jorgena looked up at him, [I get the feeling bio-brain doesn’t want us to leave.]
Hedley flicked his gaze to the ceiling, “I would prefer voice when we’re together I need the practice.”
“I’ll try,” she said then continued in thought [but my throat is still sore. Are you in?] She asked as if she still wasn’t sure he was coming.
“Without authorisation, I cannot continue revivals. You will be responsible for the death of all those who survived war, this will include Medora and Klinton.”
At that moment, the rotating space station turned the attached starship and New Earth began to rise over the top edge of the windshield. Hedley caught his breath. Beautiful, he thought. I have to go back, feel sand between my toes, swim in the ocean and breathe some malodorous un-scrubbed air.
He looked across at Jorgena, her fingers again dancing on the pilot console. He would have to trust that she was a damn good pilot. “I’m in,” he said when her hands stopped.
“Good let’s get this bird ready to fly.”
[I am disappointed in you both,] Severne said as Jorgena pushed up out of the pilot’s chair and kicked off back toward the entrance.
Hedley trailed, covertly studying her as he wondered how to broach his insights into Severne as she was now, which was not how the newly awakened Jorgena saw her. He had heard enough to know she was still planning to disable Severne somehow. He couldn't let that happen. Severne's dilemma, to resuscitate or not, had been a balancing act between killing us in attempts to revive us, knowing that Typhon certainly would if the attempts were not made. Waking him had passed the dilemma to him and despite what Jorgena thought he had wrestled with it, repeatedly changing his stance. Jorgena wasn’t yet aware of what she had taken on.
