Unbounded Page 5
Mission Time: +339.75 Earth-years
Hard shadows cut across metal surfaces in the recovery room. Mbali squeezed her eyes shut a moment, then opened them again. Cold steam billowed from her recently vacated cryostat. Herds of Custodians swarmed the bulkhead around the bright opening, then poured over the lip. The robots' small, pyramidal bodies slid over the cryostat's interior lights and mottled the opposite bulkhead with dancing, fuzzy shadows.
Clean, warm, and dry, Mbali stared into a mirror for a moment. Her eyes pierced the gloom. She left the recovery room and walked along the ring, past other recovery rooms leading to other banks of cryostats, to a radial hatch. The spinship was mostly dark, but spotlights always kept her illuminated, fading in and out as she headed towards Command Sector. Red lights glowed in the black, marking the location of every door. She passed into Command Sector. The consoles of command began to glow; she ignored them and entered her office. The curved surface of her desk dripped with streams of data. Mbali looked at the flowing numbers and oscillating graphs, but her eyes soon wandered to the black door. It opened without manual effort, and she entered.
The chamber was an icosahedron of black, triangular paneling, studded with an occasional blue light. There was nothing in the room except one humanoid form standing in the center.
"Fai-tsiri. Why have we stopped here?" Mbali asked.
Dark carbon nanofibers snaked under a gray shell. "The relevant telemetry from the integrated Shimmercast probe received by Control four centuries ago has been sent to your desk," Fai-tsiri said.
"Just orally summarize the important data for me, if you would, please."
Fai-tsiri oriented her metal body towards Mbali. Finger-thick fibers ran out from under her pearly translucent face. " Unbounded orbits a 1.784 Earth-mass planet, 1.164 light-minutes from Gliese 674. Control deems this planet interesting. Unexpectedly, it is not tidally locked, with a day length of 15.5 Earth-hours. The maximum day surface temperature is 26.8 centigrade, whilst the minimum at night is -8.8. Surface gravity is 1.2 g, and surface pressure is 3.977 atmospheres. Cloud cover is 51.4%, hydrosphere cover is 100%, ice cover is 3.3%. Atmospheric composition is 96.8% nitrogen, 2.6% oxygen, 0.5% argon."
"So it's habitable but completely covered in water? We can't make arcologic sea-floor habitats."
"Correct. But sea-surface habitats can be built. However, the nitrogen and oxygen components of the atmosphere are most likely biogenic, though skiffs should be deployed to sample sea-water and confirm the presence of a microbial ecology."
"Very well. I shall send down a team as soon as they are awake and pass medical." She walked towards the door. It did not open.
"There is one more thing," Fai-tsiri said. "Shimmercast transmitted these images from the surface." Several triangular panels flipped to their opposite side, and a sunny seascape lit their surfaces. But something else was there.
Mbali's eyes widened. "What the hell are those?"
"Unknown. That is what Control wishes you to find out."
"Mbali?" The muffled voice called distantly from the other side of the metal door. It slid open.
Mbali came out and the door closed behind her. Ryder stood near her desk. Mbali positioned herself behind the desk. "What do you want?" she said quietly.
"To talk to you about what you asked me to do earlier. We should discuss--"
Her main office door opened, and Zhong entered. "What's he doing here?" he asked, frowning at Ryder.
Mbali did not respond to him, but to Ryder she said: "Just do whatever you have to do to get the job done."
Ryder headed for the exit. When he passed Zhong, he said: "It's my duty to document the mission, remember? I'm everywhere." Mbali and Zhong were still staring at him as he manually slid the office door closed. Others were beginning to drift into Command Sector. Ryder made his way to the medical bay. The low-ceilinged bay was dark, but yellow light and moving shadows were cast from the open laboratory.
Doctor Tai looked up from a lab table. "Again, Mr. Kask? Is the Coriolis effect still nauseous?"
"No, I'm fine, thanks," Ryder said. "I need to ask you some questions about what happened with Hemi, for the record."
"Ah, that."
"Yes, that. You didn't enter an official statement into your log."
Tai leaned on the lab table. "That's because Mbali was present. She made the official statement for the logs."
"I know. Were you asked to keep any mention of it out of your log?"
Tai moved around the table and closed the laboratory door. "What are you getting at?"
"I'm just trying to fully understand the whole Nikau-Hemi incident, and right now there are major gaps. All I know is who killed whom, but that's not enough for the historical records."
Tai sighed. "I think that might not be the case."
"You think that is enough?"
"No, I meant you don't know who killed whom." And Tai told Ryder the story of how he thought Hemi was acting suspiciously, which led to Hemi's arrest by Zhong, and then the strange summary execution in Mbali's office. "And this was mere minutes after she had declared all killing is wrong, no matter what the reason," Tai concluded. He paused and waited for Ryder's response.
"Clearly Mbali wanted to cover this up. You're breaking from her official story by telling me."
Tai nodded. "I trust you more than I trust her. Either she was ordered to execute Hemi by Fai-tsiri, which is a frightening thought, or she did it of her own volition, which is also unacceptable. In either case, I have lost my confidence in her."
Ryder nodded. "I see. But if what you say is true, don't you have a duty to come forward?"
"Come forward how? Chief Zhao was there, and he should be the one to assess if there is a threat to the mission. If someone were to decide something should be done, that someone would not be I. Though I suppose I'm kind of doing something now by telling you--and hopefully you can use the information for good, because it's not clear to me Zhao is doing anything. But ultimately, I'm not a player in this game--I have more immediate concerns, like getting this gene therapy to work. But if there's anything else you think I can do, don't hesitate to come to me. And be wary of trusting others."
"Of course. Thank you, Doctor. I know what I have to do now. Good luck with your medicine." Tai nodded, and Ryder left the laboratory. Tai left the lab door open and went back to work.
After a while, the medical bay door opened again. Tai could not see who it was, but put his tools down in anticipation. Tekoha appeared at the lab door.
"Ah, Tekoha. Are you quite alright? You still seemed rather upset during your post-stasis exam."
Tekoha leaned in the doorway with one hand. "I keep telling myself despite the travesty of leaving Glow Canyon too early, I can still write several papers based on the data we collected. That's my one consolation. But I'm not here about that." He stepped into the laboratory. "Mbali has promised to make it up to me. She has a set of coordinates mapped to the planet's surface and says we should go there immediately."
"What's there?"
"Apparently something major. I thought you should come along."
"Tekoha, you're the best biologist I have ever known. You might be needed on the drop, but I'm needed here. It is crucial I perfect the therapy for internal radiation resistance."
"Very well. I'm heading out, then." He went back through the door, but paused. "Oh, was Kask here just now?"
"Yes. Why?"
"What did he want?"
Tai glared at him.
"You know what, nevermind. I'll see you later." Tekoha crossed through the medical bay and walked along the ring until he found a radial tube, then made his way to the axis. He headed over to the next radial tube and descended to the skiff bay. Zhong and Ariki were already there, talking under bright lights near the Tawaki alcoves.
"Finally," Zhong said at his approach. "What took so long?"
"I had to use the head first. Why are you over here?" Tekoha indicated back to the Ke
a skiff across the bay.
"We're not taking that. We're going down individually in these." Zhong walked towards an open alcove of a Tawaki-class skiff.
"Then why did you have to wait for me?"
"Because we're going down individually together. Protocol. Strap in." The three of them climbed into their personal skiffs and let the automation take over.
The skiffs rained from the spinning ring, like three drops of water, into the world ocean.
Tekoha was staring at the projected view of water and clouds below, but his vision tunneled to near-darkness when the breaking thrusters fired. Gradually, his weight decreased to near-normal as cumuli came to tower over him; lifting his arm and waving his hand, he still felt slightly heavy. And then something rotated into view between his fingers. He was five hectometers above the water, moving at Mach 1 and slowing. He lowered his hand. At the broad horizon stood a structure, tall and thin.
"Uh, Zhong? Ariki?" Tekoha radioed.
"We see it," Ariki radioed back. "The location of the object corresponds to coordinates of interest flagged by Shimmercast."
"Could it have been formed by ... oh." As Tekoha approached the structure at seventy meters per second, he saw it could not be a natural geologic feature. Rooted below the water-level, the structure was bisymmetric, with flowing cut-lines and topological variations both soft and sharp.
"I'd like to get a full scan," Ariki said. "Head to the pinnacle and get into an equiangular formation. We'll go from top to bottom."
Tekoha instructed his skiff to ascend and decelerate. The others moved into position at the same time.
"What do you guys think it is?" Zhong asked. "A building? A monument?"
"An archaeologist like Kahu would probably call it a menhir," Tekoha said. They floated in a triangular formation around the flat, slanted pinnacle, over four hectometers above the water. The skiffs were close enough that they could see each other's blurred body shapes through the translucent sections of the skiff hulls.
"Yeah, a menhir made of finely machined metal," Ariki said. "There are actually more of them, if you look to the northeast. I make out at least two more on the horizon; I'd like to check them out when we're done with this one." They activated their scanning lasers and descended along the tower at ten meters per second. The menhir gradually widened in girth.
"The form detail does not persist at finer levels: here at the human scale, the surface structure seems smooth and featureless--although, from the way the lasers are reflecting, I think you would feel some texture if you were to touch it," Tekoha noted.
"I'm more interested in its function, rather than the details of its artistry," Ariki said.
They reached the water line and submerged slowly below smooth waves. "Taking a water sample now," Tekoha said. "Biomarkers detected. Scanning with a light microscope. Yes, there are unicellular organisms present. No evidence of multicellularity yet."
The underwater expanse was clear, sunny, and empty; the seafloor lay in shadow. They descended another hectometer with the green pulses of their laser beams now sharply delineated; as the menhir's girth increased, so did the skiffs' distance from each other. Sunlight dimmed, skiff lamps brightened.
"No sign of macroscopic metazoans yet," Tekoha said. "I think I can see the bottom now."
"What is that?" Zhong asked. He shined a bright lamp on a precipitated mineral chimney twenty meters from the base of the menhir. It belched black water.
"A sea vent," Tekoha said.
"I thought they were only found in abyssal plains or trenches," Ariki said.
"They are usually--on Earth. But we might be on an abyssal plain now--this planet could have very shallow oceans compared to Earth." The three skiffs reached the seafloor, completing the scan.
"Alright guys, let's move on to the next one," Ariki said. They rose to the surface, shot out of the sea, and flew fast above the waves to the other menhir. And when they reached it, another appeared on the horizon. They repeated the same procedure, again with similar findings, even down to a nearby hydrothermal vent. Again, another menhir loomed.
Tekoha opened a comm channel to Unbounded. "Tekoha to Mbali, come in please."
"Mbali here."
"How many artificial structures did Shimmercast detect?"
"Five. How is your data collection going?"
"All the menhirs--that's what we're calling them--appear to be the same. And they are all associated with a nearby sea vent, but there's no macroscopic life."
"Very well. Continue with collection and return to Unbounded when finished scanning the menhir."
Tekoha paused. Then he said "Is that Fai-tsiri's order?" But Mbali had already closed the channel. He grunted and swept down into the water and dove towards the seafloor.
"Tekoha, what are you doing? You're supposed to be getting into scan formation," Zhong said.
"Hold on, I have something else to do first."
"That's a protocol violation. You have to notify me before you do anything."
"Okay, I'm going to take a closer look at one of those sea vents. Consider yourself notified."
"Dumb melon! We have to go in with you," Zhong radioed back.
"Fine." Tekoha descended upon the three-meter tall chimney, and settled near the seafloor between the vent and the menhir. He circumnavigated the chimney and scanned it with lasers, then rested again at his original position. Beams of light from Zhong and Ariki appeared, brightly illuminating the area.
Tekoha extended a sampling rod past the turbulently refracted water until the probing sensor appeared highly distorted. "The water near the vent is ninety centigrade." He reached all the way into the billowing column of black fluid. "The vented water is about three hundred centigrade."
"I have a problem," Zhong said. "There's an electrical current on my hull."
"What? How strong?" Ariki asked.
"It's only three amperes, but ...."
"Now I have it too," Ariki said. "It's increasing to ten."
"I'm retracting my sampling probe," Tekoha said. "I have the same issue. What's happening?"
"It's induction," Ariki said. "I'm reading a magnetic field strength of seven hundred milliteslas, increasing by a hundred milliteslas per second. We have to get out of here whilst we still can."
"What's the source?" Zhong asked.
"Ha. I'll give you one guess," Ariki said.
"The menhir." Zhong said.
"No natural planetary phenomenon would cause it," Tekoha said as they broke the surface in long splashes. Hulls dripping, they accelerated up along the menhir. "The skiffs are well-insulated, but--"
"Field strength is nearing one tesla! Move away from the menhir! That's an order!" Zhong shouted over the radio. The skiffs spread out, up, and away.
"Mbali to landing party. What the hell is going on down there? I'm seeing some strange telemetry from your skiffs."
"The menhir began to generate a sizable magnetic field," Zhong replied. "We're putting some distance between us and it."
Ariki slowed his skiff to a crawl. "We're fine now. I'm holding at a distance of two kilometers--altitude eight hectometers." The others slowed as well. "I'd like to try an experiment. Mbali, are you reading me?"
"Yes, go ahead Ariki."
"If we disintegrate the Shimmercast orbiter, the nanites can explore the menhir's magnetism without risk to us. They may be able to give us a good idea of what is happening."
"Very well. I'll send the instructions to Shimmercast," Mbali said.
The landing party waited, drifting in the wind above the sea like frozen raindrops. After a few minutes, a small patch of sky darkened. A black funnel cloud descended towards the menhir. It gathered itself into a rough globule a few hectometers above, losing its funnel shape and roiling in turbulent textures. It churned surface noise patterns into higher octaves as it approached the menhir more slowly. Then it seemed to be pulled apart abruptly, spreading itself into curving sheets almost half a kilometer in diameter. The gauzy layers were lik
e a ghostly image of a black onion, filtering out sunlight into bizarre, noisy shadows on the ocean surface.
"The nanites are following the lines of force of the magnetic field," Ariki said.
"Amazing," Tekoha said. "Mbali, are you getting any useful telemetry from this?"
"We're getting something. I don't know if I would call it useful."
"Wait a moment .." Ariki said. The pall grew more tenuous around its equator and darker near the the poles, where the field lines converged. There was a brief flash of light within the nanite cloud.
"The telemetry stream just dropped its bit-rate by twenty percent," Mbali radioed.
There was another flash of light, and this time Zhong saw a short spark of lightning. "What's happening?"
"Electric currents are being induced in the--" Ariki was interrupted by several loud snaps as bolts of lightning flashed in the cloud.
"I think it's time to go!" Zhong said. The skiffs fired their engines and accelerated upwards as more lightning lashed out around them; some bolts struck the menhir, some the water.
"The electricity is frying the nanites," Mbali said. "We're not receiving any comprehensible data from them anymore. After your return, begin preparations for stasis re-entry."
Tekoha experienced an acceleration black-out. He was unconscious only for a couple seconds, but when he woke up, the sky was already darkening. He let the autopilot sweep him up to the spinship and dock on its own. He sat in his chair, frowning, as he waited for the decontamination procedure to complete its cycle in the small alcove. After a few minutes, the light went from red to normal. He glanced at the HUD. Unbounded internal scans had confirmed several times no alien microbes remained attached to his hull. The alcove opened to the main skiff bay, and he could see Ariki and Zhong walking by. But still he sat. Finally he stirred and slowly made his way to the main axis.
White paneling and black padding blurred past him; he did not stop at the section of radial hatches leading to the habitat ring. He continued to a large, black hatch in a lonely volume of the axis. He unsealed it, pulled it open, drifted through, and sealed it behind him. He was not in a tube, but a large space wrapped around the axis cylinder. Small blue lights blinked on stacked plates. He drifted deeper into the machine forest. Fans whirred, ozone diffused. Movement near one of the columns caught his eye. He grabbed a hand-hold.
"Is someone there?"
"Yes." Ryder floated into view.
"What are you doing here?" Tekoha pushed off the bulkhead towards him.
"Documentation duties." Ryder was moving his hand over a control panel, then slid the drawer closed.
"Bull." Tekoha arrived at the column and steadied himself next to Ryder. "What was that?"
"It has come to my attention there may be anomalous activities aboard this ship--not the least of which is the Hemi-Nikau incident. I'm just trying to clarify some things for the record."
"Hm. Then maybe you're not such an idiot after all."
"Really?"
"Probably not. I was just trying to say, I think you're right to investigate. I am too."
"What? The deaths?"
"No, I don't care about that. I'm talking about how science has been given short shrift on this mission. We didn't spend enough time at Glow Canyon. Encountering the spear-wielding cave animals is the most important thing that has ever happened to me in my life; and I would dare argue its greater importance to humanity as a whole. But now, the data I collected there are all the data I'll ever have of those magnificent creatures." Ryder nodded, and Tekoha continued. "And now we find technological artifacts on this world, and we get to spend even less time with them. I'm starting to wonder if something is amiss in Fai-tsiri's programming."
"I was too."
"You? Why would you have reason to think that? And you're not even supposed to be in the computer core, by the way."
"I wanted to know if Fai-tsiri ordered Mbali to execute Hemi, or if Mbali decided to do it on her own."
"Execute? What are you talking about? Hemi was killed by security in a scuffle."
"No. That's the official story, but that's not what happened."
The muscles on Tekoha's face changed, somehow drooping more in the microgravity. "Show me what you found."
Ryder slid the server drawer open again. "Nothing so far. I've never seen a programming language like this."
Tekoha looked at the short blocks of Globalese letters on the screen. "That's probably because this programming language was designed specifically for spinship computer systems. It's relatively new."
"Oh? Who actually wrote the Fai-tsiri program?"
"Global Unity government AIs wrote the AIs who administrate GUSA, and a committee of those AIs wrote Mission Control, and finally Control wrote Fai-tsiri."
"So, she's a fourth generation AI."
"At least, yes."
"Then how do we ever untangle this? I mean, who knows what's really in this code?"
"A lot of people do. We don't trust our AIs on blind faith. Different sections have been looked at by different people, and small-scale simulations done with various chunks. No one person knows the whole volume of code, but you can always find someone who knows any particular section of the code. I can read some of it, but it's rather difficult for me."
"How do you know so much about programming? I thought you were a biologist."
"You really are an ignoramus, aren't you? Every biologist is also a programmer. It's a requirement of the field. I even have an algorithm named after me, which I invented. In my work back on Earth, I often simulated the possible evolutions of terrestrial biospheres." He continued to scroll through the blocks of computer code. "These are raw data from mission telemetry, not Fai-tsiri's code."
"Okay. But if the programs like Fai-tsiri are so large and complex, how do we know what their true intentions are? I mean, AIs have become so sophisticated, isn't it possible Fai-tsiri is a 'true AI'?"
Tekoha chuckled. "You're thinking of SI. True AI has been around since the Twentieth Century."
"Huh?"
"AI is artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence--by definition, it is not true intelligence. True intelligence, created artificially, is called Synthetic Intelligence. And no, I don't think Fai-tsiri is an SI. Even if you could somehow code for a program with conscious experience, we don't have hardware powerful enough to run it."
"But if the AI is sophisticated enough, it might appear to be so human-like, it would be practically the same."
"Something appearing to be the same does not mean it is the same. Two substitutable entities are necessarily equivalent, but not necessarily the same. It shouldn't take a super-AI to parse such basic logic. Although I suppose I should give you some credit, because it depends on what is meant by 'actual' intelligence. Most people include consciousness in that concept. The problem is that I can't even prove other humans are conscious, let alone digital computers. So, practically, it may become irrelevant whether a system is conscious, or 'actually' intelligent. The only thing we can ever observe is behavior."
"Okay, I think we're getting off track. What I really want to know is--could there be something in Fai-tsiri's programming which motivates her to go against our wishes?"
"I really don't think so. I have seen simulations which tested Fai-tsiri's ethical functions. I know she would never take actions harmful to humans because ..." Tekoha trailed off, enraptured by what he saw on the server screen.
"What? What?"
"The timestamps on these strings--these data were collected when we were in the Wolf 1061 system."
"Yeah, so?"
"So this string contains data written from Flamecast telemetry. And here. These numbers are familiar."
"Familiar how?"
"I just saw them. In my skiff. These numbers--are measurements in meters. They are the dimensions of the menhirs. The artifacts we just investigated."
"How can you figure that out from this mess?"
"I'm telling you, I recognize this seq
uence of numbers. It's too much to be coincidence."
"But you just said these data are from Wolf 1061."
"They are."
"So you're saying ..."
"There were menhirs on Rock Garden."
"No, that's impossible. We would have seen them."
"Would we? All spinship sensor data and probe telemetry are managed by Fai-tsiri."
"I thought you trusted her."
"I didn't say that. I said she would never harm human beings."
"So, you think she's hiding things from us?"
"That's an understatement. I think we're being kept in the dark. And we have no idea what this mission is really about."