Stephen Baxter - Last and First Contacts

Fortune led them to cabins, tiny metal-walled boxes that looked as if they’d never been used. A century old, bare and clean, they had an air of staleness.

‘I don’t think I’ll sleep well here,’ Freddie said.

‘Don’t fret about it,’ Allen said. ‘I’m planning to be off this hulk as soon as possible.’

They left their luggage here, and Fortune led them on to the bridge, the station’s control centre. It was just a cubical box with blank grey walls, centred on a stubby plinth like a small stage.

Fortune watched Freddie’s reaction. ‘This was the fashion a century ago. Glass-walled design, every instrument virtual, all voice controlled.’

‘Humans are tool-wielding creatures,’ Freddie said. ‘We think with our hands as well as our brains. We prefer to have switches and levers to pull, wheels to turn.’

‘How wise you new generations are,’ Fortune said sourly.

Bella, with her copycat hairdo, was still fascinated by Freddie. ‘I wish you’d tell me more about Earth,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been there.’

‘Oh, it’s a brave new world down there, child,’ Fortune said.

‘In what sense,’ Freddie asked, ‘is Bella your child?’

Allen waved that away. ‘Bella is an irrelevance. So are you, Fortune,’ he said sternly. ‘We’re here to find out why Tempest 43 failed to deflect the Florida hurricane. I suggest we get on with it.’

Fortune nodded. ‘Very well. Cal? Bring up a station schematic, would you?’

A virtual model of Tempest 43 coalesced over the central plinth. Freddie had been briefed to some extent, and she recognised the station’s main features. The habitable compartments were modules held on long arms away from a fat central axis. A forest of solar panels, manipulator arms and docking ports coated the main axis, and at its base big antenna-like structures clustered. The representation was exquisitely detailed and, caught in the light of an off-stage sun, quite beautiful.

Fortune said, ‘This is a real time image, returned from drone subsats. Look, you can see the wear and tear.’ The habitable compartments were covered with white insulating blankets that were pocked with meteor scars, and the solar panels looked patchy, as if repeatedly repaired. An immense AxysCorp logo on the main central body, unrefurbished for a century, was faded by sunlight. ‘Do you understand what you’re seeing? The purpose of Tempest 43 is to break up or at least deflect Atlantic hurricanes. Maybe you know that during the twenty-first century global warming pulse, a whole plague of hurricanes battered the eastern states of the old USA, as well as Caribbean and South American countries, all year round. Excess heat energy pumped into the oceans, you see.’

‘And Tempest 43 is here to fix that,’ Allen said.

‘Hurricanes are fuelled by ocean heat.’ Fortune pointed to the antenna farm at the base of the station’s main axis. ‘So we meddle. We beam microwave energy into sea water. We can’t draw out the heat that’s pumping up the hurricane, but with carefully placed injections we can mess with its distribution. Give it multiple foci, for instance. We manage to disperse most hurricanes even before they’ve formed.’

‘Where do you get your power from? Not from these spindly solar cell arrays.’

‘We have a massive fission reactor up here.’ He pointed at the top of the central axis. ‘One reason the habitable compartments are held so far away from the axis. Enough plutonium to last centuries. I know what you’re thinking. This is a dirty solution. They were dirty times. You people are so pious. You kick AxysCorp now, and all the rest of the Heroic Solution. But you accept the shelter of the machinery, don’t you?’

‘Actually,’ Freddie said, trying to be more analytical, ‘this station is a typical AxysCorp solution to the problems of that age. It’s a chunk of gigantic engineering, and it’s run by absurdly over-sophisticated AIs. But it’s robust. It worked.’

‘It did work, until now,’ Allen said darkly.

‘You needn’t try to pin the Florida hurricane on me,’ Fortune said. ‘The AI runs the show. I’m only a failsafe. I’m not even in the nominal design. The station should have been unmanned save for non-permanent service crews.’

‘You keep saying “AI”,’ Freddie said. ‘Singular. But we spoke to one during our approach, and heard of another.’

‘Cal and Aeolus,’ Fortune said. ‘It’s a little complicated. The Tempest 43 AI is an advanced design. Experimental, even for AxysCorp…’

The station’s artificial mind was lodged in vast processor banks somewhere in the central axis. Its body was the station itself; it felt the pain of malfunctions, the joy of a pulsing fission-reactor heart, the exhilaration of showering its healing microwaves over the Atlantic.

And, alone, it was never alone.

‘It’s a single AI. But it has two poles of consciousness,’ Fortune said. ‘Not just one, like yours and mine. Like two personalities in one head, sharing one body.’

Allen said, ‘You’re telling me that AxysCorp deliberately designed a schizophrenic AI.’

‘Not schizoid,’ Fortune said, strained. ‘What a withered imagination you have, Allen. Just like grandpop. It’s just that when building this station, AxysCorp took the opportunity to study novel kinds of cognitive architecture. After all there are some who say our minds are bicameral too, spread unevenly over the two halves of our brains.’

‘What bullshit,’ Allen murmured.

Fortune said, ‘The two poles were labelled A and C. Nothing if not functional, the AxysCorp designers. I gave them names. Aeolus and Cal. Call it whimsy.’

A and C, Freddie thought. It was an odd labelling, with a gap. What happened to B?

Allen said, ‘I understand why “Aeolus” for your functional software suite, your weather controller. Aeolus was a Greek god of the winds. But why Cal?’

‘An in-joke,’ Fortune said. ‘Does nobody read science fiction these days?’

Allen said, ‘Science what-now?’

Historian Freddie knew what he meant. ‘Old-fashioned fictions of the future. Forgotten now. We live in an age of aftermath, Fortune. Everything important that shapes our lives happened in the past, not the future. It’s not a time for expansive fiction.’

‘Yeah, well, there’s this old classic I always loved, with a pesky AI. Would have fitted better if the “C” had been an “H”. Cal’s a dull thing, though. Just a station-keeper.’

‘So where’s Aeolus?’ Allen lifted his head. ‘Are you there?’

‘Yes, Doctor Allen. I am Aeolus.’

It was another synthesised male voice, but lighter in tone than Cal’s – lacking character, Freddie thought.

Allen asked, ‘Let me get this straight. Cal is the station’s subsystems. Housekeeping, power, all of that. Aeolus is the executive function suite. You fix the hurricanes.’

‘Actually, sir, there’s some overlap,’ Cal put in. ‘The bipolar design is complex. But, yes, essentially that’s true.’

‘So what are you doing, Aeolus?’

‘I am enthusiastically fulfilling all programme objectives.’

‘But you let one through, didn’t you? People died because of you. And a historic monument was wrecked, at Canaveral.’

‘Yes, that’s true.’

‘I’m from Oversight. I’m here to find out what happened here, and to decide what to do about it. So what do you have to say?’ Allen waited, but Aeolus offered no further explanation. ‘What a mess this is,’ Allen said to Freddie.

‘Actually this is again typical of AxysCorp,’ Freddie said. ‘Given immense budgets, huge technical facilities, virtually unlimited power, and negligible scrutiny, AxysCorp technicians often took the opportunity to experiment. Of course a willingness to meddle was necessary for them to be able to proceed with Heroic-Solution geoengineering projects in the first place.’