Stephen Baxter - Last and First Contacts

Freddie and Allen went through the station’s systems. They quickly established that the station’s housekeeping was functioning. Air conditioning, water recycling still worked, and the lamps still glowed over the hydroponic banks.

‘So we’re not going to starve,’ Allen said edgily.

‘But the AI’s higher functions are locked out,’ Freddie said. ‘There’s no sign Aeolus is monitoring the Atlantic weather systems, let alone doing anything about them. And meanwhile comms is down. How long before anybody notices we’re stuck here?’

‘People don’t want to know what goes on with these hideous old systems,’ Allen said. ‘Even in my department, which is nominally responsible for them. Unless our families kick up a fuss, or another hurricane brews up, I don’t think anybody is going to miss us for a long time.’

Fortune snorted. ‘Bureaucracies. The blight of mankind.’

Allen growled, ‘You’ve got some explaining to do, Fortune. Like why you ordered up a hurricane.’

‘I didn’t think it would kill anybody,’ Fortune said weakly. ‘I did mean to smash up Cape Canaveral, though. I wanted to get your attention.’

Freddie asked, ‘Couldn’t you have found some other way?’

Allen said dryly, ‘Such as waggle the solar panels?’

Fortune grinned. ‘Aeolus is compliant. When you have a god at your command, it is terribly tempting to use him.’

‘So you created a storm,’ Allen said, ‘in order to bring somebody up here. Why, Fortune? What do you want?’

‘Two things. One. I want my exile to end. A century is enough, for Christ’s sake, especially when I committed no crime. I’d like some respect too.’ He said to Freddie, ‘Look at me. Do you think I did this to myself? My parents spliced my genes before I was conceived, and engineered my body before I was out of the womb. I haven’t committed any crime. I am a walking crime scene. But it’s me your grandfather punished, Allen. Where’s the justice in that?’ There was a century of bitterness in his voice.

‘And, second. Bella. My sentence, such as my quasi-legal judicial banishment is, clearly wasn’t intended to punish her. She needs to be downloaded into an environment that affords stimulation appropriate for a sentience of her cognitive capacity. Not stuck up here with an old fart like me. As in fact your own namby-pamby sentience laws mandate.’

‘All right,’ Freddie said. ‘But what is Bella? You didn’t create her, did you?’

‘No.’ Fortune smiled at Bella. ‘But I saved her.’

Freddie nodded. ‘A, B, C.’

Allen snapped, ‘What are you talking about?’

Freddie said, ‘There weren’t just two poles of consciousness in the station AI, were there, Fortune? AxysCorp went even further. They created a mind with three poles. A – Aeolus. B – Bella. C – Cal.’

‘Oh, good grief.’

‘B was actually the user interface,’ Fortune said. ‘Charming, for an AxysCorp creation. Very customer-focussed.’

Freddie said, ‘Somehow Fortune downloaded her out of the system core and into this virtual persona.’

‘I had time to figure out how, and nothing else to do,’ Fortune said sternly. ‘I’m extremely capable. In fact I’m wasted up here. And I had motivation.’

‘What motivation?’

‘To save her from Cal…’

Inside AxysCorp’s creation, three centres of consciousness had been locked into a single mind, a single body. And they didn’t get on. They were too different. Aeolus and Bella embodied executive capabilities. Cal, an artefact of basic engineering functions, was more essential. Stronger. Brutal. They fought for dominance. And it lasted subjective megayears, given the superfast speeds of Heroic-age processors.

‘Cal crushed Bella. Tortured her. You could call it a kind of rape, almost. He did it because he was bored himself, bored and trapped.’

‘You’re anthropomorphising,’ Allen said.

‘No, he isn’t,’ Freddie said. ‘You need to read up on sentience issues, Doctor.’

‘I had to get her out of there,’ Fortune said. ‘This isn’t the right place for her, in this shack of a station. But better than in there, in the processor.’

Allen asked, ‘So why did Cal chuck away our shuttle?’

Fortune said, ‘Because you said you would kill Aeolus.’

‘You said they fight all the time.’

‘Do you have a brother, Allen? Maybe you fought with him, as a boy. But would you let anybody harm him – kill him? Cal defends his brother – and indeed his sister if he’s called on.’

Allen clapped, slow, ironic. ‘So, Fortune, even stuck up here in this drifting wreck, you found a way to be a hero. To save somebody.’

Fortune’s face was dark. ‘I am a damn hero. We were told we were special – the peak of the Heroic-Solution age, they said. We were the Singularity generation. A merger of mankind with technology. We would live forever, achieve everything. Become infinite, literally.

‘And, you know, for a while, we grew stronger. We were transported. Rapt. There aren’t the words. But we got lost in our data palaces, while the rest of the world flooded and burned and starved. And we forgot we needed feeding too. That was the great fallacy, that we could become detached from the Earth, from the rest of mankind.

‘In the end they broke into our cybernetic citadels and put us to work. And they made us illegal retrospectively, and imprisoned us in places like this. Now we’re already forgotten. Irrelevant, compared to the real story of our time. AxysCorp and their ugly machines.’

‘That’s life,’ Allen said brutally.

‘This is Aeolus.’ The thin voice spoke out of the air.

Fortune snapped, ‘Aeolus? Are you all right?’

‘I don’t have much time. Cal and I are in conflict. I am currently dominant.’

‘Aeolus—’

‘I restored communications. I contacted your Oversight Panel, Doctor Allen. I received an assurance that a second shuttle will shortly be launched. The shuttle will have grappling technology, so Cal won’t be able to keep it out. But Cal is strong. I can contain him but not subdue him. Mister Fortune.’

‘Yes, Aeolus?’

‘I fear it will be impossible to fulfil further objectives.’

Fortune looked heartbroken. ‘Oh, Aeolus. What have I done?’

‘As you know I have always fulfilled all programme objectives.’

‘That you have, Aeolus. With the greatest enthusiasm.’

‘I regret—’

Silence.

Allen blew out his cheeks. ‘Well, that’s a relief.’

Bella was wide-eyed. ‘Am I really going to Earth? Is a shuttle really coming? I’m going to go look out for it.’ She ran out of the bridge.

The three of them followed Bella to the observation blister, more sedately.

‘Saved by a god in the machinery,’ Freddie said. ‘How ironic.’

‘What an end,’ Fortune whispered. ‘Two halves of the same mind locked in conflict for a subjective eternity.’ He seemed old now, despite his youthful face. ‘So it’s over. What will become of Bella?’

Allen said, ‘Oh, they’ll find her a foster home. There are far stranger minds than hers in the world, in the trail of tears left behind by AxysCorp and their like. We try to care for them all. The station’s screwed, however. In the short term I imagine we’ll reposition another Tempest to plug the gap. Then we’ll rebuild. And we’ll let this heap of junk fall out of the sky.’

‘But not before we’ve come back to save Aeolus and Cal,’ Freddie said.

‘You’re kidding,’ Allen said.

‘No. As Fortune points out, it’s actually mandatory under the sentience laws, just as it is for Bella.’

‘I’d like to see Aeolus spared that hell,’ Fortune said. ‘As for Cal, though, that deformed savage can rot.’