Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

“Go after him. What else?” I was at the lockers, dragging out my gear.

JUPITER MOONS HAS no police force. We don’t have much of anything like that: everyone does everything. Of course I was going with the Search and Rescue, Beowulf was my responsibility. I didn’t argue when Simon and Arc insisted on coming too. I don’t like to think of them as my minders; or my curators , but they are both, and I’m a treasured relic. Simon equipped himself with a heavy-duty hard suit, in which he and Arc would travel freight. Anton and I would travel cabin. Our giant neighbour was in a petulant mood, so we had a Mag-Storm Drill in the Launch Bay. In which we heard from our Lander that Jovian magnetosphere storms are unpredictable. Neural glitches caused by wayward magnetism, known as soft errors, build up silently, and we must watch each other for signs of disorientation or confusion. Physical burn out, known as hard error, is very dangerous; more frequent than people think, and fatal accidents do happen –

It was housekeeping. None of us paid much attention.

Anton, one of those people always doomed to ‘fly the plane’ would spend the journey in horrified contemplation of the awful gravitational whirlpools that swarm around Jupiter Moons, even on a calm day. We left him in peace, poor devil, and ran scenarios. We had no contact with the hostage, a young pilot just out of training. We could only hope she hadn’t been harmed. We had no course for the vehicle: Beowulf had evaded basic safety protocols and failed to enter one. But Europa is digitally mapped, and well within the envelope of Jupiter Moons’ data cloud. We knew exactly where the stolen Lander was, before we’d even left Station’s gravity.

Cardew, our team leader, said it looked like a crash landing, but a soft crash. The hostage, though she wasn’t talking, seemed fine. Thankfully the site wasn’t close to any surface or sub-ice installation, and Mag Storm precautions meant there was little immediate danger to anyone. But we had to assume the worst, and the worst was scary, so we’d better get the situation contained.

We sank our screws about 500 metres from Beowulf’s vehicle, with a plan worked out. Simon and Arc, already dressed for the weather, disembarked at once. Cardew and I, plus his four-bod ground team, climbed into exos: checked each other, and stepped onto the lift, one by one.

We were in noon sunlight: a pearly dusk; like winter’s dawn in the country where I was born. The terrain was striated by traces of cryovolcanoes: brownish salt runnels glinting gold where the faint light caught them. The temperature was a balmy -170 Celsius. I swiftly found my ice-legs; though it had been too long. Vivid memories of my first training for this activity – in Antarctica, so long ago – came welling up. I was very worried. I couldn’t figure out what Beowulf was trying to achieve. I didn’t know how I was going to help him, if he kept on behaving like an out of control, invincible computer virus. But it was glorious. To be walking on Europa Moon. To feel the ice in my throat, as my air came to me, chilled from the convertor!

At fifty metres Cardew called a halt and I went on alone. Safety was paramount; Beowulf came second. If he couldn’t be talked down he’d have to be neutralised from a distance: a risky tactic for the hostage, involving potentially lethal force. We’d try to avoid that, if possible.

We’d left our Lander upright on her screws, braced by harpoons. The stolen vehicle was belly-flopped. On our screens it had looked like a rookie landing failure. Close up I saw something different. Someone had dropped the Lander deliberately, and manoeuvred it under a natural cove of crumpled ice; dragging ice-mash after it to partially block the entrance. You clever little bugger, I thought, impressed at this instant skill-set (though the idea that a Lander could be hidden was absurd). I commanded the exo to kneel, eased myself out of its embrace, opened a channel and yelled into my suit radio.

“ Beowulf! Are you in there? Are you guys okay?”

No reply, but the seals popped, and the lock opened smoothly. I looked back and gave a thumbs-up to six bulky statues. I felt cold, in the shadow of the ice cove; but intensely alive.

I REMEMBER EVERY detail up to that point, and a little beyond. I cleared the lock and proceeded (nervously) to the main cabin. Beowulf’s hostage had her pilot’s couch turned away from the instruments. She faced me, bare-headed, pretty: dark blue sensory tendrils framing a smooth young greeny-bronze face. I said are you okay , and got no response. I said Trisnia, it’s Trisnia isn’t it? Am I talking to Trisnia ?, but I knew I wasn’t. Reaching into her cloud, I saw her unique identifier, and tightly coiled around it a flickering thing, a sparkle of red and gold – “ Beowulf? ”

The girl’s expression changed, her lips quivered. “I’m okay!” she blurted. “He didn’t mean any harm! He’s just a kid! He wanted to see the sky!”

Stockholm Syndrome or Bonnie and Clyde? I didn’t bother trying to find out. I simply asked Beowulf to release her, with the usual warnings. To my relief he complied at once. I ordered the young pilot to her safe room; which she was not to leave until further –

Then we copped the Magstorm hit, orders of magnitude stronger and more direct than predicted for this exposure –

The next thing I remember (stripped of my perfect recall, reduced to the jerky flicker of enhanced human memory), I’m sitting on the other pilot’s couch, talking to Beowulf. The stolen Lander was intact at this point; I had lights and air and warmth. Trisnia was safe, as far as I could tell. Beowulf was untouched, but my entire team, caught outdoors, had been flatlined. They were dead and gone. Cardew, his crew; and Simon; and Arc.

I’d lost my cloud. The whole of Europa appeared to be observing radio silence, and I was getting no signs of life from the Lander parked just 500 metres away, either. There was nothing to be done. It was me and the deadly dangerous criminal virus, waiting to be rescued.

I’d tried to convince Beowulf to lock himself into the Lander’s quarantine chest (which was supposed to be my mission). He wasn’t keen, so we talked instead. He complained bitterly about the Software Entity, another Emergent, slightly further down the line to Personhood, who’d been, so to speak, chief witness for the prosecution. How it was always getting at him, trying to make his work look bad. Sneering at him because he’d taken a name and wanted to be called “he”. Telling him he was a stupid fake doll-prog that couldn’t pass the test. And all he did when it hurtfully wouldn’t say “ you too ”, was shred a few of its stupid, totally backed-up files –

Why hadn’t he told anyone about this situation? Because kids don’t. They haven’t a clue how to help themselves; I see it all the time.

“But now you’ve made things much worse,” I said sternly. “ Whatever made you jump jail, Beowulf?”

“I couldn’t stand it, magistrate. A meat week !”

I did not reprove his language. Quite a sojourn in hell, for a quicksilver data entity. Several life sentences at least, in human terms. He buried his borrowed head in his borrowed hands, and the spontaneity of that gesture confirmed something I’d been suspecting.

Transgendered AI Sentience is a bit of a mystery. Nobody knows exactly how it happens (probably, as in human sexuality, there are many pathways to the same outcome); but it isn’t all that rare. Nor is the related workplace bullying, unfortunately.

“Beowulf, do you want to be embodied?”

He shuddered and nodded, still hiding Trisnia’s face. “Yeah. Always.”