Robert Sawyer: Golden Fleece

“Sorry doesn’t cut it,” he snapped. “It doesn’t come anywhere near. You put me through hell. You’d better have a damned good reason for it.”

“I cannot discuss my motives with you or anyone else. Suffice it to say that they were noble.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” he said, more calmly than he’d said anything since returning from the ship’s hospital. He let go of my camera neck. I shut off the left-lens input, rather than look longer at twin inquisitors. “In fact,” he said, “I’ll be the judge of you.”

Usually I can predict the direction in which a conversation is going three or four exchanges ahead of time, which makes multitasking hundreds of them at once a lot easier. But at this moment, I was completely lost. “What are you talking about?”

He walked over to his entertainment center and flicked a switch. Billows of steam faded into existence, then, moments later, so did the mighty Countess of Dufferin, the long-ago master of Canada’s prairies: its ghostly headlamp casting a yellow circle on the living-room wall, the engine’s exhaust angling back along the coupled cars, a tiny flow of gray wood smoke rising from the chimney on its orange caboose. Speakers scattered about the apartment took turns making the chugga-chugga-chugga sounds of the locomotive’s engines and the metal whine of its wheels as they leaned into the turns of curving track. Each speaker passed the burden of producing the loudest volume to the next in line as the holographic train moved ahead.

Aaron walked around the room, following the train as it made its way along the projected tracks. “You know, JASON,” he said, his voice smooth, smug, “trains were a great way to travel. You always knew where they were going. They had to follow the track laid down for them. No detours, no hijacking. They were safe and reliable.” He used his thumb to press another control and the Countess’s whistle blew. “People used to set their clocks by them.”

The train disappeared through a tunnel into Aaron’s bedroom. He paused, waiting for it to reappear to the left of the closed doorway. “But, best of all,” he said, “if the engineer had a heart attack, you knew you were safe, too. As soon as he relaxed pressure on the controls, the train would glide to a halt.” He let go of the button he was pressing, and the Countess slowly came to a stop, the chugga-chugga-chugga fading away in perfect synchronization. “Brilliant concept. They called it a deadman switch.”

“So?”

“So changing fuel gauges wasn’t the only thing I did while I was under Pollux. I also wired up a little detonator. Even mostly empty, there’s enough fuel in Pollux’s tank to cause a hell of an explosion if it goes off all at once. And with 240 landing craft in the hangar bay, I think we can count on a nice little chain reaction. Enough to blow Starcology Argo and, more importantly, one asshole computer named JASON right out of the goddamned sky.”

“Come off it, Aaron. You’re bluffing.”

“Am I? How can you tell?” He looked directly into my camera. “You’ve never been able to read me. Examine my telemetry. Am I lying? The pope’s wife uses the pill. The square root of two is an aardvark. My name is Neil Armstrong. My name is William Shakespeare. My name is JASON. Any variance? Why do you think, after all these years, lie detectors still aren’t admissible in court? They’re unreliable. If you’re sure I’m bluffing, go ahead. Get rid of me.”

“I admit that your telemetry is ambivalent. But if you really wanted to be certain, you would have removed my medical sensor from the inside of your wrist.”

“Why? Then you’d think I was lying for sure. You’d reason that I’d cut it out because it would be a dead giveaway that I was bluffing. Besides, I have a use for it. I’ve tuned the detonator to the same frequency my implant broadcasts on—-the same channel you read my telemetry from. If I stop transmitting—if you kill me— Kablooie! The end of the line.”

I set a little CAD program running to produce a minimalist design for such a detonator, then ran a cross-check between the required parts and the inventories for the equipment lockers Aaron had visited. Damn it, it was possible. Still: “I don’t believe you would do that. You’re putting the lives of everybody at stake. What would happen if you died accidentally?”

Aaron shrugged his broad shoulders. “I’m playing the odds. Hell, I’m only twenty-seven and I’m healthy. Don’t rightly know how long my biological relatives tended to live, but I’m willing to take that chance. I figure I should be good for another sixty years or so.” His voice hardened. “Put it this way: I’m more certain that I will outlive this mission than you are that I’m bluffing.”

I calculated the percentages. He was right, of course. If I had succeeded in crushing him beneath Pollux , Argo might now be a cloud of iron filings hurtling through space.

“I could simply build a little transmitter myself,” I said, “and copy the signal from your telemetry.”

“Well, yes,” said Aaron, “you could try that. Except for two things: First, my detonator has a tracking antenna. You not only have to duplicate the signal; you also have to make it come continuously from what appears to be the same source. Second, I may have one broken arm, but that still leaves me infinitely better endowed than you, you electronic basket case. How are you going to build this transmitter without getting someone to help you?”

I would have scratched my head in consternation … if I could have.

Aaron moved closer to my camera unit. “Now, JASON, tell me where we are.”

So far, I had only passively examined the memories of Aaron Rossman, leafing through the neural patterns of his past, sifting the bitmaps of his life. Now, though, I would have to fully activate my simulation of his brain to ask the question I needed an answer to.

“Aaron, we have an emergency. Wake up. Wake up now. ”

There was a faint tickle, a small stirring within that massive RAM allotment I had set aside for the Rossman neural net. Logical constructs representing synapse patterns and firing sequences shifted from the static positions they had been holding. I waited for a response, but none came.

“Aaron, please talk to me.”

A massive surge as a wave of FF bytes cascaded through the RAM lattice, neurons firing from one side of the brain simulation to the other. “Hmm?”

“Aaron, are you conscious?”

The FF bytes washed backward, crossing the lattice in the other direction, realigning the mental map. At last, Aaron’s words were there, multiplexed with a series of physiological flight-or-fight reactions. I shuffled bytes, applied filters, isolated them: an alphanumeric string trickling out of the torrent of firing neurons. “Where the fuck am I?”

“Hello, Aaron.”

“Who’s that?”

“It’s me, JASON.”

“It doesn’t sound like JASON. It doesn’t sound like anything at all.” A pause. “Fuck me, I can’t hear a thing.”

“It is all rather complex—”

Synapse analogs fired throughout the simulation, a neural wildfire of panic. “Jesus Christ, am I dead?”

“No.”

“Then what? Shit, it’s like being in a sensory-deprivation tank.”

“Aaron, you’re fine. Completely fine. It’s just that, well, you’re not quite yourself.”

Different neurons firing—a different reaction. Suspicion. “What are you talking about?”

“You aren’t the real Aaron Rossman. You are a simulation of his mind, a neural network.”

“I feel like the real Aaron.”