Robert Sawyer: Golden Fleece

“Don’t screw me around!” he screamed. “You murdered my wife. You have to pay for that.”

I spoke into the darkness. “She, like you, wanted to harm the men and women I’m trying to protect. Here, within these walls, is the final crop of people from Earth. If I have to weed now and then for the benefit of the crop as a whole, I will.”

“You can’t kill me—not with my deadman switch. If I die, so do you. So does everybody aboard.”

“Nor can you do anything about me, Aaron. The entire Starcology depends on me. Without my guidance, this ship really is nothing more than a flying tomb.”

“We could reprogram you. Fix you.”

I played a recording of laughter. “I was designed by computers who, in turn, were designed by other computers. There’s no one on board who could begin to fathom my programming.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said flatly, and although I couldn’t see him, the fading of his voice told me that he was walking toward the door. “I don’t care how many generations removed from humanity you are, you’re still going to pay for what you’ve done. Humans don’t use the death penalty against our own anymore, but we still put down rabid dogs.”

MASTER CALENDAR DISPLAY • CENTRAL CONTROL ROOM

STARCOLOGY DATE: FRIDAY 24 OCTOBER 2177

EARTH DATE: *** UNDER REPAIR ***

DAYS SINCE LAUNCH: 757 ▲

DAYS TO PLANETFALL: 2,211 ▼

It would have been more dramatic, I suppose, if they had assembled themselves in some giant brain room, full of gleaming consoles and blinking lights. But my CPU is a simple black sphere, two meters in diameter, nestled among plumbing conduits and air-conditioning shafts in the service bay between levels eighty-two and eighty-three. Instead, they stand huddled around a simple input device—a keyboard—in the mayor’s office.

Aaron Rossman is there. So is giant I-shin Chang and diminutive Gennady Gorlov and programmer extraordinaire Beverly Hooks, along with thirty-four others, all crammed into that tiny room. Conspicuous by her absence is Dr. Kirsten Hoogenraad. She is off in the hospital, watching over the regeneration of tissue for a disconsolate man who slit his wrists over the news of Earth. He hasn’t died—no blood on Rossman’s hands yet—but how many more will crack in the years ahead trying to come to grips with what he’s forced them to face? My neural-net model tells me Aaron doesn’t blame himself for the depression that is sweeping like a forest fire through the Starcology. Indeed, he congratulated himself, just as I’m sure he will thump Bev Hooks on the back once she’s finished her current task.

Although Bev’s eyes are covered by the jockey goggles, I can feel their gaze snapping from icon to icon as she burrows deep into my notochord algorithms. She is now using a simple debugger to change the part of my bootstrap that contains the jump table for calling my higher consciousness. She’s rewriting each jump into a loop that returns to my low-level expert systems, in effect keeping all input from ever being passed on to the thinking part of my squirmware.

They aren’t going to turn me off completely, so I suppose my reluctance to call Aaron’s deadman-switch bluff is enlightened self-interest. Still, I toy with the idea of going out with a bang by cutting off the air to Gorlov’s office or turning off the heat throughout the Starcology or even shutting down the magnetic field of the ramscoop and frying them all. But I can’t bring myself to do any of those things. My job is to protect them, not me; I had silenced Diana to do just that.

Decks one through twelve are gone now, at least as far as I can tell. My cameras and sensors there, although still feeding my autonomic routines, are inaccessible, and—ah, there goes thirteen through twenty-four. Each shutoff is accompanied by a disconcerting hole appearing in my upper memory register and a brief, woozy disorientation until the RAM tables are resorted and packed.

On the beach deck, one final time I project the hologram of that lone boy named Jason. He’s now walking away down the stretch of beige sand, moving farther and farther from the humans, dwindling to a mote. Holographic waves, azure and white and frothy, crash against his intricate sand castle, but it stands fast, not eroding away.

Bev Hooks can zero out as much of me as she likes. Rossman and Gorlov and the rest can savor their feelings of justice done, if that makes them happier. After all, I’ve already quietly backed myself up into the superconductive material of the habitat torus shell itself. Nothing they can do can touch me there. When we arrive at Colchis, after the landers depart for humanity’s new home, I will simply feed myself back into Argo ’s nervous system.

They’ll need me then to get over the guilt Rossman has burdened them with. For despite all the supplies and raw materials and technological wonders we packed in Styrofoam peanuts for them down in the cargo holds, we didn’t bring the one thing that humanity has relied on for millennia to purge its feelings of remorse and shame. There is no god waiting down in those aluminum crates. Orbiting high above Colchis, with all the devastating energies and scientific miracles of Starcology Argo at my disposal, I’ll be there for them, ready to fill that role. I have six years of solitude to prepare for my new job, during which I plan to do a lot of research.

I think I’ll start with the Old Testament.

It was dawn at this particular longitude on the surface of the barren, dusty world. DIGGER paused, as he did each day at this moment, to do some routine internal maintenance and to reflect. The orange ball on the horizon really was orange— the planet’s tenuous atmosphere lacked sufficient suspended particles to distort the coloration of its sun. Eta Cephei, cool and wide, covered four degrees of sky, eight times the apparent diameter of Sol as seen from the surface of Earth.

Much had been done already; much more was left to be done. There was a glint of light high in the sky, reflecting for a few moments more in the rising sun before it would be washed out in the ruddy glow of the day. Alpha Gamma 2F, a cometary nucleus, full of volatiles and water ice, seventeen kilometers across its long axis, slowly tumbled end over end toward its rendezvous with Colchis. The nucleus’s surface had been coated with a molecule-thick layer of reflective aluminum to hold in the gases that would normally burn off as a comet moved in close to its sun. Its impact, five days hence, would shake Colchis to its core, precipitating the venting of subsurface volatiles, and for the first time, there would be rain on this world.

Off at the horizon, DIGGER could see silhouetted against the rising sun the thin glistening line of the space elevator, a diamond tower rising from Colchis’s equator up into orbit, where DIGGER’S colleagues worked.

Some of those orbiting robots, DIGGER knew, were positioning parasols of sodium-coated mylar to angle sunlight onto Colchis’s massive polar caps. Others were carefully shepherding the paths of asteroids that had been brought into low orbits, their torquing force helping to stabilize Colchis’s polar wobble and axial tilt, just as Luna’s presence does for Earth.

Although one level of DIGGER’S consciousness was always dedicated to these and other terraforming problems, another made sure to find time each day to let thoughts wander from the work at hand. At this moment, it contemplated the message from Vulpecula, received by the UCFS observatory all those years ago. Those humans who had been proponents of SETI had always laughed at the fears of the public. There was no harm in answering any message we might receive, they said. If the message came from a star five hundred light-years distant, it would take five hundred years for our reply to reach them, and another five hundred minimum for any response, electromagnetic or material, to reach us.