David Marusek: Mind Over Ship

“Mary needs me, and there’s nothing you can say or do to keep me here.”

The proxy shook her head. “Don’t bet the farm on that, Commander. Seems to me that’s how you got yourself up here in the first place — rushing off in a panic to rescue your wife. Why don’t you let the authorities help her out this time? The way I hear it, every lab in the UD is working on the problem. It’s as much their worry as yours: if the ’leens implode, there goes the whole clone-based economy. It’s just as bad as your clone fatigue. There’s nothing you could do to help anyway and by the time you reach Earth, the whole thing will be settled one way or the other.”

“I can’t just sit on my hands and do nothing!”

“That’s exactly what you will do, soldier. You can’t leave the battlefield in the middle of a firefight because they need you at home. You have to suck it up and complete your mission.”

“I don’t even know what my mission is. Bribe the donalds with drugs? Anybody can do that.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Commander. Since the last time we met in this room, the entire operation is running as smooth as we could hope for, and no other person alive could replace you. So I’m afraid, though it’s hard on you with all this going on, you’ll just have to stick it out. Abandoning your post now will only guarantee you never see Mary again, if you know what I mean.”

Tia Jaspersen carried a tray of refreshments into the Volcano Room. Saul was half reclining on the overstuffed couch with — of all things — a squid cap on his head. Their guest, Andrea Tiekel, was setting up some equipment on the little tea table. Saul saw his wife’s expression and said, “It’s all right, dear. It’s for the Smithsonian.”

Tia looked around for somewhere else to set the tray. “But you’ve always said —”

“It’s all right, dear. It’s my centennial.”

Centennial or not, Saul had always been adamantly opposed to letting anyone fool around with his brain. This Tiekel woman had made no mention of wanting to do so when she contacted them; otherwise, Saul would have never let her come. She had said she wanted to discuss urgent GEP business and that was the only reason he had agreed.

“That’s right,” Andrea said. “Saul is the only former vice president that the Smithsonian doesn’t have in its collection. They asked me, in light of the hundredth anniversary of his term of office, to see if I couldn’t persuade him to cast a sim.”

Tia offered their guest a cup of coffee. “You must be very persuasive, Myr Tiekel.”

“I suppose I am,” Andrea said, accepting the cup. “But please, call me Andrea.” She squeezed Tia’s hand and added, “Why don’t you sit for a sim as well.”

“Me? No, I . . .”

“Why not? The Smithsonian collects spouses too.”

“I wasn’t exactly his spouse back then,” Tia said. But Andrea touched her hand again, and she said, “But, if you think so, I mean, why not?”

“Splendid!” Andrea put her cup down and led Tia to the opposite end of Saul’s couch. Like Saul, Tia had no implants, so Andrea opened a new squid for her and helped her put it on. Then she sat between them, casually touching their bare arms as the preffing generator on the table began to whir. She didn’t watch the baseline shapes herself but instead watched her mechanical scouts with her inner sight. She had released a handful of the cockroach-sized explorers on the carpet while Tia was out of the room, and they had spread throughout the house.

The conventional wisdom about Saul Jaspersen seemed to be true: he so distrusted machine intelligence that there was no mentar, midem, or even subem handling his affairs. The only AI she encountered was an ancient and totally unsecured house puter. And all that it seemed to contain were recipes, photos, house hold budgets, and other homey files.

A scout found the courier pouch in a wastebasket in Saul’s study. Another scout found the greeting card from Alblaitor under a stack of papers on his desk. While two scouts pulled it out and propped it open, a third scanned it for her to read. The text supported her fears.

Meanwhile, the preffing session began, and scenarios alternately designed for Saul or Tia were projected above the table. The two glassy-eyed subjects watched with stuporous indifference.

E-P said, At the very least we’ll get some good sidebobs out of this .

The scouts found and scanned dozens of datapins they found in the house, but none of them remotely resembled the one described in the card. After a half hour had passed with no success, Andrea began to worry that Saul had cached it off-site somewhere. She repeatedly dosed him and Tia with the MDMOEP under her fingernails, but the drug’s effect was diminishing. Then she had the inspiration to check Saul’s person and, sure enough, she found the pin in his breast pocket. That, alone, was a good sign of its authenticity.

Got it , she said and inserted it into her sidekick.

We’re safe-cloning it now , E-P said a moment later. It appears to be encrypted, probably to his eyes only. But that won’t impede us once we build his sim .

When E-P finished copying the datapin, Andrea replaced it in Saul’s pocket and recalled her scouts to her satchel. The preffing session was wrapping up. Andrea put her head back and closed her eyes. She wished she could just leave now and return to her tank, but she was obliged to play out the charade. She had to praise Saul and Tia for their cooperation, to share the dinner roast with them that was already in the oven. Its charnel-house stench made her stomach churn. For the remaining few minutes of solitude that she had, she stood at her always room window and watched clouds drift across the Bay. At home, the sun was only a little farther along its daily path than here in Alaska, but much higher in the sky. There was some sort of sailing regatta in progress around Alcatraz Island. Big colorful sails, like the wedges of pie charts.

Meanwhile, E-P built a quarantine space into which it loaded a newly assembled Jaspersen sim and sidebob, a copy of the datapin, and an Andrea sim. It was a completely isolated little universe where the clock ran hundreds of times faster than normal. There was no link between it and real reality, no chance of any malware leakage in case the datapin was booby-trapped. The plan was to let the quarantine world run for six months of local time. That should give Andrea’s sim the opportunity to use the Jaspersen sim or sidebob to open and explore the datapin and for any evil surprise to make itself known. If there was any funny business at all, the quarantine space would automatically implode, signaling those in the real world to its danger.

In the space yards, construction accidents were rare, but those that did occur tended to be spectacular. A couple of days following Fred’s meeting with Veronica’s proxy, a railgun that was shooting silver ingots from a decommissioned Oship to one of the Lucky Five malfed, spraying a stream of twenty-five-kilogram metal bricks across a wide arc of space. Most had trajectories that sent them harmlessly away from the station, but several dozen were heading for its most densely built regions. Waste scuppers successfully intercepted all but a handful of these. One ingot slammed into one of the habitation drums of the Chernobyl . It pierced the hull plating but was stopped dead by the outer saltwater jacket that shielded the drums from galactic cosmic rays and asteroid strikes. The escaping water froze and formed an ice plug, just as it was designed to do.