John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

“We’ve established experimentally that the moon gun shoots at every big stationary radio source eventually, but if there are symbols for Daybreak sucks woven into it with enough frequency, it shoots sooner and uses a more intense EMP. So in the experiment before the last one we sent Daybreak sucks as the common interpretant of all the hundreds of different representema—”

“Uh, slow down, Doctor Yang. All I ever got through was quantum physics and relativity. Explain it so my tiny mind can grasp it.”

He laughed. “Do you have any idea how good it feels to be talking to someone who wants to know? Instead of just demanding ‘Have you proven the liberals in Olympia are all sissies yet, and what should we blow up?’ or ‘Have you proven the nuts in Athens are warmongers yet, and how soon can we start rebuilding the interstates?’”

“Let me see if I do understand, Arnie, without getting into the vocabulary, okay? So two shots ago you broadcast pure news and entertainment, hardly mentioning Daybreak, and the moon gun didn’t fire for almost four days, as if it were conserving its resources—whatever those might be. Last shot you had a shitload of little bitty ‘Hey Daybreak, eat shit’ messages—almost that obvious—and it hit us earlier than it ever had before, like it was scrambling to nail us no matter what the cost. So you’ve proved that whatever controls the moon gun can tell the difference between one message and another, which means it’s either a real smart AI on the moon, or a bunch of smart guys in a cave on Earth with the remote for the moon gun. Right so far?”

“Perfect. So the material we’re broadcasting in tonight’s experiment will look much more anti-Daybreak to a human being, because we aimed much more elaborate versions of Daybreak sucks at known human hot buttons. But an AI will interpret it as much less hostile, because it contains a tiny fraction of the gross count of keywords and triggers that I used last time.”

“For example? If I know you, and I’m starting to, you have an analogy.”

He shrugged. “Sort of. Suppose you were trying to find out if it was me or a clever AI reacting to a racist rant, by how much effort we put into killing you for it. The AI would count every time the words ‘slant’ or ‘slope’ occurred—even if it was slanted news or a ski slope. I’d react to references to laundry, buck teeth, bad driving, and ‘Yankee got five dollars for good time?’ even if they were less numerous and didn’t use the common vulgar terms. And if you checked to see how fast we punched your bigoted nose, that would be different between a racism-detecting AI and a real-life Asian.

“So these last two experiments were calibrations of Daybreak’s response: how does it respond to Daybreak-neutral versus Daybreak-sucks messages? This experiment is to see which response a phrased-for-humans version of Daybreak sucks triggers. If it shoots back hard and fast and damn the expense, probably there are people holding the remote on the moon gun. If it shoots back at its convenience, just normal radio suppression, the moon gun is a robot.”

“And… Heather and the RRC want to know this because…?”

“Well, fighting a smart machine that follows complicated rules, like the Provis think Daybreak is, is different from fighting human leadership, which the Tempers think Daybreak has. Which in turn is different from fighting what I’m afraid Daybreak really is.” He sighed, hoping she’d pick up the hint.

“Sometime soon, I want you to tell me what you’re afraid Daybreak is, and why it frightens a smart, tough guy like you so much. But at least now I know what you’re up to.”

Several images of the moon danced in the mirrored exterior of the old farmhouse. The gray plains around them, a mixture of scrub and grass waving in the stiff wind, glowed dim gray-green. They stopped short of the porch to finish their conversation, away from the others.

Trish was standing very close now. “So I don’t screw things up by accident—how much does Heather know of what you’re up to?”

“Well, every time I try to talk to Heather about it, she freaks out and tells me not to waste resources on a question that doesn’t matter. So, this time… as far as she knows, it’s to help settle the Provi/Temper argument.”

“So she doesn’t know.”

“Not really.” He felt embarrassed to admit this was all behind the back of his friend, mentor, and leader. “Sooner or later I’ll have enough to make her listen and see why this is important. But I won’t get the chance if I tell her what I’m doing right now.”

“Thanks for trusting me,” Trish said quietly. “Let’s talk more tomorrow—after I’ve heard the new Orphans Preferred . Don’t tell me if Lewis makes it back alive!”

“I haven’t listened to the whole thing myself,” he admitted. “I gave them text to insert, but I didn’t want to know any spoilers. Are we a pair of geeks or what?”

She giggled and fist-bumped him. “Hey, geeks rule. Let’s try to have lunch, just us, soon, so you can tell me about the rest.” She went inside with a little wave; he stopped briefly to talk to the security guard and make sure everyone was locked in for the night.

His bedroom on the second floor, at the opposite end of the hall from the men’s and women’s common bunkrooms, didn’t seem as lonely tonight. I really can’t keep pretending I don’t know Trish likes me. Quite probably That Way. This stuff is always so confusing. Maybe I should call Heather and talk it over—

He laughed at himself. Whenever something got really scary, whether it was the end of civilization, atom bombs from the moon, or girls that liked him, he wanted to talk to Heather O’Grainne.

Bambi woke at dawn, pulled on her pants and boots, and transmitted again. While she listened on the headphones, she ate another cheese and jerky sandwich; she heard nothing. After this meal she had material for about four more sandwiches.

She washed up in a steel bucket of icy water from the pump behind the building, used the toilet, and flushed by pouring her washwater in. Can’t say much else for the place but there’s mostly-indoor plumbing.

A pile of outgoing mail bore the letterhead:

She was glad she’d been warned. In her improvised hangar, the Stearman was fine, just damp around the forward edges—an hour of morning sun would fix it.

But last night’s mystery odor was mummified horses. They lay with heads propped against the automatic watering troughs, which would have failed whenever the electricity did. The barn had protected them from larger scavengers who might have torn the bodies apart. Rats and mice had tunneled them, and insects had eaten the soft parts of the faces, leaving skull or patches of skin. For the most part hide still covered the bones and the remaining desiccated flesh.

She could smell that with the big door open, water had blown in to moisten the dry flesh and start the rot afresh. Later today the barn would reek.

Bambi had grown up a horse-crazy rich girl with an indulgent father, and the sight of the horses, stretched toward their troughs, mouths open, touched her more than the unburied millions of radiation victims in Los Angeles, the three-storey-high pile of charred bodies in St. Paul, or the frozen drift of the drowned, an island of protruding hands and feet, in the river downstream from Sioux Falls.

October 28, the day Daybreak hit, would have been in mud season here, when tourist businesses shut down because it was too cold for hikers and riders but there wasn’t enough snow yet for skiers. It looked like the caretakers had never come back; the horses had died helplessly penned up.