2312

Swan and the inspector

There are two problems in dealing with the Terminator incident,” Inspector Genette said to Swan one evening as they flew out to the asteroid belt. They were traveling with a little group from Interplan and Terminator, but often found themselves the last two in the galley at the end of an evening. Swan liked that; the inspector would sit right on the table while eating, on a plush brought for the purpose, and afterward lounge there on one elbow with a drink, so that they spoke eye to eye. It was a little like talking to a cat.

“Only two?” she said.

“Two. First, who did it, and second, how we can find and catch this agent without giving more people the idea of doing it. The so-called copycat problem, and more generally, the problem of preventing any kind of repetition of this attack. That I consider to be the more difficult problem of the two.”

“What about how it was done?” Swan asked. “Isn’t that a problem too?”

“I know how it happened,” the inspector said easily.

“You do?”

“I think so. It’s the only way it could have happened, I think, and so there you have it. No matter how implausible, as the line has it, although in this case it’s not implausible at all. But I must confess to you, I don’t want to say more about it when we are both being recorded by our qubes.” Genette raised a wrist and indicated the thick, almost cubical little wristpad that contained Passepartout. “You have your qube recording always, I assume?”

“No.”

“But often?”

“Yes, I suppose so. Like anyone else.”

“Well, in any case I want to see some things in the belt before I will be sure of my hypothesis. So we’ll talk about this more when we’re out there. But I want you to think about the second problem; assuming we catch a perpetrator and explain the deed, perhaps in a prosecution—how are we going to keep someone else from doing it? This is where I think you could help me.”

They were traveling in the terrarium Moldava, which ran in an Aldrin cycle that would take them out to Vesta in eight days. The interior of the Moldava was given over to growing wheat, and many of the people traveling in it congregated after their day’s labor in the fields at a resort on high ground near the bow, set on a broad hilltop, overlooking and then looking up at the upcurve of a big patchwork pattern of fields, different green and gold textures created by the many different strains being grown. It was like a quilter’s version of heaven.

Swan spent much of her time talking to the local ecologists, who had lots of little wheat disease problems they wanted to discuss. Inspector Jean stayed in the Interplan rooms and, as they passed Mars, spent time calling ahead to people in the terraria clustered around Vesta. At the ends of these days Swan would meet with the Interplan group to eat, then talk late with the inspector. Sometimes she talked about her daytime work. The locals were trying out wheat varieties that shed water from the seed heads better, and were exploring the genetic creation of microscopic “drip tips” like those seen in the macro world of tropical leaves, where the drip tips were long tips on the leaves that allowed water to break its surface tension and run away. “I want to have drip tips in my brain,” she said. “I don’t want to hold on to anything that will hurt me.”

“I wish you luck with that,” the little inspector said politely, staying focused on the meal, and eating a lot for such a small person.

A few days later they came to the Vesta Zone, one of the crowded areas of the asteroid belt. During the Accelerando many terraria had relocated near each other, creating something like communities, and the Vesta Zone was among the largest of these. Moldava released a ferry with the Interplan team on it, and when the ferry had decelerated and was near Vesta, they transferred again, this time to an Interplan ship with an Interplan crew.

This was an impressively fast little spaceship named Swift Justice, and in short order they were moving against the flow of the great current of asteroids, stopping once or twice at little rocks for the inspector to talk with people. No explanation for these conversations was offered, and Swan held off asking, while they visited the Orinoco Fantastico, the Crimea, the Oro Valley, Irrawady 14, Trieste, Kampuchea, the John Muir, and the Winnipeg, after which she just had to ask.

“All these little worlds had recent perturbations in their orbits,” the inspector explained, “and I wanted to ask if they had explanations for them.”

“And had they?”

“There were some abrupt departures from the Vesta Zone, apparently, and people think those threw the neighbors off course.”

Vesta itself proved to be very substantial for an asteroid—six hundred kilometers in diameter, roughly spherical, and entirely tented, which made it one of the biggest examples of the paraterraforming method called bubble-wrapping. Usually tents covered only parts of a moon, like the older domes; they were the most common structures on Callisto and Ganymede and Luna, but those moons were all so big that covering them entirely hadn’t even been considered. To cover a little moon with a tentlike bubble represented the next stage, and a viable outie option to the hollowed-out innie worlds. Swan supposed that Terminator itself was a case of paraterraforming, though she was not used to thinking of it that way and had a prejudice against outies in the asteroid belt as being overexposed and low-g, compared to burrowing into a rock and spinning it.

But now, as she regarded Vesta from a short distance out, it looked good. It was a place that would have weather and a sky (the tenting was located two kilometers above the surface), and Pauline told her the Vestans had established boreal forests, alpine ranges, tundra, grassland, and lots of cold desert. All that would be in very low g, which meant everyone would be flying and dancing around a lot, in a puffy, almost floating landscape. Not such a bad idea. They even had an immense mountain.

So Swan was interested to visit Vesta, but Genette had a different destination in mind, and after a few more Interplan people joined them, they headed to a nearby terrarium called Yggdrasil.

As they approached Yggdrasil Swan saw it was yet another potato asteroid, in this case dark and unspinning. “It’s abandoned,” the inspector explained. “A cold case.”

In the hopper’s lock Swan floated to the suit rack with a graceful little plié, suited up, then followed Genette and several Interplan investigators out the outer lock door into the void.

Yggdrasil had been a standard innie, perhaps thirty kilometers long. They entered it by way of a big hole left in the stern; the mass driver had been removed. They jetted in gently, using their suits’ thrusters to keep them upright. Flowing forward side by side, they looked like a reversal of one of those pharaonic statue pairs in which the sister-wife is knee-high to the monarch.

Inside they jetted to a halt. The interior of the asteroid was a pure black, dotted with a few distant reflections of their headlamp beams. Swan had been in many a terrarium under construction, but this was not like those. Genette tossed ahead a bright lamp, jetted briefly to counteract the toss. The pinpoint flare floated forward through the empty space, illuminating the cylinder quite distinctly.

Swan spun a little under the force of her own looking around. So dim, so abandoned; she spun in some gust of emotion that perhaps came from her poor Terminator: fist to her faceplate, suddenly she heard herself moaning.

“Yes,” the little silver figure floating by her said. “There was a pressure failure here, with no warning. This was a chondrite and water-ice conglomerate asteroid, very common. The accident review found a small meteorite had by chance hit an undetected seam of ice in the cylinder wall, vaporizing it and depressurizing the interior catastrophically. It wasn’t the first time something like that had happened, although in this case the rock readers had given it a triple A rating. Usually the ones that have cracked have been Bs or Cs, and were occupied unwisely. So I’ve been reanalyzing old accidents, looking for certain flags, and decided I wanted to have a look at this one. Mainly at the outside, but first I wanted to check the inside.”

“A lot of people died?”

“Yes, around three thousand. It happened very fast. Some people were in buildings with shelters they got to in time, and others were near spacesuits, or air locks. Other than them, the whole city-state died. The survivors decided to leave it empty as a memorial.”

“So this is like a cemetery now.”

“Yes. There’s a memorial in here somewhere, I think on the other side. I want to take a look at the inner surface of the break.”

The inspector consulted with Passepartout, then led Swan through the interior space to a boulevard on the other side of the cylinder. The neighborhood here had a Parisian scale, with wide streets running between trapezoidal housing blocks four and five stories tall.

They hovered over an area of crumpled pavements and tilted buildings, which resembled old photos of earthquake-damaged areas on Earth. It was strange how still it was.

“Aren’t there enough nickel-iron asteroids around that no one needs to hollow a conglomerate?” Swan asked.

“You would think so. But they hollowed out a few of these and found they worked fine. Keep the walls thick enough and the rotation and interior air pressure are nowhere near enough to test them. They should work and they do. But this one broke. A little meteor hit just the wrong spot.”

They floated over an area where the intense buckling had left plates of white concrete thrown up and out, leaving a long gash between them. The gash was open to space; Swan could see stars through it.

They left the devastated street and floated back out of the asteroid. Outside they toed and jetted over the surface of the rock, negotiating the typical asteroid mini-g. Swan had spent some time in this g during her terrarium-building days, and she saw that the inspector was expert in it, which of course made sense for someone based in the asteroid belt.

When they got to the outside location of the open seam, they found several of the Interplan team already at work around it. Genette made a few balletic leaps, twisting in descent to float down headfirst, taking photos of the inside of the rupture. Close inspection of a few small pits to each side was accomplished by way of one-handed handstands, faceplate centimeters from the rock.

After a while: “I think I’ve got what I need.”

They floated there, watching the others continue to work. Genette said, “You have a qube there in your skull, isn’t that right?”

“Yes. Pauline, say hello to Inspector Genette.”

“Hello to Inspector Genette.”

“Can you turn it off?” the inspector asked.

“Yes, of course. Will you be turning off yours?”

“Yes. If that is indeed what really happens when we turn them off.” Through the faceplates Swan could see the inspector’s ironic smile. “All right, Passepartout has been put to sleep. Has Pauline?”

Swan had indeed pressed the pad under the skin on the right side of her neck. “Yes.”

“Very good. All right, now we can talk a little more openly. Tell me, when your qube is on, is it recording what you hear and see?”

“Normally, yes. Of course.”

“And does it have direct contact with any other qubes?”

“Direct contact? Do you mean quantum entanglement?”

“No, no. Decoherence makes that impossible, we are told. I only mean radio contact.”

“Well, Pauline has a radio receiver and transmitter, but I select what goes in and out.”

“Can you be sure of that?”

“Yes, I think so. I set the tasks and she does them. I can check everything she’s done in her records.”

The little silver figure was shaking its head dubiously.

“Isn’t it the same for you?” Swan asked.

“I think so,” Genette said. “I’m just not so sure about all the qubes that are not Passepartout.”

“Why? Do you think qubes may be involved with what happened here? Or on Mercury?”

“Yes.”

Swan stared in surprise at what seemed to be a big spacesuited doll floating beside her, feeling a little afraid of it. Its voice was in her ear because of her helmet mike, speaking from almost within her, much as Pauline did. A clear high countertenor, pleasant and amused.

“There are quite a few little crater pits to each side of the break here. Like that one…” Genette pointed with a forefinger, and a green laser dot appeared on the rim of a small pit, quickly circled the rim, then fixed at its center. “See that? And then that?” Circling another one. They were very small. “These are fresh enough that they may have happened during or after the break.”

“So, ejecta?”

“No. Gravity here is so slight, the ejecta seldom come back. If anything did, it would almost dock. These pits are deeper.”

Swan nodded. The asteroid’s lumpy surface had many rocks lying loosely on it. “So what did the accident report call these craters?”

“Anomalies. They speculated they might be pit ruptures, where ice deposits melted at the heat of impact. Could be. But I take it you have looked at the accident report for Terminator?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember there were anomalies there too? Whatever struck the tracks didn’t hit cleanly. There are outlier craters, very small, that were not there before the event. Now, on Mercury they could be ejecta coming back down, I grant you that—”

“Couldn’t the impactor have broken up coming in?”

“But that usually happens where there’s an atmosphere heating and slowing it.”

“Couldn’t Mercury’s gravity do it?”

“That effect would be negligible.”

“I don’t know, so maybe it didn’t break up.”

The little figure nodded. “Yes, that’s right.”

“What do you mean?”

“It didn’t break up. In fact, it came together.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it was never comglomerated, until the very last moment. That’s why none of the detection systems on Mercury saw it coming. They should have seen it, it had to come from somewhere, and yet it was not detected by the surveillance systems. So to me this indicates an MDL problem. Minimum detection limit. Because there is always a minimum limit of detection, either inherent to the detection method, or else artificially set higher than the actual minimum.”

“Why do that?”

“Usually to keep warnings from going off all the time when there isn’t really any danger.”

“Ah.”

“So, each system is different, but in the Mercurial defense apparatus, what they call the method reporting level is almost equivalent to the system’s method detection limit. In other words they set their reporting level at twice the detection level, which is six or seven times the standard deviation in their measurement variability. It’s a typical setting to make people comfortable they’ll generate both the fewest false negatives and the fewest false positives.

“So, but consider what then lies below that reporting level. Basically, only very little rocks—pebbles, well less than a kilogram each. But if there were a lot of them, and they converged only at the last second, with each one coming in from a different quadrant of the sky, and at a different speed, but timed such that they all arrived at the same spot, at the same time… Then they would just be little pebbles, until the last second. They could have been tossed from the far side of the solar system, maybe, and over a number of years, maybe. And yet even so, if thrown correctly, eventually they make their rendezvous. Many thousands of them, let us say.”

“So, a kind of smart mob.”

“But not even smart. Just rocks.”

“Could that work? I mean, could anything calculate how hard to throw them, and on what trajectory?”

“A qube could. With enough of the solar system’s masses identified as to locations and trajectory, and enough calculating power, it can be done. I asked Passepartout to do it—to calculate an orbit for something like a ball bearing or a boccino, thrown from the asteroid belt to hit a particular target on Mercury. It didn’t take long.”

“But could the throws be made? I mean, would it be possible to build a launcher that would launch them with the necessary precision?”

“Passepartout said there are machines in existence with tolerances two or three magnitudes more precise than would be necessary. One would only need a steady launch platform. The stabler the better, in creating consistency.”

“That’s quite a shot,” Swan said. “How many masses get included in the trajectory calculation?”

“I think Passepartout included the heaviest ten million objects in the solar system.”

“And we know where all those are?”

“Yes. Which is to say the AIs know where they are. And all the biggest terraria and spaceships conform to itineraries set years in advance. As for the calculations, it takes a qube to be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time, meaning fast enough to use it for real-time launch instructions.”

“How long does it take?”

“For a qube similar to Passepartout, three seconds. For conventional AIs, about a year per pebble, which of course would render the method inoperable. You have to have quantum computing to be able to do it.”

Swan was feeling sick to her stomach, as if she were back in the utilidor. “So ten thousand little rocks thrown downsystem, over a matter of months or years, with such directions and velocities that they all arrive at one spot at the same time.”

“Yes. And a few stochastic gravitational fluctuations no doubt cause a little bit of scatter at the end. Indeed when that happens, those pebbles must usually miss entirely.”

“But some just barely miss.”

“Exactly. Like these little pits we see. Caused perhaps by a spaceship that changed flight plans, or the like. So maybe one or two percent of the pebbles experience a clinamen of this sort, or so Passepartout guesses.”

Now the wrench in her gut was getting severe. “So someone is doing this on purpose.” She waved at the abandoned terrarium.

“That’s right. And also, a qube has to be involved.”

“Shit.” She put an arm across her stomach. “But how… how could someone…”

The inspector put a little hand to her arm. Ygassdril floated under them, cold and dead. A gray potato. “Let’s get back to the Justice.”

Back inside the Interplan hopper, after they had eaten a meal, Swan stayed up late in the galley, and again the inspector did too.

Swan, who had not been able to stop thinking about the day’s revelations, said, “So, all this means that whoever—”

Genette raised both hands and stopped her. “Qubes off again, please.”

After they had both turned off the devices, she continued: “That means whoever did this could have done it years ago.”

“Or at least quite some time ago, yes. Some stretch of time.”

“And there wasn’t a single launch site.”

“No. But maybe there is still the launch mechanism. Their gun, or catapult, or whatever it was, would have to be a very precise instrument. A particularly fine bit of manufacturing. The tolerances Passepartout suggested were really quite fine, requiring molecular printers and so forth. We might be able to find the factory that made something so particular—we’re looking into that. And then, who might have ordered it.”

“What else?” Swan asked.

“We are looking for the program for the factory, and the design of the instrument. Its printing instructions. Also the orbital program needed to make the calculations. Qubes don’t make that kind of thing up without being asked to do it—or so we have been assuming until now. The qube that did it would have that action recorded in it, as I understand it. And so the program is likely to still exist somewhere. And there are still only a finite number of factories making qubes.”

“Couldn’t they have destroyed their qube when they were done using it?”

“Yes. But there’s no reason to assume they’re done.”

This was a chilling thought.

“We must look for the qube, the orbit program, the factory program, also the factory, and the launcher itself, and whatever the launch platform was.”

Swan frowned. “All those could be destroyed, or cleaned pretty clean.”

“It’s true. You see the nature of the problem very quickly. Even so, this investigation has to turn into a check of the records, a kind of bookkeepers’ search. As our work so often becomes.” Another ironic smile: “It is not often as dramatic as is sometimes portrayed.”

“That’s fine. But while you’re doing that, what else can we do? What can I do?”

“You can look at the other end of the problem. And I will join you in that.”

“The other end?”

“The motive.”

“But how would you determine that? And having done so, how would you locate it? Doing something like this is so sick that it makes me sick to think about it. It’s evil.”

“Evil!”

“Yes, evil!”

Genette shrugged. “Putting that aside, let us presume anyway that it is rare impulse. And so it may leave signs.”

“That someone hates Terminator? That someone is capable of killing worlds?”

“Yes. It’s not a common impulse. It may therefore stick out. And besides, it may be a political act, a kind of terrorism or war. It may be meant to convey some message, or force some action. So we can follow it that way.”

Swan felt her stomach clenching. “Damn. I mean—there’s never been a, a war in space. We’ve managed without them.”

“Until now.”

That gave her pause. For a generation at least there had been warnings from people all over the system that the conflicts between Earth and Mars could lead to war, or that Earth’s writhing problems were going to drag everyone down with them. Little wars and terrorist attacks and sabotages had never entirely disappeared on poor Earth, and Swan had sometimes thought that diplomats played on the notion that Earth’s discord might spread, in order to boost their own prestige, their own budgets. Diplomacy as necessary peacemaking in a system on the brink—it had been very convenient for them. But what if it turned out to be true?

She said, “I guess I thought spacers knew enough to avoid all that. That once we got out here we would do better. Be better.”

“Don’t be a fool,” the inspector said crisply.

Swan gritted her teeth. After an intense struggle for self-control she said, “But it could be some psychopath. Someone who has lost their mind and is killing just because they can.”

“There are those too,” Genette agreed. “And if one of them got hold of a qube—”

“But anyone can get a qube!”

“Not at all. Not even everyone in space. They are tracked from the factories, and in theory are all located moment to moment. And whichever one was involved would have to be programmed for this, as I said. It would show in its own records what it had done.”

“Aren’t there unaffiliateds that are making qubes?”

“Well—maybe. Probably.”

“So how do we find it, or this person?”

“Or this group?”

“Yes, or nation, or world!”

Genette shrugged. “I want to talk to Wang again, because his qube is really powerful, and he also has the biggest data banks on the unaffiliateds. And also because it’s possible he was attacked by this same entity. But I admit I’m a little afraid to talk to his qube, because we’re seeing so many signs of qubes acting oddly. As if they have volition now, or in any case are being asked to do things unlike anything they’ve done before. Some qubes that we’ve been monitoring are now exchanging messages in an unprecedented way.”

“You mean they’re entangled with each other?”

“No. That seems to be truly impossible, because of decoherence issues. They use radio communication like anyone else, but the messages are encrypted internally at each end, using superposition as they do. So they are truly encrypted, even when we use our own qubes to try and break the codes. This is the reason why I want to keep these discussions out of the earshot of any and all qubes, for the time being. I don’t know which ones to trust.”

Swan nodded. “You’re like Alex in that.”

“That’s right. I used to talk to her about this, and we had the same opinion about this problem. I taught her some procedures to use. So, now I have to think about how to go forward here, and how I can best communicate with Wang and his superqube. Possibly the explanation for all this is even now stored in it, unrecognized because it hasn’t been asked to look for it. Because despite all the talk you hear of balkanization, we are still recording the history of the world down to the level of every person and qube. So to find this agent, we only need to read out the history of the solar system for the last several years, and it should be there.”

“Except for the unaffiliateds,” Swan pointed out.

“Well, yes, but Wang has most of them too.”

“But you don’t want his recording system to know you’re asking,” Swan said. “In case it’s the one doing all this.”

“Exactly.”

Swan never quite stopped feeling sick after that. Someone had meant to kill her city—and yet had missed hitting it directly, thus sparing its citizens, all but the ones who had died in the panic of the evacuation and that poor concert group, killed by the impact.

Was that right? She didn’t know what to make of that—that the impact had missed Terminator itself.

She ended up talking to Pauline about it. She had an idea that she wanted to check, and Pauline was the best way to do it. There she was, after all, her voice in Swan’s ear, and always hearing everything Swan said aloud. There was no way she wasn’t going to find out all about this, eventually.

So: “Pauline, do you know what Inspector Genette and I were talking about when I turned you off?”

“No.”

“Can you guess?”

“You might have been talking about the incident at Ygassdril, which you had just seen. This incident resembles the incident at Terminator in some features. If these were deliberate attacks, then whoever initiated them might have used a quantum computer to help them plot trajectories. If Inspector Jean Genette believed that quantum computers were involved, then the inspector might not want any quantum computers to hear details of the investigation. This would be similar to Alex’s efforts to keep some of her deliberations completely unwitnessed and unrecorded by any AIs, quantum or digital. The assumption seems to be that if quantum computers are in encrypted radio communication with each other, then they may be plotting activities detrimental to people.”

Just as she suspected: Pauline could deduce these things. No doubt many other qubes could too, including Genette’s own Passepartout, programmed in forensics and detection as it certainly must be. If-then, if-then, how many trillion times a second? It might resemble their chess-playing programs, which had proved themselves to be superhumanly good at that particular game. So it was a little bit futile to turn them off only for certain conversations.

Which meant that it was all right for her to say “Pauline, if someone had calculated the trajectory of an impactor to hit Terminator smack on and destroy it, but they forgot to include the relativistic precession of Mercury in their calculation and only used the classical calculus of orbital mechanics, how far would they miss by? Assume the impactor was launched from the asteroid belt a year earlier. Try a few different launch points and trajectory courses and times, both with and without the relativity equations for the precession.”

Pauline said, “The precession of Mercury is 5603.24 arc seconds per Julian century, but the portion of that caused by the curvature of space-time as described by general relativity is 42.98 arc seconds per century. Any trajectory a year in duration, plotted without that factored in, would therefore miss by 13.39 kilometers.”

“Which is about what happened,” Swan said, feeling sick again.

Pauline said, “Being a precession, the miss should have been to the east of the city, not the west.”

“Oh,” Swan said. “Well, then…” She didn’t know what to make of it.

Pauline said, “Ordinary orbital mechanics programs for inner planet transport routes routinely include general relativity as a matter of course. It is not necessary to remember to add the relativity equations. If, however, someone who did not know that tried to program a trajectory for an impact without using open-source templates, then they might have added the relativity equations to a situation where they were already being used. And thus, if targeting the city directly, they would create an error of 13.39 kilometers to the west.”

“Ah,” Swan said, feeling sicker than ever. She looked for a place to sit down. Terminator was one thing, its people something else: her family, her community… That there could be someone capable of killing them all… “So… But that sounds like a human error.”

“Yes.”

That evening, late in the galley, she found herself again alone with the inspector, who again was sitting on the table in front of her, eating grapes. Swan said, “Since you told me about the pebble mob, I’ve been thinking that it was probably aimed directly at Terminator, but that somebody made a mistake. If they didn’t know that the relativity equations for the precession of Mercury were already part of the standard algorithms, and added the operation, they would end up hitting just the distance to the west that they did.”

“Interesting,” Genette said, looking at her closely. “A programming error, in other words. I’ve been assuming that it was a deliberate miss—a warning shot, so to speak. I’ll have to think about that.” After a moment: “You must have asked your Pauline about this?”

“I did. She already had deduced the general topics of what she missed when I turned her off. I’m sure your Passepartout is the same.”

Genette frowned, unable to deny it.

Swan said, “I can’t believe anyone would try to kill so many people. And actually do it, too, in the Yggdrasil. When so much space is available… so much everything, really. I mean, we’re in what people call post-scarcity. So I don’t get it. You talk about motive, but in a physiological sense, there isn’t a motive for stuff like this. I suppose that means that evil really does exist. I thought it was just an old religious term, but I guess I was wrong. It’s making me sick.”

The inspector’s attractive little face creased in a slight smile. “Sometimes I think it’s only in post-scarcity that evil exists. Before that, it could always be put down to want or fear. It was possible to believe, as apparently you did, that when fear and want went away, bad deeds would too. Humanity would be revealed as some kind of bonobo, an altruistic cooperator, a lover of all.”

“Exactly!” Swan cried. “Why not!”

Genette shrugged with a Gallic weariness. “Maybe fear and want never went away. We are more than food and drink and shelter. It seems like those should be the crucial determinants, but many a well-fed citizen is filled with rage and fear. They feel painted hunger, as the Japanese call it. Painted fear, painted suffering. The rage of the servile will. Will is a matter of free choice, but servitude is lack of freedom. So the servile will feels defiled, feels guilt, expresses that as an assault on something external. And so something evil happens.” Another shrug. “However you explain it, people do bad things. Believe me.”

“I guess I have to.”

“Please do.” Now the inspector was not smiling. “I will not burden you with some of the things I’ve seen. I’ve had to wonder at them, like you are now. The concept of the servile will has helped me. And lately, I’ve been wondering if every qube is not by definition some kind of a servile will.”

“But this programming error that might explain the impact hitting west of town—that’s a human error.”

“Yes. Well, the servile will exists in humans first. So, in parts of themselves people know these acts are bad, but they do them anyway, because in other parts of them some itch gets scratched.”

“But most people try to do good,” Swan objected. “You see that.”

“Not in my line of work.”

Swan considered the little figure, so neat and quick. “That must change your perspective,” she said after a while.

“It does. And… you see the same self-justifications, over and over. It’s even known which parts of the brain are involved in the justifications. They’re very near the parts involved with religious feeling, just as you might expect. Not far from the epileptic triggers, and the sense of meaning. Those parts light up like fireworks when one commits evil or justifies it. Think what that means!”

“But everything we do is in the brain somewhere,” Swan said. “Where in the brain doesn’t matter.”

Genette did not agree. “There are patterns in there. Reinforcements. Bad events grow certain parts of the brain bigger. The brain reconfigures to create a spiral of ever more horrible feelings. Further actions follow.”

“So what do we do?” Swan exclaimed. “You can’t make a perfect world and then get decent people, that’s backwards, it can’t work.”

The inspector shrugged. “Either way seems unlikely to me.” Then, after a pause: “It can go so wrong. Living in space may be too hard for us. Reduced environments. I’ve seen kids raised in Skinner boxes—human sacrifice—”

“You need your sabbatical,” Swan interrupted, not wanting to hear more.

She saw suddenly that Genette was looking weary. Usually smalls were hard to read; at first glance they looked rather perfect, like dolls, or innocent, like children. Now she saw the reddened eyes, the blond hair a little oily, the simple ponytail all flyaway with hairs that had broken at the hair tie.

And a grimace, very unlike the usual ironic smile. “I do need my sabbatical. I’m late, in fact, and I hope our investigation will soon get me there. Because I’m a little tired. The Mondragon is a beautiful thing, but there are many terraria not in it, some of them seriously deranged. Ultimately what we get by not enforcing a universal law is some kind of accidental libertarian free-for-all. So we’re in trouble. This is what I’m seeing. When you combine political inadequacy with the physical problems of being in space, it may be too much. We may be trying to make an impossible adaptation out here.”

“So what do we do?” she said again.

Genette shrugged again. “Hold the line, I guess. Maybe we need to understand out here that post-scarcity is both heaven and hell at once. They are superposed, like options in a qubit before its wave function collapses. Good and evil, art and war. All there in potentiality.”

“But what do we do?”

Genette smiled a little at that, shifted and sat cross-legged on the table before her, looking like a garden Buddha or Tara, slim and stylized. “I want to talk to Wang. I’ll figure out how. And to your friend Wahram. That’s much easier. After that… it depends on what I learn. Did Alex by chance give you a letter for me too, or for anyone else?”

“No!”

A raised hand, like the adamantine Buddha: “No reason to be annoyed. I just wish she had, that’s all. To her this was just a contingency, a backup for something she didn’t expect to happen. She probably figured Wang would tell the rest of the group about her plans. And he will, I hope.”

The next day the inspector’s crew had news, and after a conference Genette emerged and said to Swan, “Wang’s qube identified an asteroid that orbits between Jupiter and Saturn, that drifted outward in its orbit as it would have if it launched the impactor mass at Terminator. The drift happened three years ago, over a period of about six months. Wang took a look through the Saturn League records of ship movements in Saturn space, and those had signals that look like a small ship left this asteroid and from there flew into Saturn’s upper atmosphere. It might have taken the plunge, but it entered the upper clouds at an angle that means it could have tucked in there, as quite a few ships have. If so, we might be able to track it down.”

“That’s good,” Swan said. “But… this is Wang’s qube giving you this lead, yes?”

Genette shrugged. “I know. But the ship track is from the Saturn League, and they tagged it with a transponder on its way down. They also got a read on the transponder already in it, and so they know it was a ship owned by a consortium on Earth.”

“On Earth!”

“Yes. I’m not sure what to make of that, but, you know—a pebble mob can’t be launched from within an atmosphere. Nor from under a dome or tent. It had to happen on an open surface in the vacuum. So if you were on Earth and wanted to do this, you would have to go into space to do it.”

“I see that. But—Earth? I mean, who on Earth—?”

The inspector’s look was so sharp she could not continue.

Genette said, “There are more than five hundred organizations on Earth that have expressed opposition to the idea of humans in space.”

“But why?”

“They usually point out that Earth’s problems remain unsolved, and assert that spacers are trying to escape these problems and leave them behind. Often the bodily modifications in spacers are cited as evidence of the beginnings of a forced speciation. Homo sapiens celestis has been suggested as a name for us. Some also call it the speciation of class. Many Terrans have not gotten the longevity treatments. Thus there are claims that space civilization is perverse, wicked, decadent, and horrible. Destabilizing human history itself.”

“Damn it,” Swan said. “I thought they saw how much good we do them.”

“Please,” Genette said. “You must take your sabbaticals in very sheltered places.”

Swan thought about it for a while. “So what do we do?”

“I want to go to Saturn and look for this little ship. Passepartout thinks it can predict its location from its entry point.”

“And I can come along?”

“More than welcome. We are already on our way.”

The Swift Justice ferried them to a passing terrarium called Inner Mongolia, a beautiful innie of big rolling green hills, often interrupted by outcroppings of black rock, and home to herds of wild horses and elusive packs of wolves, an animal Swan particularly loved. The little towns were set on hilltops and looked like collections of fine yurts, often surrounded by lawns, and pools perched on overlooks. Genette brought along only a couple of assistants, and spent a fair amount of time with them working on what Swan assumed were other cases, in a yurt set among a cluster of them on a hilltop.

One afternoon after a morning of wandering the grassy hills, trying to spot wolves and failing, Swan came to a hilltop yurt resort that had a broad sloping lawn, a big wading pool and set of steaming baths, and a tent aviary filled with hanging baskets of flowers and many different kinds of hummingbirds, lories, and small colorful finches. The undulating lawn had been manicured until it looked like a green carpet. To Swan this was excessively ornamental, out of tune with the wild hills she had spent the morning on. She passed a pair of women who were laughing as if they also found the place ludicrous, and she said as they passed, “It’s silly, isn’t it.”

They stopped and one pointed back up the hill. “Those three people up there in dresses told us that they’re qubes in android bodies, and didn’t we think they could pass as humans. We told them they probably could, but—” The two women looked at each other and laughed again. “But that they were totally blowing it by asking us!”

Swan spotted the three sitting on the grass near the wading pool. “Sounds interesting,” she said, and headed up toward them.

“Pauline, did you hear that?” she said on the way up.

“Yes.”

“All right, well, be quiet, then, and pay attention.”

It was an old hypothesis, that humans would be comfortable with intelligent robots either when the robots were housed in something like a box, or else when they were simply indistinguishable from humans, at which point they would be just another kind of person. In between these two extremes, however, lay what the hypothesis called the uncanny valley—the zone of like-but-not-like, same-but-different, which would cause in all humans an instinctive repulsion, disgust, and fear. Thus the hypothesis, plausible enough; but because there had never actually been a robot built in a form human enough to test the near side of the uncanny valley, it had always remained a notion only. Now Swan was perhaps going to get to test the near side of the uncanny valley.

The tasteless design sense of this resort seemed to extend to the clothing of these three guests. They sat by themselves in long dresses like Victorian crinolines, looking enough alike to be siblings, or even, yes, cloned androids from a single model. Although one looked slightly more female than the other two.

Swan approached them and said, “Hello, I’m Swan, from Mercury, where we are rebuilding our burned city with the help of many qubes. I understand that you three are claiming that you are qubes, that you are not biologically human? Is that right?”

The three people sat there staring at her. The one who looked slightly female in body proportions smiled and said, “Yes, that’s right. Sit down with us and share some tea. I’ve got a pot almost ready,” gesturing at a little portable stove on the ground, and a little squat red teapot resting over its blue flames. There were cups and spoons and little pots on a blue square cloth next to her.

The other two also met her eye and nodded at her. One gestured to the grass beside them. “Have a seat, if you want.”

“Thanks,” Swan said as she flopped down. “It’s pretty heavy in here. Where do you all come from?”

“I was made in Vinmara,” the most female one said.

“What about you?” Swan asked the other two.

“I cannot pass a Turing test,” one of them replied stiffly. “Would you like to play chess?”

And the three of them laughed. Open mouths—teeth, gums, tongue, inner cheeks, all very human in look and motion.

“No thanks,” Swan said. “I want to try a Turing test. Or why don’t you test me?”

“How would we do that?”

“How about twenty questions?”

“That means questions that can be answered by yes or no?”

“That’s right.”

“But one could just ask us if the other is a simulacrum or not, and the other answers, and that would take only one question.”

“True. What if we only allow indirect questions?”

“Even so it would be very simple. What if you had to do it without questions at all?”

“But real people ask each other questions all the time.”

“But one of us or more are not real people. And it’s you who suggested a test.”

“That’s true. All right, let me look at you. Tell me about Inner Mongolia.”

“Dear Inner Mongolia, hollowed in the year…”

“Hollowéd be thy name,” one of the indeterminates interjected, and they laughed.

“Population approximately twenty-five thousand people,” said the more feminine one.

“You must be a qube,” Swan said. “No human ever knows that kind of thing.”

“None?”

“Maybe some people, but it’s odd. But I must say, you look fabulous.”

“Thank you, I decided to wear green today, do you like it?” Showing off the sleeve of the dress.

“It’s very nice. Can I look closer?”

“At my dress or at my skin?”

“At your skin, of course.”

And they all laughed.

Laughter, Swan thought as she examined the person’s skin. Could robots laugh? She wasn’t sure. The person’s skin was lightly pocked by hair follicles, slightly lined by creases at the bend points; there was a scattering of nearly transparent hair on the back of the person’s wrists and forearms, and a little patch of longer darker hairs on the inside of the wrist, which had four permanent creases just inside the hand, where the skin was thinner but darker, revealing a pair of veins, with bumps and bends in them. The skin on the underside of the hand had faint whorls, like big fingerprints, on the ball of the thumb and the meat of the hand. The lifeline was a deep long curve. It looked very much like anyone’s hand, anyone’s skin. If it was artificial skin, it was very impressive; this was said to be the hardest thing to make look natural. If it was a biological skin, as in the labs, but grown over a frame, that would be impressive in a different way. It didn’t look possible that these people’s skin could be artificial, but of course materials science was very sophisticated, and many things were possible to it. Set goals and parameters, and what wasn’t possible?

It remained a question who would want to do such a thing, but on the other hand, people did odd things all the time. And making an artificial human was a very old dream. Maybe it was pointless, but it had a tradition. And here they were, after all, and she wasn’t sure yet what she was facing. That in itself was interesting.

If you had sex with a machine, was that interesting, or just a complicated form of self-satisfaction? Would a qube register your responses to it one way or another? Would it too be having sex?

She would have to try it if she wanted to find out. It would be just another approach to the more general problem of qube consciousness. What one had to remember with qubes was that no matter the evidence to the contrary, there was no one home: no consciousness, no Other, just a mechanism programmed to respond to stimuli in a certain fashion by its programmers. No matter how complex the algorithms, they did not add up to a consciousness. Swan fully believed this, but even Pauline fairly often surprised her, so it could be hard not to fall for the illusion.

“Your skin is beautiful. You feel like flesh of my flesh.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you think, do you think?”

“I most definitely think,” the feminine one replied.

“So you have a sequence of thoughts that wander from one thought to the next in a more or less continuous flow, free associating from one topic to the next, across all the possible thoughts you could have?”

“I’m not sure it’s quite like that. I think it’s more a matter of stimulus and response, with my thoughts responding to the stimuli of my incoming information. Now, for instance, I think about you and your questions, about the green of my dress as compared to the green of this grass, about what I will eat for dinner, as I am a bit hungry—”

“So you eat food?”

“Yes, we eat food. In fact I have a hard time not eating too much!”

“Me too,” Swan said. “So, do you ever think about having sex with me?”

The three of them stared at her.

“Well, but we have just met,” one said.

“That’s often when people think of it.”

“Really? I’m not sure that’s true.”

“Believe me, it’s true.”

“I don’t have any good reason to believe you,” the second one said. “I don’t know you well enough for that.”

“Does one ever know one well enough for that?” the third one asked.

They laughed.

“Believe someone else?” the feminine one said. “I don’t think so!”

They laughed again. Maybe they were laughing too much.

“Are you people on drugs?” Swan asked.

“Is caffeine a drug?”

Now they were giggling.

“You three are silly girls,” Swan said.

“It’s true,” the feminine one admitted. She poured tea from the teapot into four little cups, passed them to the others. The second one opened a hamper and took out biscuits and cakes, handing them around along with small white cloth napkins. They all fell to with an appetite. The three locals ate just like people.

“Do you swim?” Swan asked. “Swim, or bathe in hot tubs?”

“I bathe in hot tubes,” the third one said, causing the others to cackle muffledly into their napkins.

“Can we do that?” Swan asked. “Do you bathe without clothes on? Because that way I could see your whole bodies.”

“And we could see yours!”

“That’s fine.”

“Looks like it would be more than fine,” the feminine one murmured, and the others threw back their heads and laughed.

“Let’s do it!” the second one exclaimed.

“I want to finish my tea,” the feminine one said primly. “It’s good.”

When they were done, the three of them stood up with the grace of dancers and led Swan to the edge of the pool, where a few people were already swimming, some clothed, some bare. There were small children in the shallowest pool, where a fountain of water fell on a rounded little roof and made a water-walled refuge. Swan’s three hosts put down their lunch gear on the deck and then pulled their dresses over their heads and walked over to the water. The feminine one was slight and girlish, and the other two had the willowy bodies of gynandromorphs: slightly wide hips, rounded pecs that were not quite breasts, in-between torso-to-leg ratio and waist-to-hip ratio, furry genitals that appeared to be mostly female, but with dark masses that might have been small penises and testicles, like Swan’s—one couldn’t say more without a further exploration. Although it would prove little, as genitals would be far easier to simulate than hands, being already rubbery.

Into the water then. Swan saw that they swam well, almost floated; seemed to have the same specific gravity as human beings. Probably not steel bones, then. Probably not a completely machine interior, covered by a layer of grown flesh and skin. Taking a deep breath floated them, almost, just like it did her. Their eyes too—their eyes blinked, stared, glanced sidelong, were wet. Could you make every part of a human, put it all together, and have it work? Print up a composite? It seemed unlikely. Nature itself was not that good at it, she thought as her bad knee twinged. To make a simulacrum… well, maybe you could focus on just the functional aspects. But wasn’t that what brains did too?

“You silly girls are kind of amazing,” Swan said. “I can’t figure you out.”

They laughed.

“No real people would spend all day pretending to a stranger that they were robots,” Swan objected. “You must be robots.”

“The oddest things are most likely to be true,” the second one said. “It’s a well-recognized test in Bible exegesis. They think Jesus probably did curse a fig tree, or else why have the story in there?”

More laughter. They really were silly girls. Maybe you could make a robot think only up to the level of a twelve-year-old.

But the way they swam. The way they walked. These were hard things to do; or so it seemed.

“This is weird,” she said to herself, pleased. She had thought it was going to be easy.

As she walked into a knee-deep area of the pool, they stared up at her frankly, as she had stared at them.

“Ooh, nice legs,” the third one said. “Nice body.”

“Thank you,” Swan said, over the moans of the other two. The feminine one exclaimed, “No, that’s not all right to say, some people are offended by comments about the aesthetic impacts of their bodies on others!”

“I’m not,” Swan offered.

“All right, good then,” said the feminine one.

“I was only being polite,” said the third one.

“You were being forward. You had no idea whether it was polite or not.”

“It was just a compliment. There’s no reason to be overfine about such things. If you stray over limits, people will simply assume you don’t know the protocols of their culture but are well-intentioned nevertheless.”

“People will, but how do you know this person isn’t a simulacrum, sent here to test us?”

And they laughed till they choked, splashing each other all the while. Swan joined the splashing, then sat in the water and ottered around them for a while. Then she seized the third one to her and kissed it on the mouth. The nondescript kissed back for a second, then pulled away. “Hey what’s this! I don’t know you well enough for this, I don’t think!”

“So what? Didn’t you like it?” And Swan kissed it again, followed its twists away, feeling its tongue be surprised to be touched by another tongue.

Pulling away, the nondescript said, “Hey! Hey! Hey! Stop!”

The feminine one had stood up and taken a step toward them, as if to intervene, and Swan turned and pushed her off her feet, so that she splashed hard into the shallow water. “What are you doing!” the girl cried fearfully, and Swan popped her on the mouth with a left jab. Immediately the girl’s head flew back and her mouth started to bleed, and she cried out and rushed away. The two nondescripts splashed between her and Swan, blocking Swan from her, shouting at Swan to get back. Swan raised her fists and howled as she pummeled them, and they splashed backward to get away from her, amazed and appalled. Swan stopped following them, and after they climbed out of the pool they stopped and huddled together, looking back at her, the hurt one holding her mouth. Red blood.

Swan put her hands on her hips and stared at them. “Pretty interesting,” she said. “But I don’t like being fooled.” She slogged through the water toward her clothes.

She walked back around the cylinder, looking up at a herd of wild horses and kissing her sore knuckles, thinking it over. She wasn’t sure what kind of things she had spent the day with. That was strange.

When she got back to their hilltop yurts, she waited until Genette and she were again the last two up, and then she said, “I ran into a trio of people today who claimed to be artificial people. Androids with qube brains.”

Genette stared at her. “You did?”

“I did.”

“So what did you do?”

“Well, I beat the shit out of them.”

“You did?”

“A little bit, one of them, yes. But she had it coming.”

“Because?”

“Because they were fooling with me.”

“Isn’t that kind of like what you do in your abramovics?”

“Not at all. I never fool people, that would be theater. An abramovic is not theater.”

“Well, maybe they weren’t either,” Genette said, frowning. “This has to be looked into. There have been reports on Venus and Mars of various incidents like this. Rumors of qube humanoids, sometimes acting oddly. We’ve started keeping an eye out. Some of these people have been tagged and are being tracked.”

“So there really are such things?”

“I think so, yes. We’ve scanned some, and then of course it’s obvious. But we don’t know much more at this point.”

“But why would anyone do it?”

“Don’t know. But if there were qubes that were mobile, and moving around without being noticed, it would explain quite a few things that have happened. So I’ll have my team take a look at these people you met.”

“I think they were people,” Swan said. “They were putting on an act.”

“You think they were real people, pretending to be simulacra? As some kind of theater?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know. Why would a person get in a box and pretend to be a mechanical chess player? It’s an old dream. A kind of theater.”

“Maybe. But I’m going to look into it anyway, because of these odd things happening.”

“Fine,” Swan said. “But I think they were people. Anyway, say they weren’t. What’s the problem with these things, if things they are?”

“The problem is qubes getting out in the world, moving around and doing things. What are they doing? What are they supposed to be doing? Who’s making them? And since there is a qube component to the attacks we’ve seen, we have to wonder, do these things have anything to do with that? Are some of them involved?”

“Hmm,” Swan said.

“Maybe they all come to one question,” the inspector said. “Why are the qubes changing?”