2312

Wahram and Genette

Wahram returned to Genette, who was leaving for Vinmara and did not want to waste time, saying only, “Come on,” and then hurrying off as fast as a terrier. As Wahram wheeled along in pursuit, Genette looked back up at him and asked if all was well with Swan. Wahram replied that it was, although he was none too sure about this. But it was time to focus on the plan.

As they flew to Vinmara, Genette talked to some of his associates using his wristqube Passepartout as his radio, and Wahram gestured at it questioningly.

With a shake of the head Genette said, “There are qubes working for us, as Swan pointed out, and indeed hers may be one of them, it seems likely. But I haven’t been able to check it yet, and you were probably right to keep her out of this. It’s hard to tell what she would do. But meanwhile Wang’s qube and Passepartout have both been checked out, and are helping us as instructed. So I believe,” he enunciated at his wristqube with a cross-eyed frown.

Wahram said, “Do you think the qubes are beginning to function as their own society, with groups or even organizations, and disagreements?”

Genette threw up his hands. “How can we tell? It may be they are only being given different instructions by different people and therefore acting differently. So we hope to apprehend the maker of these qube humans in Vinmara, and then maybe we can find out more.”

“What about the Venusians? Will they allow you to do what you intend to here?”

“Shukra and his group are backing us. They are in the midst of quite a tussle right now, and the stakes are high. Lakshmi’s people are either manufacturing these humanoids or else are benefitting from their existence, I can’t tell which yet, but either way Shukra’s group is happy to assist us. I think the Working Group is divided enough that we can do what we need to and get off-planet before they can react.”

This sounded ominous to Wahram. “Jump through the middle of a civil war?”

Genette said with a quick shrug, “No way now but forward.”

They came to the spaceport and hurried through it and down a jetway into a small airplane. After they were on board and in the air, Genette looked out the window and observed, “It’s a lot like China here. In fact they may still be ruled from China, it’s hard to be sure. Anyway, decisions are in the hands of a fairly small group. And they’re split now over what to do about the sunshield. How you regard it has become a kind of loyalty test for both sides. I thought most Venusians had come to accept reliance on it as just one danger among many. But the ones who object to it tend to be more vehement in their feelings. For them it’s a kind of existential issue. And so they are willing to be more extreme to get their way.”

“So what do you think they did?”

“I think what may have happened is that one of their programmers decided to instruct some qubes to help the effort to get rid of the sunshield. Maybe an open command, something like ‘figure out a way to get this done.’ So that means some qube running a probable-outcomes algorithm. And the algorithm could have been poorly constrained. Willing to consider anything, so to speak. Kind of like a person in that regard! Very lifelike. So, what if that qube then proposed to put qubes in humanoid bodies, so they could make attacks that immobile box qubes couldn’t manage on their own—attacks that humans couldn’t or wouldn’t do? Sabotage, I mean. Or call them educational spectacles, meaning some arranged disasters. If they could make the majority of Venusians believe that the sunshield was in danger of an attack—that they could all be cooked like bugs—then public sentiment would surely back another era of bombardment to give Venus a spin.”

“Scaring a civilian populace into making a certain political choice,” Wahram said.

“Yes. Which we recognize is one definition of terrorism. But this might not be so apparent to a qube programmed to look for results.”

“And so the attack on Terminator was a kind of demonstration?”

“Exactly. And it certainly had that effect here on Venus.”

“But this new attack on the sunshield, it could have been much more than a scare,” Wahram said. “If it had succeeded, it would have killed a lot of people.”

“Even that might not register as a negative. Depends on the algorithm, and that means it depends on the programmer. There are lots of people on Earth available to replace anyone killed up here. China alone could easily restock the place. The whole Venusian population could be killed and replaced by Chinese and China not even notice. So who knows what people might be thinking? These programmers may have set their qubes off in new directions, even given them new algorithms, but whatever they did they won’t have made human thinkers of them, even if they did get them to the point of passing a Turing test or whatnot.”

“So these qubanoids definitely exist.”

“Oh yes. Your Swan has met some, as have I. The thing on Io was one. And I’ve been interested to learn that a great many of them are on Mars, passing for human and involved in government. Mars’s problems with the Mondragon and with Saturn—they look a little suspicious to me now.”

“Ah,” said Wahram, thinking it over. “And so you are doing what?”

“We are apprehending all of them at once,” Genette said, checking Passepartout quickly. “I sent out the code to do it, and now’s the time. Midnight Greenwich mean time, October 11, 2312. We have to pounce.”

They landed outside Vinmara and after that Wahram was thankful that he was in a wheelchair, because Genette terriered from one brief meeting to another at a terrific clip; even wheeling along Wahram could barely keep up.

Kiran came in a few minutes later on another flight and met with them to show them which building the eyeballs had been heading for. Soon after that an armed group arrived and wasted no time surrounding this building. After a short delay they blasted down the front door and rushed in with weapons drawn, in full spacesuits. A thick pall of gray gas poured out of the interior from the very moment they broke down the door.

In less than five minutes the building was secured. Immediately Genette was conferring with the assault team, and then with Shukra, who showed up with another contingent of armed supporters, there to make sure there would be no local resistance to a rapid extraction of the facility’s contents.

Genette conversed continuously with people, in person and over mobiles, unflustered but very intent—used to this kind of thing. Used even to the idea of plunging into a fight between Venusian factions, which Wahram thought must be extremely dangerous.

When Genette seemed to be done for the moment, and was sitting on the edge of a table, drinking coffee and looking at his wristqube, Wahram said curiously, “So these pebble attacks—they were a matter of one Venusian faction wanting to influence the population here? To get its way in a fight with another faction?”

“That’s right.”

“But… if the attack on the sunshield had succeeded, wouldn’t the terrorists have killed themselves too?”

Genette said, “I think there would have been time for an evacuation. And the perpetrators could be off-planet by now. Also, if qubes made the decision, they might not have cared either way. Whoever the original programmers were, at that point they might not have been in control of the decisions being made. The qubes themselves might have been thinking, Well, it’s a loss, but there’s more of us where we came from. So they would get what they wanted whether the attack worked or failed.”

Wahram thought it over. “What about that killed terrarium out in the asteroid belt? The Yggdrasil?”

“I don’t know about that. Maybe it was meant to make people feel vulnerable. Maybe they were just testing their method. But it’s odd, I agree. It’s one of the reasons I want to see these qubanoids, and any people they’ve picked up here.”

A group of people emerged from the front door of the complex, and Genette made a beeline to them. Many were smalls; the attack on the building had apparently had a Trojan horse component to it, with a bunch of smalls cutting in through air ducts and firing gas canisters to start the attack.

“All right, come on,” Genette said when he returned to Wahram’s side, “let’s get out of here. We have to get these things off-planet as fast as we can.”

A line of about two dozen people, mostly standard size, but including a small and a tall, filed out the door, chained together by their security vests. Genette stopped them one by one as they passed, asking questions very politely, only detaining them for a few seconds each. Wahram inspected them also as they passed, and he noted their possibly too-smooth motion, and an intent glassy-eyed blankness to some of them; but he would not have put bets on his own ability to tell which ones were human and which manufactured. It was disconcerting, that was for sure. A little drop of dread seemed to have slid down his throat to his stomach, where it was spreading.

Genette stopped the last person in line: “Aha!”

“Who’s this?” Wahram asked.

“This is Swan’s lawn bowler, I believe.” Genette held up Passepartout and photographed the person, then nodded at the matched photos on the wristqube’s little screen. “And, as it turns out”—running a wand over the young person’s head—“a human being after all.”

The youth stared at them mutely.

Genette said, “Maybe this is our programmer, eh? We can investigate on our way out. I want to get off Venus as fast as we can.”

This meant another quick crossing of the city, and a tense passage through lock gates to their impromptu helicopter pad. More than once, officials who should have had reason to question such a large group instead let them pass, sometimes while chattering nervously on their headsets through the whole process.

When they were airborne again, Genette glanced at Wahram with a mime’s round-eyed wiping of the brow. Their helicopter headed for Colette, and at the spaceport there, they rushed onto a pad and got into a space plane, and rode it juddering up into lower orbit, there to be hauled in by an orbiting Interplan cruiser.

It was the Swift Justice; and when everyone was aboard, they set a course for Pluto.

In the weeks of their trip out, they brought the lawn bowler in for questioning more than once; but he never said a word. He was definitely human. A young man, thirty-five years old. They were able to trace him back from Swan’s sighting in the Chateau Garden to one of the unaffiliateds, one that would not give its name to outsiders; Interplan had it listed, with accidental prescience, as U-238.

During the flight to Pluto and Charon, Wang’s qube was able to ferret out quite a bit more about the lawn bowler’s brief life. It was a sad tale, though not uncommon: small terrarium run by a cult, in this case Ahura Mazdā worshippers; strict gender division; patriarchal, polygamous; obsessed with physical punishments for demonic transgressions. Into that little world, an unstable child. Reports of aggression without remorse. Stuck there from the age of four until departure by defection at age twenty-four. Learned programming on Vesta, known by no one; absorbed for a time in qube design at the Ceres Academy, but then left school; detached from the school culture. Eventually kicked off Ceres for transgressing its security codes one too many times; then a return to his home rock, where, as far as anyone knew, he had remained. But in fact no one had been watching. How he had come to the work on Venus was unclear, that sequence hidden in the fog that surrounded the Venus Working Group—in this case Lakshmi and her anti-sunshield effort, a unit that had hidden all its actions very effectively. Thus Vinmara and the lab that made humanoids, including the ones that had gone to Mars and infiltrated the government. And the ones that had moved to Earth and then the asteroid belt, and built and operated the pebble launcher. So this young man had either invented the pebble mobs, or designed qubes that had invented them; and he or his creations had executed the attacks.

“Yggdrasil?” Genette said to the bowler at one point.

The diagnostic monitors attached to the youth’s body and brain showed a solid jump.

Genette nodded. “Just a test, eh? Proof of concept?”

Again the monitors showed the jump in the metabolism. The idea that these jumps constituted a reliable lie detector had long since been abandoned, but the physiological leaps were still very suggestive.

Wordless as the youth remained, there was no way to be sure why any of these things had happened. But an association with Yggdrasil seemed clear.

To Genette, this was what mattered. “I think the attacks on Terminator and Venus were political,” he said to Wahram, with the youth right in the room with them, staring mutely at the wall, the monitor’s jumpy lines speaking for him in a sort of mute shouting. “I suspect they were approved by Lakshmi. But breaking open the Yggdrasil came first, and probably was this person’s idea. A demonstration for Lakshmi, perhaps. Proof of concept. And so three thousand people died.”

Genette stared up at the youth’s tight face, then said finally to Wahram, “Come on, let’s get out of here. There’s nothing more to do here.”

In the three weeks it took to reach Pluto and Charon, Wahram’s injured leg took a turn for the worse, and after a consulation among themselves, the ship’s medical team decided to amputate it just below the knee and begin the pluripotent stem cell work that would start the growth of a new left leg. Wahram endured this with as little attention as possible, quelling the dread in him and reminding himself that at 113 his whole body was a medical artifact, and that regrowing lost limbs was one of the simplest and oldest of body interventions. Nevertheless it was creepy to look at, and phantom itchy to feel, and he kept himself distracted by grilling Genette repeatedly about the plan the inspector’s team was now executing. But no matter how much he distracted himself, he never got used to the sensation of the new leg growing down from his knee.

Spacecraft from all over the solar system were converging to join them on Charon, because this was where the Alexandrine group and the Interplan agents working with them were gathering all the qube humanoids that had been apprehended, which, as far as they knew, were all that had been manufactured. All had been captured on the same day they had closed the facility in Vinmara, most of them in the same hour. Almost half of them had been on Mars. The entire operation had been planned and coordinated by word of mouth, and the precise moment for the execution of the plan communicated the day before, when Genette sent a single radio message, a performance of the old jazz standard “Now’s the Time.” In every particular the plan had come off without a significant hitch, even though more than two thousand agents had taken part in the operation, and four hundred and ten humanoids captured. Not one of them had exhibited any sense that they might be in danger of arrest.

Genette’s plan now was to exile all these humanoids, along with the lawn bowler and about thirty other people involved with the qube attacks. An agreement had been made to use one of the starships being built out of Pluto’s moon Nix. This starship was in fact just a specialized terrarium—an almost completely closed biological life-support system, exceptionally well supplied, and with extremely powerful engines. It would now serve as a kind of prison ship, similar to the ones orbiting in the asteroid belt, but ejected from the solar system. The starship terrarium’s inside would be sealed, its navigating AI placed outside the sealed cylinder. And off it would go: four hundred qube humanoids, the lawn bowler, and the group of people who had been judged guilty of complicity in any of the attacks. It was not a big group, because the lawn bowler appeared to have conceived and designed the attacks in a way that did not need many human confederates to make it work. So: exile, from the solar system and from the rest of humanity.

“Surely Lakshmi should be in there too!” Wahram objected to Genette.

“I agree, but we couldn’t manage to grab her. The Venusians will have to deal with her, or maybe we can prosecute her on Ceres and see where it gets us.”

“But this exile ship,” Wahram said. “What if the qubes break through to the controls? Reverse their voyage and come back, hungry for revenge and smarter than ever?”

“The speeds are too great,” Genette said easily. “The fuel aboard will be quickly burned getting them to tremendous speed. By the time they dealt with the problem of refueling, it would take centuries to get back. By that time civilization will have worked out some way to deal with them.”

“What do you imagine that will be?”

“I have no idea. We’re going to have to deal with qubes, there’s no getting around that. We have the wolf by the ears. My sense is that if qubes are kept out of humanoid bodies, and out of the hands of angry programmers, they’ll just be part of the scene, like Passepartout is now.”

“Or Swan’s Pauline?”

“Maybe keeping a qube in your head isn’t a good idea,” Genette admitted. “I wonder if Swan would agree to move it into a wristqube like mine.”

Wahram doubted this, though he wasn’t sure why. He was less and less sure of Swan, no matter what the issue in question happened to be.

He went on to another uneasiness. “Isn’t this a clear case of cruel and unusual punishment?”

“It’s unusual,” Genette allowed cheerfully. “Even unique. But its cruelty is relative.”

“Sent off with qubes? Isn’t it a weird kind of solitary confinement, something out of a nightmare?”

“Exile is not cruel. Believe me, because I know. The mind is its own place. They could in theory make quite a fine terrarium in there, and then settle an empty Earth somewhere off in the distance, and start a whole new wing of humanity. There’s nothing stopping them from that. So it’s just exile. I am an exile myself, and it is a recognized form of severe but nonlethal punishment. And this person killed three thousand people, just to test out a weapon. And also programmed quantum computers that now can’t tell whether what they’re doing is good or bad. They’ve been given intentionality without adequate limits, and are an obvious danger, and we don’t have a good defense against them right now. So I think sending them away is making a statement about how we treat qubes. We don’t just turn them off and break them up, as some are calling for, but send dangerous ones off in exile, just like we send off humans. That’s got to be a good message to the qubes left behind. We’ll then keep them in boxes so we can keep them in our control—at least I hope we will. That may or may not work. But what I’m hoping is that we can stop any more qubes of any kind being made, at least for a while, and take some time to look more closely into what smarter qubes or intentional qubes or qubes in bodies might mean. So to my mind, we’ll have administered justice, and bought ourselves some time. So I’m glad there’s been agreement from the Plutonians and the Mondragon and all the other relevant parties, including Shukra. And hopefully Swan, when she hears about it, and everyone else.”

“Maybe,” Wahram said.

He was still not comfortable with Genette’s solution. But every alternative he came up with was either too harsh (death for all of them) or too lenient (reintegration into society). Exile—the first starship a prison—well, there were prison terraria in the asteroid belt, locked from the outside and with conditions inside ranging from utopia to hell. So the lawn bowler’s group and its creations could make what they wanted. Supposedly. It still struck him as a version of hell. When all was said and done, little Inspector Jean Genette could be quite as inhuman as the lawn bowler; sanguine, blithe, impenetrable; regarding Wahram now with a look that was the same for all—saint, criminal, stranger, brother—all of them regarded with the same birdlike gaze, frankly evaluative, interested, willing to be convinced.

Still Wahram was uneasy, and he read the files on all the humans and humanoids they held captive, which at this point came to a few thousand pages. When he was done, he came back to Genette more upset than ever.

“You’ve missed something here,” he said sharply. “Read the interviews and you’ll see that there was someone in that lab in Vinmara who was letting some of these qubanoids loose and sending them off to people elsewhere in the system who helped to hide them. The ones that Swan ran into in the Inner Mongolia, and at least four more—they all tell similar stories. Whoever was doing this told them they were defective, and that they needed to go on the lam if they wanted to keep from being demolished. The qubes didn’t know what to make of that, and some of them acted strangely after they got loose. Maybe they were defective, I have no reason to disbelieve it. Anyway, this person in the lab was getting them away from Lakshmi! So does that person deserve exile also? And do the defective qubanoids that got away deserve exile?”

Genette frowned at this and promised it would get looked into.

This was not satisfactory to Wahram. He had been involved with Genette and Alex in the problem of the strange qubes from the beginning, and now felt he was being somewhat shunted to the side. He rolled his wheelchair into a meeting of the Interplan investigators and other members of the group as they discussed the situation, and again made the case for these innocents caught up with the rest of their captives. In the end it was not unanimous, but a strong majority agreed: all the qubanoids were to go into exile; the lab assistant who had been setting the defectives loose would not. It turned out that this lab assistant had not only let them go, but also erased them from the lab’s records, in quite a clever bit of work, Genette informed Wahram—as if it were the cleverness that justified the pardon. Wahram, still deeply unsatisfied, let the matter drop. The Venusian lab assistant, a young person scarcely older than the lawn bowler, would be free to go. And the poor defective qubes might be better off among their own kind.

So when the time came, Wahram sat in the viewing chamber of the Interplan cruiser and watched with the rest of the people there as the matter-antimatter engine fired up, and the First Quarter of Nix began its trip to the stars. It looked like any other terrarium on the move, maybe a little bit bigger. Ice formed a fair percentage of its mass, and the exterior looked like an ice statue of something like a great white dolphin, flying on a tail of lightning.

“What about the people who built it?” Wahram asked. “Wasn’t that their starship?”

“We have to replace it. They intend to send four in a kind of fleet, so we will make another one for them out of Hydra. We can take some of Charon too if we need it. So they will still have their four ships.”

Wahram remained troubled. “I still don’t know what I think of this.”

Genette did not seem concerned at that. “Best we could do, I’m afraid! It was a hard thing to manage offline and in utter secrecy. Quite a nifty little operation, if you ask me. Amazing what you can do with paper and synchronized watches. Every person involved had to behave with the utmost secrecy and completely trust the people they knew in the network, and they all had to be right about that for it to work. It’s quite an accomplishment when you think about it.”

“Agreed,” Wahram said, “but will it be enough?”

“No. The problem remains. This just gives us a little breathing room.”

“And… you are confident you got all of them?”

“Not at all. But it looks like the facility on Venus was the only one making them, or so Wang’s qube believes. And we’ve got enough records from their energy use and input of materials to get a maximum count of how many could be made, and we got almost exactly that many. Possibly there are one or two still out there, but we’re thinking they will be too few to do any harm. They may be more of the defectives let free by that young lab assistant. Anyway, we will try to catch them if they are out there.”

Meaning, Wahram thought, that right now somewhere in the system there could be machines in human form, escaped into the crowd, doing their best to stay free, perhaps, when any X-ray machine or other surveillance device would reveal what they were—out there hiding, trying to accomplish the goals they had been given, perhaps, or new ones they might choose for themselves, according to some self-invented algorithm of survival. Damaged, dangerous, detached from any other consciousness, solitary and afraid—in other words, just like everyone else.