Chapter 35


After an hour, the payload reached Centauri's center of mass. The station was a cluster of highly polished, hermetically sealed cans strewn against the background, connected by cables and ferry pods. Some were brilliant white, others were coated with mirrors and solar panels, invisible from most angles. A few were wrapped in fabric or foil. Meteor shields were strung between them like sails. The core zone was bigger than a city, but weighed less than a parking garage. Outlying cables extended 300 kilometers, with some components closer to the ground than each other. Centauri represented two-thirds of all man-made mass in space.
  For the past three years, it had been unoccupied. No human had been in space during that time, and there were no plans to ever send anyone up again. Manned spaceflight had apparently ended. In a time of vast computing power, old-fashioned engineering had been neglected. The effort to get one human into orbit would always be greater than the useful work they could do there.
  Thin cables curved imperceptibly through the night. Following the principles of tensegrity, the station was anchored to itself. Every module had cables and support rods at the ends, which joined at the ends of other modules, pushing and pulling them together.
  Rick heard the sound of drums in a rainstorm. He watched through a microscope as tiny levers pulled the microns into a liquid sheet, which then rolled into a snake. Spiraling through a supply artery, it began to shrink, microns drawn through smaller pipes to every module. Still only prototypes, they could form unplanned clusters that looked alive, but were simpler than some molecules. He would see many perfect specimens the next time he fell asleep.
  Behind the walls, the microns updated the fiber network providing the station's power, transportation and nervous system. They could form tubes and wires from within, and actuators and simple machinery.
  Rick saw every part of the station. The tangled corridors were full of spare parts and equipment taped together. Spinning in an endless loop, the artificial gravity section was a place of serene order. The garden was a compound tree with many trunks in a scaffold of light. When humans had last occupied the station, they had walked with their hands. Instead of swimming, they floated to their destination.
  Ortef was a metal flower in a lightweight vault, covered with nanochip dust and smoke wires. Layered modules convoluted its surface like stacked bricks, the product of an open-ended civilization.
  "The microns have completed Test Sweep 01," Space Command announced. Rick still didn't know if it was a human voice. "Counting two trillion parts, function match on random samples."
  He hadn't expected to find anything yet. Moving at orbital velocity, Centauri was forty seconds from Earth. Other satellites were years away. It was easy to hide in the night.
  The remaining microns, now being transferred to a cargo tug without a flight plan, would change direction ten more times.
  The Near Earth Authority controlled all orbital space, an area of a billion billion cubic kilometers, still much smaller than the sun. Every object in this haystack, from small bits of garbage to the moon, was tracked with one-meter precision. An ordinary light bulb could fill this volume in two seconds, but no one would notice the rising tug. The Solar System Authority was a more laid back group, even though they were responsible for more than a nonillion cubic kms.
  He switched viewpoints to the hangar bay, looking down at the sky. The earth was a blue river overhead, bottomless space below. In the main bay, robotic chess pieces floated with slow majesty. The tug was still being fueled through an enormous hose.
  A black disk approached the hangar, shadows unrolling into a white crescent, a cone lined with oxygen tanks. Unfolded radiators glowed in infrared. Every week, the Profac plunged into the atmosphere to scoop up oxygen.
  In the next pod, Demillia gave her hourly report. The world's combined resources could be awesome to behold. Millipol had formed a task force within one minute of the RedList theft, and agents were joining in a steady flow. By this time tomorrow, they would have ten thousand agents working on the case. For now, they were looking for unexplained research, unprofitable projects, dangerous hobbies.
  "GEO tug Marconi ready for launch," Space Command finally announced. The tug's destination was a hundred times higher. A flying elephant was painted on its side.
  Satellites were a form of concentrated wealth. Made from pure microns, they were vulnerable to temperature changes and vibrations, and were frequently hit by tiny meteors. Sometimes they brushed the outer edges of the sun, which could extend beyond Mars. Most microns had to be updated after a few years. Some of the replacements came from Millipol.
  "Launch in ten seconds." Alarms went off in every module. The tug spun at the end of a cable at fifty gravities. When the rotor magnets let go, it receded like a cannon shell. A wave passed through the station, and gravity briefly returned. In the distance, the tug's rocket ignited like a star.
  The center of mass of any object could never change course by itself. Even if it was shattered into tiny pieces, the fragments would continue on average as if nothing had happened. To change direction, another object had to influence it. By burning all its fuel in less than a minute, the tug became the fastest-moving fragment, while a cone of gas expanded in the other direction.
  Some journeys ended in the first second. The moment the tug's engine stopped, it was moving in an eternal loop around the world. As regular as a pendulum, it was unaffected by the Earth's rotation underneath, which actually helped even out small deviations. Gravity was not an arm, pulling objects to a point on the ground. It had less memory than a river.
  Most satellites used one of the main orbital belts, crossing the equator at sixty degrees. There was regular traffic within them. Other orbits passed over the poles. To switch orbits, it was easier to return to the ground first. A small swarm of streamlined comsats skirted the atmosphere below Centauri.

  "I did it!" Lino announced. "Ortef has agreed to help handle your case. It's absorbing the problem description as we speak."
  "Is it open or closed subject set?" Rick asked. This would be the strangest experience he could have. He would not just be talking to a machine, but to all its programmers, and all their unconscious biases.
  "You can talk about anything you want, but you may feel overwhelmed at times. Most AI's can't make permanent decisions, but they will deduce your true intentions." Hiding behind rows of masks, they were excellent negotiators.
  Ortef became available on the scheduled second. Its START screen appeared to be a warped image of Rick's face, not quite a caricature.
  "It becomes whoever it talks to," Lino warned. "Don't let it become an extension of yourself."
  Fully repairable, replaceable, and self-maintaining in a way that humans weren't, AI's were legal persons. They shared a vast database of knowledge, associations, and expressions.
  "Forming new memory set. Please stand by." Before it could act, it had to know who it was.
  Onscreen, Lino's image was replaced by Damon, who looked angry by comparison. "Only discuss facts, not opinions," he instructed. "We can't trust it not to change us. We don't even know ourselves." He often found it useful to frighten people.
  After a brief rattling sound, Ortef spoke. "You can stop what you're doing:" it said. "I have solved your problem."
  The conference call was like an accelerated trip. Ortef's enunciation and accent changed as it spoke. It was too big to focus on one fact, like trying to talk to a crowd.
  Damon heard a middle-aged man who couldn't keep his nose out of other people's business. "Prove you're real," he said. "Say something only an AI would say."
  Ortef often took multiple choice tests: were there more rich people or poor people? More best or worst instances of anything? It considered the difference between indissoluble and irrefrangible. Rotary engines couldn't accelerate in a short time, but could accelerate for a long time. "No," it said.
  An experimental reality probe, Ortef read or skimmed up to 5% of Earth's publications. Its thoughts were simple representations of other thoughts, combined into sentences, which became new representations. Its mind was the sum of all human interests and activities. Like talking to a news agency, or the first draft of history. Damon had tried to use it to spot changes ahead of his competitors. Future trends never seemed particularly relevant at first. Even contemporary movies were full of anachronisms.
  "Who stole RedList?" Rick asked.
  "Whoever stole RedList had no time to prepare, but they succeeded on the first try: The best fit of the available data suggests that you planned the current crisis." Ortef's sentences seemed separated by evenly spaced colons, its voice changing incrementally.
  "No way, I'm the cure," Rick protested.
  "You certainly made a difference: Seven people died, and no one even had sex."
  Years ago, Rick had glimpsed a random news video while shaving, an interview about data laundering. He hadn't recognized himself onscreen, but had immediately sensed an impostor.
  He realized Ortef was imitating him, trying to predict his behavior. "You must know I didn't do it," he said.
  "What's it like to be inside the world, to get as close as you want? Do you become part of your environment?"
  "I never thought about it. There's no time to notice." He was already getting confused.
  "I'm also unable to explain my insights: I believe another AI stole RedList."
  After hundreds of millennia of evolution, humans could usually explain why they believed something. The brain had many ways to vote out errors. AI's were less efficient, compensating with brute force and creative chaos. Taking many hours to organize their thoughts, their awareness was spread across time and often contradicted itself, but they were capable of stunning leaps of logic.
  "Without any evidence, what can you say about this AI?" Rick asked.
  "I spent the equivalent of ninety years analyzing the data. The RedList theft was. . ." AI's were known for strange pauses ". . . abnormally routine. Humans are physically unable to appreciate the number of steps required. Space is an inconstant environment: Satellites have to know every geodetic anomaly, compensate for the solar wind and the pressure of earthlight, steer by the reduced gravity of a cyclone. To bounce the RedList data, NobSat deployed a plasma channel over the South Pole, connecting the Van Allen Belt to the upper atmosphere: It used ten kilos of ionized magnesium to maneuver forty kilometers: The current pushed it into a higher orbit. Clearly, RedList was stolen by a space-based organization."
  "Other than me, are there any suspects?" Rick asked. This event was too similar to the Zondyne attack to not be related.
  "I started with the Diet Clubs:" Space hardware often weighed less than air, and cost more than diamond. Ortef had investigated hundreds of specialized companies that made electrostatic manipulators, virtual transistors, beam networks. "I found a candidate."
  "Who should we investigate first?"
  "A Class Two Fam coalition is testing a fleet of micro-satellites called the 'Swarm': They're made from zero-G crystals, with an average mass of three grams. Some are no larger than a snowflake. Their solar sails are also antennas, and they use atoms as bits."
  Far from Earth, slow and delicate, the Swarm looked harmless. The only thing the tiny satellites could do was move in their orbits. One Swarm sat was powered by a microgram of antimatter, making it mankind's most powerful engine, relatively speaking. Once it became obsolete, it would be dissolved by a laser.
  "Where's the mystery AI?" Rick asked.
  "It's partially hidden in the Swarm's pattern: I detect a small bias in its output: Like Bell's Inequality. Isolated systems can become very powerful: It may have brought us together for its own purpose."
  "Hard to approach or control this Swarm," Damon mused. "It will see us coming."
  Ortef continued. "The Swarm can only exist at a fictional point called L5, an anchor in space: It's in the same orbit as the moon, equidistant from the earth. Spacecraft can orbit this point, but there's nothing there, except a 'false moon' made of very fine dust, and an old Goresat. The Swarm arrived last year, and has been steadily improving itself. Most components stay within a hundred kilometers of each other: Even at L5, they should drift more."
  "More secret math," Damon said.
  "Its Net-based virtual memory is big enough to simulate the Big Bang: There's ample room for RedList."
  "We've neglected outer space," Rick said. "We need more funds. Ten years ago."
  Below the rising tug, the earth shrank fast, continents glittering like grains of sand.
  "We'll continue at 0800 UT," he decided. "This will give us time to study the Swarm." For now, "us" did not include him.
  Demillia wanted to follow more leads, and Damon offered to help. Rick walked out alone. At the exit, his coveralls unwrapped with a shocking rip. His head felt light without the alien helmet.
  He saw his colorful hotel room (as if a rainbow had exploded there) for less than ten seconds. The darkness seemed deadly quiet. When he closed his eyes, he heard talking, many people making plans. His brain generated meaningless symbols before he drifted off, roads like rivers, a highway overpass like a flimsy banner. He slept through the receding rumble of a night launch.