22

We Always End Up Fighting

“So what is it? What was sending all those engine commands?”

“I don't know,” Leela says. Her lab-coated avatar floats in the middle of the observation deck, seated cross-leg, surrounded by a web of shimmering nodes and flowing lines, an abstract representation of the White Cat's computer network. She's studying them as she talks, but I know it's an illusion. What her image is doing doesn't follow from what her brain does—she's showing us this on purpose.

I never thought about how much goes into how human beings talk to each other, until I talked to someone who wasn't a human.

“Pretty much as soon as I got that packet filtering trick in place, the messages just stopped coming. I don't even know where they originated from. The sender network addresses are all numbers that don't actually exist. Lots of different ones. Fabricated.”

“So you don't know anything?” asks Miranda. She's still wearing some sort of sleepwear. It's got pictures of cats on it.

“I didn't say that. I just don't know where the signals come from. I took a long hard look at them while you were flirting with Marcus in the showers, and sleeping, and whatnot.”

Miranda's lips part, and her brow furrows. A thought nags at me… how does Leela have any idea what we said to each other in the showers? Is there a camera in there somewhere?

Leela doesn't give me time to ponder that unsettling thought.

“Anyway, what I do know is that those packets evolve. Along a time sequence. They start out as complete gibberish, and they change. Have a look.”

She sweeps her hand towards both of us in an arc, and a spray of text windows launches from her fingertips, expanding into our view. It's a nice effect, but the actual text I'm seeing isn't very enlightening.

“It still looks like gibberish to me,” I say, with a shrug. “I'm not a programmer. What am I looking at here?”

“Okay, look at the first one,” she says, and the text window on my left expands and slides forward. “It's just a bunch of random characters, right? Okay, over here—what does that look like?”

“Numbers?”

“Try imagining them as burn specs.”

It's like an origami trick. Fold and refold and it's a crumpled piece of paper, then fold once more, finally, and it's a frog, or a whale, or, in this case, it's the same sequence of command codes and input numbers that make up a maneuver… this angle, so many seconds, this much fuel feed rate in these chamber sectors, containment field splines like this…

… almost.

“Ohhhh. It's… wrong, it's got it all wrong… but… it's trying to learn the drive.”

“Yeah. And before that, it learns network packet protocols. I think it may have started out as just raw noise on the network, but we didn't notice until it found the engine controls.”

“So what is it?” Miranda asks, “I mean, what does that tells us about what it is? Some kind of smart virus? Some sabotage software?”

I rub the back of my neck, trying to work out the kinks from too much heavy time. The handful of hours of fitful sleep I snatched after my shower isn't cutting it. “I don't think so. I reinstalled the Cat's whole drive image from scratch. Everything. Any sort of virus or malware anyone planted on there would have been wiped out.”

Miranda purses her perfectly sculpted cupid's-bow lips and blows out air in an exaggerated sigh. “Does someone else want to say it, or should I?”

“Say what exactly?”

“Seriously, Marcus. Isn't it obvious? It has to be the artifact,” she says.

“No,” says Leela. “I know the timing is pretty coincidental, but… a completely alien technology, figuring out how human network tech works, in a few hours? That's pretty far-fetched, even if it were an AI.”

She shrugs and spreads her incorporeal hands.

“I couldn't do it. And there's nothing to suggest that Tomb Builders had anything like AI technology.”

“Except what just happened,” says Miranda. “Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. The timing is too coincidental. What else could it be? Marcus, what do you think?”

“Hey, you're the scientists around here. I mostly just pick up heavy things and put them down.”

Miranda purses her lips again, and cocks an eyebrow at me, skeptical. She's onto me. I'm nowhere near that humble.

“But,” I cut in after a pause, “it does occur to me to wonder… what made Miranda's EVA pack malfunction? Didn't it happen the first time she got near this thing? And didn't it happen right after that pack was slaved to the Cat's computer? Which means a lot of radio signals—”

“That it could have intercepted! And copied!” Miranda finishes my thought. “Marcus, that's brilliant!”

Wait, did she just compliment me?

Leela frowns. “It… I don't know. It kinda makes sense. But a feat like that… if you're right, whatever this thing is, it's either an incredibly powerful computer, or it's got incredibly powerful computers in it. And if it can access our wireless network, there's no telling what it could do next.”

“Didn't you cut it off?”

“Well, yes, but I used filtering software on the relays. Kind of a stopgap solution, to be honest.”

“So you're saying this thing could sabotage us again at any time?” Miranda asks.

“It's not impossible. I'm still picking up the occasional weird test packet. I filter them out, but… I don't know what this thing is learning from them or how smart it is.”

“Okay,” I say. “Let's assume that our gremlin actually is the artifact. We can't just gamble on Leela being able to out-hack it on an on-going basis, home field advantage or no. So how do we disable it until we get clear of this mess?”

Miranda purses her lips. “What if we cut the power?”

“I didn't see any sort of external power source. Unless you want me to haul the whole thing to the machine shop and start cutting, I don't see how—”

“We're not cutting it up,” says Leela, folding her arms and scowling at me.

“I wasn't suggesting it, but—”

“No, Marcus, this is important. That thing has been drifting in space for thousands of years, and it still has power. I don't think it's running off a simple battery. Even fusion might not do the trick. Whatever it's using, if you break it open…”

She trails off, but her avatar suddenly catches fire, burns to a black caricature of a skeleton in a matter of moments, then falls to ash, leaving behind a pair of blinking cartoon eyes. Then reappears shooting me a significant look.

“Boom,” says Miranda ruefully. “Okay. No cutting. So what else can we do?”

I shrug. “Go around in circles all day? Talking isn't getting us anywhere. I'm going to go have a look at this thing. C'mon.”

Miranda's wide, surprised eyes catch me turning to go, lock with mine, then drop down, looking at… her arm?

Oops. Instead of just beckoning, I rather impulsively grabbed her wrist, tugging at her to follow me. Great. Time to have another fight.

But she just turns one corner of her mouth up in a little asymmetric smile, and says “Okay, fine. But I'm perfectly capable of walking on my own, you know.”

Leela makes self-satisfied laughing noises from somewhere as I shrug, step aside, and sweep my hands forward in an elaborate “after-you” gesture. Miranda starts up the access ladder, but not without a backward glance I cannot quite interpret.

No explosion of temper? Nothing at all?

Weird.

I wasn't expecting it to be this… real.

When you've watched enough movies on your neural lace, and everyone who travels for months with four other dudes in a cramped spacecraft has, you're used to seeing a lot of computer graphics that you really couldn't tell from a solid object, or a filmed model, the way they used to do. You'd think this would create some sort of instinctive disbelief, some tendency to look for the pixelation, for the logo, for the zipper up the back of the monster suit.

You'd be wrong. That thing hanging above us from the crane is strange, abstract, unexpected, but exudes… solidity. This is not the product of some human modeling artist, however deranged, however copiously plied with Giger artworks and synthetic cocaine. This is the real deal.

“Stand aside, it's kind of heavy,” Leela says. Her avatar is up on one arm of the descending crane claw, wearing some sort of old-fashioned hoop skirt thing that somehow doesn't prevent her from lounging like a cat, and doesn't even pay token homage to the laws of physics the rest of us have to follow.

“Heavy? In here?” Miranda asks. It's a relevant question. We're standing on the inside of the front hull, and the spin radius is so tiny here that we're barely held down, and have to shuffle to avoid flying.

“Mass about twenty-seven metric tons. At about two hundred thousand cubic centimeters, that's exactly one hundred thirty-seven point four three grams per. Way too light be neutronium, way too dense to be anything else. Right now, that is. Mass readings keep changing.”

Changing?

“That's impossible.”

I suppose it's stupid of me to say it, staring at the evident solidity, the sheer there-ness of the thing, of the pattern of embossed lines crawling over it at not-quite-right angles, but the words just slip out even so.

“Oh, really? Well, I don't think anybody told it that particular piece of hairless-monkey wisdom. Check this out.”

Leela's insubstantial avatar bounces up and gives the crane claw a virtual kick, theatrically timing the move as she starts rotating it on hydraulics. The whole assembly spins about ninety degrees and stops.

“And now I'm reading twenty-six and seven ninths metric tons,” she announces, faintly smug.

“Wait, what?”

“Well, either it's messing with my instruments somehow, or it has more dimensions than we do. Like there's a tesseract in there, folded up in higher space, and we're only reading the mass of the part that crosses our reality, or the part of our reality that isn't folded up itself. String theory may be debunked garbage, but we can still construct models that—”

“Leela, English please.”

“That is English. It's not my fault that your brains are only hardwired to visualize three dimensions. I'll make it simple. I think it's bigger on the inside.”

“What?”

“If you think about it, it's a clever way to pack more stuff in there. While you were both asleep, I've been turning it this way and that, and moving it a few centimeters back and forth, trying to puzzle out what they did. I think maybe I understand a little bit, mathematically speaking. But as for how they did it—”

She shrugs.

“—I have no idea. As much in the dark as you.”

“Can you lower it down a bit more?”

She does, and I place my palm flat on the glossy green-black surface of the thing as it drops to waist level. My hand trembles in anticipation, but nothing seems to happen. It's smooth, far too smooth for something solid, and there's no sensation of heat or cold, like it's the exact same temperature as my skin. Or like it doesn't have a temperature at all.

Miranda lets out a low sound, some inarticulate expression of wonder, or perhaps puzzlement, and brushes her fingers over the damaged section on one corner. There's a pulling and twisting of the material, a splash pattern like high-velocity meteoroid impact.

“Looks like ordinary physical forces can effect it,” she says.

“I'm not sure I want to take advantage of that,” I say, tapping on the intact portion next to the impact scars. It rings like glass. “Too risky. We could damage it, or, like Leela said, 'boom'. Let's not tamper with the box of trouble just yet.

“We can mess with our stuff, instead. I'm going to pull the wireless cards from the fusion drive, and anything else that I can, then string network cable. If we can cut the artifact off from any of the network hubs, then that should safeguard our most important stuff, at least. Leela, I want you to work on hardening the network in any way you can. Any ideas?”

“Full network encryption?”

“I already have that. When I was reinstalling the network, I was sure to—”

“You selected 'enable encryption' instead of 'require encryption,' so, no, you actually don't. Never mind. I can fix it.”

“Will that even help? Can this thing…?”

“Crack a ten twenty-four bit elliptical curve crypto key? Don't think so. It would require more bit-state changes than there are energy quanta in the universe—”

“English, Leela!”

“We should be safe unless we've accidentally kidnapped a god.”

“Okay, sounds like a plan—” I begin, but Miranda begins talking at the same time.

“Is it possible that 'kidnapped a god' is exactly what we've done?” she asks.

I don't have an answer for that one.

Afterwards, she's waiting for me back in my cabin. Sitting on the bed. Typical Miranda—doesn't like to be looked at, touched, or criticized, but no sense of anyone else's territory or personal space. At least she doesn't look quite as smug as she did when she first broke into my ship and made herself a sandwich.

Frankly, she looks a little worried.

“How'd it go?” she asks.

“Okay. I pulled the wireless cards out of everything I could and strung a whole lotta network cable. Be careful not to trip over anything, by the way. That won't cover everything, there's still a lot of components that are wireless-only, but Leela's getting encryption set up on the whole network. She says it'll take maybe half an hour, and she'll need to help you sync up your neural lace when she's done.”

I cast an eye about the small metal space, but another place to sit down fails to materialize. What does she expect me to do, squeeze in next to her? Yeah, that would sure go over well. I settle for giving her a pointed look and clearing my throat.

Which she ignores.

“So… after that…”

“Yeah, after that, what? And you're in my seat, you know.”

She gives me cocky look. I could swear she practices every facial expression in the mirror for cuteness. “I'm still technically part owner of the White Cat,” she says, the tilt of her eyebrows daring me to do… something. I don't know.

Still with the little power plays.

“Move, or I'll move you.”

“Okay, okay,” she grumbles, but doesn't get up, she just scoots over and makes room. Not enough of it. I just plant myself next to her anyway, even though we're crammed right up against each other. If it's gonna be awkward, let it be awkward for her. She'll make space quick enough.

She doesn't, though. She just repeats her question.

“After you're done… how do we get out of this? I mean, if we're surrounded, then it's only a matter of time before someone spots us, right?”

“No, not really. They might, but we were moving pretty quick when I turned off the drive and we went dark. My plan is just to stay hidden until we glide off, away from most of them, or at least until we get into a position to make a break for it.”

“And that'll work?”

“No promises, but I think the odds are good. After that, we just have to figure out somewhere to hide out. I think I can call in a favor or two for that, send some emails, that kind of thing.”

She gives me a look, but I just keep going.

“Yes, yes, yes, I know. You don't want to trust anyone with this. But we don't have to keep the Snark with us. We can take lots of photos and video, then just stash it on an uncharted asteroid like… ah… pirates burying treasure, kayno? Then when we find a buyer, we just give them the location, split the cash, and—”

And she's staring at me like I've sprouted an extra head.

“What?” I ask.

“Sell it?”

“Uh, yeah. Was that not the plan? What the hell else would we do with it?”

”Sell it?”

“What, did you want it for your collection, or something? It's a little big to be a doorstop. Not to mention that it seems to want to try to hack into whatever comes in range, for who knows what purpose. I thought that was the whole idea, right? Loot whatever we could? Sell it to the highest bidder?”

“Marcus,” she says, with a sigh, “the last time humanity found something like this, it revolutionized our whole civilization. Do you have any idea what the Starlight Coalition is worth, in actual money? You don't meet someone in a shady nightclub and sell that like it's a load of titanium ore you stole from some miners. Stop thinking like a pirate and try to expand your horizons a bit. Think like an entrepreneur. Most of the value of any business is in its future potential. You don't sell equity for cash.”

She still hasn't pulled her leg away where it's touching mine. Warmth radiates through our clothing. I think she's too busy ranting to notice.

“We're going to study it, reverse engineer it, and see what we can make. We've already seen what this thing can do. If we can figure out how to build computers like that… well…”

She trails off, but I get the message.

“Okay, Princess—uh, sorry—Pixie. Miranda. Whatever. I get your point. It's worth a lot of scratch. But I'm just a pilot. And you're a doctor. A medical doctor. And this is an asteroid mining ship, which I built on the look-up-plans-on-the-internet-and-do-it-yourself program. We don't have the skills or the tools to reverse engineer anything more complicated than a ham sandwich, much less something built by an advanced entire alien species.

“So, yes, I understand the potential. But we're so far out of our depth that the fish have lights on their noses. So what's wrong with convincing someone else, someone with the proper resources, how valuable this thing is? Then we take a huge buyout, and, I dunno, you go start another AI company or something?”

“You're still not thinking big enough,” she says, with exaggerated patience, like I'm a slow-witted child. “We don't do everything ourselves, we hire people. We get whole team going. Start the next Starlight Coalition.”

“With what money? As you pointed out when this all began, I'm broke. And you? Well, you keep telling me that it's your family who control all the money.”

“We get investors, Marcus. I know how to raise capital and hire people. This is what my family does. This is what I learned while you were flying ships around and knocking pieces off of asteroids and doing… I don't know. Space stuff.”

She waves her hand in an airy gesture, dismissing the entire Belt and the metal, water, carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen fuel we provide to keep her and her rich friends alive. Just like that. Just start a company. Raise some money, she says, like she's talking about going to the grocery store to buy potatoes and some flavored krill steaks.

“So… if you don't have money…you just… go and get some?”

“Yes. Why not?”

“I wonder if you have any idea how spoiled you are.”

“How could I forget?” she asks, with a little sigh. “You keep reminding me. You could at least stop complaining, it's working in your favor this time. So you just finish up the space stuff, and then let me do my thing, okay? Now, repeat after me: 'Thank you, Miranda, you sweet beautiful amazing genius of a woman, for bailing me out of trouble and making me so rich that I never have to worry about anything ever again.'”

“Sweet? You? Hah.”

I'm not going to argue with “beautiful.” Or even possibly “genius.”

“Look, Pixie, I get it. What I'm saying about this stuff is probably just as dumb and frustrating as it was for me when you tried to set us on a course directly for the no-fly zone. And I'm not gonna stick my head in the sand like you did.”

“Of course, you aren't. I'm a much better teacher than you. So we—”

”But I do have a few questions. Number one, if we're making the next Starlight Coalition, or something—”

I can't prevent the skepticism from leaking into my voice. We're just… us. Couple of oddballs in an old mining ship.

“—how can we do it different? I mean, fusion drives are less than one percent of all spacecraft. I know you don't care about this, but I'm part owner, here, and I do not want us to end up as another monopoly selling rich people's toys, okay?”

She gives me a look and another little sigh.

“I'm going to have to do a lot of hand-holding with you when we get this all started, aren't I?”

She leans way inside my personal space, pressing against me even more, and looks me in the eye.

“Look, Marcus. Every new technology starts off a luxury good. Indoor plumbing, electric lights, internal combustion ground vehicles, whatever. It costs a lot to bring new products to market. Then you figure out how to get the price down. Look at, oh, I don't know… neural lace implants. They used to require a lot of intrusive neurosurgery, and they were just for pilots and early adopters who could afford them. Then that high cost sponsored the biotech research that made lace seeds that just grow in. Now they're available to everyone who doesn't live on Earth or something. That's how it all works.”

“Yeah, but—”

She puts a hand on my forearm to silence me.

“No, I'm serious. Whatever we find, we'll have to charge the kind of prices we need in order to grow. We won't have control over that. Broader markets will have to come later.”

“Yeah. Right. So if this is all so inevitable, why haven't fusion drives gotten cheaper in fifty years?”

“Haven't they?” she asks, breezy, like it doesn't matter. “I don't really follow that industry. Look, you'll be on the board of directors, okay? You can raise issues like this when we have some numbers to work with. I can't answer stuff like that now.”

Great. Me. On a board of directors. Of a corporation. That'll go great, I'm sure.

“Okay, fine, whatever. Question number two, how long do you expect this company to last?”

“A long time. The Starlight Coalition has been around since the Artifact War. SpaceX has been in my family for five generations. So, it'll probably last longer than we will. Even though I'm actually, ah, engineered to last a while. Why?”

“So your plan is for us to run a company together. For the rest of our lives. Or at least until you screw me out of my share?”

“Interesting idea, but, yes, Marcus. Did you not realize that?” she asks, giving me that “you are an overgrown idiot child” look, again.

“But we can't have a five minute adult conversation without arguing!”

“Yes, Marcus, I know. Why do think I've been trying so hard to make peace? But you just keep picking fights with me.”

“Wait, you're saying I was the one picking fights with you?”

“Yes, Marcus!” She's starting to raise her voice again. This is trying not to fight? “I was trying to be nicer, we were getting along better, and…and… you came back for me. You saved my life! And then suddenly it was like you were furious at me.”

She's right up in my face, leaning forward on the bed, gesticulating. We're crammed way too close together, and there's that same faint vanilla scent coming off her.

Then she deflates a bit, the way she always does after her brief flashes of anger, and her voice goes quiet.

“You actually seemed worried about whether I was okay. And then you suddenly looked like you wanted to kill me yourself. I just don't know what your problem is!”

“I just didn't want to talk about it.”

“Yes. You never want to talk about it. You just shut down. It was like you were mad at me for surviving!”

Oh.

That's exactly why I was mad, wasn't it?

She was alive. And dad is still dead. And that's not fair. The universe took the best man I ever knew, the man I looked up to, the man I wanted to be. And left me a pretty, deranged, spoiled pain in the ass. All because I got it right, that catch maneuver, the second time.

Not the first.

That's what she's asking, whether she knows it or not. She saw it, but of course she doesn't know what it means.

Well, so what? Am I supposed to spill my guts to her? Like some pathetic simp who can't see past how pretty she is? Look for pity? Maybe a pat on the head?

I don't think so. I've woken up every day for five years wishing I could talk to him one last time. She doesn't get invited into that. We may be allies of a sort, I may end up having to look at her across a table made of actual wood, in a corporate boardroom, but there's no way I share this one.

“Marcus? Hello? What's going on?”

“Look, that… it wasn't about you, okay? But don't expect a fucking hug now, okay? You get marks for trying, but you're not sorry for what you did. You're just sorry I'm less disposable than you thought I was when you assumed you could treat me like crap. You want something. You haven't really improved. You haven't learned anything. So don't bother.”

I get up off the bed, bouncing in bit in the light gravity. I don't want to be near her anymore. I don't want to look at her. Except I do. And I don't. I just want to be by myself. And I don't.

Her voice follows me, aggrieved, accusing. “What is it you want from me? I get it, you think I'm not a good person. You say it and say it and say it. I get it already.

“Well, guess what, Mister Marcus Warnoc, Custodian of the Moral High Ground? You're not a good person, either! You beat me up. You were willing to risk permanently damaging Leela just because you were mad at me. You went behind my back and lied to me about resetting all the computers. And even if you think how you treated me was totally justified, what about all those people who you robbed, huh? If you hadn't done that, nothing I did to you, none of the stuff you're so mad about, would ever have happened at all!”

She pauses, then, more quietly, almost pensive—“We would never have even met.”

I don't know what to say. I'm angry, frustrated, sad, disappointed… in myself. She and I are going to be rich together, maybe… but she was wrong. Being rich won't stop me from worrying “about anything ever again.” It won't fix a single problem that I care about.

I just rest a forearm against the wall, and my forehead on that arm, and don't say anything.

“We're not the good guys, Marcus,” she says, softly. “If this were a movie, we wouldn't be the heroes. Maybe heroes don't even exist, not really. But we're stuck here with who we are. So can't we please just try to make the best of it? And maybe save the moral inventory for when we aren't being chased by a mob? I know we're not really very compatible, but we need to work together, and I'm trying, okay?”

“It's not about compatibility. Or morals. That's not what makes people get along,” I say, to the wall.

“What is it, then?”

“Trust,” I say, turning to face her. She's still cross-legged on my bed, looking up at me, her eyes shining, the way they always seem to, whether she likes what she's hearing or not.

“A sincere apology would be nice. But it wouldn't fix the problem. Because the problem is that I know what you're capable of. And so how do I know you won't do something like that again?

“And, yes, before you say it again, yes, me, too. I'm capable of bad stuff, too. I might have standards, but I guess I sure as hell didn't fucking live up to them, did I? So, okay, yes, you're right, we're bad people. We could argue about who's worse, and who did what to who, but that doesn't matter. What matters is we can't trust each other.”

And I turn away from her, as I walk out the door, driven out of my own room, my own private space, by the urgent need to not have this conversation.

“Because we know each other too well,” I mutter under my breath.