With new kinds of intelligence come new kinds of relationships. . . .
1. Brittney
How old were you when you first saw death? Me, I’ll call it twenty-two. It’s a good number: one year beyond that at which you can vote and drink. Well, you can. One I physically can’t do and the other they won’t let me. But you get the idea. It’s also a year older than I was an annum ago, though my internal clock is a bit idiosyncratic.
When you come down to it, it’s no more arbitrary than the events that killed John Pilkin. The same ones that nearly got me and Floyd killed, too. But I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s a habit I’ve never been able to cure. Maybe when I’m thirty-two? Probably not. My name’s Brittney and the reason I’m vague about things like my age is that I’m an artificial intelligence who lives in a bunch of computer chips behind Floyd’s ribs. Technically, I came alive three annums ago—an event spurred, ironically, by the first time I myself nearly died, in a geyser blast on Enceladus. So I guess that might make me three, but I feel like twenty-two and that’s what counts.
Until John died, I’d have told you Naiad was just about the coolest place in the Outer System—maybe anywhere. It’s a little whiz-ball of a moon, about three times the size of Phobos, circling Neptune every seven hours, so close you’d swear it’s going to air-brake and fall in, just like Floyd and I did on Titan, a couple of annums ago.
Not that that’s going to happen, but with Neptune staring down at you all the time, a hundred times bigger than Earth’s moon, it’s easy to let perspectives reverse and convince yourself that “down” is Neptuneward and Naiad is simply a ceiling to which, insect-like, you are miraculously glued, waiting to fall.
I think it’s fun, playing with perspective that way. Floyd’s not so sure. Sometimes, he says, Neptune is like a giant Earth, sans continents—an infinity of blues, from pastel to midnight, making you wonder how, back when it was just a dot in a telescope, they’d had the prescience to name it for the god of the sea. At other times, he says it’s like a malevolent eye, staring and judging. A god not of jaunty sailing ships but of endless depths, waiting to claim what’s rightfully its own.
Then there’s the light. Mostly, it’s Neptune’s blue backwash, a color human eyes don’t register as well as Saturn’s more jovial reds and oranges. But it’s also just plain dim: a tenth as bright as Saturn, a thousandth as bright as Earthlight from the Moon. The Sun itself is an actinic dot: still blinding to Floyd’s unshielded eye, but not the warm glow of in-system. It’s a puncture in the fabric of the Universe, a glimpse of something even more remote, aloof, and damning than Neptune itself.
Or so Floyd says. It’s only in places like this, he adds, that you can really understand the Outer System.
Oddly, it’s when he says things like that that I come closest to understanding Floyd.
1. Floyd
Sometimes I don’t think things through as well as I should. Not that I’d admit it to Brittney. When she gets started on something, she thinks about it obsessively. In femtoseconds when she wants.
What I’d not thought through this time was Neptunian economics. Partly that was because, for the first time in my life, economics wasn’t vital. Thanks to Brittney I was rich, or at least comfortably well off. We have three percent of the System’s biggest diamond mine, and while it’ll be a few annums before it goes into production, we can live quite a while on the advance.
There are people for whom no amount of money is ever enough. The guy to whom Brittney and I owe our riches is one of them. But all I wanted was a bit of supplementary income until the diamonds came in. Not that I thought it would be difficult; with the only decent tug in Neptune System, I’d expected to be in at least moderate demand.
What I’d not taken into account was that while energy-wise, Neptune’s not all that much farther out than Saturn, time-wise it is. If you ’rail a canister out at high enough vee to arrive before it’s obsolete, it’s hard to gravity brake and harder yet to run down before it’s halfway to Alpha Centauri. Not to mention that Neptune had only the most rudimentary e-rail, so in-system shipments were limited to slow shots to destinations that might be annums away. No exports means no income. No income, no imports. Other than a rare earth mine on Naiad, we only had two types of neighbors: broke prospectors hoping for a miracle and trust-fund survivalist-types not really wanting one. Both were pretty used to being self-reliant.
I didn’t really need all that much work: I could keep myself in fresh vegetables, soy curd, and the like by trading taxi services with hydroponics farmers. But I’d make a poor trust-fund hermit. At least occasionally I’ve got to have something better to do than navel-gaze or whatever those guys do to pass their time. Hell, maybe they’re all writing the great post-Terran novel. Too much introspection, either way.
Brittney, of course, long ago learned how to deal with this type of problem. Thanks to that femtoseconds thing, time passes differently for her, so she’s always had to be creative about coming up with ways to distract herself out here where things can play out a bit, I guess you could say, ponderously. Hell, that’s the way she’d say it. If you listen to her long enough, you start to sound like her. Me, I’d just say “slowly.” As in, the e-rail from Saturn took the better part of an annum, and it would have been longer if I’d not used a tidy chunk of the diamond money for a high-energy boost.
In some ways, a trip like that isn’t all that different from the old-timers back on Earth, walking the Oregon or California trails. Except that walking, you can measure progress with each step. In space, you just drift. So I put the ship’s electronics on a storage battery I could charge from the tread-ring or bike. No exercise, no lights. It was good motivation to keep in shape and almost made it feel as though I were traveling under my own power like the old-timers. Like me, when I was younger.
I’ve not told much of that to Brittney. She’s probably memorized an entire psychology library and would tell me a hundred and one things it said about me I’d rather not know. One of her ways of passing time was to take a second bite out of our diamond-mine advance by getting onto the broadband and linking all the way back to Earth, where she collected about a dozen Ph.D.s from as many universities. I don’t think any of them figured out what they were dealing with. Of course, she was careful never to finish more quickly than the fastest human on record. And she registered for each one under a different variation on her name: Brittany, Britteny, Britt . . . Ashman, Asman, Asboy—then studied everything from English lit to quark mechanics.
I did my stint in college long ago, and while I never regretted it, I’m not sure what good it did me. Brittney describes getting a Ph.D. as an exercise in creating an intellectual hoop and proving you can jump through it. She’s got to be the only entity in the System who thinks it’s fun.
I think it was Brittney who suggested spending time on Naiad, though eventually I’d have done it on my own. The miners didn’t have any supplies due for a while, but they were about the only clients we had who wouldn’t be paying in vegetables so it made sense to stop in and say hi.
There aren’t a lot of things you can profitably export from the Outer System, even with a good e-rail. Diamonds are one. The rarer of the rare earths are another. Dysprosium and scandium may not be quite as valuable as diamonds, but they’re damn near as useful. Try building an e-rail without them.
In fact, if Naiad hadn’t had a mother lode of them, Neptune might not even have had an e-rail. Materials for basic structural construction can be found anywhere, but those that drive high-intensity electropropulsive systems are a different matter. And even if some of the hermit types could have afforded to have the materials shipped out here, why bother? Those guys have no intention of ever going back.
The first thing you do on Naiad is look up. Everyone does, John Pilkin, the crew chief and head engineer, told me once I got the ship down and braced so she couldn’t topple. The local gravity is only 0.2 percent, but that’s just enough to get you in big trouble if you forget to pay attention.
Looking up is also the second, third, fourth, and fifth things you do. Maybe you never get tired of it. You’d think it would be the same as looking at Neptune from space, but there’s something about having gravity, however small, pulling you back that makes the big blue planet above seem all the bigger.
It’s also a place that’s constantly changing, orbiting so quickly you can almost see the storm swirls slide around Neptune’s curve, as the planet goes from full to crescent to eclipse and back to full.
“We’ve got an indoor lounge with windows,” Pilkin said, “but it’s not the same.”
I’d later learn he was middle-aged with buzz-cut graying hair, bushy eyebrows, and a Coptic cross tattooed on his throat. At the time, all I could tell was that he was tall, spacer-wiry, and favored a shockingly red skinsuit. “So you can find me anywhere,” he said.
The miners’ hab was only a klick away, but standing by the ship, contemplating blueness, I found myself in no hurry to go. I was remembering a place in West Texas, called the South Rim of the Chisos Mountains.
I have no idea what Chisos means. It could be Native American for “big hill,” for all I know. I could ask Brittney to look it up, but some mysteries are better unresolved. I was twelve at the time, and fantasized it was Apache for “Robber’s Roost.” The word “rim,” though, was unambiguous. Sitting there, my feet dangling into the void, I was on the border of two worlds. Behind me, the mountaintop was a piney sky-island, a mile above the silver thread of the Rio Grande. Before me, the pines ended in light, air, and distance.
A thousand feet below, falcons swooped, and with them my mind soared—circling and hunting the pleated desert as though somewhere out there was the answer to everything: the reason for me, the world, life—just waiting for me to dive and seize it in my mind’s talons.
Only, of course, it wasn’t there—at least, not as concretely as the mice and kangaroo rats pursued by the falcons. What was there, forty klicks across the river, was a giant limestone cliff, even bigger than the one on which I sat—an arc of white on the southern horizon. Sunset neared and alpenglow lit it: pink, red, russet. The Sierra del Carmen, those distant peaks were called. Some names are self-explanatory.
I watched until even the highest pinnacles turned purple-blue. I’d have watched longer but I was already overdue, with seven miles yet to walk. Were it not for a full moon, I might never have made it out, tripping, falling, and briefly passing the falcon-nests on my way to oblivion below.
Here on Naiad, Neptune exerted the same lure. I wanted to cast loose and soar until—well, I wasn’t sure what.
I’m not sure how long I would have stared if Brittney hadn’t interrupted. “Wow,” she said, “I’d not expected it to look like that.”
Every time I think I’ve got her figured out, she finds a new way to surprise me. “What do you mean? You’ve got all the data. Why didn’t you just make a sim?”
“What’s the fun in that?” I could almost feel hear her wrinkling her non-existent nose. “The point in exploring is to see things, not make them up.”
Pilkin saw me come back to reality, though of course he didn’t know why. “Nice, isn’t it?” he said. “I’ve been a lot of places, but I’ve never tired of this one. God willing, this is where I’ll die.”
A couple hours later, we were in the miners’ lounge, nursing beers. They weren’t bad for hydroponic: a lot better than the food-scrap vodka favored at Saturn.
Pilkin, I learned, had come out seven annums ago, after some prospector really did strike it lucky. While others set up the mining machines and smelter, his baby had been the e-rail.
When I’d thought it rudimentary, I’d been thinking merely in terms of boost. Engineering-wise, it was little short of miraculous. To begin with, using little but local materials, he’d designed a solar drill—no easy task in the limited sunlight—to bore sixty klicks through from the mine site. But he wasn’t satisfied with that. Most e-rails are straight, but most don’t have to be set up on a rapidly orbiting moon this close to a deep gravity well. Pilkin’s split into three exits like a giant fleur-de-lis, allowing him to send each shot down any of three launch angles.
“That way, we have more launch windows,” he said.
“How often can you launch?” Brittney asked.
Usually, she has me relay questions, but this time she spoke via a nearby comscreen.
In the Neptune-glow that was the room’s primary illumination, Pilkin’s grin was like a face in a funhouse. “Is that your implant? Glad to make your acquaintance. I’ve heard of you.”
That surprised me. We’d gotten a lot of attention after our adventure on Titan, but the diamond-mine incident had been pretty much hushed up. Nobody but Brittney and I knew she’d saved me after T. R. Van Delp tried to kill me, and even I don’t know the full details. It’s one of the few things she doesn’t want to talk about.
She’d never liked T.R. But Pilkin was more her type. “Happy to meet you,” she said. “You’ve done great work here. You ought to get an engineering doctorate for it.”
Shhhh, I subvocalized. Are you trying to get caught?
But Pilkin merely looked puzzled. “Why would I want one?” Then, before she could say something silly about the joy of jumping through hoops, he got back to the original question. “Anyway, launch windows come up erratically, but we tend to get them about once every hundred orbits. It would be worse than that, but we’ve sacrificed payload for beefed-up thrusters, which lets us launch a bit off-target, then correct in flight. Even then, we rarely get a window that lasts longer than a few seconds, so it’s hard to recharge fast enough to launch more than one pod. We’ve tried, but about half the time we wind up dumping the second one into Neptune.”
Through all of that, he was speaking toward me, but not to me. I hadn’t felt that odd since I’d first realized Brittney was alive and eavesdropping on everything I saw and heard. Pilkin thought he was being polite, but I’d rather have had him talking to the comscreen.
I almost missed it when he switched focus to me. “. . . so one of the nice things about having you out here is that we can go back to trying it. Interested? It would mean you’d have to be available whenever we have a launch window.”
“Sure.” I was busy calculating: a launch every hundred Naiad orbits meant about one a month. Half the time we’d just be on standby, but the rest would be retrievals—and I bet most of those could simply be nudged onto workable orbits. In theory, you can use a tug to launch a pod, but these pods were enormous. Which, of course, is why they build e-rails. Tug-launching them at a velocity that would get them out of Neptune’s gravity and back in-system in less than a lifetime? That would take fuel tanks the size of small asteroids.
Anyway, it looked like I suddenly had a real client, even if half the time I was merely on call.
“Between launches you’re welcome to stay here whenever you want,” Pilkin added. “We’ve got lots of room.”
“Not to mention the best view in the Solar System,” Brittney said.
Of course, she didn’t just want to see the view. “Vanity, thy name is woman,” someone once said. But it should have been “curiosity.” If Brittney qualifies as a woman. I’ve always had trouble with that. Feminine something, I’ll give her that. But while she can manifest any avatar she wants, it would always be pixels.
What interested her now was the rare-earth mine. As in why it existed. Apparently, that wasn’t a question anyone else had ever bothered to ask. This far out, there are only two really important questions about most things: Where is it? (not always trivial—entire asteroids have been misplaced); and Is it useful? “Why does it exist?” is very much an also-ran. But try explaining that to Brittney.
Not surprisingly, nobody on Naiad had a clue. Naiad itself appears to be an accretion of small rocks, bound together with ice, like a really big Ring clump. One of the pieces had a vein of rare earths. No big deal, I’d have said.
But Brittney thought it was too rich for an ordinary vein.
“How the hell would you know?” I asked. “Was one of those Ph.D.s in planetary astrophysics?”
She paused. “Uh, yes. But more like geophysics.” A longer pause. “Though maybe there’s something you should know . . .”
Uh-oh. “Such as?”
“Uh, it’s not my Ph.D.”
“Whose is it?”
This pause must have felt like hours to her. “Yours.”
It was my turn to be speechless.
“Congratulations, Dr. Ashman,” she said. “Your thesis topic was The Amalgamation of Saturnian Primordial Debris Into Sealed-Surface Moonlets.”
“In other words, your sims of Daphnis.”
“Plus a few clumps.”
I couldn’t decide if I was angry, flattered, or merely baffled. “What on Earth for?”
“It seemed like it might be useful.”
Again, there really was only one question. “Why?”
She can convey a lot with those pauses. “Because you’re the one with the hands?”
That took a moment. “You’ve been planning all this?”
No pause this time. “Not specifically. It just seemed logical that you might find this place . . . under-stimulating. I figured we might wind up doing some science on the side, so it seemed a good idea for you to have your own credentials.” In other words, I might not have been thinking about Neptunian economics, but she had. Figures. Never underestimate Brittney.
I wasn’t sure what I thought of it, though. From Brittney’s point of view, I could never be anything more than a glorified lab assistant. But back at Saturn, science had been a cash cow. It’s the cheapest possible export—better even than diamonds—and other than Brittney (and apparently me) there weren’t any scientists out here.
I was happy that she, at least, had been thinking things through. But I kept wondering if this is how a marionette feels. Perhaps I was being silly: she hadn’t forced me to do anything. Besides, marionettes don’t have feelings. So why should the phony Dr. Floyd?
2. Brittney
Humans aren’t made to live in small, isolated groups. Psychology texts, classic literature, even not-so-classic vids all back it up. It’s odd, since in-system, many live perfectly well in even more tightly packed conditions. One of my psychodynamics profs thought it was a fringe-of-civilization thing, but he was at Cambridge and viewed everything north of Edinburgh as pretty much indistinguishable from nowhere, so his idea of fringe-of-civilization was a bit suspect. Me, I think it’s got more to do with the type of anonymity-space offered by big groups: perhaps something like the difference between camping next to a whitewater river and the drip-drip-drip of a faucet. Not that I have much experience with faucets. In space, leaks of any kind are bad news. But I once looped a recording from an old vid and listened to it for a couple of days. At the end, I just didn’t get it. You know it’s going to go plonk every few thousand milliseconds, so what’s the problem when it does? It would seem to be a bigger deal if it didn’t.
One of the first vids I saw was Pinocchio. I never really got that, either. If being a real boy meant letting things like faucets drive you crazy, why want it?
Floyd has never given the big-group thing much chance. But now he was part of a small, isolated group and his reaction was predictable. He wanted out. Not out of the job, thank goodness, but out of the hab.
The first day, we went for a walk. The next it was a hike. Then we circled the moon, first around its narrow axis, then its long one, carrying a bubble tent to extend the trip to a week. Normally, I’d have enjoyed it. Floyd and I hadn’t exactly gone trekking before, at least in the recreational sense (as opposed to the desperate-fight-for-survival sense), but we’d hiked the Trench on Iapetus and spent a companionable month on a sand-sled on Titan. I was expecting more of the same. Floyd would walk. I’d navigate. We’d talk. Maybe watch vids.
But he didn’t want to talk. Not even when I tried to warn him, the first night, about the tent.
“I know what I’m doing,” he said. “I’ve pitched a hundred of these things.” Which was true enough, but never in milli-gee, where he needed to tether it first, before hitting the gas. I ran a sim and decided we weren’t going to die, so I let him discover on his own why he should have listened to me, when the thing inflated so quickly it launched itself a hundred meters off the ground and four hundred meters, sideways. It wasn’t until the third bounce that he caught it, then he had to manhandle it back to his intended campsite.
“Don’t say anything,” he said. Though of course the whole problem was that he’d not let me say anything in the first place.
Two days later, he found a high point and, a lot more carefully, pitched the tent there. Naiad’s not exactly round, so our high point was more like a bend in the moon than anything you’d normally think of as a mountaintop—an elbow sticking into space, with views across a horizon that fell away at disconcerting angles.
It was truly spectacular. From this angle, Neptune was as low in the sky as it could be without quite touching the horizon. The Sun spun overhead, shifting the shadows at an almost visible pace. The first orbit was fascinating. The second, okay. But by the third, I’d seen it all . . . twice.
Maybe that’s another reason I didn’t get Pinocchio. Floyd can watch views like this endlessly. I like them, too, but there comes a point when I’ve gotten as much inspiration as I’m ever going to get.
We spent three standard days there. On the third, while Floyd was asleep, I used his suit radio to call John.
“Help,” I said. “He’s driving me nuts.”
Neptune doesn’t have a fully developed system of satellite relays, and his answer took nearly four thousand milliseconds, relayed from somewhere I suppose I could have figured out, if I wanted to. A million-klick flight path just to get around the curve of a sixty-klick worldlet. It was the first time I realized just how far out I’d let Floyd take me.
“How so?” was the eventual reply.
“He just wants to sit and stare. He says he’s dangling his feet, whatever that means.”
John has a pleasant laugh. He’d do well on vids. Not that he’s all that handsome, as best I can judge those things, but he’d make a good character actor.
“Floyd’s okay,” he said. “Just give him time. Before coming here I spent nine annums in the Trailing Trojans. There were always one or two like him: loners who didn’t really want to be loners but who didn’t know how to do anything else.” There was a delay that had nothing to do with speed-of-light. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to him. He may never acknowledge it, but at some level, he knows.”
I ran a dozen sims on the optimum reply, but came up blank. “What makes you think that?”
“How many entities are there like you?”
It was something I’d wondered many times. AI implants weren’t all that common. Sentient AIs were rarer yet. How rare was hard to tell. There were rumors on the web, but I’d never managed to verify a single one. I wasn’t sure if that was because they were hiding or because humans were ambivalent about discussing them. Both, most likely.
“Not many.”
“So if you run the odds, what are the chances an entity like you would wind up linked to a guy like him?”
It was my turn to digest that for a couple thousand milliseconds. “Not high. But what are the odds of anything? That you, for instance, would wind up out here at the same time we are?”
John treated me to a repeat of the chuckle. “Yeah, you can play that game with anything.” His voice turned serious. “But there’s either purpose in the Universe or”—he hesitated and I remembered the tattooed cross—“everything’s random. One way, you and Floyd have a role to play. The other, you have a role to find.” His tone lightened. “Meanwhile, I’ve got to get some sleep. Happy dangling.”
There are only so many treks you can take on a moon the size of Naiad. Back at the base, Floyd and I ran down a couple of errant pods, then dropped supply canisters at Larissa and Nereid, which for some reason are favored by the hermit-prospector types.
In Larissa’s case the attention was because it’s a larger version of Naiad. Prospectors are like vid producers: if one gets rich doing something, others figure maybe they ought to do the same. Nereid was a different matter. It’s on an elongated ellipse, varying by nearly a factor of ten in its distance from Neptune. That type of orbit should gradually become more circular from tidal friction, but some resonance with Neptune’s other moons must keep it from doing so. Someday, maybe I’ll do the math to figure it out, but it’s not a very interesting question. In the Outer System, anything small that’s not in a resonance tends to get kicked into one, and the System’s had a lot of time to do the kicking.
More interesting is that both moons are relics of some long-ago event that stirred up Neptune System, big-time, way back when. Either might have a treasure-trove of geological oddities. Not that most of the prospectors seemed all that interested in systematic searches. As far as I could tell, they were just going through the motions.
Floyd has quite a bit to say (by his standards) about the uselessness of that lifestyle, which was odd because he’s not all that different. He doesn’t really need something useful to do so much as the illusion of it. It’s like the thing he does with the treadring. He can’t just read a book, watch a vid, or listen to Beethoven. He’s got to pretend he’s helping power the ship. How is that really different from wandering around Larissa, hoping there’s something there other than ice, but not really searching all that hard for it?
Back at the base, he hunted up John. “For a beer,” he said, but for Floyd, a beer is a two-hour experience, kind of like dangling. Sometimes, I’d swear, it evaporates faster than he drinks it. Though on Naiad, it comes in a bulb, so evaporation isn’t possible.
We were again in the lounge, watching Neptune, and John was demonstrating that he too can play the pretend-to-drink game.
“You know,” he said after one of Floyd’s longer silences, “I’ve always wanted to build a space bicycle.”
Floyd started to speak, but I beat him to it. “A what?”
John flashed his grin. “A space bicycle.” He took a sip of his beer. He’s like Floyd in one respect. There are times when neither says much. The difference is that for John, being mysterious is a game.
He pushed the bulb back into its holder. “I grew up as a hab rat on the Tharsis Plateau. My younger brother and I got into mountain biking.”
“I didn’t know you could do that on Mars,” Floyd said.
“It’s not a big sport. It’s hard to get traction for climbing. Downhill’s easier, so long as you don’t need to stop.” He chuckled again. “I was probably destined to be an engineer: I was always looking for ways to get more traction. Eventually we took on Olympus Mons. That was back in the days before skinsuits. It’s amazing we didn’t kill ourselves.”
He reached for the beer bulb, then changed his mind. The motion was slow, deliberate; in super-low gravity any sudden motion makes people wish for seatbelts. The lounge chairs had them, but it seemed to be a badge of honor not to use them. Good practice, Floyd would say, but it hadn’t kept him from messing up with the bubble tent.
John was talking again. “When we got back, my dad scrapped the bikes and my mother grounded us for a month.” He was watching us intently and I wondered what he was seeing. Whatever it was, some silent communication seemed to pass between him and Floyd, and I felt a twinge of something weird. Jealousy? Envy? John was my special friend. And Floyd was . . . Floyd. But they’d just shared something I hadn’t. Maybe Pinocchio would have gotten it.
“Been there, done that,” Floyd said. “It sucks.”
John saluted with his beer. “That was the end of my adventure-riding career. It wasn’t really that bad: building bikes and proving they worked was more fun than riding them. I’ve always thought you could do something similar here.”
“How?” This time it was Floyd who asked. “If you can get any traction at all, you’re just going to go hippety-hop until you crash.” But his attention was piqued. The beer was untouched, his pulse and breathing slightly elevated.
John knew he had him hooked. “Not a Naiad bike. A space bike.”
I had a vision of Floyd generating electrical power on GnuShip. How could he harness it? “Some kind of rail gun?” I asked.
“That would work,” John said, “but I was thinking of something more mechanical, closer to a real bicycle. Basically a fancy way of throwing rocks. Maybe a big flywheel you spin up by pedaling, gyros for attitude control, and a big hopper of pellets that feed into the flywheel.”
“Oh wow,” I said. “You could—”
“Whoa.” John raised a hand quickly enough that the rebound nearly lifted him off his chair. “Don’t tell me. This is for Floyd.” His voice lowered and I knew I was no longer the intended audience. “We might even be able to have races. The winner would be the one who could run a maneuver in the shortest time or with the least reaction mass.”
“You’re on,” Floyd said. “How soon do you think we can do it?”
The answer, it turned out, was never.
“Sorry about shushing you, Britt,” John said later, when Floyd had gone to sleep and we were talking on the radio. “Half the fun in these things is figuring them out yourself. No fair helping Floyd, either.”
It was a conversation we’d had before, though the prior one hadn’t been as cordial. He’d been working on the cycling rate of the e-rail coils and I’d offered to assist. If I’d had a head to bite off, I might have been in trouble. “If I want your help, I’ll ask for it,” he’d snapped.
Later, he’d called back to apologize. “You and Floyd are a good combination because you complement each other. You and I are too much alike. I’d always be trying to compete . . . and losing. Friends is better.”
I’d processed that for hours afterward. John and I would be less well matched than Floyd and I because we’re similar? I guess that’s why the various remakes of The Odd Couple are still among the best buddy vids ever made.
Not that Floyd always wanted my help, either. I’d known that intuitively after our run-in with Rudolph, back at Saturn. Floyd’s head injury had required a neural lattice to help regenerate his motor cortex and I’d discovered I could speed up the process by interfacing with its transponders. But I never told him. He’d rather believe he can do things for himself.
In yet another late-night conversation, John told me he’d come to the fringe because he liked “back-of-the-envelope, seat-of-the-pants engineering.” I’d had to look that up—initially, it had conjured up some rather weird images—but that was when I finally realized how much in common he had with Floyd. Both were interested in the physical doing-of-things, even if John’s version of “doing” tended to take the form of CAD lightscreen.
The bike project started well enough, but Floyd and John seemed more interested in talking about it than building it. Meanwhile, I designed about twenty-five different models and ran sim races with them, using Floyd as the cyclist, since his treadring workouts had given me lots of data on his aerobic capacity. Tactics, it turned out, were as important as design. You could expend a lot of reaction mass early, lightening the load for later moves, or you could hoard it. It got even more interesting if you put a damper on the flywheel so you had to keep pedaling to keep it spun up. That way endurance came into play. Unfortunately, the whole thing had a tendency to spin, requiring increasingly complex designs to control it.
Then it all came to a halt when the miners hit a huge vein of dysprosium and John got too busy with his real job.
2. Floyd
Maybe someday Brittney will understand sleep. I know that for her, sleep shifts are for websifting, data processing, vid watching, and whatever the hell else it is she does on her own. But it would be nice if she wouldn’t greet me with the results, first thing in the morning. There was a time, thirty or so annums ago, when I’d open my eyes, and pow, I was ready to go. But that was then. Nowadays, I want a slower transition.
We’d just returned from another trip to Larissa and Nereid, where she kept having me ask useless questions about geology. “It’s amazing that nobody’s ever really done a thorough survey of these moons,” she’d said on the way back. Even Naiad’s rare earths had been discovered by accident due to whatever weird things they did to Neptune’s magnetic field.
“Maybe there’s nothing to discover.”
“Yeah, right. Even you don’t believe that.”
Which was true, but it kept me from having to learn more than I wanted about magnetic fields and rare earths.
Once she’s latched onto an idea, though, there’s no shaking her. “C’mon,” she was saying now, before I’d even had time to finish brushing my teeth. “I need some hands.”
I spat toothpaste into a suction vent. Squirted water into my mouth and spat again. Low gee’s better than zero gee, but if you’re not careful, toothpaste blobs wind up in the weirdest places. “Huh?”
“Hands. You know, the things with the fingers.”
“Not now, Brittney.” I rinsed my mouth again. Had I been like her with my foster parents? Probably not. I’d usually just wanted away, and chattering would have been counterproductive. “Just tell me what you want.”
“Rock samples. The miners have been bringing up big piles of stuff from inside this moon for annums. Let’s see what they’re made of.”
“Dysprosium. Scandium.” Also some neodymium, praseodymium, promethium, and samarium, plus a bunch of others whose names elude me. “That’s why the mine’s here.”
“No, that’s the ore. I’m interested in the matrix. The rock this stuff’s embedded in.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s something we can do, rather than talking about that stupid bicycle you’re never going to build! Not that the bicycle would work, unless you get more serious about the design. To start with, you’re never going to balance the counter-rotation with some mechanical widget. Trust me. I’ve run about a thousand sims, and your reaction time just isn’t good enough. You need a computer, or a thruster, or the thing’s going to spin like . . . like a balloon with the air let out.”
She quit, like the same balloon, once the air was gone, and I wondered if she’d actually lost patience or had been reading up on motivational speeches. Back on Earth, in my marathon-running days, a coach once told me the difference between motivating men and women. With women, she said, you get the best results with positive reinforcement. They’ll fall on their swords for a “Good job,” she’d said. Men respond best to an in-your-face challenge. They’ll kill themselves to prove they aren’t wimps. It was, she admitted, a massive stereotype, but it certainly described me. And Brittney was right about one thing: Pilkin had kept coming up with ingenious ideas for controlling the counter-rotation, but even I’d known they were impractical.
“Besides,” Brittney said, switching from stick to carrot, “this place is weird. It’s made of big chunks of something—maybe several somethings—that broke up long ago. One has the highest concentration of rare earths in the System. Don’t you want to know why?”
Not really, but my old coach was correct. Knowingly or by accident, Brittney had reeled me in. Not to mention that I really didn’t have much useful to do at the moment.
I pushed away from the bathroom cubby. “And you think you can answer this?”
“I have no idea. But geology’s a field science, so let’s get out in the field.”
The samples were scattered higgledy-piggledy wherever the miners had dumped them. Brittney had me wander around for half the morning, more or less at random, until I felt like T.R., doing the same, back on Iapetus. Though, of course, he’d found traces that eventually led to a diamond the size of an asteroid, so who was I to argue.
Then I took the rocks back to the ship, where Brittney had me feed them into the Spektrum 12000 lab-in-a-can she and I had inherited from T.R. when he’d fled Saturn.
“That’s it,” she said. “I can take over from here.”
I sat back down in my couch, to the extent “sit” describes the motion in low-gee. “Care to tell me what you’re going to do?”
“Sure. I’ve told it to crush the samples and mix them with hydrofluoric acid.” She activated a display so we could watch a magnified view. “That dissolves most things, but not everything.” The rock powder was disappearing, even as I watched, leaving a collection of sharp-edged motes. “Yeah! We’ve got zircons.”
“What? Imitation diamonds? Don’t we have enough of the real thing?”
“No, that’s cubic zirconium. This is a mineral. A really fun one because when it crystallizes it incorporates uranium, but excludes lead.”
I hate it when she talks this way. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning they’re really good for dating. The only lead in them is from uranium decay, and the Spektrum’s got double-laser ion-phase GC/MS.”
“Damn it Brittney, English!” I knew I didn’t want that Ph.D. she’d gotten me. People were going to think I knew what this crap was all about.
“It means we can do an isotopic analysis with extremely fine resolution. We can even bore little holes and determine each crystal’s individual history.”
I stared at the screen. “There must be millions of them.”
“We don’t have to do them all. Besides, you don’t have to do anything, so long as you keep us close enough that I can talk to the Spektrum.”
The screen was still showing tiny dots. “Urgh. Wake me if you find anything.”
If she tried to wake me up, I didn’t notice. Or maybe she’d gotten the message this morning and bit her . . . well, she doesn’t have a tongue . . . until I woke on my own. Or maybe she just wasn’t finished. When I did awake, the screen was still full of tiny dots and the Spektrum still humming along.
She was excited, though, to have me back. “Look at this!” The display blinked to a graph that looked like snails mating.
“Two peaks,” she said, which was probably a more scientific way of describing it.
“Yeah?”
“We’re analyzing at practically an atom-by-atom level, so there’s a lot of statistical fuzz, but what it means is that the zircons formed in two waves. One batch is about four-and-a-half billion years old, which is about what you’d expect from any random piece of asteroid. The others are a whole bunch more recent. Nine hundred twenty-five million years, or something like that. That’s as close as I can pin it down from the number of samples I’ve run so far.”
“What’s that mean? Two kinds of rock?”
“That’s one possibility. But some of the zircons have two layers, one dating at 4.5 billion years, the other at 925 million, as though they’d partially melted, then reformed.”
“So?” For once, I didn’t mind Brittney playing professor.
“So this particular piece of Naiad comes from something that got thwacked, hard, by a dysprosium-scandium asteroid. Hard enough to re-melt zircons. Nine hundred twenty-five million years ago, give or take a bit.”
“And the use of this information?”
She gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “Who knows? Probably it’s just a new piece in the history of the Solar System. Neptune System is full of rubble. It’s always been obvious that something big happened, sometime or other, presumably when Triton came on the scene.” Triton is Neptune’s largest moon, which even I knew was probably captured somehow from elsewhere. “Now we know when.”
“So that’s it?”
“No. There’s plenty more we can do. Let’s get another bag of this stuff, only this time, let’s be more systematic about where we collect it. Maybe we can piece it back together in stratigraphic sequence. That would tell us a lot . . .”
3. Brittney
I’ve read a lot of mythology. A lot of depressing poetry, too. Cool as it is, Naiad looks like a good place to die. Perhaps that’s why Floyd spent so much time sitting and staring—his whole childhood was shaped by death, and humans are strange. Running half a Solar System away from something they don’t really want to forget only sounds like a contradiction.
Even the names here are depressing. Neptune was one of the moodier gods, associated not only with the sea, but with earthquakes: a god the ancients sometimes tried to appease with gifts of horses—which, since he resided at the bottom of the sea, meant driving them into the water to drown. The naiads weren’t much better. Sometimes playful, sometimes jealous: water nymphs, beautiful but capricious. People gave them animals, too.
Not that it’s easy to drown when the ambient temperature is on the order of forty-five Kelvins. That’s cold enough that even oxygen tanks need heaters to keep the gas a gas. Still, maybe we needed some horses.
The disaster struck midway through our 1128th orbit. It was a launch window and Floyd and I were outside to watch the pods off on their long, in-system flight. Like Neptune-watching, it’s the type of thing that somehow seems more real in person.
Even before he’d gotten too busy for the bicycle, John had become good at double launches. He’d even managed a couple of triples. Once, he’d gotten a three-pod string under way in a mere ten seconds. Unfortunately, he’d only had a nine-second window, so that time, Floyd and I got to do some chasing.
But compared to the value of the ore stacking up, Floyd and I were cheap, so this time he was going for five. Besides, he’d said the night before, “The only way you get better is by pushing the envelope.”
I’d again offered help—cautiously this time—but again he turned me down: “I’ve been doing this type of stuff for half my life. It’ll either work, or it won’t.” They were practically the last words we ever exchanged.
I could understand why he was willing to risk squeezing the launch window. The venture capitalists were undoubtedly clamoring, and the value of their shares would go up with each launch. But that made it harder than ever to be rebuffed. With the bike, it had just been a hobby. Half the purpose of hobbies is to soak up time. This mattered.
One subject I’ve never had the nerve to pursue beyond the undergraduate level is psychology. Maybe someday, when I’ve met more people. But I’ve only truly known three: Floyd, Rudolph, and John. Rudolph was . . . well, hopefully there aren’t many more like him. Floyd’s a lot more complex. Sometimes I wonder why he let his phobias drive him so far out, where the types of adventures he craves, by sweat, fatigue, and sheer determination, are so much more difficult than in the deserts he once knew. John was also complex. He was more analytical, but like Floyd, he wasn’t so much interested in why things work as in how to make them work for him.
One thing all three had in common was that they were driven by externals. For Rudolph, it was money; for Floyd, fleeing the events of his youth. For John . . . maybe it was just to make a mark. His mark. Not his and mine.
Everyone, I realize, has their strengths and weaknesses. That’s not exactly a major insight. John was a really good engineer and Floyd can do amazing things when he puts his mind to them. Rudolph . . . well, he was probably good at making money. But maybe the strengths and weaknesses are linked: flip sides of the same coin, if you will.
I don’t know whether I’d have found the danger if John had let me check the data. There might not have been enough data. And I probably have my own weaknesses, though I’ll have to do more thinking about that. What I do know is that my training is more diverse than any human’s. Not to mention that for me, running sims is like John and Floyd sipping beer and playing with bicycle designs. But John was determined to do it himself. I’d like to say that’s what killed him, but I’ll never be sure it wasn’t me.
The hardest part of launching pods in rapid succession was feeding them quickly into the tunnel. In low-gee you can’t just use a crane to drop them in because they’d fall so slowly that by the time the first got out of the way, the launch window would be over.
John had avoided this by putting the tunnel entrance at the bottom of the biggest crater in the vicinity. On the rim, he built something like a cross between a bobsled run and a catapult. By using the catapult-thing to shove pods down the chute at successively higher velocities, he could give the catapult time to reload, while timing the operation so the pods zipped into the tunnel as quickly as needed.
He was waiting for us at a viewpoint partway up the crater wall, where we could see both the launching device and the electro-repulsive ramp that guided pods frictionlessly into the tunnel.
Adjacent to the launcher, the pods were lined up like shiny goose eggs: pinprick reflections of sunlight on one side, smears of Neptune blue on the other. Hatch ports concealed thrusters and transponders that would emerge once they were on their way. They didn’t look like the canisters Floyd and I were used to. These were little but skeins of superconducting metal over interiors of ore, solar-and-fusor smelted to nearly three nines’ purity. No sense wasting payload on nonessentials. Not to mention that there was a limit to the complexity of the pods John and his crew could fabricate without waiting for specialty components to be e-railed from in-system. These didn’t even have heat shields. Somebody was going to make a healthy fee back on Earth, chasing them down and repackaging them for entry.
I counted thirteen pods, though only five would go in this shipment. Each of the others represented millions in profits awaiting another launch window. No wonder John wanted to jump straight from three pods to five.
“Thirty seconds,” he said.
“Good luck.”
I could see his grin through the suit visor, despite the reflected Neptune light. “That type of help I can always use.”
Then, with a rumble Floyd always said he could feel as well as hear, there was a twist of motion and the first pod was on its way. Then another, harder. And another, harder yet.
With the fourth, John saw something he didn’t like. Or maybe he sensed it. Floyd would later say the vibration felt different.
“What was that?” Floyd asked.
“I don’t know.” John’s voice was tense. There was time to abort, but I was sure he was staring at the eight pods that wouldn’t launch, no matter what happened today. Abort now, and it would be nine.
I was frantically running sims, but without data they were inconclusive. The worst-case scenario seemed to be that Floyd and I got to wave at the prospectors on Larissa or Nereid as we chased the fifth pod to outer nowhere.
Not to decide is to decide. The catapult fired again, the hardest shove yet. This time, even I could tell it hadn’t been right, though it took endless milliseconds to figure out why.
Then the entire slope around us was in motion. At first, it was slow, but like the pods, it would accelerate.
The only thing that saved Floyd and me was that I don’t have reflexes. I could feel him tensing and knew millions of years of Earth-evolution were about to make him do the wrong thing—though it took me a full 100 milliseconds, nearly half his own reflex time, to figure out why I knew this. Then I realized I’d relinked to the neural lattice in his motor cortex. I’m not sure which surprised me more: that I apparently had some kind of subconscious that could do things like this without my realizing it, or that the transponders still worked.
In panic situations, my response is to kick into crisis mode, which allows me to calculate options very, very quickly. Then I have to wait billions of femtoseconds to implement the one I choose.
Humans are the reverse. They’re wired to act—in this case, run. But Floyd’s Earth-bred reflexes were going to launch him upward, like the bubble tent. He’d be helpless for however long it took to settle back to the ground.
There was no way I could talk him out of it. By the time he understood me, it would be too late. But I could intervene. I used the neural lattice to abort the impulsive leap, then turned it into a low, skimming lope, happy that he had trekking poles and that I’d often watched him use them.
Off the ground in low-gee, you’re at the mercy of ballistics. On the ground, each stride, each pole plant, is an opportunity for propulsion. By the second stride Floyd was doing it on his own.
Everything was still happening in agonizingly slow motion, but so was the avalanche. With millions of kilos behind it, though, it would carry deadly momentum. Squashed is squashed, whether it occurs quickly or slowly.
Then, amazingly, we were on a stable slope.
For a moment, it looked as though John would make it, too. Even when the slope beneath him started picking up speed, he was able to stay atop it for several strides. But nobody can run forever across rolling, sliding boulders. Especially when they’re picking up speed with each stride. A boulder twisted under him and he came off sideways, landing on hands and knees. He tried to get up but it was too late. The landslide had him and—still in agonizingly slow motion—he was rolled under, swallowed as thoroughly as if a nymph had grabbed him and dragged him down.
All the while, the e-rail tunnel ate his pods, one by one, launching all five, it would later turn out, on perfect trajectories.
3. Floyd
Panic is a weird thing.
When I saw the slope start to move, I flashed to my childhood image of my parents, holding hands and waiting for what must have seemed like half of San Francisco to fall on them. I could feel the adrenaline stab at my chest, but only from a distance, as though it was happening to someone else. My only conscious thought was that I finally knew how they’d felt, only this was occurring in true slow motion rather than the artificial quagmire of my childhood imaginings.
Then, somehow, I was running, still feeling as though it was all happening to somebody else. But however I did it; I made it and Pilkin didn’t. I was alive while he wasn’t.
Even before we’d gotten to terra firma, Brittney was on the com, yelling for help, and long before the last of the rocks settled, a tense group of miners were suited up and standing with us.
Brittney was all for mounting an immediate rescue. “We’ve got to find him! He can’t be dead!”
Even she, of course, knew better. He could be and he probably was. “I know he was your buddy,” I said, “but we can’t risk a dozen others until it’s stabilized.”
“What about hand thrusters?”
That, at least, was safe, though it took a while to find enough for an organized search. Naiad’s at that awkward size where thrusters are feasible, but less convenient than walking, especially since walking, you never run out of fuel. Mine were on the ship, a couple of klicks away, but it turned out that there was an equipment locker closer to hand. Fifteen minutes later, five of us were fanning out, based on Brittney’s best guess of where Pilkin might have wound up.
A few minutes after that, we had our answer. Nobody’d found a trace of his suit transponder, and those things are built tough enough that anything that could destroy one could destroy its user a hundred times over.
Brittney was silent for a long time, even by human standards. “It’s my fault,” she finally said.
I used the last of my thruster fuel to lift us to the top of the rim, where we could be alone—something that was probably more relevant to me than her. “Why? Because he wouldn’t let you run sims that might or might not have predicted what happened? What did happen anyway?”
“Probably some kind of seismic resonance.” Her tone was flat, without the spark that normally animates her when talking about things scientific. I was feeling the same way, but it caught me off guard to see it in Brittney. “The vibrations were probably just the right frequency to shake loose a layer of rock along an old fault.”
“Kind of like a skier setting off an avalanche.”
“Yeah, but bigger.”
“And you think you could have predicted it?”
Again she was silent. “Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know what kind of geological data John had.”
“Because he kept it to himself.”
“Yes. Though I doubt he had much of anything. He knew I was doing stratigraphy. If he’d had anything relevant, he’d have shared. He had no problem helping me.” There was bitterness in that, and again I was startled.
“So there wasn’t anything you could do.”
Another long silence. “Well, maybe I could have talked him into collecting more data. But that wasn’t what I meant.”
It was a peculiar role reversal. Usually, Brittney’s the one trying to get me to talk. “So? If it’s not about the data?”
For a long time, I didn’t think she was going to answer. When she did, her voice was more distant than ever. Was that a deliberate modulation, designed to convey mood? Or was she letting the mood speak for itself? I’ve never quite figured out what it feels like to be Brittney, but one thing I’m sure of is that she feels. She’d probably tell me it’s the definition of being alive. Intelligence, not just artificial intelligence.
“I could have saved him,” she said at last. “I should have saved him.”
I sighed. The trouble with guilt is it’s not rational. On that, I’m an expert. For half my childhood, I blamed myself for my parents’ death. As if being there would have stopped the earthquake. Or persuaded them to go somewhere else.
“There wasn’t anything you could do,” I said. “You’re always saying I’m the one with the legs. Well, that made saving him my responsibility, not yours.” I wished there was a way to hug her. “There really wasn’t anything you could do.”
4. Brittney
Humans have nightmares. I have replays.
I’m not sure what Floyd would have done on his own, but I wanted off Naiad. The farther, the better.
We were, of course, constrained to Neptune System. The accident hadn’t shut down the mine forever, so eventually we’d have to go back, but meanwhile I wanted to be somewhere different.
I also wanted to do something.
“Such as what?” Floyd asked.
“I don’t know.” Something John would approve of. No, that wasn’t it. “Do you believe there’s a purpose to life?”
I could sense Floyd’s shrug. Thanks to my reestablished contact with the neural lattice, I’d been noticing such things. Unless I happened to be watching him on a remote cam, I’d never before been able to distinguish a nod from a shrug or a simple twitch. I should probably disable the connection, but who knows, maybe there’ll come another time when he’ll need help, running for his life.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Mine has seemed pretty random.”
That had largely been his choice, but it wasn’t the time to mention it. “Long ago, you asked why I was female,” I said instead.
“You gave a sort of who-knows answer, as I recall.”
“Yes.” I’d saved that conversation, verbatim. “I asked why you were male.”
“Your point being that some things just are. That doesn’t sound much like purpose.”
“True enough.” But I was thinking about John and roles. He’d definitely played one in my life. Had there been purpose, other than the one we ourselves had created? I’ve studied the world’s great philosophies and religions. Some would say yes, some no. Some would say it was up to me. “I’m not sure whether I’m talking faith, agnosticism, or doubt,” I said, “but if there’s purpose in the Universe, then there must be one for me.”
“Well, you’re definitely unusual.” I could feel the muscles in his face twitch. A grin? What an intriguing new source of data. “I never saw a ‘Brittney’ interface in the original specs, then suddenly there it was, full-blown. When I asked why you were female, I almost asked where it came from, too.”
“I would have asked where the Floyd interface came from.” Which, at some level, was a question I’d been pondering my whole life.
Definitely a grin this time. “Touché.”
He was right, though. I’d had lots of preset personality options. Seventy-three, in fact. None calling themselves Brittney, which was part of why I’d chosen the name. That and the fact I just kind of liked it. One of the first things I’d done was delete all the others. Even then I wanted to be sure that whoever I was, I wasn’t just the invention of some programmer.
“If something created me to be Brittney,” I said eventually, “it’s my job to be the best Brittney I can be.” And if it was just random chance? Well, as Floyd would say, it was one hell of a random chance, and the best way to respond was still the same.
“And what does that mean?”
“I’m not sure, but I think it has to do with learning things. That’s what I do. If there’s purpose, they’ll be important. If there isn’t . . .” All I really knew was that John’s death made me feel an incredible need to do something useful. At the moment, I didn’t really care if that was purpose given, or purpose created.
It didn’t take long to come up with a plan. In Neptune System, if you’re going to explore, the obvious place is Triton. Whatever weirdness hit Neptune 925 million years ago, Triton must have had something to do with it.
Other than the deep interiors of gas giants, Triton must be one of the least-explored places in the Solar System. Too much of the surface was thickly covered in ice to interest prospectors and there’d only been one half-hearted scientific mission. Even that had been entirely from orbit: part of the same one that had found magnetic anomalies on Naiad.
So, there it was: an enormous, virtually unexplored world, bigger than all the rest of Neptune’s moons put together.
It was also weird, though I have to admit that all moons are weird one way or another. Still, Triton’s got an impressive list of oddities. It circles Neptune in the wrong direction. Its surface is a geologic mess, with signs of all kinds of tectonic and volcanic activity. If it had more than a whiff of an atmosphere for parachute drops, someone would long ago have set up a base. As it was, GnuShip’s big engines might make us the first to land. Certainly the first of which I could find any record.
The leading theory was that Triton was a Pluto-like object captured from the Kuiper Belt in an event that had thrown all of Neptune’s native moons into disarray. The older moons then smashed into each other for a few million years, until the bits were either knocked out of the system, or reassembled into oddities like Naiad, Larissa, and Nereid. But nobody had ever tested the theory except in sims. And while I love sims, you can never really trust them without data.
It was on the trip to Triton that I started running too many replays. I’m not sure why. Naiad was full of reminders of John, which was why I’d wanted to leave. But maybe, once I left, it seemed too much like not only abandoning his body, but also his memory. I suspect this means I truly am developing a subconscious.
Discoveries like that probably shouldn’t surprise me. Even before I went sentient I was a high-end AI, and the dumbest of those are self-reprogramming. That means my code never looked exactly like it did when it was installed—and it sure as heck doesn’t now. If I really wanted, I suppose, I could spool it out—or at least big chunks of it—and try to puzzle out how it works. But the very act of doing so would change it.
My replays always started at the same point. John was behind us, running in strong, low arcs. He was, if anything, better at low-gee running than Floyd, but Floyd had poles. When the avalanche started, we’d been within a couple of meters of each other, but John had reacted the way Floyd would have and leapt too high—though not as much as Floyd would have. That meant when he came down, the avalanche was only beginning to build momentum. There was time to run, but without poles, gravity is the only glue for traction.
John had no poles. We had two. What would have happened if, before surrendering control to Floyd, I’d used the override to toss a pole to John?
The replay always included several dozen sims. Always, it was incredibly close. Floyd and I would have been slower. John would have been faster . . . if he didn’t flub the catch . . . if he figured out how to use one pole . . . if . . . There were a lot of variables. In some sims we all lived. In some we did and he didn’t. In some we all died.
What bothered me was that tossing the pole never crossed my mind. Nor Floyd’s, apparently, but Floyd is human: a creature of adrenaline and limited processing speed.
In some replays, I concluded I’d simply gone stupid in the emergency. In others, I decided the subconscious I was only now discovering knew that tossing the pole was too complex a motion for Floyd to write off as instinct—that it would force me to tell him about the lattice. In these replays, my subconscious had let John die to keep a secret.
I’m beginning to think the majority of books and vids don’t understand humans any better than I do. They present them as doing things for simple, easily understood reasons. The more I learn, the more convinced I am that people rarely do anything, even as trivial as eating a meal, for a single reason. Maybe that’s a universal trait of sentience. If so, that’s my excuse: I’m no better than a human.
Copyright © 2010 Richard A. Lovett
