Emergence (Fox Meridian Book 5) (16 page)

‘So Hannah could be the kind of sociopathic gynoid to be happy going on with Grant’s mission in life?’ Fox asked.

‘I think that’s a given. However he did it, she’s clearly not following the standard rules. If you started torturing people for your own amusement and Kit knew, she would report the crimes. Her intrinsic nature would not allow her to remain silent. Hannah said nothing for years.’

‘Important note then,’ Jarvis said. ‘If you turn serial killer, Fox, keep Kit out of the loop.’

‘I do not believe Fox will become a serial killer, Mister Jarvis,’ Kit responded immediately.

‘Thank you, Kit,’ Fox said.

‘She has many other legal recourses for violence and would not need the additional outlet.’

Fox looked at Terri in the shuttle seat beside her. ‘Is it murder if I strangle my PA?’

‘No, but I’d be upset. Also, it’s impossible. I suppose you could do it in VR, but she’d just pop back up again.’

‘Better and better. I can strangle her over and over again.’

‘I know you only say that because you love me,’ Kit said with a bright grin and a cute tilt of her head.

‘Terri, did you program her to be evil?’

‘No,’ Terri said. ‘I blame her upbringing.’

‘Are you accusing me of bringing up our child badly?’

‘Well, it’s not
my
fault.’

‘I want a divorce.’

Terri grinned. ‘At least your humour’s improved.’

‘Yeah. Sorry. The Grant thing has me on edge. Minotaur may have been set back by having his home base taken out, but I’m willing to bet it’s not the last we’ve seen of him. It’s piling up.’

‘Understandable,’ Jarvis said, ‘and I agree about Minotaur. I’m glad you’ve decided to cheer up though.’

‘It is never pleasant to see one’s parents squabbling,’ Kit said.

‘That’s it,’ Fox said, ‘you’re grounded. For a month.’

Kit executed a precise stamp of her foot, which would have launched her toward the ceiling if she had been solid, and then proceeded to deadpan, ‘That’s not fair. You don’t understand me. You’re mean and I hate you. Also, other teenage stuff.’

‘She got her sense of humour from you too,’ Terri commented.

Fox shrugged. ‘Well, I had to do something right.’

Jenner Research Station.

MarTech’s Jenner Station was just as isolated and isolating as ever. Out on the far side of the Moon and largely buried deep under the lunar surface to avoid radiation, it was the most secure facility MarTech had. Kit described the network defence systems as ‘scary.’

‘Now that you’re here,’ Terri said as they made their way, somewhat crabwise in the low gravity, off the shuttle, ‘you’re both going to take at least a few hours to acclimatise before I hit you with the situation report.’

‘You know how I hate that placebo acclimatisation crap, Terri,’ Fox said.

‘It’s company regulations and you’re straight off ten hours of travelling. Don’t you at least want a rest?’

‘I do,’ Jarvis said. ‘A rest, a drink, and a meal that doesn’t taste like plastic.’

‘We can do two out of three. I’m not sure about the food.’

‘Valid point, but I’ll take it anyway.’

Fox grumbled something inaudible and then added, ‘Can I go see what Whitwallace has cooking? I’ll sit down and drink coffee while he shows me his new toys.’

Terri gave her a smirk. ‘Since big guns actually qualifies as recreation for you, that’s allowable.’

~~~

Whittaker Whitwallace was the same tall, gangling man in a counterpressure suit and tatty lab coat he had been when Fox had last seen him. There were rumours that his thin limbs had had trouble keeping him off the ground even before he had spent years living at one-sixth gravity and he certainly returned to Earth as rarely as possible. Then again, his passion was building weaponry with an affair on the side with defence mechanisms of various sorts, and Jenner was the best place in the solar system for that.

That said, his ability to keep Fox entertained was limited at the moment. ‘Uh, well, we are working, uh, of course,’ Whitwallace said, ‘but, uh, we have nothing really, uh, new in development at the moment.’

Fox sagged a little. ‘Aww, I may have to go lie down and rest or something, Whitwallace. You’ve got nothing?’

‘Uh, nothing really
new
.’ Turning, he picked a pistol from his bench and then held it out to her. Fox took it, turning it over in her hand. It looked a lot like a fairly standard automatic pistol with a vented, ten-mil barrel and a built-in tactical light, black frame, and blue steel slider. ‘That is the, uh, production version of the micromissile pistol Mister Martins built for you. We are completing the product verification.’

‘It’s sleeker than the prototypes. Any idea when it’ll be ready? We’ve shipped some copies of mine to some of my staff, but switching to the production version would be good.’

‘Another month or two. Uh, the unique feature on these is the grip. We have started using the materials Yliaster can produce in some of our products.’

Fox lifted the unloaded weapon, aiming it at a wall anyway. The grip shifted a little under her hand, settling against her palm as she applied pressure, to fit her hand perfectly. ‘One of those dynamic plastics?’

‘Indeed. It adapts to the user’s hand, ensuring a firm grip and optimal performance. It, uh, makes the weapon easier to fire.’ Fox nodded and handed the pistol back. ‘The guidance system in the, uh, ammunition gave us some pointers too. The grenade launchers in the new assault rifles will be able to launch multi-mode, guided munitions.’

‘Multi-mode? You squished anti-radiation and visual homing systems down to twenty-five millimetres?’

‘With, uh, Mister Martins’ innovations, it was a relatively simple task.’

‘For you maybe.’

‘Well, yes. Uh, we do have one quite exciting weapon in testing, but unfortunately you can’t fire it.’

Fox pouted. ‘Why not?’

‘No trigger. It is a cyberframe, Miss Meridian, a combat android.’

~~~

Terri appeared in the weapons department as Fox and Whitwallace were walking through into the area they were using to test the new android. She had a peculiarly interested look on her face which Fox could not quite interpret, but suspected was based around observation of Fox’s reaction.

That seemed a little odd since there was nothing amazingly new about the robot Fox saw when she entered the chamber. There was an unskinned, metal skeleton, humanoid in shape and it would be classed as an android primarily because it lacked the primary features which most people used to define a gynoid, and the unisex models usually got classified using the male name. It was more compact than many Fox had seen, being not much more bulky than a human, but right now it was immobile and hooked up to some sort of diagnostic system by a lot of cables.

There were several people peering at screens and making notes on tablets, and generally looking industrious. Fox might have suspected they were on a coffee break before Whitwallace entered, except that there was another man in the room who looked like he might have kept them honest. Fox was a little confused about his presence, however: he was a fairly large man, over six feet and heavily muscled, and dressed in military fatigues. Well, a green T-shirt and camouflage pants. The T-shirt was stretched over the man’s chest like a second skin, which was interesting enough, but Fox had not been told the military had
anyone
at Jenner Station.

‘What do you think?’ Terri asked, still wearing that odd smile.

‘Well, it’s quite compact,’ Fox said, turning her attention to the frame again. ‘New alloy?’

‘It is, actually,’ Whitwallace replied.

‘Looks like there’s some new artificial musculature there too. That looks new. Um… I’m not seeing anything
really
new here. What does the military think?’ Fox looked around at the soldier. He turned his head to look at her, but said nothing. ‘Strong, silent type. Right.’

‘He would be,’ Terri said. ‘We haven’t got his AI ready yet.’

‘You w–
That
is an android?’

‘That is a cyberframe, the same kind as the other one, with a new artificial skin we developed using an Yliaster variant. I don’t tend to think of them as an android unless they have at least a class three AI. He’s loaded with a class two which
really
isn’t using the computing power that’s jammed in there.’

‘You built a terminator? Did Hollywood tell you nothing?!’

‘Hollywood’s a desert,’ Terri pointed out. ‘We think an, um, infiltration model, don’t say anything, might be useful in a number of fields besides invading the strongholds of the last humans alive and slaughtering them with a plasma rifle.’

‘Right…’ Fox looked at Whitwallace. ‘You don’t happen to be working on–’

‘Plasma weapons are technically impossible,’ the engineer replied. ‘Uh, unless you want them to operate as melee weapons. Containing the plasma would need a, uh, force field or something.’

‘Well damn. I really looked forward to walking into a shop and asking for a phased plasma rifle in the forty-watt range. Even though that sounds like a really low power for an energy weapon.’

‘We’ll make a scientist of you yet,’ Terri commented wryly.

Fox walked over to the man – it was hard to think of him as a machine – and stroked a hand over his skin. He did not seem to object, or react. ‘This is… skin,’ Fox said.

‘Kind of,’ Terri said.

‘A combination of engineered skin cells and nanomachines,’ Whitwallace explained. ‘A modified Yliaster machine produces it. Uh, lays it directly onto the chassis.’

‘We can reskin your arm with it at some point,’ Terri suggested. ‘I’d prefer the process was fully mature first, but we can engineer cells based on your skin. It
should
mesh in perfectly.’

‘That’s something to look forward to,’ Fox said. ‘Assuming our machine overlords let you do it, obviously.’

‘Oh, obviously.’

24
^th
January.

‘Just so we’re clear, you dragged us out of important work, to the back side of the Moon, to look at a tank of blue water?’ The tank in question was about five feet in height and maybe three in diameter. It did indeed appear to be full of blue liquid, but perhaps not water. Fox was scowling at it.

‘Looks can be deceiving,’ Terri replied. ‘That’s possibly the most dangerous, certainly the most contentious, tank of
anything
I’ve ever had anything to do with. I’d go so far as to say it might be the most contentious thing MarTech has ever made.’

‘Huh. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.’

‘What does it do?’ Jarvis asked. ‘Aside from being a pretty cool Christmas ornament, or maybe a retro lounge decoration. I mean, the sparkle is nice, but…’

‘Physically,’ Terri said, ‘it’s a computer built on the same basic principles as the Yliaster swarms.’

‘There’s a swarm of nanoscale computers in there,’ Fox said.

‘Yeah, suspended in coolant. There’s a
lot
of quantum-scale effects we have to mitigate, and we need to provide power through induction. The processors communicate internally through light transmissions tuned to propagate well through this medium. That’s why it sparkles so much, by the way. There are lots of tiny machines flashing lights at each other.’

‘So what makes it different from Yliaster? Which is not without its contentious aspects, I might add.’

‘The machines in Yliaster run very simple software. They know how to assemble things, and the control computer pulses out a set of instructions for them to follow, and then they start working. They talk to each other to get the job done, but they’re dumb. Simple machines doing simple jobs. FEI is more complex.’

‘FEI?’

‘I’ll get to that. You remember I had this idea of building an AI using lots of simple AIs talking to each other to make something that was better than the current model, more scalable?’

‘I remember something about that. I seem to remember being a little scared of it. But you were talking about using Jackson’s mega-cluster.’

‘We decided to try something slightly different. We started off with a couple of thousand nanoprocessors and a fairly simple learning program which mimicked a dozen or so neurons on each machine. We set them going and fed in stimuli of various sorts, and just left them.’

Kit had appeared beside Fox while Terri talked, staring into the tank with interest. ‘You have added more processors since then?’

‘We’ve got activity monitors. Whenever it seemed like activity was flatlining or dropping off, we added another few hundred machines. It was pretty slow at first. There was a lot of activity, but I think the system was just soaking up whatever we tossed at it and not really making much of it.’

‘How long ago did this start?’ Fox asked.

‘June last year. About six months.’

‘How many processors?’ Kit asked.

‘It’s up to a billion, emulating around sixteen billion neurons.’

‘The human brain averages between nineteen and twenty-three billion.’

‘Yeah. We changed the inputs last month and began feeding it a self-describing language sequence developed for communicating with aliens. We’d been seeing some signs of metacognition in the activity sequences and we wondered if it could work it out.’

Fox shivered. ‘I’m going to assume it could.’

‘We got our first reply sequence on the thirteenth. That’s why I got up here as fast as I could.’

‘I’m still trying to get my head around this,’ Jarvis said, frowning at the tank. ‘What’s metacognition?’

‘Thinking about thinking,’ Kit replied quickly and with a rather excited edge to her voice. ‘It is considered by many to be a primary attribute of sapience.’

‘Right. And you communicate with this thing like it was from Alpha Centauri?’

‘We didn’t give it a language,’ Terri said. ‘Well, it had a minimal binary language it used to communicate within the cluster and the ability to expand that language. It expanded it. We haven’t managed to decipher much of how it talks to itself, so we had to use something which would give us a common-ground language. Just like we would have to do if the residents of Alpha Centauri popped in for a visit.’