Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three (33 page)

Shay was well aware that most of the other pilots in the squadron simply assumed that the two Prims, Gray and Ryan, had something going together.

It wasn’t true, in fact. Shay liked Gray, and knew he liked her, but perhaps it was the expectation of others itself that had kept her a bit aloof from him—a relationship that was strictly business, strictly professional.

She also assumed that Gray had been having sex with Schiff since before she’d come aboard, back when Lieutenant Schiff was still an ensign in
America
’s avionics department. She’d not been sure what their relationship was now, though Schiff’s unhappiness at the moment was suggestive.

Shay pushed past the discomfort, and pulled Schiff a little closer. “You know, hon, there’s scuttlebutt that the Sh’daar must have picked him up after he came through the tunnel. If he’s alive, he might be on that moving planet they spotted.

“What . . . what if he was on that battleship?”

“Then he’s dead, and there’s not a thing we can do for him, except to remember him.”

Schiff began sobbing quietly.

“But if he’s still alive, we
will
find him. We don’t leave our own behind. Ever.”

And she held the younger pilot for a long time.

Chapter Twenty-One

1 July 2405

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

0235 hours, TFT

G
ray was asleep when his AI switched back on.

He’d let himself drift off because there wasn’t anything else he
could
do. His AI would switch on, or it wouldn’t, Lieutenant Schiere would show up or not, the fleet would arrive with particle beams burning and fighters zorching or it wouldn’t . . . and since Gray couldn’t affect any of these things himself, he fell back on that most ancient of prerogatives of military men throughout the ages—the ability to grab some personal downtime whenever the opportunity presented itself.

But he became aware of links opening and in-head icons switching on and came fully awake in an instant. “You’re back!” Then an unpleasant thought occurred to him. “Is that . . . you?”

“This is your Starhawk Gödel 920 artificial intelligence linking through your implanted personal assistant,” the familiar voice said in his head.

“Where the hell have you been?”
Gray’s own shout, ringing within the close confines of the fighter’s cockpit, startled him. He’d not realized that he’d been that stressed.

“I have not been anywhere,” the AI replied. “Unlike humans, my existence depends upon the presence or absence of superpositional quantum states within a crystalline matrix. I can be erased or copied, but not moved within the conventional meaning of the word.”

“You’ve been off-line,” Gray replied, “for eleven fucking hours! You must have been
somewhere
!”

The AI didn’t answer, and Gray realized that he was trying to argue with it as though it were human. It was extremely intelligent, but human it was not.

He took a deep breath and tried again. “Do you have any record of events during the past eleven hours?”

“Negative. We were experiencing a visual feed from outside sources, observing the Six Suns and some unusual artifacts in the sky.” There was a pause. “I cannot now regain that link.”

“Do you feel . . . any different?”

It was a stupid question, Gray knew, but he couldn’t think of any other way to phrase it. Artificially sentient systems didn’t
feel
, though they certainly could imitate human emotions if they needed to.

“I submit that I would not be aware of any difference in my own mentation,” the AI replied, “since stored memories of past mental states might have been altered.”

“So why would they switch you off for half a day, then just switch you on again?”

“Unknown. I believe it possible, however, that the intelligences running the local information systems essentially froze my overall memory and processor quantum states in order to avoid decoherence.”

Gray’s understanding of how AI computer systems worked was weak. After all, he used the things, had elements of quantum computer technology implanted in his central nervous system, but he didn’t need to know how they worked.

He knew, however, that his AI functioned through the manipulation of qubits—quantum bits. Where classical computers operated on binary bits—one or zero, on or off, yes or no—quantum computing used the superposition of those two states to define a far vaster range of possibilities. During his training, he’d been given a brief explanation of the mathematics, and been introduced to the concept of a Bloch sphere; if the binary bit possibilities were represented as the north and south poles on a sphere, the probability amplitudes of superposition included any point on the sphere’s entire surface.

The problem with using quantum states in computers, however, was that even the act of simply observing the system could change it, a process known as decoherence. His AI was suggesting that their captors had somehow isolated the computer system’s memory and processors, taking them off-line, in order to . . . do what?

“Run diagnostics,” Gray told the AI.

“I have been doing so. I should note, however, that if malicious changes have been made to my programming, I would likely also be programmed not to be aware of them.”

“I know. Do it anyway.”

A hard knot of fear uncurled within Gray’s gut, and his heart was pounding. As a Prim, he’d never particularly trusted modern computer technology. Kids growing up on the mainland—
citizens
—received their first cerebral implants within a year or two of being born, and had those systems upgraded when they started formal educational downloading, usually before age four. Gray hadn’t received his first implant until he’d been inducted into the Confederation Navy in his early twenties. Worse, he’d grown up on the Periphery hearing stories all his life about how the citizens on the mainland weren’t entirely human, how they were controlled by their implants, how the monolithic Authority could watch and record everything they did, integrating them into the global network as if
they
were cubits in a vast, planet-sized computer.

Scare stories. Propaganda, taking advantage of the natural human tendency to fear the unknown, to focus on
us
against
them
. When he’d joined the Navy, Gray had actually begun a kind of late blossoming. A whole new world had opened up to him through downloads from the global Net. The Authority didn’t really watch all of its citizens all of the time . . . or if it did, you were never aware of it. Hell, even if they did, the advantages of universal health monitoring, instant in-head communication with anyone else within the network, access to any and all information about anything and everything with a simple thoughtclick . . .

It sure as hell beat grubbing around in rooftop gardens above the watery canyons of Manhattan, hoarding precious caches of nano for food, clean water, and clothing, or hunting rats in the labyrinthine ruins of the TriBeCa Tower. People on the Periphery tended to romanticize the so-called free life of the Ruins, but what that freedom generally meant was freezing in the winter, fighting off raids by rival clans, and dying of any of a ridiculous number of diseases or injuries because you didn’t have the medinano to treat them.

As Gray thought about it, it wasn’t the technology that had bothered him for these past few years so much as the isolation. His fellow TriBeCans had been his family, one of the most powerful independent clans in the Ruins. They were all gone now—God knew where. Some time after he’d left, joining the Confederation Navy in a desperate bid to get medical help for his wife, they’d been wiped out by a rival gang—probably before the tidal wave that had scoured the Ruins during the Defense of Earth.

Since coming on board the
America
he’d made a few close friends—Ben Donovan . . . Rissa Schiff . . . Shay Ryan, his fellow Prim in the squadron. Most of his squadron mates had kept their distance, though, or actively closed ranks against him. Worse, he’d even started keeping his own distance from Schiffie and from Shay, just because of the rumors and the snide comments about Gray and his monogie perversions.

Gray pulled himself up short. What the hell was he doing? Somehow, his memories, memories he generally kept tightly locked down, had started rising as if of their own volition.

“I think,” he heard his AI say, “that
they
are interested in your thoughts on technology.”

“They’re working through you somehow, aren’t they?”

“Unknown. I cannot detect their presence. However, it is distinctly possible that they are using me to access your mind, your memories, through your personal assistant. If they did indeed copy me without creating decoherence of my quantum storage matrices, they would have had ample time to examine my structure and operational algorithms, plan and initiate desired changes, and even test those changes within a virtual environment.”

“But what do they
want
?” It was a scream, piercing in the fighter’s cramped cockpit.

Gray realized that he was terrified, on the verge of panic. He was trying desperately not to think, wondering if the Sh’daar could read his mind through his PA, wondering how he could block them, how he could fight back, wishing he could somehow claw the nanochelated microcircuitry out of his skull now, before they peered any deeper into his memories, into his
soul
.

“I believe they want to communicate,” the AI replied.

“So where is that virtual Agletsch? We were doing okay with that approach.”

“As you point out, Thedreh’schul is a virtual Agletsch, meaning that she is an illusion created by a complex AI system. I have the impression that we are dealing with a very large, very powerful AI rather than organic sentients. Clearly, this intelligence understands human language, thanks to contact with the Agletsch. What it does not understand are the myriad points of attitude, belief, conditioning, and worldview inherent in human existence—human psychology, if you will.” The AI broke off suddenly, then added, “Someone wishes to link with you.”

“Who?
What?
”

“Unknown.”

Gray took several deep breaths, forcing himself to at least a ragged imitation of calm. If the Sh’daar had wanted to kill him, they wouldn’t have gone through all of this.

“Put them . . . put them through,” Gray said.

And his cockpit faded away, replaced almost at once by a place that Gray knew very well. . . .

Admiral’s Quarters

TC/USNA CVS
America

Omega Centauri

0250 hours, TFT

Rank doth have privileges beyond the ken of the lower ranks. Koenig’s private quarters were adjacent to his office and constituted a small apartment suite with separate living and sleeping areas. Unlike the stacked bulkhead occutubes used by junior officers and enlisted men, his bed was thought-responsive and mutable, capable of shifting from flat and open to womblike and close, with adjustable heating, pressure, and surface texture.

Nevertheless, Koenig couldn’t sleep.

He could have linked into the bed’s electronics through his personal assistant and allowed it to adjust his brainwave patterns, lowering him into unconsciousness, but he didn’t like the muzzy and incoherent feeling left when the program brought him back out. If he was awakened in the middle of the night watch for an emergency, he needed to be instantly alert. The medtechs all assured him that electronically enhanced sleep induction—
eesie
as it was popularly known—was completely natural and should leave no unpleasant side effects, that any side effects he
was
feeling must be purely psychological.

Koenig didn’t buy it. He’d resorted to eesie a time or two over the years when he’d been afflicted by particularly severe insomnia, but he much preferred to rely on his organic brain’s rhythms and chemistries.

He was, he realized, lonely, nothing more.

He had his bed unfolded to full-open, and was staring up at the viewall which ran from the deck toward the foot of the bed up the curve of the bulkhead to the gently ascending ceiling over his head. He often liked displaying scenes of Earth there, but at the moment it was linked to the ship’s astrogational sensors, showing the stars outside the ship.

Ten and a half hours into the acceleration phase of the jump,
America
and her consorts had traveled some three and a half billion kilometers from the TRGA tunnel. Their speed now was 189,000 kilometers per hour, some 63 percent of
c
. At that tremendous velocity, the stars outside were only just beginning their relativity-induced crawl toward the starbow effect, and were so tightly clustered across the entire sky that it was impossible to note with certainty any distortion at all. Had his eyes been more sensitive, he knew, he might have noticed that the stars in the direction of their travel were glowing just a bit brighter and a bit bluer. Now that he knew what to look for against that stellar backdrop, he could see the Six Suns directly ahead.

God, he missed Karyn. Eight months since her death, and the hole inside, if anything, gaped worse than ever.

He resisted the temptation to talk to her simulation, his PA.

Koenig’s sleeping quarters were equipped with some high-technology innovations common enough on Earth, but rare within the Spartan confines of military warships in space. Ginnie was one, sealed at the moment inside a storage compartment in the bulkhead nearby.

Ginnie the Gynoid, Mark XII, was a commercial sex surrogate. She had a respectable and long-established pedigree; a German firm had first marketed Andy the Android as far back as the early twenty-first century, a humanoid robot so lifelike that she’d actually managed to leap the barrier of the uncanny valley. The more expensive models had actually simulated breathing and pulse rates, both of which increased if you stimulated certain portions of their anatomy.

Ginnie was far more sophisticated than her precursor of four centuries before. She could talk, for one thing, using a link to the local network to acquire an AI personality human enough to beat even the toughest Turing Test. She could move with human smoothness and precision, her eyes would follow yours and blink in a lifelike manner, and microactuators gave her an incredible range of expressions and emotional simulations. A nanomatrix within the gynoid’s skin and facial bones allowed it to sculpt itself into a good double of any specific person.