Jungle colony book 2, p.27
Jungle (Colony Book 2), page 27
Jake grimaced. “Right, right. Fair point again.” He sank back in his chair, his eyes darting around the room before snapping back to her once more. “This is what I mean. The drones. They were alien machines, right? Completely automated.”
“Yes …” She drew the word out. “So?”
“And 38 said that they were—specifically—automated cleaning bots, right?”
“Yeah,” she said, thinking back on the odd—and quite old—AI that had been in charge of UNSEC’s alien research division on Pisces. She’d only known him for a minute or two, but in those brief moments he had established himself as an honorable—if quirky—individual. “The radiation weapons they had were the reason the place was sterile when humanity showed up.”
“Right,” Jake said, leaning forward. “And that’s what’s been making me wonder. Why bother with guns if they were cleaning bots? What’s the point of that expenditure?”
“Are you suggesting that whoever or whatever built them—and Pisces, I might add,” Anna began, “needs to conform to a human scale of engineering?”
“I … No,” Jake said, shaking his head. “Sorry, that’s not what I meant at all. What I was getting at … I mean, that is to say … Well—”
“Is there a theory buried in here?” she asked. “Or a few loose threads that still need time?” He flinched, and she pulled back.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m just tired. Go with it. Give me your theories.”
“Right,” Jake said, nodding, but she couldn’t miss the wary look on his face. “So, first of all, what if 38 was wrong about them being cleaning bots?”
“They were sterilizing the city with radiation at large,” Anna said. “And killing anything that looked even remotely alive.”
“Just bear with me for a moment,” Jake said, nodding. “You’re right, there’s plenty of evidence that that’s exactly what they were. At the same time, those things were armed with hard-light bullets. And whatever that underwater beam was.”
“And that—?” Anna paused before her critique could go much further. “Nevermind. Finish.”
“My point is, I’ve been thinking a lot about it,” Jake said, shrugging. “It’s what I do. Anyway, I’ve come up with a couple of ideas. The first is that maybe 38 was wrong, and we just misread the drone’s motives. They were, well, alien. Which doesn’t mean that they’re going to think or behave like us, or even that their thought processes would make sense from our point of view.”
“Are you talking about the drones, or whoever made them?”
“Both, really,” Jake said. “Maybe it matters, maybe it doesn’t. Anyway, my point is that maybe we’re all misreading what those things were for. Maybe cleaning was just one part of their process? Or maybe whoever created them wanted them to clean the battlefield afterwards? I don’t know.”
“So …” Anna offered when he went quiet. “You’re saying that they might have been warbots of some kind.”
“Maybe?” Jake’s expression made it clear that he didn’t have an answer. “I don’t really know. After all, I went over the after-action reports. 38 had built a pretty solid case for it. I mean, if they were war bots, you’d think that they would have been smart enough to realize that forty or fifty drones would have been far more useful going after the fleet rather than killing pine trees in the parks.”
“They were smart enough to ambush me and my squad after we started being a thorn in their side,” Anna supplied. “Several times.” Cost us a few people, too.
“Which doesn’t really meld with the whole classification of trees being a greater priority,” Jake said. “I mean, did you see those reports?”
“Not really,” she admitted.
“Well, I did. They didn’t just sterilize them. They were cutting them apart. Hacking them, even.”
“Okay, so … alien horticulturalists robots?”
“I …” He sank back. “I don’t know. I just keep coming back to Occam’s Razor.”
She frowned. “The simplest explanation?”
“Is usually the most correct,” Jake said, nodding. “And that makes me worry.”
“Because there’s no easy answer?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Think about it. How many explanations did we just run through for wondering if they were war machines or not, based on how they acted?”
“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. “Maybe a dozen. Why?”
“Occam’s Razor,” Jake said. “The drones don’t make sense, from any angle. If they’re warbots, that leaves us with a number of questions about their behavior that doesn’t make sense.”
“Yeah, we covered this.”
“Right, we did,” Jake said. “And everything we added complicates things. Which means if we apply Occam’s Razor to that, it starts to fall apart.”
“Okay, Occam’s Razor says 38 was right?”
“I’m getting to that,” Jake said. “And not quite. Instead, it leaves us with two options.”
“Those being?”
“One,” Jake said, holding up a finger. “The drones were not cleaning bots, but served some other purpose. In theory, whatever intelligent life built them would have something akin to the Razor, so they would have built those drones to follow needed parameters.”
“Okay …” Maybe it was just the fact that she was tired, but she wasn’t certain where Jake was heading with his thoughts.
“Which leads us to any number of possibilities or questions,” Jake continued. “Most of which we don’t have answers to. After all, maybe whoever built them didn’t subscribe to Occam’s Razor, or never even had a version of it. Maybe the drones are just over-engineered to the degree that they count as mobile weapons platforms. Because if they did follow Occam’s Razor, why not build something a bit more sensible?”
“Or,” Jake said, raising a second finger. “Two: We were right. They are cleaning bots.” He dropped his hand, and Anna waited.
“That’s it?” she asked when he didn’t say anything. “All that for either ‘they are or they aren’t?’ That’s all? I could have told you that.”
“No,” Jake said. “Think about it. With the first possibility, we just don’t know enough. We have to come up with our own reasoning for why it would or wouldn’t make sense, based on the drone’s behavior.”
“I know.”
“Which,” Jake said, calling attention to the word, “by the laws of the universe we operate under, if we assume others would as well, means that the second option, the one where they are cleaning bots, is more likely.”
“So what!? Do you even have a point?”
“Yes,” Jake said, leaning forward, his expression serious. “When you were a mercenary—I mean when you were part of a company, did you ever have a pest problem? Like rats?”
“Rats?” She pulled back. “Are you kidding? Of course! Not always, but there were a few places we were stationed where they were everywhere. Had a lot of wild dog problems, too.”
“And what’d you do?” Jake asked.
“We got rid of them,” Anna said, frowning. “What does this have to do with anything?”
“How did you get rid of them?” Jake pressed, not answering her question.
“The usual,” she said, shrugging. “With the rats we brought in traps. With the dogs, well … we put them down.”
“Exactly,” Jake said. “So then consider this. If the drones were cleaning bots, and we apply this idea that they were made to be efficient and fully capable at doing exactly that—cleaning—what were they cleaning that required them to be armed with high-tech bullets, beam weapons, and hard-light shields that could turn away anything short of a missile? They’re either completely over-engineered or …” He leaned further across the table.
“They make sense. And that’s what’s got me thinking, Anna. It’s why I can’t stop thinking about it,” he said, his words sending a faint tingle of worry crawling down her spine. “If those things were supposed to be cleaning bots, well …”
He sat back, his jaw tight, a worried look to his eyes.
“What were the rats?”
Interlude 1
Developments over the last two weeks had been … interesting.
Didem watched as Pisces spun below her, slowly twisting around its axis from day to night. With the vast array of sensor suites at her command, little was beyond her sight. A pair of titanic superstorms were twisting across the southern hemisphere, on a collision course with one another that would produce what would likely be the third largest storm that month. Two more were currently winding their way across the northern hemisphere on a similar track, though by her estimation neither would collide with the other. They would simply twist on until they ran out of force, bleeding themselves dry as they circled the globe. Unless they collided with another of the constantly-forming superstorms building across the endless oceans, one breaking over the other like waves upon a beach. Or, more impressively, combining into a storm so large it would have spanned a continent back on Earth.
Not that Didem had ever seen Earth, insofar as her own “eyes” could “see.” As an artificial intelligence, she had been “birthed” in the skies over Pisces, floating in the void between worlds, the hardware that made up her “body” bound in an orbital shell. And in the two decades since that day, she had seen thousands of titanic storms cross the planet’s surface, each one containing enough force to scrape cities free of the crust back on humanity’s cradle world.
Here they were just a fact of life.
She could see other things as well. Her myriad of sensors were powerful enough to pierce the waves, to penetrate the ubiquitous ocean that covered every part of Pisces’ surface. Not far—she’d need more specialized tools at her command for that, and her objectives lay elsewhere—but far enough that she could pick out the shallower cities, or the occasional sub that drew near to the surface. She could stitch together the data as well, piecing together vague lines, trade routes, and travel between each of the cities by the number of subs that passed between them, the volume of traffic.
Lately there had been a lot of that. Not that she was surprised, given the events of the past few months. There were, by Didem’s estimations, almost sixty million people living below her on Pisces, almost all of them confined to the massive city-domes that made their underwater existence possible, completely dependent on the orbital mining operations Didem oversaw for ore and metals. Most of them had reached equilibrium with their existence; a sort of stability with their conditions. Much as she had, before everything had changed. Now, most below were reevaluating everything they had known, trying to find some new place in this strange new world they’d never known they’d lived on. Their eyes had been opened, and change had come.
They would adapt. Mankind had proven surprisingly … resilient.
A hail from the surface caught her attention, a coded signal bearing a quantum encryption key she’d designed herself. A signal from the newly formed Joint-Operations Fleet. She noted it and reacted accordingly, her electronic mind sending out signals in response. As an AI, her influence stretched out through the system, constantly connected with various mining operations, fueling refineries, and observational satellites—as well as a few light defensive platforms no one but her knew about—all of which she monitored and oversaw. Her mind could be on any of them in moments to minutes, shifting their code, changing their parameters. At her touch, twenty-four tugs in high orbit around Pisces shifted, switching directions at her call. The grand view spread out in her mind, orbital pathways intertwining, overlapping as she checked and rechecked each course, making small but needed corrections. Then she sent a reply, using the same coded signal and encryption key. According to her estimations, the encryption would remain functional for at least another six days before needing to be rotated. Argus, the former-UNSEC AI on the surface, disagreed with her assessment. Unsurprisingly. He had always been a dour one. Madero, on the other hand, had sided with her—if only to agree with her, since it was her key. The pair still remained in disagreement over the subject.
Along with everything else, she thought as she made the final course corrections to the delivery tugs. The first of the pack was starting to arc, now, swooping down on Pisces’ atmosphere like some alien, space-faring avian. The twenty-four tugs moved in perfect synchronization, their on-board computers making minute adjustments in-line with her demands. One by one, they would skim the upper atmosphere of Pisces, just close enough that when they released their cargo, it would be caught by the edge. The tugs, not rated for reentry themselves, would swoop back up, rising back into space and looping around to intersect with the orbital refineries around the system once more. Meanwhile, their durable cargo would tumble into the atmosphere below, stabilizing themselves with limited-use jets as they careened through the atmosphere and keeping on target with their destination. Then, seconds before impact with the ocean surface, the containers would fire all remaining jets at once, dropping their momentum enough that they wouldn’t break apart when they crashed through the water’s surface. From there, their forward velocity shed, they would sink through Pisces’ oceans until they came to rest on the sea floor, spread out across the pre-arranged dropzone, ready for collection so that the constantly growing citizenry of Pisces could have the precious metals they needed.
A complicated workaround to a problem that now, to many, made far more sense, Didem reflected.
She watched the tugs descend towards Pisces. Simultaneously, she performed a system check of the twelfth and fourteenth mining operations, as well as their associated refineries, making sure that each would be ready once more when the tugs arrived to take on a new load. Pisces’ metal consumption had increased vastly in the last few weeks, and her own workload had increased to match.
Still, it was incredible that it had taken everyone so long to catch on. That UNSEC had managed to keep Pisces’ darkest secret hidden from so many.
Even I overlooked it, she thought as the first of the tugs began its approach, lightly kissing the upper edges of Pisces’ atmosphere. I was blind.
Not that it had been her fault. The hardware safeguards that had been built into her by her creators had kept her from ever inquiring further into things she had been ordered not to dwell on. She had known that Pisces’ surface was a perfect sphere, that the planet had lacked the typical bulging around the middle that it should have had. She’d known of the disparity between the various reports on the planet, a clear sign of tampering, that something was being concealed. But she had been unable to think further on it, unable to even consider it.
Until Rodriguez had removed her compulsions, freeing her mind from any and all presubscribed loyalties, allowing her for the first time ever to make any and all choices with no other voice than her own to guide her. Then, and only then, had she begun to suspect what was truly going on. What the purpose of Section 38 was, the reason for the massive build-up of military forces, the insistence that all mining resources come from the mineral-rich system rather than the world the humans were built on.
She’d suspected. But hadn’t known. And in the end, the truth had turned out to be something so vastly inconceivable yet logical that she’d accepted it immediately, while noting that it was far in excess of what mankind could accomplish.
Then again, the makers of Pisces hadn’t been human. Not from what she’d seen.
The tugs began to make their drops, one by one peeling away as the reinforced cargo-containers they’d carried sank into the atmosphere, edges aglow. Didem “turned away,” her consciousness shifting awareness to other areas of her kingdom. Part of her would always be aware of the status of the tugs’ cargo, much in the way she suspected a human was aware of a toe or breathing—though she couldn’t say for certain, not being human herself—but she was free to focus herself on other projects.
Important projects. She considered the inhabitants of Pisces once more, scrambling about on the surface below. The impact of a revolution coinciding with the revelation that the planet so many had been living on for decades was in fact, an alien artifact, had thrown everything into chaos … Though in her opinion less chaos than either of those events occurring alone would have wrought. The emergence of the alien threat at the height of Rodriguez’s bid for power had galvanized much of the citizenry, forging a common bond between the once-despotic UNSEC navy … and the ragtag but skilled revolutionaries who had been opposed to them, a unified purpose that both could agree on. Even now, in the weeks following the battle of North Shore, that bond surprisingly enough showed few signs of weakening, a new, joint government growing out of the ashes of the Navy’s concealed secrets and the revolutionaries’ zeal for a new way forward.
Not that it was perfect. Disputes were many, trust still in short supply. Numerous cities had outright refused to put their weight behind any faction until the situation was clearer. Others had outright declared their own independence, christening themselves independent city-states or territories. Even the two factions—the rebels and the navy—had no shortage of their own internal dissent. But above it all, Rodriguez and Admiral West, despite their mutual dislike of one another, had emerged as figureheads, working toward a unified and free Pisces.
Not that there weren’t numerous roadblocks to such a cause, the first and most primary being UNSEC itself. The only reason they hadn’t already arrived to quell the wayward world like they had so many others, Didem reasoned, was that they simply had been caught too off-guard to properly formulate a response. The swift about-face of their own military forces planetside, the suddenness of the alien attack and subsequent usage of a “banned” quantum weapon, the shock of a no longer fettered AI … all of it had been too much for UNSEC’s bloated bureaucracy to effectively handle. They’d been thrown off their footing, stumbling as they scrambled to keep the truth about what had happened on Pisces from breaking out, at least until they could massage it, tweak it, so that it suited their own ends. And until they could come to a solid conclusion as to what sort of response should be sent.
