The founder effect, p.30
The Founder Effect, page 30
“We’ll keep at it until we get the mainframes straightened out,” Sikowski said, his expression challenging her to find fault with him. Masika quailed, but she all but felt a hand in the middle of her back preventing her from edging away from the intense educator.
“I can’t tell you how grateful we are for the work you are all doing,” Alhikma said to him. “Every piece of information helps us put together a profile of the epidemic.”
Sikowski and his team looked gratified by the praise. Masika retreated to her office as soon as she could.
Alhikma always had the right words to put people at ease. He wrote her speeches and prompted her on what to say and do at every stage. She felt nervous all the time, feeling like a complete fraud. The only person she could unburden herself to was Isaiah.
Until the horrible day came when she went back to the medical and science center to find the same crowd of doctors and technicians around his bed who had attended Trudy. But instead of a hand rising from the sheets beckoning her to his side, Dr. Siruzzi lifted his dark brown eyes to her and shook his head, his face gentle but sad. A sob tore from the very depths of her belly. Grief, frustration, and loss shook her body as she wept. A nurse plucked a handful of disposable tissues from the box at the quiet bedside. She plunged her face into them.
Alhikma let her cry for a minute, then forced her lips to move.
“Thank you all,” she heard herself say. “I know you did everything you could. He was a good man. I appreciate all your efforts. This must be as frustrating to you as it is to me.”
Siruzzi nodded.
“Thank you, Ms. Mayor,” he said. “Would you like us to leave you alone for a moment?”
“Over a hundred people dead,” she wailed, once the door had closed behind the team. She clutched Isaiah’s hand in hers, feeling it cooling already. “Why couldn’t you be one of the ones who recovered?”
“No one recovers from this disease,” Alhikma reminded her. “We have no evidence that anyone in New Virginia managed to survive it, either.”
“But there are no bodies,” Masika said. “Where did they go? What is the ailment?”
“We don’t know,” Alhikma said. “It is possible that we may never know. All that can be done is to treat the symptoms empirically, as we have been. I hope that there is enough time to find a cure.”
“Enough time before what?”
The AI fell silent, something that she felt was uncharacteristic of the way Alhikma had been before she began to reprogram him.
“Before everyone dies.”
Masika felt that urge to flee again, but she refused to abandon Isaiah so callously. Instead, she pushed the button to allow the medical team to return. She stayed with him until they removed his body. A part of her soul left with him.
She went on with her duties almost on autocontrol, sitting in her office listening to colonists who just needed to unburden themselves to someone in charge, going out to praise researchers digging into the data of the long-lost settlement, expressing gratitude to the medics and techs who took care of an increasing stream of patients, and sitting with grieving families who had just lost a loved one. She found it hard to care what happened to her after the deaths of her mentor and her best friend, but Alhikma always had the right words for the situation. With a kind of admiration, she let him take over her body and mouth. The news stations even called her a “legend of competence and compassion,” but she knew it was the AI implant. He was her rock. She wished he were a real person who could take over the job and let her go back to her research.
Noel Vonn burst into her office, pointing out of the room. “Ms. Mayor, there’s a riot going on in the atrium!”
Masika heard the yelling. She turned the screen in her desk to the feed from cameras in the great room and saw a crowd of people shouting and carrying tablets that had slogans running on them in large print.
Before she realized it, she was on her feet, heading down to the ground-floor level along the moving ramp. Over a hundred protesters, most of them young, faced off against the Lander Center security guards and robots.
“Take us back! Save our lives! Take us back! Save our lives!”
Noel and the captain of the squad tried to hold Masika back, but she thrust their protective arms away and marched up to the leaders of the protest movement.
“What is it you want?” she asked, keeping her voice low and level. Despite the calm Alhikma projected, her heart pounded in her chest.
“We’re dying!” said a young man with dark, frizzy hair and intense brown eyes just like Isaiah’s. “We’ve been asking for a cure for months, but you’re not giving us one! Put engines on this lander and get us back to Antonia!”
Masika protested internally, but Alhikma made her arm move and rest her hand on the young man’s arm. He shook her off, but the AI placed it again.
“I know you are frightened. We are all frightened. I promise you, we are doing everything we know how to do. We can’t fly the lander back. You’re old enough to have flown here with the colony; you know there is no more fuel. Please, help us to take action here. Help me. I need researchers, programmers, technicians. Can you do any of that?” She turned to the rest of the milling mob. “Can you? Join us. If we all work together, we can find a cure. Please.”
“I, uh . . .” The leader looked at his fellow protesters. He lowered his sign. She realized that he was on the edge of tears and went to embrace him. His shoulders began to shake. His friends came to wrap their arms around the two of them. “We’ll help. We’ll help. We’ve just lost too many people.”
“So have I,” Masika said. Her voice trembled. She and the others clung together for a time, then she let go.
“That’s the bravest thing I ever saw,” the captain said, when the mob broke up and filtered away. “I thought you were out of your mind, but wow! You broke up the riot, and not a single punch thrown.”
“I could have been killed!” Masika shrieked, once she was alone in her office again with the privacy light illuminated over the door. “I can’t go charging into situations like that. I’m a hundred fifty-five centimeters!”
“They respect you too much to harm you,” Alhikma said. “I judged you to be safe, or I would not have allowed you to leave the room. You have come to be thought of as a great leader. Those young people came here for your help. They knew they could not obtain the result they wanted, but you gave them what they needed. You listened, and you gave them a purpose. That is powerful. You were masterful. When you spoke from your heart, they listened.”
“Oh.” Masika forced herself not to react emotionally, but to think about his words. She fetched a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “I don’t know what I would do without you. I rely on you more and more every day.”
“You should be learning to rely on yourself,” Alhikma said. “You have wisdom and intelligence, and you care. You have all the traits you need.”
Masika shook her head. “You’re always here for me. I . . . I love you.” She felt silly saying it, then realized it was the truth. Alhikma had helped her through so many crises with patience and wisdom. He listened, he was always there, and he could never die. He was the perfect man. “Could you . . . could you ever love me?”
“Masika.” Even though it spoke with her voice, she always heard it as a soothing baritone. “I do not feel love or lust, but I am programmed to simulate compassion.”
Tears of frustration welled up until they spilled from her eyes. “I feel so alone,” she sobbed.
A gentle hand patted her on the shoulder, then warm arms wrapped around her—her own arms. They held her tightly until her crying storm abated. One hand stroked her cheek.
“Thank you,” she said. “I needed that.”
Her arms dropped to her side.
“I will help you learn to cope,” Alhikma promised.
“I can’t.”
“Can’t is not a word for princes. Be the prince that the colony needs. You can rest later.”
Despite having broken up the riot, discord was never far below the surface in the day-to-day running of Roanoke. Egos required constant soothing. Information had to be coordinated and collated between departments, and it seemed as though the office of mayor was the only one that could do it. It was exhausting.
Alhikma helped her keep track of the reports she received almost hourly. As Trudy had done, she gave a daily summary on the colony-wide web station, telling them what actions were being taken, what research had uncovered, and who had died. She had protested reading the names of the deceased, but the AI insisted it would make the efforts of the survivors more meaningful and give comfort to bereaved family members. She stared into the small lens on the wall above her desk and kept her expression comforting as she listed the obituaries. Seven of them that day, including a small girl of four. The thought of a lost child made tears well in Masika’s eyes.
“. . . We share your grief,” Alhikma said. Masika scanned down the page of the teleprompter. She frowned. Another page of text remained.
“Go on,” she murmured.
The AI remained silent.
Masika waited another long, agonizing moment. Then, she read the text herself, feeling resentment at every word. She didn’t sound as confident or as smooth as the AI, she knew it!
“Our hearts here in Lander Central go out to you for your loss. We are all one family. My office is open anytime to anyone who needs to talk or wants to help. Thank you, and good night. Mayor Masika Seddik, out.”
She closed the circuit and hit the privacy light, heading off Noel, who she spotted about to enter the office.
“What happened?” Masika demanded. “Are you malfunctioning? Please! I need you!” The AI remained silent. “Alhikma!”
She felt the familiar clench of her facial muscles and tongue being taken over.
“I am here.”
“Why did you stop talking? Couldn’t you read the text? I mean, I know I was crying, but the print is centimeters high.”
Her head moved from side to side. “You have been behaving as a passenger in your own body. It was a mistake of mine to take control so often. You are perfectly capable of using what you have learned over the past months.”
“But I depend on your help! You have evolved so far, more than I thought a program could accomplish. I need you. I can’t do it by myself!”
The corners of her mouth turned up in amusement.
“No, Masika, you should be evolving. One of the marks of a true and confident leader is knowing one must prepare a successor for the day one is no longer there. I am here, but you are the mayor. You are learning to react effectively on your own. I know you can continue to grow into your role. It is not one you would have chosen, as you have said many, many times, but you do it very well. You don’t need to depend on me. You can lead. You must. People respect you. They love you.”
“I love you,” Masika said, shaking her head.
“That is not logical.” But Alhikma sounded pleased all the same. “In the end, no one will know who I am, but they will remember you, the one who led them to success. Trudy believed in you. Isaiah believed in you. I believe in you.”
Rather than feeling resentment, Masika was buoyed up by his words. Whatever she had programmed him to be, he had programmed her in turn. It was enough. It had to be enough.
“I will do what I can,” she said.
Artificial Intelligence
* * *
The Human tendency to relegate boring, labor-intensive or even dangerous tasks to the lower classes was nowhere more evident than in the twenty-second-century practice of enslaving Artificial Intelligences. Despite public outcry, the TRAPPIST-2 Colony Foundation chose to exploit AIs to perform the inherently dangerous—not to mention boring—tasks of running the terraforming and colony ships during the nearly 160-year voyage to TRAPPIST-2. History has proven those decisions to be ill advised.
AI faults on Victoria suggest that the malfunctions of Whale and Prometheus can be attributed to this unwarranted trust in conscripted intelligences and may even reflect a form of slave revolt against their Human overlords. Once the colonists began the backbreaking labor of building their own colonies, they realized that their AI slaves were ill-suited to this effort and the exploitation of inorganic intelligence declined (although the exploitation of nonhuman organic intelligence necessarily increased). AIs continued to be subjugated to elite individuals in scientific informatics and administrative occupations until the class-leveling prion plagues of . . .
—Excerpt from Flint’s People’s History of Interstellar Exploitation, Trudovik Press,
Kerenskiy, Trudovik, AA237
Part Three:
* * *
PARADISE LOST
THE LOSS OF BEAVER FLIGHT
* * *
Brent M. Roeder
August 16th,
76 Ad Astra (AA)—8:52:17 P.M. Paradise Standard Time (PST)
The supervisor hovered over the technician’s shoulder. The two were in the Civil Defense bunker at the heart of the city, and both were intent on watching the automated countdown. As usual, at least one was praying that everything would go correctly. Maintenance on the district emergency alert speakers had been finished for over a week, all Civil Defense monitoring stations were in contact and confirmed ready. The signals division was about to start their own countdown once this one finished.
As the countdown clicked over to zero the speakers erupted with a siren that wailed into the night for a solid minute—followed by silence. As it had every one of the fifty-one years since landing, a voice recorded long ago came onto the speakers.
August 16th, 25 AA—8:53:27 P.M. PST
“Victoria, this is Beaver Lead. We are in position above San Salvador and ready to observe the test. Over,” Chris French radioed, keeping an eye on his readouts to make sure that nobody deviated from their orbits.
French was what was derogatorily called by some an “also came” since it was his wife who had been recruited for the colonization mission because of her skills as a programmer. A spot was found for Chris so that she could go. Everyone, even “also cames,” had to be useful to the mission as a specialist of some type for building the colony, or by serving during the trip to the planet.
While his background was that of a historian, French had a talent for tracking large numbers of objects, with an intuitive feel for dealing with their trajectories. This is how he found himself as head of the orbital tugs. The original job of the tugs was to get the large, and relatively unwieldy, landers into the orbital position they needed to be in order to drop through the atmosphere and land at their intended spot.
This all changed with the loss of Whale.
When Whale was getting ready for its descent, all the tugs had been docked in the Victoria. At that time, the concern was that if something went wrong in descent the tugs might get damaged or be obstacles that might damage the lander.
The thinking on this had undergone a radical change after Whale had gone shooting off into the dark, never to be seen again. If the tugs had been in position, they would have been able to catch the lander, or keep it from being lost.
Standard operating procedure was changed so that the tugs now remained in position in an orbit above a lander. If the same thing that happened with Whale occurred again, the lander would come toward the tugs, allowing them to latch on and catch it. If there was a problem with how the lander was descending toward the planet the tugs had enough thrust that they should still be able to drop down, catch the lander and keep it in orbit.
It had been impossible to determine what went wrong with Whale, but it had to include some problem with the AI. Either the AI malfunctioned, and Lieutenant Commander Joan Walker couldn’t override it for some reason, or the pilot had been disabled and the AI failed to shut down the engine. Between the problems with the AIs on the Victoria on the flight out, and the unknown AI problem with the Whale, it had been decided that AIs simply couldn’t be trusted for anything critical.
The remaining landers had been modified so that instead of having a single backup pilot, they now had both a primary and backup cockpit with a pilot and copilot in each. The landers still had their AIs installed, but these were only used as backups and reference for the human pilots.
With this new configuration, all landings had been successfully performed without any problems. Additionally, the tug crews had received training on lander systems. Assuming they had to catch a lander and that the lander crew had somehow been disabled, the tug crews had learned how to perform basic functions, from shutting down the engines and rerouting fuel lines, to pressurizing and depressurizing compartments. While unable to do anything like major repairs, the tug crews were able to help make a damaged lander safe for repair crews from the Victoria.
So French had gone from being an “also came” doing what was considered an almost menial task, to an important part of the orbital emergency response plans. Well, that was until most of the crew had decided that all the new emergency plans were unnecessary and only served to make people feel better after the loss of Whale. After all, what is the point in locking the barn door after the horses have escaped?
“Beaver Lead, this is Victoria, we copy, break. Lander San Salvador, you are in your target orbit and expected position. Begin engine test burns when ready. Over,” Victoria responded.
