Event Horizon (Hellgate) (120 page)

But Dario’s head was shaking. “No, we didn’t. Lai’a was perfect, Mark, or we’d never have taken off into transspace with it.”

“Then – what?” Jazinsky demanded.

“I’ll find out,” Mark said darkly.

She tilted her head at him. “You already suspect.”

“Perhaps I do.” He was moving as he spoke. “Give us a couple of hours. I’ll give you a buzz when we know more.”

“Besides,” Rusch mused, “if an upgraded copy comes online with every memory, ever skerrick Lai’a ever knew, it has no way to know it’s not the original, and the original won’t ever know it never rebooted.”

“Still,” Tor said slowly, “it’ll always be a
copy
. It won’t be the Lai’a who went to war with us, even if it thinks it is.” He shook himself. “Remember way back, Mark, our scientists ran a bunch of experiments to see if you could upload a complete, living personality into computer memory – save a copy of yourself before you kick the bucket, was the idea. Achieve functional immortality in holographic crystal, in a virtual world like a game reality, utterly indistinguishable from our reality.”

“Which was dandy,” Dario went on, “till somebody thought to ask, are you uploading an autonomous program based on someone’s memory and moods, or are you uploading their soul? Because if the soul gets left behind when the body goes belly-up, what’s the point? The part that matters is gone – all you uploaded is a glorified snapshot … and nobody I know ever got confused between the family album and the living spirit.”

“The point was,” Mark remembered, “the next living generation would continue to have benefit of your presence. The deceased would endure, in every
tangible
way. If the soul vanished into the aether, what did it matter, since the copy functions just fine?” He held up his hands to halt the impending dispute. “I know. The argument was, uploading to dynamic memory doesn’t offer any kind of immortality, just convenience for the people left behind who’d miss having you around – until they found somebody to take your place!” He gave Marin and Travers an exasperated look. “There’s a saying among our people: ‘If it makes no difference, what’s the difference?’ But you feel it as a niggle, down deep … oh, there’s a difference. So let me do what I can to save
our
Lai’a. I want it back as much as you all do. And the preliminary work is still going to take two hours – I’ll call you.”

“Driftway 884,” Joss announced, “in 140 minutes.”

“We’ll know about Lai’a,” Marin said as the Resalq stepped out, “before we take a shot at flying this thing for real … and speaking of flying it, I’d like to spend the next couple of hours watching the nav feed in full veeree, and listening to Mick and Jo.” He flexed his fingers. “I want to get the feel, before we go hands-on.”

He was right. Travers looked sidelong at Vaurien, who nodded. “Joss, stream everything to Nav 2.” Richard watched the workstation come alive. “Anything you need, Neil, Curtis?”

“Just coffee,” Travers decided, and was on his way to the ’chef while Marin popped open the storage drawer under the workspace and broke out a pair of full veeree sets, still in the vacuum packs.

It was like ‘buddy hooking’ at a gaming den. Travers had visited more than a few in his time, and some of the cutting-edge flight games approximated the experience, though none of them depicted transspace. Even here, the multi-dimensions of Elarne were simulated in three dimensions to allow the human brain to grasp them, work with them. Travers slid smoothly back into the navigator’s role.

They were seeing the same feed as Vidal and Queneau, eavesdropping on Mick and Jo to compare reactions. Only one correct, safe route could be cut through the gravity express; room for error was normally measured in less than a second – just enough time to correct, if a mistake were make.

Vidal was good. This was the first time Travers had flown in parallel, shadowing Queneau, reading the same data, watching, feeling Vidal’s responses. He was
brilliant
. His error factor was smaller than Marin’s and his correction time was shorter – which was not to disparage Marin. But Vidal was born for this – he was a natural transspace pilot who dabbled in other aspects of life, while Marin had always been Dendra Shemiji, and flew transspace of necessity.

And no matter Vidal’s brilliance, Marin’s numbers were more than good enough for him to remain one of the best transspace pilots in the business, even as ships like the
Gypsy
began to fly, and transspace flight crews began to abound. Those days were coming, Travers thought. The lid was off Pandora’s box and no force would cram it back into place.

Time raced by. He was never aware of it while he was immersed in the simulation. At Alshie’nya this assignment would be done, but he knew he would want to fly again. He indulged himself in a fantasy of navigating for Vidal on the
Gypsy
, while Marin and the Sherratts ran a mission of exploration on the other side of the galaxy. He gave a small start as Joss said,

“Driftway 884 in 20 minutes. Colonel Marin, Colonel Travers, your presence is requested in Tech 3.”

He slithered out of the veeree envelope with a groan. For as long as half a minute after the visor lifted and the hair-fine needles drew out of his temples, it was reality that looked fake, so dull, it could only be a bad mock-up. Slowly his brain adjusted; he blinked away the vivid veeree images of the writhing, roiling world of transspace, and stretched every joint.

“Tech 3,” Marin echoed – also blinking, forcing himself away from a realm in which he flew ‘naked’ in the transspace stream, without any awareness of the ship about him, hull and engines and machinery. He gave Travers his hand, clasped it tightly. “It felt good. I was damned close to Mick, every time, all the time.” He paused. “You trust me?”

“I’ve always trusted you,” Travers told him mildly. “So does Mick – and Richard. They wouldn’t be handing this ship to us if they had any doubts.”

Rabelais’s quiet voice surprised them. He was still sitting on the other side of the tank, following the comm feed though he only glanced now and then at the graphics. “You guys are the best,” he told them. “Mick is something else, beyond everyone’s league … it’s in his genes. Maybe something he inherited from me.” Pride spoke in his voice. “I’d fly with him anytime – and you. He taught you well, and you had the aptitude to start with.”

“Thanks.” Travers stood, skin prickling, pulse beginning to race in anticipation, like a not-too-unpleasant sickness. “We’ll be in the tanks in half an hour – Mark’s asking for us right now.”

“I heard.” Rabelais gestured toward the lab. “You go ahead. I want to listen to this – I want to hear the exit into the driftway.”

The lab was almost dark. The threedee display seemed almost too bright, and Travers wondered what he was looking at. It seemed to be a grid structure, where each cell in the grid was octagonal, and streamers of colored light wove glorious abstract art, dynamic forms that came together and flew apart again while he watched. All three Sherratts, Tor, Midani and Roy were on one side of the threedee, Vaurien, Jazinsky and Rusch on the other side. Even now, Travers was inclined to look into the shadows, as if Teniko would be there. He caught a phantom glimpse of him, just a replay of old memories triggered by the situation.

“There! You saw it?” Mark pointed.

“Nope. Back it up, run it again.” Jazinsky leaned closer.

“It would help,” Vaurien said caustically, “if you told me what I was looking for.”

But this time Jazinsky had it. “Well, son of a bitch.” She froze the display, backed it up a few frames at a time, until a flare of red and a square-edged, sharp-cornered, rhomboid shape coalesced out of the smooth, liquid flow. “There is it.”

“And
what
it is?” Travers wondered.

Mark’s left hand traced the smooth, blue flow curves. “These are the normal, pure processes for Lai’a. The way its ‘thoughts,’ if a machine can possess any such thing, cascade from logic processor to logic processor. Each of the cells in the grid is a discrete logic gate; notice how it can take between one and several
hundred
logic gates to arrive at any decision. Living brains use essentially the same method to sift sensory input and arrive at conclusions, make decisions. And against all of that, you have
this
.”

“All I can tell,” Marin mused, “is, it’s different. It doesn’t flow; it’s static, not dynamic. All sharp edges and rigid corners.”

“Exactly.” Mark stood back. “It’s a set point, not a dynamic flow. It represents, for instance, a solid instruction: thou shalt do … whatever. Fixed points are inflexible, solid. They form the basal programming, what we call the fundamental code, on which the AI is built, like … like a set of building bricks. They form the simplest concepts, giving the AI its understanding of what things are, including its own language. Without these fixed points all you have is windmilling chaos, no point of reference. But this … isn’t one of
our
fixed points.”

“Ours,” Dario went on, “are all buried so deep in the fundamental code, they’re only one level above the hardwired instruction set, without which the AI can’t even boot itself up. This?” He breathed a long sigh. “This is code that hitched a lift with us.”

“Zunshu?” Vaurien asked sharply. “You – and Lai’a! – saw no risk, you were delighted to transfer everything you could squeeze out of the computer core.”

“We were,” Mark agreed. “And this is
not
Zunshu. The Zunshu AI language, we’ve known since Kjorin. Even before that, I got the first glimmerings when I took years over interrogating a captive probe. This is very different.”

“It has to be Veldn, then.” Marin groaned. “Is this a virus? Did the Veldn plant a time bomb before they left? Were we supposed to buy the ranch in transspace? Damnit, that’s low.”

But Mark made firm negative gestures. “No, no, this is far less sophisticated than any virus. This is just a … a fragment. The problem is, it’s a fragment of something like a weapons control routine. It’s very potent, and it’s crossed the species barrier, as it were,
like
a virus. It’s purely accidental, and now we know the Veldn AI language, we’ll design the next generation firewall to deal with it. But this …”

“Enough to disable Lai’a?” Jazinsky hazarded.

The Sherratts shared a glance, and Mark nodded. “If it replicates itself, yes. And it
was
replicating, making copies of itself everywhere it found a breach in the security we built into Lai’a. It was already big and bad enough to fool several diagnostic routines, blinding Lai’a to its very existence.”

Vaurien stooped for a better look at the graphical representation. “And what does it
do
?”

“We have no idea,” Dario confessed. “It could cause Lai’a to spontaneously erase itself. Or give directives to go offline right in the middle of critical transspace
maneuvers
… undock the drive, scram all three generators without warning. Or,” he admitted, “change the color of the lighting in the crew lounge and carbonize the croissants. The problem is, there’s no way to know what it’ll do without observing it, and if we let it run its course, it could kill Lai’a. And I do mean
kill
.”

For some moments the lab was silent, and at last it was Vaurien who said evenly, “All right, it has to be winkled out of there.”

Mark’s big arms folded on his chest. “Easier said than done.”

“Not something you can do in-flight?” Vaurien guessed.

“Not in a few days,” Dario mused. “Shutting Lai’a right down stopped the little bugger from replicating, but all we can do is go in there with
another
virus-like AI that’s configured to find the little bastards and snip them out, like putting the shears through rotten DNA.”

“Problem?” Travers looked from Mark to Dario and back.

“Numerous problems,” Mark said bleakly. “We can certainly create a virus to do the job; we can even adapt several existing viruses, to save time. But long before I set this thing loose on
our
Lai’a, I’d want to test it on a copy – a holographic memory matrix loaded with something equally as sophisticated as Lai’a, and deliberately infected.” He gestured at the display. “Think of it as radical brain surgery. We can delete this fragment of Veldn code, but what’s the point, if Lai’a comes back online with all the brains of a game machine in a veeree den?”