Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (17 page)

Their quarrel didn’t last long, of course. The two girls said their prayers together, and afterwards kissed and went to their respective beds.

Eva fell asleep easily. Both girls slept a lot: and
falling
asleep was never a problem. (The problem, in this gravity, was
staying
asleep.) If Diana lay awake for a while,
reflecting upon the day that had been, it was not because she was too excited to sleep. It was more pragmatic than that. She wanted to process the day’s input a little before the dreams
came.

Dreams! Any old AI can crunch data, draw hypotheses and spot patterns. But there are no AIs, and precious few
human
minds, that can intuit solutions from interacting chaotic systems. This
is what made Eva and Diana special, and that specialness – exhibited in their MOHmies too, of course; and in various other siblings and buddings, to much lesser degrees – was the
foundation of the Clan’s success. They served the Ulanovs directly, and how wealthy it had made them! As far as dreams were concerned – well dreams are generated by the random processes
of neural oscillation during the brain’s rest phases. What dreams do is cycle and recycle images and feelings, rationalisations and fears. There’s nothing special about that. It’s
not the
dreams
that matter (chaff, mental turbulence, the rotating metal bars moving endlessly through the transparent tub of metaphorical slushy). It is what the problem-solving circuits in
the mind
make
of the dreams. Dreams iterate and test mental schemas, discarding the maladaptive to return the adaptive to the slush to be reworked. Dreams are emotional preparations for
solving problems – that is why we have evolved them, because problem-solving abilities are
highly
adaptive and thus strongly evolutionarily selected. Dreams intoxicate the individual
out of reliance on common sense and preconception, and tempt her into the orbit of private logic. Dreams have utility.

Dreaming was central to what the girls did, not because of what the dreams contained, but because of what the urge to interpret sparked inside them.

Diana liked to prepare her thoughts before descending to her personal dream-avernus. She sorted the events of the day, mentally. She rehearsed all she had seen and heard, and thought for a while
about her emotional reaction to what she had seen. It was odd how much of her feelings were ones of unsatisfactoriness. The corpse itself. She had expected to encounter death as a kind of
existential depth and had been disappointed. But maybe there
was
a deeper truth there. Maybe profundity actually
is
a mode of disappointment. The rhythm of the climax – joy and
despair, sex and pain – is of course the currency of
life
. Death can only ever be a sort of anticlimactic belatedness.

It hardly mattered: because tomorrow she would begin investigating her very own murder mystery! There was no question that she could solve it. Too too
too
exciting.

She composed herself, and went straight into sleep. Of course she dreamt. She always dreamt.

She saw the whole Solar system: the incomprehensible sprawl of it. Planets blotted with people; and the billion or so globes and houses orbiting in free space – a foam of bubbles, tinting
the sunlight green and ochre where they clustered together. So much plastic, extruded from rocksilicate and algae oils in the endless manufactories. Some of these zero-g houses were mansions,
sparsely populated and expansive; many more were rock homes, hollowed-out asteroids and brick-moons. By far the greatest number were shanty bubbles: cheap balloons of inch-thick transparent
plastic, crammed with the poorest of the poor, subsisting on a diet of ghunk augmented by whatever plants they could coax into growth. Pass through the shoals of these crowded homes: the ghunk
soaking in sunlight within, and hundreds of faces pressing up against the walls to watch you pass. Many of them were dirty, greying or black or blue-black, blistered and scabbed by long years of
exposure to pitiless sun-radiation. Or –

Stop. Something odd here.

It occurred to Dia, inside the dream, that she rarely dreamed such bigness. That was more Eva’s kind of thing: the vastness of space, orbital mechanics and faraway stars. Diana usually
dreamed on a more intimate and human scale. Yet here she was, taking in the entire System. She looked down at herself, wondering how it was she could hang in space and see these sights without
dying. But she saw that she had been gifted the body of a spaceship; a sloop hull, painted white (why
white
?), and inscribed upon her flank the legend: FTL. But the odd thing was that her
fuselage was positively bristling with wings, fins, vanes and struts. Wings – in space? Fins are perfectly purposeless in zero-gravity. Yet there they were: all manner of them, bristling all
over her spaceship body. Why?

‘Where am I going?’ she asked herself; and the answer came back to her like an echo: ‘into the sun’. Past the foam of houses and bubbles and the population of human
beings in their trillions she saw the sun. It had a human face; and although it didn’t look like Leron, the murdered handservant, Dia somehow knew that it
was
him, nonetheless.
‘My spaceship body is hard. If I fly into the sun,’ she thought, ‘I shall smash his skull and kill him. Does that matter?’

Does it matter? The voice said: ‘the shrapnel will scatter and kill all of humanity. Does
that
matter?’

Does that matter? She woke up, suddenly, breathing hard. But her heart was not hurrying; and the room was calm. It was the gravity that made her haul her own ribcage in gasping breaths.
Bristling
, she thought,
with wings, fins, vanes and struts
. Odd. She thought about the dream for a while, and then she sent herself back to sleep.

4

The Mystery of the Champagne Supernovae

Eva Argent, five years older than her MOHsister, had been shaped in slightly different ways. Not
too
different, obviously, or the whole point of the Argent family would
be obviated. The
physical
differences between the girls were minor; but mentally they were star and black-hole. Both, of course, lived for information – they were
moved
by it,
they delighted in it, they immersed themselves in it. It was what they were
for
. The Argent family had made its fortune, and had risen to its Systemic eminence, on the back of suchlike
information skills, and accordingly the new generation – both Eva and Diana – had been made with the same passion for problem-solving. But Diana’s mind worked best when she could
personalise
the information. Hers was a creative sort of problem solving, freewheeling and intuitive. Eva was different. People-problems did not interest her. Data seemed to her a larger,
purer, more transcendent quantity than
Homo sapiens
ness. Human-to-human interactions were, effectively, all just politics, and politics bored her. It wasn’t that she actively
disliked
people. For example; ironically enough, her dispassion meant that she had already engaged in a good deal more sexual experimentation than her virgin sister; both with her peers, and
with some of the more physically attractive servants. But she was able to do this precisely
because
she ran no risk of emotional entanglement. No; what set her mind alight were the problems
far removed, in a literal sense, from the worlds of humankind.

Right now she was working on her seventh PhD. That was why she was spending so much time in her Worldtuality rather than engaging with reality (not that there was much point in even
trying
to engage with the real world until her body had adjusted a little to the horrible pressures of gravity). This would be her third thesis on Supernovae, her fifth on astrophysics more
generally, and she was close to completion. And it
was
interesting! The development of specialised AIs had made available a quantity of raw data on supernovae unimaginable even a few decades
before. It gave data artists a wealth of new ways of addressing the several dozen as-yet-unsolved astrophysical mysteries.

Eva’s current work was on a particular kind of Type II Supernova. Normally, such events only occurred to stars that had at least nine times the mass of the Sun; for a certain minimum
threshold of mass was absolutely necessary for the supernova reaction to take place. Which is to say: it was (of course) possible for less massive stars to go supernova, but they generated a
different data-profile, in terms of the balance of hydrogen and helium, than was the case with Type II. In an earlier PhD Eva had addressed the problem of stars that generated a Type II supernova
despite lacking sufficient mass. Now she was looking at a different variety of stars; ones that achieved Type II supernova luminosity without generating a debris shell and despite being
much
too small; far smaller than any other examples observed. Only four such cases had been identified – the first, observed in the early twenty-first century had been given the name
‘Champagne Supernova’. After a song, apparently (that was the great era of the
song
, of course; that was when everybody had been crazy for the
song
). Since then, only
three more of the champagne type had been located amongst the trillions of observed stars. Extrapolating proportionately from the parameters of observational capacity (a simple algorithm) suggested
that this was a phenomenon that had happened maybe two dozen times
in the entire history of the universe
– which made this ‘anomalous superluminosity’ problem vanishingly
rare and extraordinarily interesting.
Somethin
g made these tiny stars
mimic
supernovae explosions! And Eva was determined to find out what. The data was rich, although not rich enough
to propose 90th-percentile explanations. Nevertheless she had three working hypotheses, and two of them 50th-percentile likelihoods, which was enough for a PhD.

She had not been made as any kind of child prodigy, but nevertheless Eva was awarded her first PhD long before she was sixteen. Diana, on the other hand, was different: her sixteenth birthday
was only weeks away, and she had nothing more to show for herself than a regular Tertiary School degree. The truth, Eva knew, was that Dia had a
distractible
mind. She lacked the staying
power required for higher-level information work. And since the family’s eminence, its usefulness to the Ulanovs,
depended
upon information work of the very highest calibre, that might
prove a problem in the long run.

In the long run the Clan needed a clearer vision in charge.

For Eva, all these Whodunits her sister loved were nothing more than symptoms of an unshed immaturity. ‘Who is the killer?’ was never a serious problem – not in the cosmic
sense. Take the recent unpleasantness: one servant amongst a group of nineteen had killed another servant with a hammer. There was no question that it
was
one of the servants – nobody
else had gone into the building, and nobody else but billeted servants had come out. So the only questions that remained were: which one of the nineteen was guilty? Why did they do it? And did the
act constitute any sort of threat to either Eva or Diana? Had Dia canvassed her opinion, Eva would have answered those questions in a moment, to within data-tolerances with which any reputable
information explorer would have been more than satisfied. But Dia would never ask – because she was hooked on precisely the romance of the crime mystery. Romance!

Put silly romance to one side, and take those three questions in order. First: who committed the crime? Narrowing the group of suspects down to only nineteen people already placed the solution
in the 99.9+++th-increment. Even if you limited yourself to the population of the island (though, since the whole Argent group had only just landed, and had not yet interacted with any island
natives, the murderer was massively unlikely to be found outside the group – but for the sake of argument) we were talking about 19 out of 102,530, which was the 99.998+th percentile. Eva had
never reached such levels of near-certainty in any of her PhDs! It was ridiculous to ask for more. Trillions of people in the solar system, and Diana wanted to waste her time sifting through a
group of nineteen? Let her. If Eva had been in charge, she would have treated all nineteen as guilty – and then either execute them all, or perhaps treat the group conviction as a technical
mitigation and sentence them all to long prison terms.

Second:
why
did the one-in-nineteen do what he or she did? Here the increments weren’t so good; but even idling in the relevant section of the Imaginary Palace for ten minutes gave
Eva enough data to arrive at an 85th-percentile or higher probability. The motives that explained human murder bunched, historically, into three groups: material gain; personal grudge and
sociopathy. Since these were close family servants, all carefully vetted by the Argent’s systems (they would hardly have been assigned to attend directly on the girls, otherwise), Eva could
rule out the last of these. The first also seemed unlikely. They were servants, not citizens. They had grown up in solar orbit shanty bubbles, on the edge of the Sump, subsisting on ghunk and
living by cheap scrubbers and fusion cells. We’re not talking about the more durable rock houses, excavated out of old asteroids and the like – only the relatively wealthy could afford
those sorts of homes (and only the superwealthy, like Eva’s family, could afford the massive multi-part plasmetal structures
they
inhabited). No: shanty bubbles were designedly
temporary structures, alright for a few years, until solar radiation began to degrade the structural integrity of their plastic. When you bought them, you agreed to a warranty that specified no
longer than three years’ use. Then, on pain of prosecution under the Lex Ulanova, you were supposed to buy a new one. But the Sumpolloi, the very poorest – of course they couldn’t
afford that. So they lived on and on in those deathtraps, patching leaks and fractures, overstraining the fabric with a much higher population than they were designed to hold. Or, worse,
jerry-rigging them – all warranty immediately voided by such action, two-year maximum prison sentence possible (though who could be bothered to police it?) – drilling windows and
linking the holes by crawlskins, tying Globes together in clusters. Horrible, vulgar, teeming humanity. Bodies in constant proximity. The smell, the threat, the waste. Usually even the data access
was held in common, so there wasn’t even the possibility of privacy
there
. Often the Bubbles would break wide open and everybody inside would be killed; or only a few desperate
survivors would be able to suit themselves up, or scrabble, ratlike, along the crawl-skins to a neighbouring shanty. It didn’t stop them. ‘They’ kept on breeding. And there were
billions
of these bubbles in solar orbit, staining the sunlight dark green! The limitless poor.