The Ouroboros Wave (10 page)

“Chief, the droid is vectoring toward you. Sending coordinates.” Tatsuya squinted into the distance. He could see a dull red glow, still far off—probably the droid’s thrusters.

“SysCon, I have to say, there’s not a whole lot of I in your AI. That droid sure is wasting fuel.” As he watched, the red glow moved steadily closer.

15

“I DON’T HAVE TIME TO WASTE ON YOU!”

Catherine’s heart was pounding with fear. This entire chain of events hinged on a simple mistake by Graham Chapman. His SETI investigations depended on distinguishing between natural and artificial perturbations, but not all artificial perturbations were the work of extraterrestrials.

Chapman had neglected to equip Shiva with the ability to distinguish between gravity waves that might have been generated by an extrasolar civilization and those created by the anomalous ring oscillations he had been researching. This must have occurred to him just before he died. Knowing his program better than anyone, he’d rushed to restore the system to its previous state. Ironically, he’d become Shiva’s first victim.

But everything revolved around one source of data: the interferometer system. If that were taken off-line, there would be no gravity waves to detect. Catherine brought up the interferometer controls. The avatar quickly responded.

“Catherine, you are about to interfere with some very important observations. In fact, to do so would be a criminal violation of the ring’s operating protocols. I’m sorry, but I have to eliminate you.”

“Eliminate me? How?”

“Your actions demonstrate intent to defeat my purpose. Your existence cannot be permitted.”

The console shut down and the room plunged into darkness. Catherine tried to restart the console from her web. There was no response.

16

I ’LL ONLY HAVE A FEW SECONDS
.

One more time, Tatsuya hurriedly reviewed the approaching droid’s operating specs on his web. His plan was half-baked, but without weapons it would have to do.

The maintenance droid was a rectangular cuboid about the size of a small car, with six manipulator arms. It was nicknamed the “bumble bee” because of its laser, reminiscent of a stinger at the end.

Tatsuya held his forearm mirrors toward the droid. Normally the mirrors were used to check the condition of the space suit; in theory they should be able to deflect a laser beam. His suit transmitter was mounted on his chest. If the droid fired its laser, that was where it would aim. Tatsuya held both forearms up, protecting his chest. If luck was with him, the laser would bounce back and might even knock out the droid.

Come on, fire…

The droid drew closer and stopped, its laser welder just out of reach. Its optical sensors scanned Tatsuya intently.

“Tatsuya, Shiva’s reasoning is spiking again. What’s the droid doing?”

“Nothing. It’s just checking me out.”

Tatsuya had more than a passing familiarity with this droid. If the warning light on the welding unit changed from green to blue, it meant the laser was fully charged. Red meant discharge was imminent.

Suddenly the droid began moving its arms slowly in front of its sensors, as if it was examining them. After a few moments of this, Shiva seemed to reach a decision. It slowly extended the welding unit toward Tatsuya. Tatsuya moved his mirrors closer to the business end of the welder, but as he did so he brushed against another manipulator arm and knocked himself out of position.

Shit!

The droid’s sensors were tracking him, laser arm moving with them. The warning light turned blue. Tatsuya prepared to face death.

17

WHEN THE LIGHTS
in the control room went off, Catherine thought for a moment that she might be about to die. But nothing happened. She was simply alone in the darkness with a dead console.

By “eliminate,” had Shiva meant from the system?

Apparently the answer was yes. When she hit the switch, the lights came on as usual. She manually entered her backup administrator ID and the console powered up normally. A quick check showed her primary ID was invalid. Catherine was no longer part of Shiva’s universe. But the AI had no objection to her backup ID.

Shiva had reacted poorly to the prospect of shutting down the observation program. If he deleted her backup password, she’d lose her only chance to take countermeasures. The next few seconds might be her last chance to act. She did so without hesitation. First she cut the power to the interferometry arrays on the North and West platforms and ran a quick status check on Chapman’s program. Sure enough, with no data coming from the arrays, Shiva detected no anomalous perturbations and had idled the SETI program. She quickly locked the program—and Chapman’s avatar—out of the system. The entire process took a few seconds; after a few seconds more the console showed the AI operating at its default parameters.

That’s all it took?

The ring itself could have been in dire danger with the wrong move, yet half a dozen commands was all it took to resolve the problem.

Did we learn anything from this after all?
wondered Catherine. Was this a complex failure or a simple one?

18

THE SHUTTLE,
jammed with the forty crew members from Amphisbaena, docked at North Platform. System Control took control of the maintenance droid. Tatsuya held on to one of the droid’s arms as it ferried him back to the station. Shiva, having recognized him as a physical presence, had been about to fire the droid’s laser, but Catherine’s intervention had prevented that. Now the droid was under human control.

Tatsuya decided to remain on Amphisbaena. Its systems were rebooting and returning to normal, but there was a lot of recovery work to do. He also welcomed the chance to avoid the hero’s welcome awaiting him on Ouroboros; it would only have embarrassed him.

Catherine stopped at North Platform just as the shuttle was arriving. Her team on West Platform reported Sati ready for verification testing, and Catherine knew that meant many busy days ahead. She was dead tired. Spending her sleep period on North Platform seemed the best option—if she returned to West Platform she’d be sure to plunge into the work waiting for her. Tatsuya’s voice, when it came up on her web, seemed to signal that they had put the problem behind them at last.

“So this whole thing was Shiva being convinced that anomalous ring oscillations were evidence of extraterrestrials? It’s ironic—Shiva wouldn’t have behaved the way he did if he’d understood
human
intelligence, but he assumed the vibrations he was detecting indicated nonhuman intelligence. By the way, did you ever figure out what was causing those residual oscillations?”

“I think that what Graham realized just before he died is that Shiva alone doesn’t have enough computing power to analyze every perturbation in a structure as large as the ring,” said Catherine. “That created the potential for Shiva to mistake one type of oscillation
for another.”

“I guess that’s the price of genius—sometimes your theories get
ahead of you. But once Sati’s online—”

“Something like this can’t happen again.”

“What I don’t understand is why the droid spent so much time
observing me instead of shooting.”

“The answer to that will have to wait, but I think Shiva’s interaction with us led him to infer the existence of a world outside cyberspace, and he was trying to confirm that. That’s why he hesitated to attack you immediately. He was getting a lot of new data
from the droid’s feedback circuits.”

“Whatever. At least it gave me a chance to come out of this alive.”

Catherine’s response was interrupted by a message from West Platform. “Catherine, we’ve been sifting through the raw data you sent—the interferometry data that Dr. Chapman’s program was
accumulating.”

“Yes? What’s up?”

“Well, we let Sati have a go at it, just for fun. A lot of it was false positives—Shiva didn’t have the capacity to filter it all. It’s just…”
“Just what?”

“Well, there’s this underlying pattern that’s left after we filter the data. We can’t explain it in terms of natural or man-made sources. We’re assuming it’s just another artifact.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“This one pattern doesn’t look anything like natural gravity waves.
We’ve already corrected for sources at the galactic center.”

“So what is it? Intelligent signals from outside Sol System?”

“We think it’s a possibility, that’s all.”

“What do you think, Tatsuya?”

Tatsuya patched in a feed from one of Amphisbaena’s observation cameras. It was a visual of the glowing gas ring circling Kali.
“Take a look.”

The ring of gas seemed to be shining less brightly than before,
but it was still circling Kali, pulsating steadily.

“He always was a stubborn bastard. I think he’s having the last laugh.”

RECONFIGURING KALI’S ORBIT
and constructing the accretion disk proceeded in parallel. Soon AADD would begin transforming the solar system with energy from the disk.

The first phase of this process would primarily be devoted to terraforming Mars, but AADD’s ambitions were far larger than that. They would transmit power from the disk throughout the solar system, making human habitation possible even on some of the smaller asteroids. And once the energy transmission system was complete, humanity would truly have slipped the bounds of gravity. With radiative cooling systems in place around Kali, the entire structure would be seven thousand kilometers across, roughly the diameter of Mars, and the gravity on its surface would be about the same as that on Mars. By the time the transmission system was complete, it would have grown larger than the planets themselves, to encompass the entire solar system, or at least its inner core.

Naturally, completing such a gigantic undertaking was impossible without mishap. A huge number of new basic technologies would be needed. Sometimes the experiments made in pursuit of such technologies had unexpected consequences. Until their origins were known, these remained riddles, seemingly products of chance.

THE RIDDLE OF
RAPUSHINUPURUKURU
A.D. 2144

MY FIRST IMPRESSION
of the asteroid was that it looked bizarre. The flat side of the misshapen object was completely obscured by a honeycomb-mesh antenna. For hundreds of millions of years Rapushinupurukuru had moved in solitude along its own eccentric orbit. It had taken less than a month for the construction bot to build a structure that hid the entire surface from view.

Mass was needed to ensure stable energy transmission, and Rapushinupurukuru had been well chosen. Its eight hundred million tons of mass came in a shape that was ideal for construction of the microwave array; so ideal, in fact, that it was hard to believe it hadn’t been created eons ago for just this purpose.

Its shape was somehow neither natural nor artificial. One might say it was unnatural. Now this unnatural object rotated roughly every five minutes.

If everything had proceeded according to plan, Rapushinupurukuru would not be rotating at all. From where I was sitting, the only thing visible should have been a twenty-kilometer-wide hexagonal antenna. As built, the antenna consisted of 250 individual segments, but the asteroid’s rotation, slow as it was, generated enough centrifugal force to exceed the strength of the fragile joints holding the segments together. They had been designed for weightless conditions. The centrifugal forces at the edge of the antenna reached 0.45 G; there was no way the joints could hold.

More than two hundred segments had spiraled off into space. Now only the central section was left, a honeycomb section about a kilometer across, still big enough to hide the near side of the asteroid beneath it. The far side was naked gray rock, faintly iron-red from ion weathering, though the spectrum shift was hard to see with the naked eye. I’d first noticed it while browsing the image bank on my web.

Of course, Rapushinupurukuru didn’t have “near” or “far” sides. It was just convenient to call them that. The side with the mesh antenna was the near side. The far side showed no trace of human activity.

“I hate these things.” Barbara was squinting at her web’s readout through a bulky pair of data goggles. I was doing the same with mine. “How’s the analysis, Barbara? Any results?”

“I reran the calculations. Same as the first time.”

“Figures.” I was looking at the same data—everything
Dragonslayer
’s sensors could pick up, in fact—but given our different specialties, we were interested in different things. Our agent programs were filtering the data differently too. In all likelihood we weren’t even talking about the same thing.

We were in
Dragonslayer
’s core block. We didn’t need to occupy the same space to communicate, but the ship only carried twelve. Dispersing the crew to mitigate vulnerabilities in case of an accident wouldn’t eliminate much risk. Still, there was no bridge or central control station. Everyone had access to all the information they needed to execute their responsibilities via web.