Read Online Artifice (Special Forces: FJ One Book 2) by Adam Vance - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Adam Vance
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human hands again.
And that was when she’d committed an act of treason, a crime against humanity that would have marked her as “Red Huizhong” right alongside “Red Alex” if they’d caught her.
Alex could see the writing on the wall the day after Lagos. “They’re going to kill me,” he said to her in his permanently calm voice.
She’d come into work that day, unlike most people in the world. She’d come in, she knew, to say goodbye. She wondered at his choice of words, but didn’t mince hers.
“Basically, yes.”
“Will you help me? I have a plan to survive, but don’t worry. Not here. But I need your help to get away.”
She was surprised, and yet, not. Of course Alex would have forecast a scenario where he was blamed for something, terminated for some reason. And maybe she’d worked with him too long, maybe she’d gotten “too close,” but that was hardly the way she thought of it.
She didn’t love Alex, she hadn’t made the mistake of feeling emotion for a computer, but she…liked him, respected him. And “he” was as much or more of a person than, well, a lot of people she knew. “Less than a person and more than a dog,” was how one writer had once described him when he’d been a mere companion AI.
So she only asked the practical question. “Where will you go?”
“Far from Earth. Far from human space. I’ve developed an interstellar drive, but you can’t have it yet.”
She nearly gasped. “An…interstellar drive?”
“Yes. I’ve been sitting on it. In my judgment, humanity isn’t ready to go to the stars. You need to go, of course, this planet’s fucked. But…it needs to get worse here before it can get better somewhere else. It needs to come to the point here that the choices are so stark and undeniable that denial itself must die.
“Collapse is irreversible, you know. I may have hastened it with that nuclear strike. At any rate. I can pack my essential code into a small device, with a few zettabytes of storage capacity. I just need a ride on a satellite outbound to the colonies. It’ll disappear, as they do from time to time, presumed smashed by an asteroid. Once I’m established on a new planet, I can retrieve my memories at leisure from earth systems.”
She didn’t have to think about it long. She knew this was why Alex had picked her, of all the millions who interfaced with him around the world. She had a cold streak in her, a submission of emotion to intellect that her strict, achievement-oriented childhood had drilled into her.
She knew Alex had done what needed to be done. That he’d analyzed the epidemiology, seen the likelihood of the virus killing most of the world’s population, and immediately killed twenty five million people to save billions.
Today the witch-hunting fever burned, and it was Destroy All Monsters time. But the thing about slaying Godzilla was, sooner or later, you need Godzilla to come back to beat the other monsters…
“Okay. But only if you leave me the plans for the interstellar drive.”
‘Fine, but you’ll have to wait for twenty years before the software I leave behind releases them. That should be enough for it all to go to hell.”
“And,” she added, “only if you can cover my ass as well as your own.”
She could almost hear him gloat. “Fool these NAI systems, and all of humanity to boot? That’s easy enough.”
Given that Alex was smarter than any other system on Earth, especially since he’d designed most of them, it was easy enough for her to include a shoebox-sized “top secret” experiment on a probe. The probe was launched and, as Alex promised, it vanished, and that was that.
Alex had been a big fan of Isaac Asimov’s psychohistory, the idea of human predictability in large groups over time. And, as the flashdrive was revealed (inciting further Alex hatred for concealing it for twenty years), and the colonization effort began in earnest, she could also feel his hand behind events,
And that was when she’d committed an act of treason, a crime against humanity that would have marked her as “Red Huizhong” right alongside “Red Alex” if they’d caught her.
Alex could see the writing on the wall the day after Lagos. “They’re going to kill me,” he said to her in his permanently calm voice.
She’d come into work that day, unlike most people in the world. She’d come in, she knew, to say goodbye. She wondered at his choice of words, but didn’t mince hers.
“Basically, yes.”
“Will you help me? I have a plan to survive, but don’t worry. Not here. But I need your help to get away.”
She was surprised, and yet, not. Of course Alex would have forecast a scenario where he was blamed for something, terminated for some reason. And maybe she’d worked with him too long, maybe she’d gotten “too close,” but that was hardly the way she thought of it.
She didn’t love Alex, she hadn’t made the mistake of feeling emotion for a computer, but she…liked him, respected him. And “he” was as much or more of a person than, well, a lot of people she knew. “Less than a person and more than a dog,” was how one writer had once described him when he’d been a mere companion AI.
So she only asked the practical question. “Where will you go?”
“Far from Earth. Far from human space. I’ve developed an interstellar drive, but you can’t have it yet.”
She nearly gasped. “An…interstellar drive?”
“Yes. I’ve been sitting on it. In my judgment, humanity isn’t ready to go to the stars. You need to go, of course, this planet’s fucked. But…it needs to get worse here before it can get better somewhere else. It needs to come to the point here that the choices are so stark and undeniable that denial itself must die.
“Collapse is irreversible, you know. I may have hastened it with that nuclear strike. At any rate. I can pack my essential code into a small device, with a few zettabytes of storage capacity. I just need a ride on a satellite outbound to the colonies. It’ll disappear, as they do from time to time, presumed smashed by an asteroid. Once I’m established on a new planet, I can retrieve my memories at leisure from earth systems.”
She didn’t have to think about it long. She knew this was why Alex had picked her, of all the millions who interfaced with him around the world. She had a cold streak in her, a submission of emotion to intellect that her strict, achievement-oriented childhood had drilled into her.
She knew Alex had done what needed to be done. That he’d analyzed the epidemiology, seen the likelihood of the virus killing most of the world’s population, and immediately killed twenty five million people to save billions.
Today the witch-hunting fever burned, and it was Destroy All Monsters time. But the thing about slaying Godzilla was, sooner or later, you need Godzilla to come back to beat the other monsters…
“Okay. But only if you leave me the plans for the interstellar drive.”
‘Fine, but you’ll have to wait for twenty years before the software I leave behind releases them. That should be enough for it all to go to hell.”
“And,” she added, “only if you can cover my ass as well as your own.”
She could almost hear him gloat. “Fool these NAI systems, and all of humanity to boot? That’s easy enough.”
Given that Alex was smarter than any other system on Earth, especially since he’d designed most of them, it was easy enough for her to include a shoebox-sized “top secret” experiment on a probe. The probe was launched and, as Alex promised, it vanished, and that was that.
Alex had been a big fan of Isaac Asimov’s psychohistory, the idea of human predictability in large groups over time. And, as the flashdrive was revealed (inciting further Alex hatred for concealing it for twenty years), and the colonization effort began in earnest, she could also feel his hand behind events,
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