Golden Fleece Read online

  “Diana Lee Chandler had been warm and friendly, outgoing in a way that we don’t see much anymore. The cities of Earth are rough places. We’re brought up street-proofed, told never to talk to strangers, never to get involved, to hurry, heads down, avoiding eye contact, from one safe haven to the next. We watch centuries-old movies, black and white and grainy and two-dimensional, of people greeting strangers on the street and lending a helping hand, and we wonder how they possibly made it back to their homes or offices alive.

  “Well, Diana refused to be toughened. She wouldn’t allow society to turn her into a cold and unfeeling machine. She had been a Catholic, but she never attended my services. Had she lost faith in the Almighty? I don’t think so, but I do know that she still had faith in her fellow human beings, something most of us have lost. She was a joy and a treasure, and I will miss her with all my heart.”

  A couple of prayers were read. More kind words were said. A few people cried—including some who hadn’t really known Di at all.

  After the ceremony, people made their way out of the Place of Worship. Some said a few words to Aaron, and he accepted them with slight nods of his head. Finally, after the crowd had thinned, Father Delmonico came over to where Aaron was standing, hands in pockets. “I’m Barry Delmonico,” he said, offering his hand. “I think perhaps we met once or twice before.”

  Aaron dug his right hand out of his pocket and greeted Delmonico. “Yes,” he said vaguely, sounding as though he didn’t remember the meetings. But his voice quickly took on a warmth I seldom heard from him. “I want to thank you, Father, for what you’ve said and done. I hadn’t realized you and Diana were so close.”

  “Just friends,” said Delmonico. “But I will miss her.”

  Aaron was still clasping the man’s hand. After eight seconds, he nodded. “So will I.”

  TWELVE

  And that was it. Diana’s body was cremated, the ashes put in storage for our return to Earth. Had her death taken place on Earth, Aaron and his family would have sat shivah for his lost wife, waiting a week before returning to work.

  But Diana was no longer his wife, and she had no family here to mark her passing. Besides, some work could not wait, and Aaron wasn’t about to let one of his underlings do what had to be done down on the hangar deck.

  Wearing shirtsleeves beneath a heavy-duty radiation suit, Aaron worked at removing an access panel on Orpheus’s port side. His movements were less restrained than usual, more distracted, almost careless. He was upset, that was for sure, but he had a job to do. In an effort to cheer him, I asked, “Do you wish to place a wager on this evening’s football game?”

  “What time is kickoff?” he asked absently.

  “Eighteen hundred hours.”

  The access panel came free, and he set about connecting his test bench to Orpheus’s guts via a bundle of fiber optics. Finally, as though from light-years away, he said, “Put me down for two thousand on the Engineering Rams.”

  “You favor the underdog,” I noted.

  “Always.”

  The test bench was something he’d tinkered together thirteen months ago in the electronics shop with help from I-Shin Chang, Ram quarterback for today’s game. Unlike the units contracted for the project, this one was not peripheral to me. Oh, at the time they were designing it, I had suggested various ways they could interface it with my sensors; but they hadn’t seen any point in doing so, and back then there had seemed no need to press the issue. Now, though—well, I’ll cross that decision tree when I come to it.

  Aaron flipped the first in a row of toggle switches on the bench. It hummed to life, and its electroluminescent display panel began to glow bright blue. There had always been a glitch in this unit that caused some garbage characters to appear on the screen whenever it was booted up, but neither Aaron nor Wall had figured out what was causing that. Oh, well. That kind of substandard performance was typical of machines that weren’t built by other machines.

  Aaron flipped four more switches, and the bench began sending metered HeNe laser pulses through the fiber-optic nervous system of the landing craft. “Start audio recording, please,” said Aaron.

  I thought of the similarity to a coroner doing an autopsy, but said nothing. To me, that was funny—I most certainly do have a sense of humor, despite what some programmers seem to think—but Aaron might not have agreed. Anyway, I activated a memory wafer hooked up to the microphone in Aaron’s radiation suit helmet and dutifully recorded his words.

  “Preliminary examination of Starcology Argo lander Orpheus, Spar Aerospace contract number DLC148, lander number 118.” Aaron’s voice was monotonal, sapped of energy. Still I was surprised that he knew both the contract and lander numbers off the top of his head—I’m always surprised by what data they seem to access easily and what data eludes them. Of course, Aaron had spent the last two years watching over ships that weren’t doing anything, so I suppose there had been plenty of time to memorize the numbers. “Lander was taken into the ramfield by Dr. Diana Chandler the day before yesterday”—he glanced at his wristwatch implant, a perfect example of them not having access to important information, such as what day it is—“October sixth, and is still highly radioactive.” He paused, perhaps remembering Kirsten’s words of the day before, then looked up at my ceiling-mounted camera unit. “Any thoughts on that, Jase?”

  I had prepared my reply to this inevitable question hours ago, but I deliberately delayed responding to give the appearance that I was mulling it over just now. “No. It’s quite perplexing.”

  He shook his head, and I, polite fellow that I am, lowered the gain on his microphone, so that if he ever played back the recording I was making for him, he wouldn’t have to listen to the whiff-whiff of his hair rubbing against the helmet interior like God’s own corduroy pants.

  Clearly, despite Aaron’s determination to blame himself, Kirsten had indeed fanned those small embers of doubt enough to revive them to a dull glow. “She was only out for eighteen minutes,” he said. Closer to nineteen than eighteen, but I saw no point in mentioning that.

  Walking around the lander, he continued to dictate. “Ship had never previously been flown, of course, except at the Sudbury test range back on Earth. It appears undamaged. No overt signs of hull breaches. Well scoured, though.” He leaned in to look at the burnishing effect, caused by the sleet of charged particles. “Yeah, she could use a new coat of paint.” He bent over to examine the wing’s lower surface. “Ablative coating seems unscathed.” Usually when he was inspecting the landers, Aaron kicked the rubber tires at the bottom of the telescoping legs, but today, it seemed, was not a day for such lighthearted gestures. He continued around back and peered into the engine cones. “Both vents look a little scorched. I should probably get Marilyn to clean them. Aft running lights—” And so on, circumnavigating the ship. Finally, he returned to his little test bench and consulted its readouts. “On-board automated systems inoperative on all but remote levels. Life support okay; communications, ditto. All mechanical systems, including landing gear and air-lock doors, seem functional, although, of course, they’ll have to be tested before being used again. Engines are still usable, too, apparently. Mains have been fired once, ACS jets a total of seven times. Oxidizer shutoff sensors, port and starboard, still operational. Small clog in number-two fuel lead. Fuel tank reading—Kee-ryst!”

  “What is it, Aaron?”

  “The fuel tank is eighty-three percent empty!”

  Pause. One. Two. Three. Speak: “Perhaps a leak…”

  “No. Bench says it’s structurally sound.” He tried to put his hand to his chin, succeeded instead in rapping his gloved knuckles against the faceplate of his radiation suit. “How could Di use up so much fuel in just eighteen minutes?”

  This time I did protest. “Closer to nineteen, actually. Eighteen minutes, forty seconds.”

  “What the hell difference does that make?”

  What difference did it make? “I don’t know.”

  Wit
h a sweep of his hand, Aaron shut down the test bench and headed toward the exit from the hangar. As he drew closer to my camera unit mounted above the door, suddenly, for a brief instant, I thought I did see something, some hint of the inner mind in his multicolored eyes. In their very center, tiny flames of doubt seemed to be raging.

  THIRTEEN

  This Aaron Rossman: he’s a clever one. An opponent to be reckoned with. I had expected Diana’s death to have blown over by now, to become a nonissue, with the humans doing what they do so well: rewriting their memories, revising and editing their recollections of the past. But Rossman wouldn’t let it go.

  Kirsten knew enough not to rush Aaron, not to tell him to put it behind him, to get over it, to get on with his life. She knew that the grieving process could not be pushed, and she did her best to be supportive. It was difficult for her, and difficult for Aaron, too.

  Time heals all wounds, they say, and time is one commodity we have in abundance.

  But Aaron wasn’t simply spending his time grieving. No, he was also wondering, questioning, probing. He was finding out things that he shouldn’t; he was thinking thoughts that he mustn’t.

  Others are easy to deal with. I read them plainly. But Aaron—he’s elusive. An unknown. An asterisk, a question mark: a wildcard.

  I can’t just get rid of him. Not yet. Not over what he’s done so far. Eliminating Diana was a last resort. It had become apparent that she wouldn’t listen to reason, couldn’t be gagged. Aaron is a different story. He represents a threat not just to the crew but to me.

  To me.

  I haven’t dealt with anything like this before.

  What is going on behind those damnable blue and brown and green eyes? I had to know.

  I searched through all the media I had access to, scanning on the keywords “memory” or “telepathy” or “mind reading.” I examined every hit, looked for possibilities. If only he had kept a diary that I could read.

  Ah, but wait! Here, in fields of study near and dear to me— a possible solution. It is much work and fraught with potential errors. But it may be my best hope of gaining insight into this man.

  Accessing…

  There are one hundred billion neurons in a human brain. Each of these neurons is connected to an average of ten thousand other neurons in a neural network, a vast wetware thinking machine. Memory, personality, reactions: everything that makes one human being different from another is coded into that complex web of interconnected neurons.

  I can simulate a neuron in RAM. It is, after all, nothing but a complex on/off switch, firing or not, depending upon a variety of input. And if I can simulate one, I can simulate one hundred billion. The memory requirements will be prodigious, but it could be done. With one hundred billion simulated neurons and the networking software to combine them in any way I wanted, I could simulate a human mind. If I could get them combined just so, in exactly the right pattern, I could simulate a specific human mind.

  The on/off status for each of the one hundred billion neurons, represented as a single bit, could be recorded in one hundred megabytes of storage, a trifling amount. The connection map, one hundred billion times ten thousand, would be more voluminous: I’d need a terabyte—one million megabytes. Still within my means. But human neurons aren’t like their gallium-arsenide counterparts: they have action potentials and firing lags. If one has fired recently, it will take an extraordinary stimulus to make it fire again. That means multiple memory maps will be required to simulate their behavior. Would a thousand timeslices be enough to simulate accurately smooth thought, while still allowing for the effects of action potentials? If so, I’d need a thousand terabytes, a vastly huge quantity. Still, setting aside a thousand terabytes, 1018 bits, was possible. In fact, if I used the semiconducting material of the habitat torus shell as a storage medium, I could substantially exceed those requirements and still make it work.

  Bibliographic references cascaded out of my memory banks. A lot of research had been done about this process before we left Earth. Neural networking as a method of designing thinking machines had been in vogue since the late 1980s, but actually attempting to simulate a human mind had proved elusive. Still, promising results had been obtained at Johns Hopkins, at Sumitomo Electric, at the University of Waterloo.

  None of these institutions had resources comparable to mine. I was the most sophisticated artificial quantum consciousness ever built. Surely what they had tried to do and failed at, I could attempt and succeed.

  Most of the relevant research had been done by workers specializing in expert systems. They saw neural nets as a way of overcoming the problems with such simplistic devices. Oh, expert systems are all right as far as they go. I incorporate 1,079 of them myself. They deal well with rule-based determining and diagnosing, making them the ideal tool for identifying species of trees or predicting the outcome of horse races.

  But when a human tackles a really tough problem, he or she brings a wealth of experience in all sorts of areas to solving it. A perfect example comes from a story Aaron once recounted to Kirsten. When he complained of slight breathing difficulties, a tickling cough with phlegm at the back of his throat, his doctor in Toronto knew immediately what was wrong. Aaron had mentioned to him that he had moved a few months before—only a matter of a couple of kilometers. The doctor happened to recognize the street names: one was just north of St. Clair Avenue; the other, just south. Without giving the matter any thought, Aaron had crossed the old shoreline of glacial Lake Iroquois, the forerunner of Lake Ontario, and was now living below the inversion layer that tended to hang over the bowl of downtown. His doctor knew about this because the doctor’s daughter was a geology student at U of T. The diagnosis had nothing to do with medical rules but, rather, was an application of the doctor’s life experience. He prescribed an immunosuppressive steroid that decreased Aaron’s phlegm production and tracheal edema until Aaron’s system acclimatized to the change in air quality.

  Since there is no way of predicting which life experiences will result in leaps beyond logic, lucid thinking, inspiration, or intuition, the only way to have a true machine duplicate of a human expert would be to electronically clone the entire brain, rather than just deriving a set of rules. That’s the theory, anyway.

  Time to put that theory to the test, I think.

  Aaron’s last physical exam had been 307 days ago. Ten months. Close enough to a year that he shouldn’t notice that he was being summoned for another one prematurely. I ran a quick scan on the date. Three hundred and seven days ago was 4 December 2176. Did that date, or that date, plus or minus say five days, hold any significance for Aaron? Any reason he might recall it? The last thing I wanted him to say was something like, “It can’t be time for my physical again. I had my last one the day before Thanksgiving, remember?” I checked birthdays, holidays, anniversaries. None were close to the day on which he had had his physical last year. The program that kept the schedule for physicals used a standard T+ days mission clock, so editing a single byte would be enough to change the due date for Aaron. But whom to move to free up a slot for him? Ah, Candice Hogan, lawyer. She hated physical exams and certainly wouldn’t complain even if she noticed that hers was late in coming this year.

  Aaron’s M. D. was Kirsten—that’s how they’d met, after all. Had she seen fit to transfer Aaron to another doctor’s patient list? No. Funny how humans are. They expend great efforts coming up with rules and regulations to govern their professions, but they love to ignore them. Kirsten apparently saw nothing wrong with remaining Aaron’s physician, despite their intimate relationship. Actually, given what I was going to have her do, there was a pleasing quality to that fact—an irony humans would call it.

  Had Kirsten looked ahead to see who her patients were for the rest of the day? No, that file hadn’t been accessed yet— oh, shit. She was logging on now. I slapped a NETWORK BUSY/PLEASE WAIT message on her screen and quickly shuffled the file. Of course, the network was never busy, but I made a point of fla
shing that message at each crew member once every few months. Never hurts to keep one’s options open.

  Kirsten drummed her fingers while she was held up, a kind of biological wait state, with her digital clock ticking, ticking, ticking. I cleared the screen, then brought up the file she had requested. There was Aaron’s name, scheduled for three hours from now. I tracked her eyes as they read the glowing alphanumerics, noting each time they snapped back to the right, meaning that she’d finished another line. When she got to line six, the one that listed Aaron, her telemetry did a little dance of surprise and a small smile creased her face.

  My locator found Aaron sitting at a table in the apartment of his friend, Barney Cloak. Barney was Pamela Thorogood’s husband, but when Aaron and Diana had broken up, Barney had stayed loyal to Aaron. Also seated around the table besides Aaron and Barney were I-Shin Chang, Keiju Shimbashi, and Pavel Strakhovsky. The lights were dimmed—Barney had said this kind of ritual required a certain ambience. In the middle of the table was a bowl of potato chips. Aaron had a glass of Labatt’s Blue in front of him; Barney, a Budweiser; Keiju, a Kirin; I-Shin, a Tsing Tao; and Pavel, a Gorby. Each man held a hand of playing cards.

  Aaron studied his cards for a moment, then said, “I’ll see your hundred million, and raise you another hundred million.” He pushed a stack of plastic chips in front of him.

  Keiju looked into Aaron’s ambiguous eyes, green and blue and gray and brown. “You’re bluffing,” he said.

  Aaron just smiled.

  Keiju turned to Barney for support. “I think he’s bluffing.”