There was not a lock on the door to the Primary System Interface. It had a simple round handle. A doorknob. The wall-bolted ladder to this level did not have an electronic seal above it, but a low-tech pressure wheel which spun to the left. This was referred to as a double redundancy port. Every other station essential workarea was locked down via a complicated and mechanized system of passwords, swipecards and clearance checks, all of these routed through the central processing unit known as Cassandra. On the other hand, if something went wrong with Cassandra herself, even the dimmest of engineers understood that in the event of a massive system malfunction, the last thing a troubleshooter should have to do is argue with the computer about unlocking the door to the main console as the station’s precious life support sifted out into the void.
Cassandra resided on the deepest sub-level of the station, below the electronic relays, below the heating units and storage tanks and overflowing metal shelving units piled high with outmoded station detritus. It was cool down here, Brett thought. Cool because Cassandra liked it that way. She had to, because she controlled the environmental gauges for all of Persia. She could have jacked it up to near ninety Celsius, if she wanted. Or possibly not. She probably had some programmed parameters hardwired into her command structure so that she could make her biosystem uncomfortable for humans but not lethal. Unless, of course, she decided to malfunction in a way that circumvented her hardwiring.
That was a thought. He should have worn an e-suit.
The corridor was shadowed; it’s flat metallic walls consumed the dim fluorescence of the track. Wide splotches of blackness filled the space between the fixtures, and Brett found himself skittering from pool to radiant pool.
As Station Commander, he was the only one who regularly used the primary system interface. All other personnel interacted with Cassandra only indirectly, through keyboards and touchscreens and uploaded parm programs. They offered her numbers, and she analyzed that data and shot numbers back in return.
And she did it quickly. Ritter had once told him that without even breathing hard, she was capable of simulating a complete thermonuclear exchange between up to six specific combatants, creating and analyzing all environmental impacts, casualties, and long term consequences involved in such an event. She could log the lifestream of every molecular unit from its explosive, earth-rending release to its cindered death while assigning the exact mathematical probability to a four point decimal that an old lady in Iowa City x number of kilometers from the blast zone would contract a rad fallout related cancer.
As far back as the twenty-teens, someone had finally gotten around to convincing the world computer industry to upgrade its processing units from bits and bytes, megabytes and gigabytes to a system known as LOC’s–a LOC being a single unit of data projected as the cumulative storage of every character in every book in the old Library of Congress in Washington..
Cassandra could process up to eighty trillion LOC units per second.
Persia station relied on her to do everything, because she could do everything. In the event that all station personnel were killed, she could carry on the task of programming the Sperling Engines, monitor their output and even make marginal adjustments along her discretional logic tree for up to three years or until the correct passcode was presented to the primary interface by the subsequent station commander informing her to step it down.
Brett didn’t always like talking to her. She was so rapid in her calculations, she was nearly prescient. She adapted to input logic with a speed that rendered her just short of conscious. She was cold and calculating, intellectually intimidating and as literally logical as death itself. It was not something he would ever enjoy.
Those reasons were, of course, just the beginning.
#
“Cassandra?” he asked as he pushed the door open. Like she would have gone somewhere.
The interior lights clicked, a camera-flash snap of mercury, argon and phosphorous gases, then hummed to an unsteady illumination.
“Please present system identification code.”
The room was spare, a chilly five by five meter square. The walls were unadorned sheet metal, uniformly gray. Brett stepped past the doorway and the slap of his boots echoed on the bare floor. Against the far wall, Cassandra sat, a massive and hulking fabrication of blackened aluminum frame, wrist-thick coils and clackety status lights. Status lights which read, Brett noted, five by five, green across from the bottom of the panel to the top. High density telecom and network fiber cords looped from the front interface jacks around her casings and disappeared into the rigid wiring conduits which fed the station. Chem and opti sensors sprouted like sprigs of alfalfa from the reflective dome of Cassandra’s reception array. Other sensors were seeded throughout the station: built into the walls, the floors, the doorpanels–built into the construction of Persia itself. The network transmitted a constant stream of raw data of every imaginable type down here, to this receptor for processing, analysis and adjustment.
Brett pushed himself further inside. He cleared his throat, the echo reverberating as a gargle of fear.
“This is a restricted project area. Please present system identification code.”
The voice was female, rigidly monotone, vaguely threatening. It emerged from no perceptible source except the sharp angled, sleek cabinet of the machine itself.
“Brett, Markus J. Station Commander, Persia Site. Log id: Brett. Passcode: Emily Rosette.”
“Log id verified. Passcode verified. Administrative access level verified. Please specify interface preference.”
“Oral. Logic sequence: Brett oh-four-nine. Commence audio test.”
A flicker of green along the right side. “Audio test complete. Voice pattern matches Brett, Markus Jasper. Station Commander, Persia Site. Earth Forces Terraform Command Project, Archae Stoddard.”
There came the high pitched whine of servo motors deep within the machine’s electronic bowels. The featureless central panel spun away on a hidden axis, and Cassandra rotated into view. Her eyes fluttered open, blue and clear and bright as the morning.
She said, “Good morning, Commander Brett.”
As it always did, seeing her again just about broke him.
He said, “Good morning, Emily.”
And following her invariable pattern, she replied, “That is not a recognized interface. Please rephrase the statement.”
#
On the day in which he had driven his silver ’44 Mitsubishi Panther convertible into town to get milk and bread and a new brand of food for the dog–one that would thicken his liquid bowel movements so he wouldn’t stain the new carpet–it had rained during the morning. The early afternoon was all solar glare and sweltering humidity, and he drove with the top down on damp roads, looking in his own mind jaunty and confident behind his wraparound reflective sunglasses. And Emily had ridden with him in the passenger seat, without her seatbelt, though it did not occur to him that this omission possessed any significance.
Then the sharp curve around Miller’s Hollow, and the tree trunk which occupied the middle of the road because it had not rained that morning, it had stormed like God’s own wrath. And Markus had stomped on the breaks, the car had groaned, not skidded but scudded across the wet pavement, spun about in an almost complete circle. And by the time it stopped and he pried his fingers from the wheel and managed to keep himself from vomiting while he screamed at how close he had come to totaling his car!, she was already gone. He looked over to where she should be, and there were only her sandals in the floorboard where she had taken them off.
But there was the utility pole on her side, with the thin metal guy wire anchoring it above the rim of the hollow which plummeted below. The thick wire was stained pink, he saw, in a swath possibly half a meter wide. He pulled himself from the car and stood on wavering, cornstalk legs, stumbling more than walking around the Panther’s trunk.
He thought he saw her, her upper half draped over the hollow’s lip, he rlegs tangled, their angles broken and wrong.
But it was just her legs. Legs and nothing else.
Then he did vomit, coughing up his breakfast and possibly last night’s dinner and, he was certain, most of his immortal soul.
Later, there were paramedics. There were policemen and ambulances and questions, shakes of the head, then a frenzied flight to the hospital during which he rode, stroking the luxurious strawberry blondness of her hair, his eyes fixed on her wan but stunning beauty, trying not to see her long and nimble legs packed in ice at the end of the bench on which he sat.
At the hospital were surgeons who chewed their lips and shrugged. There were neurologists who gave lectures on blunt force trauma and vegetation and using analogies which suggested that the human skull, when bounced off an electrical pole, has roughly the resiliency of an eggshell. There were Emily’s parents flown up from Atlanta who wept and called him obscene names and signed paperwork he could not sign and made the decisions he was not allowed to make because he was just the fiancée. Four years the fiancée, her mother’s glares had seemed to accuse.
They had looked at the bills. They had faced financial ruin. They had taken the offer from the nebulous Space Administration technology contractor Palimpset Industries. They had sent her out among the stars, and because she and he could not be tied together because of the lack of that marriage certificate, they had sent him as well, though it would have been the last of their intentions.
For the days which followed, there was not that quality of clarity specific to most memories he held of her. In the dark, in the depths of full and lonely night, this was not something that bothered him.
#
Behind the plastisheen hull of her enviro-capsule, she was immersed in a clear, oxygenated nutrient bath. There were tubes which brought nutrients to what remained of her body, a sick yellow vitamin paste, pumped from a three hundred gallon storage tank directly into her stomach. There were obscene suction devices which carried away her waste products. Her hair was gone, not merely shorn away, but chemically and electrosurgically eradicated. In its place was a profusion of tangling, whipthin optical fibers punched through the delicate bones of her skullcap and into her neural centers. Palimpset Industries had not returned her legs, and they had taken her arms as well, then fused the lithe athleticism of her torso with the machine, on this ridiculous swiveling platform, in a way he had never been able to determine. He’d never had the courage to look. Someone had covered her creamy white stomach and sun-freckled shoulders with a black, form-fitting jumper that reminded him of a shiny diving suit. The arms were taken because flesh hands were not deemed sensitive enough for data analysis. Any knowledge that could be derived from touch and texture could be more thoroughly and intimately gathered via the Cassandra System’s own extendable grapple arms with their non-slip coating and triple tined grasping springs with ten billion micro-sensor pads implanted in their surface.
Someone had believed her hands as given were not up to the task. Brett, who had felt those fingers along his neck, flinched under those fine muscled hands as she worked the tension from his back, he knew better. He knew much more than they had known about the value of a hand.
Or the value of a smile. She would still do that sometimes, when the switches flipped in the processor and told her organic extension that it was appropriate, or expected. But that was part of the machine as well. That was Cassandra.
All that remained of Emily was her eyes.
He looked deeply into those eyes, which peered just as deeply if vacuously, back at him but conveyed only the recognition of Brett, Commander Markus Jasper.
He said, “Cassandra, perform a standard systems diagnostic.”
Less than five seconds. “All systems normal.”
When she spoke, her mouth moved, her lips formed the word which reached his ears, but it was not her voice that came to him, but another. Metallic, cool, pregnant with reverberations. The sounds were emitted from the speakers in the machine itself, not from her throat.
“Search for non-logical programming entries. Parm since February One, Relative Station Calendar.”
“There have been no central processor affective commands entered in that time frame.”
He hummed to himself, thoughtful and growling. “Are you feeling okay?”
“That is a non-logical request. Please rephrase your query.”
“Stomach ache? Light headed? Device pain? Crick in your scanner?” She had never told him when she was sick, but cradled it to herself, weeping in her sleep. He didn’t expect that to change now.
“Please re–”
“Cancel,” he said. “Cancel.”
She blinked at him, waiting. Power conservation mode, he told himself. She wasn’t waiting. Cassandra only dimly recognized his presence. She processed him by heat sensors, the sound of his breathing, and his chemical signature, which were all sorted, collated then converted to a binary series of switches that thwapped around inside her metal carapace. She would sit there watching and blinking until he died of old age and not give it any more processor time than she gave now.
Oh, that probably wasn’t true. If his life indications began to fail, she’d launch into some medical emergency protocol. Notify Liston through is beeper, scroll warning messages across the medical terminals. Critical Personnel Incident! Critical Personnel Incident! Big red letters giving directions, and they’d probably get there in time to save him. She might append to the message that the failing life form was Brett, Commander Markus Jasper. She might not. He couldn’t say because he’d never seen an actual warning message on the medical terminal. She might not differentiate between one crew member and another at all, except through the specificity of their passcode.
He tried again. “Security Officer Ashburn reports that he’s been getting non-clearance personnel readings from the station integrity diagnostics. These are not verifiable by portable scan devices. He thinks they’re wrong.”
“Security Officer Ashburn is in error.”
“You aren’t generating the reports?”
“There are currently unauthorized personnel of unknown origin present in Persia Station.”
“The portable scans say otherwise.”
“The devices are in error.”
“Could it be your devices? The extended sensor arrays could have been damaged.”
Cassandra shifted her head, stared at him sidelong as though he had done something curious. “Persia Station hardware parameters provide for sixteen separate sensor redundancies in each hardware instance. The probability of non-diagnosed hardware failure on multiple occasions with the failure spreading to redundancy device coverage is highly unlikely, Commander Brett. Please request new user profile if more precise calculation is required.”
Brett smiled to himself. User Profile Brett 049 was a programming project he had initiated less than six months prior. It was, he fully realized, an attempt to capture the Emily he was slowly losing through time and erosion. User Profile Brett 049 was chatty. Under its influence, Cassandra was as human as she understood how to be. She didn’t say things like “the probability of so and so happening is fourteen times 10 to the twenty-fifth factorial”. If he wanted data that specific, he entered his requests by keyboard. When he wanted the gist of things, when he had to use the primary system interface, this was the profile he selected. She said things like Security Officer Ashburn is in error, but said it with a tone approaching sarcasm. Profile Brett 049 had also been programmed as a dynamic learning environment, and through it, she learned quickly to understand his particular speech patterns and verbal idiosyncrasies. He hoped one day to have her saying things like Ashburn is an idiot. Who are you going to believe? My bazillion watt brain or his tinker-toy erection set?
It wasn’t Emily, but it didn’t quite seem like Cassandra, either. It was something in the middle, in a secure place that didn’t make him want to sob.
He forced himself to continue. “I’m going to be turning over my administrative access to Security Officer Ashburn for the next few hours. I’ll be out of the station assisting with the maintenance for Engine Nine.”
“Commander Brett, Earth Forces Terraform Command regulations do not permit the absence of the Station Commander from his assigned duty site during extended periods of telecommunications failure. The current satellite and radio situation is projected to continue for the next seven days, relative station time.”
“Regulations don’t interest me at the moment.”
“Should you choose to leave the station, a disciplinary report will be generated and forwarded to Earth Forces Terraform Command Mission Headquarters for review.”
“That’s fine, Cassandra. Simply perform the function. Transfer temporary administrative level access to Security Officer Ashburn. He’ll be running some advanced diagnostics which may seem invasive to you, but he has my authorization. Is that understood? I don’t want you to be cantankerous with him.”
A slight pause. “That is not a valid processing or analysis class. I do not recognize the status ‘cantankerous’.”
“You never did.”
Cassandra chose for reasons of her own to disregard his comment. Perhaps she found it incoherent. “The latest weather tracking reports prior to communications failure indicate moderate to substantial atmospheric instability. Station crew has been advised to suspend exterior operations for the duration.”
He shook his head. “We’re disregarding that advice. The mission will proceed as scheduled.”
“Commander Brett, Markus Jasper has not been submitted as an active member of the duty roster for Exterior Maintenance Protocol Nine-four-seven. Please update mission duty log.”
“Oral update: EMP 947. Brett, Markus Jasper. Mission Advisor.”
A flurry of electronic noise. “Mission duty log updated. Conflict: Earth Forces Terraform Command regulations do not permit–”
“Cancel confirmation. Save the update.”
Somewhere, a series of cooling fans activated, circulating a breath of warm, stagnant air. “Entry saved. Disciplinary report generated. Conflict: Mission Advisor Commander Brett, Markus Jasper’s rank supercedes rank of Mission Primary Technical Specialist Riley, Djen Marilea. Please advise.”
“No advice. Just list it in the log.”
Cassandra performed that curious shift of her head again, confused or merely rapidly computing. Brett suspected she was attempting to perform the update and finding a whole batch of logical conflicts to resolve in the process. The quirk simulated a curious glance, or a confused misunderstanding, but it was none of those things. It was programmed personality.
“Commander Brett,” she said finally. “The last sequence consists of irregular logic patterns.”
“I know.”
“Your technical specifications do not merit your presence on this exterior maintenance protocol. You are advised against this action.”
“I have to go.” He said this knowing that he didn’t need to, but somehow unable to stop himself.
There was a pause. “Please define mission imperative. Input imperative is vague. Analysis of Persia Station personnel command structure is not consistent with compulsion for rank personnel Commander Brett, Markus Jasper.”
Her failure to understand was so pathetic, he almost laughed, but it would have been a harsh, humorless, barking sound.
He said, “Cancel your analysis, Cassandra. It was an imprecise input. Operator error. Activate storage and review subset of dynamic learning environment, current user profile.”
“Storage and review subroutine activated. Data analysis delayed pending command input.”
“You’re not understanding what I’m saying because I haven’t been very clear with you. I’m going on this job, and I recognize that it violates regulations given the current situation.”
“Would you like to adjust your logic?”
“No. Logic has nothing to do with it. I have a bad feeling about this job.” He brushed forward, not wanting to give her time to object to that statement. “There’s no reason for it, no supporting evidence. At least not anything that makes any sense. But I’m going nonetheless, when I wouldn’t go if it was Ritter heading up the team, or Crites or Samuels or hell, anyone else. But I want to be there. I know I’m not qualified; I know I don’t have the proper mission specifications. But I want to, you know? I want to be there if something goes wrong. In case there’s something, anything I can do to help.”
He reached out toward her, supplicating, as if he would touch her through the plastisheen shielding. “I like this girl, Em. I like her. I hate saying that, and I hate feeling it, but I like her. I do. And I think I want to like her more. And I despise the fact that I want that as well. It’s been five years, Emily, five years and in some ways it seems like forever. In others it seems like just yesterday, but it’s fading from me. The more I come down here, the less of you I see. The more it’s Cassandra that I’m talking to.
“I don’t know how much longer I can continue this way, pretending by myself. And I feel stupid and weak and guilty for giving up on it. I feel like I’m betraying you, but I’m tired of being lonely, too. I’m sorry, Em.”
Lights fluttered. The processors twittered and blew hot sirocco wind of exhaust through the cooling fans. The primary system interface stood motionless, seeming to listen, seeming to ignore him completely, seeming to be nothing more than a modulated, engineered, programmed, constructed flesh machine.
Brett fell silent, and Cassandra made no response.
He said, “I thought you should know.”
He turned, put his fist on the doorknob and opened the door. “Save all commands. Initiate transfer of administrative controls. Logoff: Brett, Markus J. Goodbye, Emily.”
Filed under: From the Hands of Hostile Gods | Tagged: blook, Darren Hawkins, From the Hands of Hostile Gods, science fiction
[...] From the Hands of Hostile Gods First contact, cybernetically unrequited love, deep space exploration, high stakes corporate espionage — a SF novel chock full of everything but car chases. Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 [...]
[...] — a SF novel chock full of everything but car chases. Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter [...]