He still didn’t want to talk to the artificial intelligence, but he’d become too reliant on having his questions answered. Usually, that was handled by his own in-head RAM, but he was genuinely curious about what the AI would say.
“Yes?”
“What’s happening to them? The people like I was, down there in the Ruins?”
“Most have already been relocated.”
“Where?”
“New New York. Atlantica and Oceana. The New City around the Columbus Crater. Wherever they want to go, really. Quite a few have volunteered for off-world colonies. Mars. Chiron. New Earth.”
“‘Volunteered?’ No relocation camps?” He’d heard stories …
“There are relocation camps for the Refusers. However, I assure you that they lack for nothing.”
Refusers.
It was actually the translation of a Sh’daar term for those who’d refused to accept the Sh’daar Transcendence—their long-ago version of the Technological Singularity. It was also used, sometimes, to describe certain humans or human groups who rejected some aspects of modern technology. There were human religions, Gray knew, that rejected manipulation of the human genome, or medical life-extension technology.
In this case, Konstantin’s use of the word referred to those Prims who would not take cerebral implants, for whatever reason, preferring what they thought of as “living naturally.” Some would be afraid of change … or simply wanted to hang on to what they already had in the face of the unknown.
Gray didn’t agree with so extreme an ideology, but, having been there, he certainly understood where it came from. And it rankled him to hear about them so easily dismissed.
“Why do you ask?” Konstantin wanted to know.
“Sometimes I still identify more strongly with the other Prims than I do with full citizens.”
“Full citizen is an archaic term, Captain. They all are being happily and productively assimilated into the overall culture.”
Yeah, right. Happily assimilated was a contradiction in terms.
The phrasing wasn’t what truly bothered him, though. What Gray carefully guarded from the voice in his head was the fear that AIs, like Konstantin itself, were increasingly herding Humankind along narrowing paths that led to the gods alone knew where, paths understood and shaped by the AIs and utterly beyond the intellectual or emotional ken of organic humans. Beyond what made a human, well, human. Gray had worked with Konstantin many times and still didn’t fully trust a machine intelligence that, almost by definition, he was unable to fully understand.
He was only now realizing that he trusted Konstantin far less than he trusted the Pan-Europeans. And the realization bothered him.
“Flight time to Geneva,” the robot announced in Gray’s head, “fifteen minutes.”
The flier accelerated, leaving the gleaming towers of the new Manhattan vanishing below the horizon astern.
New White House
Washington, D.C.
1602 hours, EST
“Captain Gray is on his way,” Konstantin said quietly in President Alexander Koenig’s thoughts. “As you directed.”
Koenig was seated at his desk in the newly grown White House, located approximately on the site of the original. For several centuries, Washington, D.C., had been submerged, its buildings and monuments in ruins, its grounds flooded and engulfed by mangrove swamps. As with the Manhatt Ruins, dams and flood walls had been nanotechnically grown across the tidal estuary to the southeast so that the swamps could be drained. The reclamation was far enough along that the seat of the USNA government had only weeks before been moved from Toronto back to its historic seat in the District of Columbia.
Koenig sat back in his chair, looking over the reconstruction. The work was ongoing and expensive … but progress was being made.
Now, other kinds of progress needed to be made.
“Good. Did he put up much of a fuss?”
“Not really. He is suspicious of the Pan-Europeans, of course, and, as expected, he trusts neither my motives nor yours. He does not like being manipulated.”
“Hardly surprising. You pulled a damned dirty trick on him, you know.”
“Yes, I do. But if the threat to Earth is as severe as I believe it now is, we cannot afford to have him tied down by the traditional chain of command.”
“Maybe not. But at least we could have told the poor son-of-a-bitch …”
“Mr. President, this is something we must not leave to chance … or to human will and fallibility.”
Koenig scowled. “Sometimes, Konstantin,” he said slowly, “I get the feeling that you don’t trust humans.”
Geneva
Pan-European Union
2217 hours, GMT+1
It was raining and dark as the flier shrieked in over Burgundy, dropping swiftly from its cruising altitude of forty thousand meters, its outer surface reconfiguring from hypersonic mode to landing. “Going from sperm mode to turkey mode” was how fighter pilots described it, as the ship morphed from a sleek teardrop to a flattened, domed box with wings for landing. A former Navy pilot, Gray wondered if he would have to edit those memories sometime soon. They were a part of him, sure … but they were of damned little use now beyond pure nostalgia.
The lights of Geneva Spaceport glared up ahead, with the European capital’s urban sprawl delineating the black emptiness of Lake Geneva beyond. They touched down on a commercial pad, where an embarkation tube attached itself to the flier as the gravs were still spooling down.
Elena Vasilyeva, a tall woman in black with colorful abstract animations writhing over her face and hands, was there on the passenger concourse to meet him. “Captain Gray?” she said, extending a hand. “It was good of you to come on such short notice.”
It’s not like I had a whole lot of choice, he thought, but he kept it to himself and shook her hand. She was speaking Russian, but he heard the words in English as his in-head software translated them in real time.
“No problem,” he replied. “A pleasure. I’m sorry you had to stay at work so late in order to meet me.”
“It … what is the expression? It goes with the territory. This way, if you please.”
They traveled by mag-tube to the Ad Astra Confederation Government Complex, and a large meeting room a couple of hundred meters up, near the top of the tower. The space’s floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the aptly named Plaza of Light and its titanic monument, Popolopolis’s statue Ascent of Man.
A number of other
