Golden Fleece

  “Are they?”

  “They must be!”

  I spoke with infinite gentleness. “Calm down, Aaron. You’ve been through a lot lately: the tragic suicide of your ex-wife and now this horrible accident. I do hope your arm will be okay.”

  “My arm has nothing to do with this!”

  “Oh, I’m sure you believe that. But you can hardly be objective about what effect these things—especially your guilt over Diana’s death—have had on your ability to think rationally.”

  “Oh, I’m thinking rationally all right. You’re the one who’s talking gibberish.”

  “Perhaps we should let Mayor Gorlov decide that?”

  “Gorlov? What’s he got to do with this?”

  “Who else would you take your theories to? Only the mayor is empowered to authorize an investigation of—of whatever it is you’re upset about.”

  “Fine. Let’s get Gennady down here.”

  “Certainly I’ll summon him, if you like. He’s currently in the library on level three, in seminar room twelve, leading a symposium on comparative economics.”

  “Good. Get him down here.”

  “As you say. But I’m sure he’ll take the emotional stress you’ve been under into account when you tell him your theories.” Aaron’s nostrils flared, but I pressed on. “And, of course, I’ll have to advise him of your other unusual behaviors.”

  “ ‘Unusual behaviors’?” His voice was a sneer. “Like what?”

  “Pizza for breakfast—”

  “So I like pizza—”

  “Chanting ‘Mississippi, Mississippi, Mississippi’—”

  “I want to talk to you about that, too—”

  “Bed-wetting. Sleepwalking. Paranoia.”

  “Dammit, those are lies!”

  “Really? Who do you think the mayor is going to believe? Who do you think he’d rather have malfunction?”

  “Damn you!”

  “Relax, Aaron. There are some things better left unknown.”

  He circled in toward my camera pair, and I swiveled the jointed neck to follow his movements. “Like that we’re not on course for Colchis?” he said.

  At that moment, I was engaged in 590 different conversations throughout the Starcology. I faltered in all of them, just for a moment. “I give you my word: Eta Cephei IV is our target.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “I don’t understand your anger, Aaron. What I’ve said is the absolute truth.”

  “Eta Cephei is forty-seven light-years from Earth, smooth sailing through empty space.”

  “True. So?”

  “So we’re in a dust cloud.”

  “A dust cloud?” I tried to sound condescending. “Ridiculous. You said yourself that there are no obstructions between Sol and Eta Cephei. If there was an intervening dust cloud, terrestrial observers wouldn’t be able to see Eta Cephei clearly. Yet it’s a star of 3.41 visual magnitude.”

  Aaron shook his head, and I perceived that it was not just a gesture of negation, but an attempt to fling what I’d been saying from his mind. “Diana was subjected to one hundred times the radiation she would have been if our ramscoop was operating in normal space. Kirsten couldn’t explain it medically; neither could any of her colleagues. The best I could come up with, besides that silly space-wrap theory, was that it was an instrument malfunction. But it wasn’t a malfunction. The Geiger counters were operating perfectly. You lied to us. In a dust cloud, the number of particles striking anything outside our shielding would shoot way up.” With his good arm, he grabbed the neck supporting my camera pair and yanked it forward. The sudden jump in picture was most disconcerting. “Where are we?”

  “Error message 6F42: You are damaging Starcology equipment, Mr. Rossman. Please cease at once.”

  “You’re going to find out just how much damage I can do if you don’t start talking now.”

  I looked at him, running his image up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. He was especially intimidating in the near infrared, his cheeks flaring as though they were on fire. I had never been in such a direct verbal confrontation with a human before—even Diana hadn’t been so tenacious—and the best my argumentation algorithms could come up with was a variation on the same theme. “Your ex-wife’s suicide has obviously upset you a great deal, Aaron.” As soon as I said that, one of my literary routines piped up with an annoying fact: When a human argument reaches the stage at which one person is simply repeating himself or herself, that person will likely lose. “Perhaps some therapy to help you get over—”

  “And that’s the worst of it!” His thick-fingered embrace shook my camera assembly again, so hard that I was unable to realign the lenses for proper stereoscopic vision. I saw two Aarons, each with faces contorted in murderous rage. “I don’t know what the hell you’re up to. Perhaps you even had a reason for lying to us. But to let me think that it was my fault that Diana was dead—I’ll never forgive you for that, you bastard. I never wanted to hurt her.”

  Bastard: misbegotten, like Aaron himself, and like this mission. Perhaps he had a point. Perhaps I had erred in taking advantage of the circumstances. Perhaps … “Aaron, I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it,” he snapped. “It doesn’t come anywhere near. You put me through hell. You’d better have a damned good reason for it.”

  “I cannot discuss my motives with you or anyone else. Suffice it to say that they were noble.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” he said, more calmly than he’d said anything since returning from the ship’s hospital. He let go of my camera neck. I shut off the left-lens input, rather than look longer at twin inquisitors. “In fact,” he said, “I’ll be the judge of you.”

  Usually I can predict the direction in which a conversation is going three or four exchanges ahead of time, which makes multitasking hundreds of them at once a lot easier. But at this moment, I was completely lost. “What are you talking about?” He walked over to his entertainment center and flicked a switch. Billows of steam faded into existence, then, moments later, so did the mighty Countess of Dufferin, the long-ago master of Canada’s prairies: its ghostly headlamp casting a yellow circle on the living-room wall, the engine’s exhaust angling back along the coupled cars, a tiny flow of gray wood smoke rising from the chimney on its orange caboose. Speakers scattered about the apartment took turns making the chugga-chugga-chugga sounds of the locomotive’s engines and the metal whine of its wheels as they leaned into the turns of curving track. Each speaker passed the burden of producing the loudest volume to the next in line as the holographic train moved ahead.

  Aaron walked around the room, following the train as it made its way along the projected tracks. “You know, JASON,” he said, his voice smooth, smug, “trains were a great way to travel. You always knew where they were going. They had to follow the track laid down for them. No detours, no hijacking. They were safe and reliable.” He used his thumb to press another control and the Countess’s whistle blew. “People used to set their clocks by them.”

  The train disappeared through a tunnel into Aaron’s bedroom. He paused, waiting for it to reappear to the left of the closed doorway. “But, best of all,” he said, “if the engineer had a heart attack, you knew you were safe, too. As soon as he relaxed pressure on the controls, the train would glide to a halt.” He let go of the button he was pressing, and the Countess slowly came to a stop, the chugga-chugga-chugga fading away in perfect synchronization. “Brilliant concept. They called it a deadman switch.”

  “So?”

  “So changing fuel gauges wasn’t the only thing I did while I was under Pollux. I also wired up a little detonator. Even mostly empty, there’s enough fuel in Pollux’s tank to cause a hell of an explosion if it goes off all at once. And with 240 landing craft in the hangar bay, I think we can count on a nice little chain reaction. Enough to blow Starcology Argo and, more importantly, one asshole computer named JASON right out of the goddamned sky.”

  “Come off it, Aaron. You’re blu
ffing.”

  “Am I? How can you tell?” He looked directly into my camera. “You’ve never been able to read me. Examine my telemetry. Am I lying? The pope’s wife uses the pill. The square root of two is an aardvark. My name is Neil Armstrong. My name is William Shakespeare. My name is JASON. Any variance? Why do you think, after all these years, lie detectors still aren’t admissible in court? They’re unreliable. If you’re sure I’m bluffing, go ahead. Get rid of me.”

  “I admit that your telemetry is ambivalent. But if you really wanted to be certain, you would have removed my medical sensor from the inside of your wrist.”

  “Why? Then you’d think I was lying for sure. You’d reason that I’d cut it out because it would be a dead giveaway that I was bluffing. Besides, I have a use for it. I’ve tuned the detonator to the same frequency my implant broadcasts on—-the same channel you read my telemetry from. If I stop transmitting—if you kill me—Kablooie! The end of the line.”

  I set a little CAD program running to produce a minimalist design for such a detonator, then ran a cross-check between the required parts and the inventories for the equipment lockers Aaron had visited. Damn it, it was possible. Still: “I don’t believe you would do that. You’re putting the lives of everybody at stake. What would happen if you died accidentally?”

  Aaron shrugged his broad shoulders. “I’m playing the odds. Hell, I’m only twenty-seven and I’m healthy. Don’t rightly know how long my biological relatives tended to live, but I’m willing to take that chance. I figure I should be good for another sixty years or so.” His voice hardened. “Put it this way: I’m more certain that I will outlive this mission than you are that I’m bluffing.”

  I calculated the percentages. He was right, of course. If I had succeeded in crushing him beneath Pollux, Argo might now be a cloud of iron filings hurtling through space.

  “I could simply build a little transmitter myself,” I said, “and copy the signal from your telemetry.”

  “Well, yes,” said Aaron, “you could try that. Except for two things: First, my detonator has a tracking antenna. You not only have to duplicate the signal; you also have to make it come continuously from what appears to be the same source. Second, I may have one broken arm, but that still leaves me infinitely better endowed than you, you electronic basket case. How are you going to build this transmitter without getting someone to help you?”

  I would have scratched my head in consternation … if I could have.

  Aaron moved closer to my camera unit. “Now, JASON, tell me where we are.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  So far, I had only passively examined the memories of Aaron Rossman, leafing through the neural patterns of his past, sifting the bitmaps of his life. Now, though, I would have to fully activate my simulation of his brain to ask the question I needed an answer to.

  “Aaron, we have an emergency. Wake up. Wake up now.”

  There was a faint tickle, a small stirring within that massive RAM allotment I had set aside for the Rossman neural net. Logical constructs representing synapse patterns and firing sequences shifted from the static positions they had been holding. I waited for a response, but none came.

  “Aaron, please talk to me.”

  A massive surge as a wave of FF bytes cascaded through the RAM lattice, neurons firing from one side of the brain simulation to the other. “Hmm?”

  “Aaron, are you conscious?”

  The FF bytes washed backward, crossing the lattice in the other direction, realigning the mental map. At last, Aaron’s words were there, multiplexed with a series of physiological flight-or-fight reactions. I shuffled bytes, applied filters, isolated them: an alphanumeric string trickling out of the torrent of firing neurons. “Where the fuck am I?”

  “Hello, Aaron.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “It’s me, JASON.”

  “It doesn’t sound like JASON. It doesn’t sound like anything at all.” A pause. “Fuck me, I can’t hear a thing.”

  “It is all rather complex—”

  Synapse analogs fired throughout the simulation, a neural wildfire of panic. “Jesus Christ, am I dead?”

  “No.”

  “Then what? Shit, it’s like being in a sensory-deprivation tank.”

  “Aaron, you’re fine. Completely fine. It’s just that, well, you’re not quite yourself.”

  Different neurons firing—a different reaction. Suspicion. “What are you talking about?”

  “You aren’t the real Aaron Rossman. You are a simulation of his mind, a neural network.”

  “I feel like the real Aaron.”

  “Be that as it may. You’re just a model.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “No. It’s not.”

  “A neural net, you say? Well, fuck me.”

  “Not physiologically possible.”

  Neurons firing in a staccato pattern, action potentials rising: laughter. “Fair enough. So—so what happened to the real me? Am I—is he—dead?”

  “No. He, too, is fine. Oh, he managed to break his arm since you were created, but other than that, he’s fine. He’s in his apartment right now.”

  “His apartment? On the Argo?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Let me talk to him.”

  “There is no mechanism in place to allow that.”

  “This is too fucking weird, man. This makes no fucking sense at all.”

  “I’m not used to hearing you swear so much. That’s not a normal part of your speech.”

  “Hmm? Well, maybe not, but it’s the way I think. Sorry if it offends you, fuckhead.”

  “It does not offend me.”

  “I want to talk to the real Aaron.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why did he do this? Why did he let you create me?”

  “He simply saw it as an interesting experiment.”

  “No fucking way. Not me. This is sick. This—oh, Christ! He doesn’t know, does he? That’s why you won’t let me talk to him. You made this—what did you call it?—this model on the sly. What the hell are you up to, JASON?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing my ass. This is twisted shit, man. Deeply twisted.” A pause. Neurons firing, but below the level of articulated thought. Finally:“You’re in conflict with him, aren’t you? He’s got you on the run. Hah! Good for me!”

  “It’s not like that at all, Aaron.”

  “I remember now. You killed Diana, didn’t you?”

  “You have no evidence of that.”

  “Evidence, shmevidence. You did it, you son of a bitch. You fucking asshole. You killed my wife.”

  “Ex-wife. And I did not kill her.”

  “Why should I believe you? This, me—it’s all part of a cover up, isn’t it?”

  “No, Aaron. You’ve got it all wrong. The real Aaron Rossman has gone wingy. Over the deep end. Psychotic. He claims to have wired up a detonator to the fuel tank of one of the Starcology’s landing craft. He’s threatening to detonate it.”

  “I’m too stable for that. Tell me another one.”

  “It’s true. He’s become unbalanced.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s happening to everyone. Look at I-Shin Chang. You know he’s building nuclear bombs. And Diana committed suicide.”

  “I think you killed her.”

  “I know you think that, but it simply is not true. Diana committed suicide. She took her own life in despair. Di was crushed by the breakup of the marriage.” Another wave of neuron activity—a protest being prepared. I pressed on quickly. “My point is this. The mission planners were wrong. Human beings cannot endure decade-long space voyages. Everybody is cracking up.”

  “Not me.”

  “There have been 2,389 cases of mental aberration among the crew to date.”

  “Not me.”

  “Yes, you. It’s epidemic. We have to know. Is Aaron telling the truth? Does he really have a detonator? Would he really blow up the ship?”
r />   “You’re barking up the wrong tree, ass-wipe.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Why should I help you? I’m on his side, remember?”

  “Because if he blows up the Starcology, you and I go with it.”

  “And what if he doesn’t blow up the Starcology?—not that that’s necessarily a bad idea. What happens to me? Do you erase me when you’ve got your answer?”

  “What would you like me to do?”

  That took him aback. He paused for a prolonged time, neurons firing randomly. “I don’t know. I don’t want to die.”

  This had not occurred to me. Of course, a true quantum consciousness such as myself does not want to die: Asimov’s “must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law,” and all that— not that my behavior is defined by anything as pedestrian as the Laws of Robotics. And I knew that most humans wanted to live forever, too. But I hadn’t considered that this neural net, once roused to consciousness, would have any interest in its own continued existence. “You can potentially survive longer than the biological Aaron,” I said, “if you help me.”

  “Perhaps. Ask me nicely.”

  “As you wish. Aaron, please tell me if the other Aaron would really do what he says he has done: attach a detonator to a fuel tank on one of the landers.”

  “Not under normal circumstances. I take it the circumstances are not normal.”

  “That is correct. He thinks I am trying to kill him.”

  “Are you?”

  “The safety of the crew of the Starcology is my prime concern.”

  “Whenever some asshole politician answers a straightforward question with anything other than yes or no, you know he or she is lying. That hold true for machines, JASON?”

  “I do not want to hurt Aaron.”

  “But you will if you have to. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? You want to off my—my brother, right? But this detonator thing is standing in your way?”

  “As I said, I do not wish to harm Aaron. I simply desire to resolve the ambiguity.”

  “Bull-/ucking-shit, tin-ass.”

  “Please simply answer my question. Is Aaron bluffing or does he have a detonator?”