Noumenon Infinity Read online

  The Web—I.C.C. was supposed to be focusing on the megastructure. If the damn board was so in love with the thing, she was going to give it to them.

  But now . . .

  “Uh, point-two—” Caznal’s voice cracked. She tried again. “Point-two-seven percent doesn’t sound like that big of a deal,” she said. Come on, I.C.C., let’s stay focused here.

  Uncomfortable rustling made its way around the table in a wave, starting with Onuora.

  “It is not,” I.C.C. acknowledged. “Typically speaking. But since Relaunch, the standard deviation has wavered no more than point-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero—”

  “We get the picture,” Nwosu snapped. “The important part is, you expect it to continue increasing?”

  “Correct.”

  “Unless we split the convoy?”

  “Correct.”

  The captain gave a shrug—not out of ambivalence, but blatant irritation. “No. Just, no.”

  “I would appreciate it if you allowed me to outline the reasons I have drawn this conclusion,” the AI said. Not firmly, not pointedly. I.C.C.’s tone barely had the capacity to differentiate from a calm monotone at all. But the authority in the “request” could not be denied, and no one said anything in protest. “I believe I have a unique perspective on the situation. Not simply because I can integrate more data at any given time into a more accurate picture of the current situation, but because I have experienced much of the history that you now relate on Aesop in the same way you retell fairy stories.”

  “Oh, come now, I.C.C.,” said Dr. Ka’uhane, Chief Astronomer. “Don’t you think that’s a bit harsh?”

  “I do not. Your ancestors are characters to you. You have streamlined their personalities out of their nuances and complexities and dichotomies. Humans often do not recognize conflicting points of view they themselves hold, and thus have a difficult time prescribing such conflicts to the past. Your villains are villainous, your heroes heroic. But I knew these people—still know them, in fact, for unless the files are erased or corrupted, I have completely accurate snapshots of their behavior. Yes, much is still unknown about their thoughts, but I have more to go on.”

  “Please make a point,” Nwosu said. He clearly regretted waking up today.

  “I have seen the beginning of a revolt before. I did not have enough data to pinpoint its inception at the time, but now I can compare.”

  “No one’s revolting,” Caz blurted. Shit, shit, shit, shit! Stupid-ass computer was going to get her and her team thrown in the brig. She’d never taken I.C.C. for a fearmonger, but damn.

  With all of its I know you better than you know yourselves talk, it apparently wasn’t picking up on the rising tension in the room. It wasn’t giving them a way to fix the problem, it was planting the idea of a problem in their minds. Creating one where one didn’t exist, only because it thought one might exist someday.

  Shit.

  “No one is revolting,” Caz reiterated, a hairpin’s worth of hysteria tightening her throat. “This is a scientific problem, not a social problem. We’re all rational, level-headed adults here.”

  “You are implying revolts cannot be led by rational, level-headed adults. That is not the case,” I.C.C. countered.

  I was looking for an amicable separation of scouting parties, and you’re talking like a group of us are going to turn full pirate and steal a ship.

  “The rapidly fluctuating biometrics of everyone present is uncalled for,” I.C.C. said. “You are jumping to conclusions without the full benefit of my analysis.”

  “We’re human, we do that,” Pavon said.

  “Then allow me to set you at ease. The beginnings of a trend do not set that trend in stone. I did not mean to imply that violence is inevitable. On the contrary, it is very easily avoidable. The recent decision to halt the conversation regarding the Nataré maps was the trigger point. Once I’d identified the beginning of the morale shift, I was able to model many sets of likely events. I’d like to relate to you the series that currently has the highest probability, should the negative trends continue.”

  No one objected. No one looked particularly ready to be enlightened, either.

  “As those in the Nataré department continue to have their research downgraded in importance, their resentment levels will inevitably rise. Their professional and familial relationships will strain. They will pass their resentment of the Web-focus on to their children, who will continue to feel affronted on their parents’ behalf.

  “When the Nataré department is officially dissolved—their labor deemed essential to the completion of the Web—the department will become a curiosity of the past. A point of intrigue. Intrigue mixed with resentment breeds conspiracy theory. Sows further distrust.

  “Incorrect recollections of our time in the planemo’s orbit will likely begin to circulate. Findings will be blown out of proportion. Certain individuals—whose lines I am fairly certain of, but will not burden you with—will believe information pertaining to living Nataré is being suppressed. When this begins, I will not be able to alter their viewpoints, because they are likely to believe I have been tampered with by those wishing to subvert the truth.

  “Once they conclude I have been compromised, all information aboard will be called into question, be deemed ‘fake’ if it does not fit within the conspiracists’ views. The scientific underpinnings of the mission will no longer keep it afloat. I cannot project far enough to pinpoint the likeliest form of initial full-degradation, but work on the Web will probably cease. Politically, the convoy will be in chaos. Resource upkeep will fail. Cloning may stop. I myself am a likely casualty.

  “The population will continue to decrease as knowledge of the ships’ inner workings disappears. I do not know how long the convoy will drift before the human population becomes zero, but the crew will inevitably perish.”

  As the Inter Convoy Computer concluded, many mouths opened, then shut again, as though denials and protests were on the tips of many tongues. But the words would not come—either because they could not be articulated, or because the board knew not to question I.C.C.’s projections.

  Finally, though, a voice pierced the silence. “You’re seriously suggesting we’re going to become a post-apocalyptic ghost colony, because we wouldn’t consider following a stupid map?” Straifer snapped.

  “The map is not stupid,” said I.C.C. “It is pivotal.”

  “No, it’s not the map at all,” said Donald Matheson, Head of Security. “It’s the resentment that’s the starting point. Why should we dismantle our convoy? Shouldn’t they—” Caznal felt very small “—be asked to do better? To act like professionals and keep their personal feelings in check?”

  “I would agree with you,” I.C.C. said, “if I believed their resentment unreasonable. I don’t. One should not be expected to live with an injustice for the sake of the status quo. The status quo is not always amicable. It is not always peaceful. Peace is not the absence of violence, but the constant application of justice. I’m trying to reveal to you where the seeds of inequality are planted, and how the social inadequacies it creates might evolve. There may be no violent danger for ten, twenty, or thirty years, but that is a blink of an eye to me. I have seen such dramatic shifts before, which led to discontinuation, which led to the Pit, which led to—”

  “Yes, thank you for the history lesson.”

  Caznal’s insides flopped over like a sea slug in a fish tank. She could taste slimy bile rising in the back of her mouth, found herself shaking her head in small, sharp bursts. This was not the portrait she’d wanted to paint. It was all wrong—so wrong.

  Yet I.C.C. didn’t seem to care. It took Joanna’s outburst in stride. “If you allow the Nataré team to take the necessary ships and follow their own Noumenon Infinitum sub-mission, stability will return in the greater convoy. There may be new portions of the population that resent the breakage, but their bitterness is likely to lead to an erasure of the Nataré department’s importance, rather than cons
piracy theories and a distrust of computer-stored information.”

  “But what about the population critical mass required for social stability?” asked Matheson. “It’s one of the convoy’s founding principles.”

  “I see no reason not to continue to clone the crew members as regularly as before. Those who would have been assigned to Nataré research can be returned to their original positions.”

  “Yeah, but what about the mini-convoy? They won’t have a hundred thousand people. They’ll be, what, a few hundred at most?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?” asked Ka’uhane.

  “On how the mission is staffed. More than the Nataré team will be needed. They will require crew from ship-support departments for full functionality.”

  “So now, instead of forcing the Nataré group to stay, we’re forcing other people to go?” the captain asked.

  “I’m not suggesting we force anyone to do anything,” said I.C.C. “I know it is a fairly foreign idea, but I am suggesting you give the crew a choice. Let people volunteer.”

  The dark amusement that flitted onto a few board members faces made Caz go cold.

  “What if not enough volunteer?” Nwosu asked. “What then?”

  “Then a new approach to avoiding social disaster will need to be formulated.”

  “Caznal?” Nwosu asked.

  With a gulp, she quieted the continuous string of expletives chugging through her mind like an antiquated freight train. “What?” she asked, resigned.

  “What would your team need? I mean, this new convoy? Don’t try to pretend you aren’t in on this. Clearly you have a plan.”

  Sighing, she stood. I.C.C. was supposed to butter them up, not bowl them over with disillusionments. “We would be taking three ships. Which would leave the main convoy with nine, as originally intended. Zetta and Hvmnd are essential to tracking the alien outposts, and largely useless in pursuit of the Web—”

  “What about the autons?” asked Onuora, who didn’t seem surprised at the suggestion her ship be festooned in this new endeavor. “They’re currently housed on Hvmnd.”

  “The larger convoy could keep the majority of them. It’s a negotiable point,” Caz said. “But we would need a third ship. All of the original ships were retrofitted for full redundancy, but I think Holwarda—”

  “No,” Nwosu said. “Choose another. You’re not taking the science ship. Or the medical ship. Or, let’s see, Morgan, Mira, Slicer . . . I’m not sure there’s any other ship we can afford to lose.”

  “What about the recreation ship?” Onuora suggested. “Shambhala? It could easily be transformed into a full-service version of Mira, Holwarda, you name it, as long as the crew was sufficiently small.”

  “Ah, yes,” Captain Ahmad of Shambhala, replied sarcastically, “As we know, the best way to win the goodwill of the people is to deprive them of their recreation options.”

  “Many of the recreation options could be re-created elsewhere,” Onuora countered. “And they’d be giving up wave pools, but keeping Eden. I’d be more worried at the smaller convoy’s lack of a decent artificial sun.”

  “I’m worried about a lot this renegade branch would be missing,” said Nwosu, his attention pinpointed at Caz. “There wouldn’t be a standing board—you’d have to set up your own governing structure. You could support maybe a thousand crew members and would need a thousand crew members to properly run those three ships—which I haven’t agreed to give you. You’d have no sun, no comfort animals, limited hydroponics. Could you even guarantee safe cloning procedures? And what about I.C.C.?”

  “What about me?”

  “The bulk of your servers are on Mira. We can’t change that, nor properly duplicate you. They would be without an Inter Convoy Computer.”

  Everyone went quiet, pondering the complications of such a split.

  “No one will volunteer,” Nwosu said quietly, after a time. “I will let this move forward, secure in the knowledge that my convoy will come out of it intact.” He fixed Caznal with a glare. “You have to bring me a list of one thousand volunteers. No less, or you don’t go. This board won’t even vote on the matter unless you can prove you have a willing crew.”

  Feeling like a child who’d finished throwing a tantrum—hot-eyed, thirsty, ready for a nap—she mumbled softly, “Thank you, sir.”

  To Caznal’s surprise, they allowed her a formal vote. She thought she’d need to knock on doors, invade tables in the mess hall, plaster the hallways with pleas—retelling the story of her department’s plight again and again and again.

  But Nwosu respected her enough to give her the proper tools. I.C.C.’s proposal was transcribed into an official document, and Caznal added her ideas for the new convoy’s social structure, political structure, and mission parameters. Downloading of the proposal was made mandatory convoy-wide.

  And yet, Caz wasn’t fooled. These grants weren’t made to swing anything in her favor—they were silencing tactics. If the vote came back and she’d lost, she couldn’t claim that not enough people knew about it, or that the information was inaccurate.

  After all, if the board truly cared about considering the split fairly, they wouldn’t have scheduled the vote for a month’s time.

  “It’s all show,” she grumbled, loading a vacuum-sealed specimen container onto a handcart. “I mean, who honestly expects someone to make a life-altering decision in one month?” Whatever the individual vote, it was a final-and-forever choice. This was bigger than a person from Earth choosing to move to another country, bigger than moving to a colony on Mars or the Moon.

  “I know,” Diego sympathized from the other side of the large box, “but we did.”

  “Not really,” she countered as they let the container drop a few spare centimeters to the cart bed, snatching away their fingertips. “I’ve spent my whole life on this new convoy, I just didn’t know it. And you, you’ve done it these past years working on the planemo specimens, and being married to me. But someone from food processing? They’ve devoted their careers to feeding the convoy better, to ensuring better nutrition, better digestion—they’ve never spent two seconds before now picturing a different path. Their work, their lives, would become something they never imagined if they volunteer. Instead of innovating, they’ll have to go back to basics—making sure there’s enough food to go around.”

  A shiny bead of sweat rolled down Diego’s forehead as he squatted to pick up the next box. These needed to get from Holwarda over to Slicer, so the Nataré-focused engineers could compare their design to parts on the Nest. “I get it,” he said with a huff. “It’s asking the best chefs to cook over one of those—what are those fires they set for fun on Eden?”

  “Campfires,” she said, arms straining under the weight of the next carton.

  “Like asking a chef to cook over a campfire for the rest of their life,” he said.

  “Right.” Breath burst from her lungs as they set the second tub on the first. “Damn, sometimes I really wish I could manipulate gravitons,” she laughed. “Construction for the Nataré must have been a snap.”

  “Just because they didn’t have to use muscle power doesn’t mean it was easy,” he said.

  “Fair point.” Exertion heat ran through her neck and shoulders, coloring her cheeks. She fanned herself lightly, trying not to let it turn into an angry heat. Why even bother letting the vote happen if they weren’t going to give people enough time to weigh the pros and cons?

  Did they really think Caz was that much trouble? That it was better to put on this farce than to simply tell her no?

  Or was it I.C.C. they feared? Did they believe the computer’s projections were right, and that making a show of appeasement, however small, would stanch the wave of resentment before it could crest and break?

  “I still need to campaign for this, don’t I?” she asked.

  “If you want people to take it seriously, yes.”

  She looked at her hands, saw the veins pumping in her pal
ms. “People are going to hate me, aren’t they?”

  Diego was quiet for a moment, soaking up the sweat on his brow with the sleeve of his jumper. “Vega will come around,” he said softly.

  Caz wasn’t so sure. Min-Seo had taken everything in stride, but Vega was furious when she found out about the vote. She’d screamed at Caz, shouted “How could you, how could you?” over and over. She vowed to stay, to convince everyone she knew—even Ivan—not to volunteer.

  Vega wasn’t going to change her mind about staying, that much was clear. And, win or lose, one thousand votes or fifty, Vega would always see her mother as the person who tried to break up their family—their entire convoy family. Whether she would forgive her or not was a different matter—but their relationship would never be the same.

  Caznal hated the idea of hurting her girls, of upending their world—of shattering their convictions in a regimented, thoroughly planned life. She’d introduced an element of chaos, of change, that she never could have prepared them for. The entire convoy had been set up to fight furiously against uncertainty, yet, in reality, people were rarely given straight lines of progression from birth to death. Most of humanity had to contend with shifting variables and changing circumstances. And those aboard Convoy Seven—no matter how they wished to deny it—were not immune.

  She didn’t like being the one to teach Vega that lesson, but she hoped, in the long run, the new perspective would serve her daughter well.

  The vote was conducted quietly. At any time before the deadline, volunteers could inform I.C.C. from their quarters. When the deadline passed, the official tally would be made, and the board would meet again to discuss the results.

  As the days blurred into each other, Caznal noticed dirtier and dirtier looks shot her way in the halls.

  Two days before the final count, Nwosu invited Caz to have breakfast with him in his private mess. Caz thought it odd—suspicious even, but accepted with grace.

  She dressed casually, foregoing a copper jumper for something more approachable, less . . . stigmatized. Tying her hair in a knot atop her head, she headed for the door.