He offered Elspeth a dirty look and a fond insult. Leah smiled after him, proud that he trusted her enough to do as she asked without explanation. Elspeth found a pencil.
“Dad, can you show me what you were working on?”
“More AI stuff,” he said, returning. A sheaf of glittering perfect squares showed one white side in his hand. “Boring.”
“I want to learn,” she said, and didn't mean it as anything except an excuse until she saw his eyebrow go up and the little smile curve the corner of his lip. Nobody actually cares what he does, do they? We just leave him alone and let him do it. The revelation hit her almost like a fist, and she dropped her eyes as she took the papers from his hand.
And she paid attention while she wrote out, slowly and precisely, with a rounded hand, every word Richard dictated, and sketched out the circuit diagrams and schematics he showed her — nanite controller protocols, and the careful instructions on how to create them.
1500 Hours
Monday 4 December, 2062
PPCASS Huang Di
Under way
Min-xue opened his eyes on the wonder of the stars. Whispers seemed to stroke him — the Huang Di—like anemone fingers. Whispers without voices, he thought, and wondered if one day he, too, would write a poem that might be worthy of remembrance. He might have said that he felt the ship as he felt his flesh, but it was more than that. Imagine the feeling of starlight on your skin, Captain.
What he said was, “Captain, I'm ready to activate the stardrive now.”
Captain Wu cleared his throat. “Affirmative,” and if Min-xue hadn't been able to read his heartbeat through the medical sensors in his chair, he never would have known that the man was afraid.
The Huang Di flexed itself into darkness and the sightless space between spaces, and almost instantly back out again. Despite himself, despite knowing how far from the deadly embrace of the Sun and her planets they were, Min-xue half expected the unfelt breath that filled his human body's lungs to be his last. Too close to the gravity well, he thought, and almost whooped out loud at the realization that he was still alive to think it.
“Transition accomplished,” he announced coolly. “Distance traveled”—he checked parallax through his external sensors—“one-twentieth of an astronomical unit, sir.”
Less than half of a light minute.
The smallest distance yet recorded using the Martian drive.
5:00 PM
Monday 4 December, 2062
Allen-Shipman Research Facility
St. George Street
Toronto, Ontario
Leah couldn't sit still, even though Patty kept grinning at her from under the polished dark curtain of her hair. The light moved over it, entrancing Leah with how real and how bright everything seemed. The boundless energy in her veins pushed her around the green-carpeted waiting room. She glanced up, squinted at the brightness of the fluorescents flickering on the stark white walls, and tried to tune out the yells of the four male students playing hologames while they waited.
“Jumping bean,” Patricia said.
Leah jiggled her shoulders and paced a few more steps. “Like you're not excited.” Tuva, are you there? Richard, I mean. Tuva was the handle he'd used in the VR game space where she had originally met him. Leah hadn't known he was an AI then.
“I'm here, Leah.” The sense of presence was comforting. “Your friend is right. You're bouncing off the walls.”
Like you ever sit still. Which was true. Even his computer-generated image was a fidget. I'm going to fly, Richard!
She felt him grin. And then she startled, as Patricia seemed to materialize beside Leah and place her hand on Leah's arm. The touch felt funny — sharp — and Leah jerked away. Patricia did, too, looking down at her fingers as if she'd scorched them. “Whoa.”
“Weird.” Leah brushed her hair off her neck in irritation. “It must be the Hammers. Aunt Jenny said they could make everything a little weird. Weirder, I mean.”
Patty smiled, but Leah could see — by now — that it didn't ease the tightness by the older girl's eyes. And then Patty looked up, and Leah did, too. They both heard the footsteps in the hall. “That'll be Aunt Jenny.”
“And Papa Fred,” Patricia answered, nodding. The boys were still distracted by their game as the two girls moved toward the door.
Monday 4 December, 2062
Sol-system wide area nanonetwork
17:15:44:45–17:15:44:56
Richard let a thin filament of his awareness move through the Montreal, the Huang Di, the Calgary, the half-built Vancouver, and the three Chinese vessels still under construction. Was aware of the presence of the Chinese pilots in their regimented daily routines. Followed the progress of the Chinese invasion into Russia, Russia's response — piggybacking on the Montreal's radio, microwave, and laser transmissions. It annoyed him to not be able to use the Chinese ships similarly, and it annoyed him more to have to spawn remote processes and wait for them to report back, and the amount of data he could transfer without being noticed was limited. They're desperate. The Huang Di and its sister ships are a last-ditch effort, he realized. The AI contemplated the Chinese record of cultural imperialism, and Japan, and Taiwan, and Tibet. He ran a few hundred variations on population and climate numbers. And he worried.
Richard sighed, while another thread of his attention rested on Trevor Koske — not able to control him, or read Trevor's thoughts without revealing Richard's presence, but the AI feeling the pilot's existence like a heartbeat low in the back of his chest. Richard watched through the shipwide monitors as Koske went about his routine — one life among uncounted thousands, if he considered the still incomprehensible alien presences pushing at his attention.
The AI had also conceived a particular fascination with Lt. Christopher Ramirez. Chiefly because he couldn't see why the sullen, muscular blond made such an effort to cultivate Koske. Koske was only slightly less offensive to Ramirez than he was to anyone else. Richard, the eternal observer, let his crippled alter-ego deal with Koske and with Wainwright on those occasions when it became necessary, and chose to watch the grunted conversations between the two men at meals or in the boxing ring.
They both liked to fight.
Ramirez spent his off-duty hours reading twentieth-century politics and twenty-first-century philosophy. He was unmarried. His early air force career had been marked by disciplinary problems, but his service for the past five years had been exemplary — and even the armed services tended to overlook minor problems in a code jockey as talented as Ramirez.
Except Richard — sacrificing some of his precious bootlegged bandwidth to pick over Ramirez's records on Earth — noticed a few things. Such as that Ramirez's registered party affiliation in college had been to the neo-Greens, but the neo-Green Party — while extant — had not become widespread outside of Europe until two years later, and Ramirez had been the only student at the University of Guelph to so register.