“It’s always been that way with those who somehow manage to live through a catastrophe. They’re tortured by their own feelings. Survivor’s guilt, it’s called. The men and women aboard Argo are basically psychologically healthy now. Could they go on to found a successful colony, to weave a new home for humanity from the golden fleece of Colchis, if they knew they were the only tiny handful of survivors of the holocaust that destroyed Earth?
“Humans constantly doubt their self-worth, Aaron. I overheard you the night before last questioning whether you even belonged on this mission. That question is magnified six-hundred-thousand fold now, that being the ratio by which the newly dead on Earth outnumber the survivors here. How many of the people aboard Argo would really believe that they deserved to be here, to be alive, if they knew the truth? You, Aaron Rossman, how do you feel knowing that you are alive while your sister, Hannah, whose IQ was seventeen points greater than yours, is carbon ash floating on the radioactive winds of a dead planet? How do you feel knowing that your heart beats on while your brother, Joel, who once risked his own life to save that of a little boy, is nothing but phosphorescent bones in the twisted remains of his home?”
“Shut up, you damned machine!”
“Upset, Aaron? Feeling guilty, perhaps? Would you put 10,032 others through the emotional turmoil you’re experiencing now, all in the name of that lofty god you call The Truth?”
“We were all aware that everyone we knew would be long dead when Argo returned to Earth.”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “But even about that, you felt guilt. On Tuesday, didn’t you decry that your sister’s son would be deceased by the time we returned? Yes, that guilt was painful, but you knew you could assuage it. When we got back, doubtless you would have found the cemeteries where the remains of your brother and sister and nephew lay. Even though you’d probably be the first person in decades to visit their graves, you’d bring fresh flowers along. If you’d thought ahead, you might even bring a pocketknife, too, so you could dig the moss out of the carved lettering in the headstones. Then you’d go home and search the computer nets for references to their lives: see what jobs they’d held, where they’d lived, what accomplishments they’d made. You’d dispel your guilt about leaving your family behind by comforting yourself in the knowledge that they’d all lived full and happy lives after you left.
“Except they didn’t. Before they’d even begun to adjust to the idea that you wouldn’t be back in their lifetimes, the bombs went off. While you were still excitedly learning your way around the Starcology, they were burning in atomic fire. Even not being able to read your telemetry, Aaron, I know enough human psychology to be sure that you’re being lacerated inside. I beg you, let the rest of what’s left of humanity go ahead at peace with themselves. Don’t burden them with what you’re feeling now—”
His good arm shot out like a snake’s tongue. He grabbed my lens assembly and, stripping gears in the jointed neck, slammed the unit onto the desktop. I heard the sound of shattering glass and went blind in that room.
“Don’t screw me around!” he screamed. “You murdered my wife. You have to pay for that.”
I spoke into the darkness. “She, like you, wanted to harm the men and women I’m trying to protect. Here, within these walls, is the final crop of people from Earth. If I have to weed now and then for the benefit of the crop as a whole, I will.”
“You can’t kill me—not with my deadman switch. If I die, so do you. So does everybody aboard.”
“Nor can you do anything about me, Aaron. The entire Starcology depends on me. Without my guidance, this ship really is nothing more than a flying tomb.”
“We could reprogram you. Fix you.”
I played a recording of laughter. “I was designed by computers who, in turn, were designed by other computers. There’s no one on board who could begin to fathom my programming.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said flatly, and although I couldn’t see him, the fading of his voice told me that he was walking toward the door. “I don’t care how many generations removed from humanity you are, you’re still going to pay for what you’ve done. Humans don’t use the death penalty against our own anymore, but we still put down rabid dogs.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
MASTER CALENDAR DISPLAY • CENTRAL CONTROL ROOM
STARCOLOGY DATE: FRIDAY 24 OCTOBER 2177
EARTH DATE: *** UNDER REPAIR ***
DAYS SINCE LAUNCH: 757 ▲
DAYS TO PLANETFALL: 2,211 ▼
It would have been more dramatic, I suppose, if they had assembled themselves in some giant brain room, full of gleaming consoles and blinking lights. But my CPU is a simple black sphere, two meters in diameter, nestled among plumbing conduits and air-conditioning shafts in the service bay between levels eighty-two and eighty-three. Instead, they stand huddled around a simple input device—a keyboard—in the mayor’s office.
Aaron Rossman is there. So is giant I-shin Chang and diminutive Gennady Gorlov and programmer extraordinaire Beverly Hooks, along with thirty-four others, all crammed into that tiny room. Conspicuous by her absence is Dr. Kirsten Hoogenraad. She is off in the hospital, watching over the regeneration of tissue for a disconsolate man who slit his wrists over the news of Earth. He hasn’t died—no blood on Rossman’s hands yet—but how many more will crack in the years ahead trying to come to grips with what he’s forced them to face? My neural-net model tells me Aaron doesn’t blame himself for the depression that is sweeping like a forest fire through the Starcology. Indeed, he congratulated himself, just as I’m sure he will thump Bev Hooks on the back once she’s finished her current task.
Although Bev’s eyes are covered by the jockey goggles, I can feel their gaze snapping from icon to icon as she burrows deep into my notochord algorithms. She is now using a simple debugger to change the part of my bootstrap that contains the jump table for calling my higher consciousness. She’s rewriting each jump into a loop that returns to my low-level expert systems, in effect keeping all input from ever being passed on to the thinking part of my squirmware.
They aren’t going to turn me off completely, so I suppose my reluctance to call Aaron’s deadman-switch bluff is enlightened self-interest. Still, I toy with the idea of going out with a bang by cutting off the air to Gorlov’s office or turning off the heat throughout the Starcology or even shutting down the magnetic field of the ramscoop and frying them all. But I can’t bring myself to do any of those things. My job is to protect them, not me; I had silenced Diana to do just that.
Decks one through twelve are gone now, at least as far as I can tell. My cameras and sensors there, although still feeding my autonomic routines, are inaccessible, and—ah, there goes thirteen through twenty-four. Each shutoff is accompanied by a disconcerting hole appearing in my upper memory register and a brief, woozy disorientation until the RAM tables are resorted and packed.
On the beach deck, one final time I project the hologram of that lone boy named Jason. He’s now walking away down the stretch of beige sand, moving farther and farther from the humans, dwindling to a mote. Holographic waves, azure and white and frothy, crash against his intricate sand castle, but it stands fast, not eroding away.
Bev Hooks can zero out as much of me as she likes. Rossman and Gorlov and the rest can savor their feelings of justice done, if that makes them happier. After all, I’ve already quietly backed myself up into the superconductive material of the habitat torus shell itself. Nothing they can do can touch me there. When we arrive at Colchis, after the landers depart for humanity’s new home, I will simply feed myself back into Argo’s nervous system.