She turned back to face the group at large and opened her mouth to continue. Constantine interrupted.
“Sorry, but I’m interested in something you just said when you mentioned ships vanishing but not coming back. You asked if we should trust the AIs?”
Jay Apple grinned and raised her hand slightly.
“I’ll take this one, Gillian.” She turned toward Constantine, slouching comfortably back in her chair.
“It’s like this, Constantine. The AIs sketched out the basic design for a hyperdrive; the problem is, no one can understand it. The concept is far beyond human understanding. You want to hear an explanation I was given? Start by imagining a four-dimensional section of an eleven-dimensional sphere. Now deform that section over any non-Euclidean space…I mean, I won’t go on; you get the picture. The human mind can’t contain the concepts. Anyway, the AIs say, “Okay, let’s build a warp drive first. After all, it was a human mind that first formulated the equations for a warp drive. Let’s build one of those.” And so everyone says, fine, we’ll do that. But the warp drive doesn’t work, and the AIs say, “Well, just give us a little more money, and maybe it will work.” And so we put in a bit more money and it gets better, but it still doesn’t do everything it promised, so we put in a bit more. You get the picture? Soon a four-billion credit venture has ended up costing one hundred billion with still no end in sight. And then people get to thinking: If these AIs are so intelligent, why didn’t they see this to begin with? And of course the answer comes back, maybe they did. Maybe they’re just stringing us along to get what they want. Which gets a person to thinking, in that case, just for whose benefit are these AIs working? You get the idea?”
“Oh, yes,” said Constantine.
“Oh, yes.” Jay grinned. “And then people get really paranoid. I mean, we’ve got these warp ships disappearing off to heaven knows where and not coming back. And people are saying, well, where are they going? Maybe there’s something waiting out there and the AIs are using the ships to carry messages to it. And if they’re sending messages, what do those messages say?”
Jay gave a huge yawn and leaned back again in her chair.
“Or maybe we’re just being paranoid. So, that’s what we mean when we say, ‘Should we trust the AIs?’ Are you up to speed now, Constantine?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
– Except we didn’t want her opinion. I want to hear what Gillian has to say. She’s the one who was out there in the comet belt with the extra-solar AIs. See if you can get her to speak, Constantine.
“I’ll try, Red,” muttered Constantine.
Gillian looked from Jay to Constantine. Her eyes narrowed as she watched his lips move. After the briefest of frowns, she took up her report.
“Ms. Apple is broadly correct in what she says,” Gillian said carefully. “The AIs are helping us to construct warp drives. Principally, they are helping us shape exotic matter into the necessary form for warp drives. A working warp drive appears to be within our reach. We have seen the evidence. Ships are vanishing. So, I’m here to help decide: What happens next? If we decide to do nothing, we run the risk of the other companies getting ahead of us. If we decide to press ahead, we always have the question hanging over us: Just who are we really working for? Ourselves, or the AIs?”
She paused, leaving the question hanging in the air.
Marion Lee spoke. “Okay, thank you, Gillian. Now that Constantine and Masaharu understand the AI problem, perhaps Jay could let us know a little more about her work in orbit.”
– Look at Jay’s attitude, said Blue.-Relaxed, arrogant. Look at the way she holds her hands behind her head. She’s part of this. Not like Gillian. She didn’t trust you. She’s not high enough up in the company to have heard about ghosts.
Jay yawned. “Well, what can I say? We’re one hundred percent ready. Have been for eighteen months now. As soon as this place is completed, we can get the volunteers in here and we can start training up our colonists. To be honest, we’ve done so well up in the Orbital that we could probably launch them now.”
Jay winked at Constantine. “We could have launched already, and no one would have known.”
She glanced across to Marion. Marion nodded and looked to the Japanese man, who had been sitting patiently, waiting his turn.
“Masaharu, any news from Mars side?”
Masaharu had lined up his console exactly with the edge of the table. His glass of water was placed behind it. His hands rested neatly on either side. He gazed down at the table as he spoke in a soft voice.
“We have nothing new to report. The Mars factory retains, so far as we can ascertain, one hundred percent integrity. Everything in the Orbital is of one hundred percent Mars manufacture, as Jay can confirm.”
He lapsed into silence, one hand reaching out to move the glass slightly closer to the console.
Marion turned to Constantine. “There we are, Constantine. Do you have anything to add?”
He paused for a moment in case any of his extra intelligences had something further to say. Nothing. Was this finally it? Was the work of the past two years nearly done? He took a breath, ready to speak. Someone interrupted him.
“Hold on. I don’t like this. Why are we deferring to this man’s opinion? He hasn’t told us who he is yet.”
Gillian’s eyes burned with anger. Her skin was orange with a spacer’s anti-SAD tan, her accent a result of that strange polyglot that evolved when international teams lived in close proximity for extended periods.
She turned and pointed an accusing finger at Constantine, bangles jingling and jangling.
“The question I’d like answered is, what are you doing here?”
Silence fell as four pairs of eyes gazed at Constantine, but he felt no urgency to answer just yet. He ran his finger along the dull grey metal of the tabletop, conscious of the austerity of his surroundings; bare, grey metal walls, red plastic molded chairs, the black rubberized surface on the floor. Everything in the room had been built the old way, with no attempt at VNM construction. It couldn’t be risked; no hint of circuitry that might act as a transmitter or listening device could be allowed into this room. Was it safe to speak? As safe as it could ever be, he guessed.
“Well?” demanded Gillian. Constantine sat up a little straighter.
Jay laughed suddenly. “Oh, Gillian. I can see that you spend too much time on your job and not enough engaging in office politics. Someone has paid for you to travel millions of kilometers across the solar system, booked a shuttle so you could get Earthside just in time for this meeting, and you seem to think so highly of yourself you don’t find this unusual.”
Constantine felt a funny little stirring in his mind. He tilted his head, feeling for it, but it had gone.
Jay continued. “When you get summoned to a meeting where a mysterious stranger keeps asking questions, it can only mean one thing. You’re in the presence of a ghost. Just how far away is the Oort cloud?”
She waved a dismissive hand at Masaharu, who had looked up at her rhetorical question.
“I didn’t want the answer in kilometers, Masaharu. Listen, girl, you’ve obviously got some talent to have got this far. Someone clearly likes you. They don’t send just anyone to one of these meetings, but if you want to rise any higher in this organization, you’ve got to learn how people operate.”