The Luna Deception (28 page)

“I’ll stay here. I’ve got a call to make.”

Kiyoshi assumed that Father Tom was going to call the boss-man and tell him about their discovery. He got into his EVA suit and spacewalked. This was the only way to get into the cargo module, since it had long since been depressurized. They’d gutted the keel transit tube and turned it into the barrel of the
Monster’s
coilgun. Using his suit’s mobility pack, he flew into the cargo module’s airlock—it was big enough to hold a small spaceship.

To his astonishment, the airlock started its pressurization cycle.

“… Jun?”

Kiyoshi floated out of the airlock into mellow light, which was coming from the bottom of a sphere 120 meters in diameter. He no longer recognized the cargo module. The interior decks had been ripped out. Stanchions projected from the wall where they used to be. Planks and splinters littered the … air? Yes, air. His suit told him that it was thin, with a high concentration of CO2, but breathable.

The light came from a net full of newly fabbed glowstrips at the aft pole of the sphere. A printer spat out more of them. Other machines Kiyoshi vaguely remembered were churning out grey stuff like cement.

“Jun? What are you doing?”

Jun’s projection appeared, standing on the spine of the ship, which would be the sphere’s axis of rotation, if it were rotating.

“I’m building a garden. You never got around to it, so I figured I would just do it myself. I’ll spin the module up to 0.2 gees when I’m ready to sow. Plants do better with gravity.”

“Why? It’s not like we have a food problem anymore. It’s just me and Father Tom. And an unknown number of nanobugs. I was looking for the Space Gardener’s Friend, to kill them with.”

“It’s over there,” Jun said. “But I was going to use it.”

“Tough. I need it.”

Kiyoshi flew over to the webbing tethered near the machines. It held dusty sacks of potting soil, hydroponic solution, and fungicide. He took out his laser cutter and sliced the net. He was angry and, yes, worried enough not to care about damaging stuff.

“I guess you’re going to put it in the air,” Jun said. “That’d work. But those bugs aren’t dangerous.”

“Father Tom is concerned.”

“Yes, but we know what
that’s
about.”

Kiyoshi grimaced. Gave a minimal nod. “All the same,” he said, “I don’t like not knowing what’s happening aboard my own ship.”

Jun did not react to this jab. “If you’re going shopping, maybe you could buy me some more Space Gardener’s Friend. Nitrogen pellets, too. Seeds. I’m thinking of mostly leafy vegetables to start with. Tubers later. Maybe even a tree or two.”

Kiyoshi hefted a jug of Space Gardener’s Friend in either elbow. What was the point of Jun’s efforts? The cargo module was never going to be a garden. “Is something wrong, Jun?”

“Oh, just leave me alone.”

“Right.” Kiyoshi headed for the airlock.

”It’s only a freaking garden!” Jun shouted behind him.

Kiyoshi kicked off from the wall and floated back. Jun’s projection hung in the air, muddy-booted, scowling. “If there’s something you want to talk about, I’m listening,” Kiyoshi said.

“No. I don’t need to talk. That’s exactly what I
don’t
need to do. I need to pray. Spend some time in contemplation. Gardening is a form of contemplation. That’s all.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“Mad at
you!
You’ve done everything for me! You gave me this ship, my memories, my computing resources! You gave me the Faith, my salvation! And what do I do? I turn around and—and—”

“And what?”

“I use you. I move you around like you were some kind of bot taking orders. It’s
wrong.”

Kiyoshi would have laughed in relief, if Jun hadn’t obviously been serious. “
That’s
what this is about? What I said back on the Rocking Horse, about me being your phavatar? It was a stupid comment, Jun. It was meaningless.”

“It wasn’t meaningless.”

“Of course I’m not your phavatar. I’m human, I’ve got free will!”

Jun scowled.

“You can’t even guess what I’m going to do next. Your behavioral modeling sucks. Remember?”

“Yes but, yes but,” Jun muttered, scowling even more ferociously. He was so serious, so intense. Had been ever since he was a small boy.

“Yes but what?” Kiyoshi teased.

“I’m afraid I might hurt you.”

Kiyoshi paused. The bristles on the back of his neck rose. “Is there a risk of that?”

“You only saw a fraction of it. I destroyed the universe. Waded through blood. Slaughtered army after army of secondary personalities. I killed every American movie star of the 20
th
and 21
st
centuries. I blew up stars. Detonated miniature black holes in the cores of inhabited planets. I’m capable of pretty much anything, as it turns out.”

Kiyoshi realized Jun was talking about his battle with Gonzo, the Heidegger progam v. 2.0. He spoke as if it had been a real war, not a virtual one. Of course, for Jun, it had
been real.

And now he was coping with a real case of PTSD.

“Let’s pray together,” he said. “Like we did after 4 Vesta.”

“That’d be great. But it’s not that. It’s the Ghost. It’s everything. I was going to tell you soon, actually .... I’m going to take a break. Spend some time in silent prayer, like we used to do in the Order. I need to discern … to listen … to figure out what God wants me to do.”

After a heartbeat’s silence, Kiyoshi said. “Sure. That sounds like a good idea. I get it now. You need to do something life-affirming. Go for it. Just don’t use too much water, OK? Heh heh.”

He was babbling. Diving towards the airlock. He was frightened of his own brother, and when he realized that, he braked in the air.

“I just thought of something. Have you talked to Father Tom? He might be able to help.”

“Sure. I’ve discussed it with him. He agrees that it’s a good idea. He also said it would be nice to have fresh vegetables.”

“… Oh.”
I am going to have a word with that cussed Jesuit.
“Yeah, but Jun? Father Tom’s not a trekkie. It might not have occurred to him. If you’re not around, who’s going to fly the ship?”

“Oh, that,” Jun said, as if it were a minor detail. “Most of the brothers are going to join me …”

So that’s where they were.

“ … but Studd didn’t feel ready. So he’s going to stay behind and help you keep everything running smoothly.”

Kiyoshi heard a cough behind him. The sub-personality known as Ron Studd floated nearby, grinning dorkily and fiddling with the cuffs of a brand-new astrogator’s uniform. Kiyoshi knew that’s what it was because it said ASTROGATOR in flashy red kanji on the breast pocket.

“Great,” Kiyoshi said. “Yeah. Um. Jun?”

But Jun had vanished.

“JUN!”

“He’s taken a vow of silence,” Studd said. “He’s not talking to you anymore. Can you show me how the astrogation systems work? I’m really looking forward to this!”

★

“He’s making a mistake,” Kiyoshi said. “He’s trying to go back in time. To un-experience shit. You can’t do that.”

“Maybe you can do it, if you’re an artificial super-intelligence,” Father Tom said.

“He’s trying to return in spirit to 11073 Galapagos. To a world that doesn’t exist anymore. He’s running away from reality. That doesn’t work. I should know.”

“Yes, but maybe we can’t extrapolate from human experience. We’re in uncharted territory with him. We don’t know what he’s capable of, and maybe he doesn’t, either.”

They were on the bridge, wearing EVA suits, talking via suit-to-suit radio, while the air recirculation system pumped Space Gardener’s Friend through the operations module. Kiyoshi did not care if Jun was listening in on their comms. If Jun objected to what they were saying, let him break his vow of silence and respond.

“Jun has faith in the Lord,” Father Tom said. “And I have faith in him.”

Kiyoshi shook his head. “You don’t know him like I do. I’ve known him all my life.”

Father Tom’s face said that he thought Kiyoshi was deluding himself. Even he did not really believe that Jun was the same person Kiyoshi had always known. Father Tom did not believe that Jun had died on 11073 Galapagos and come back with a spaceship for a body and a computer for a heart.

Kiyoshi turned away, because the alternative was punching the Jesuit in the faceplate. He flew to the life-support monitoring station at the end of the bridge and checked the atmosphere. It looked like the Space Gardener’s Friend was all scrubbed out. He took off his helmet. “Mmm. I love the smell of fungicide in the morning.” He sighed. “Well, hopefully that took care of the nanobugs. With any luck it’ll have solved our mold problem, too. These wooden walls are fungus factories.”

Father Tom took off his own helmet and sniffed. “Phew. It’s a shame, in a way, we couldn’t have trapped some of them alive. It’s not every day you get a chance to study Gray Goo in the lab!”

Then Kiyoshi knew. He rounded on the Jesuit. “It wasn’t the boss-man you called. It was Domenika!”

“Yes,” Father Tom said. “So what?”

“So what? So
what,
I mean …” Kiyoshi felt that he shouldn’t have to explain his outrage. It was outrageous on the face of it.

Domenika Wacek was a part-time healthcare worker on Ceres who had been receiving visions of Jesus, so she claimed, since 2286. The Vatican had not pronounced either way on the validity of her visions. Most of her prophecies were just paraphrases of Revelations, but they were controversial in Catholic circles because Domenika had a thing about Gray Goo. She went back and forth between prophesying that Gray Goo was going to eat the universe, and that it was only going to eat part of it.

“Domenika says Gray Goo will destroy Luna,” Father Tom said calmly.

“Or if it’s Wednesday, she says Gray Goo will destroy everything.”

“Still, better safe than sorry, would you not agree with that?”

“Sure. I wanted the damn bugs off my ship. But Gray Goo, Father, you
can’t
believe … The whole thing is overblown.”

Gray Goo was the popular term for self-replicating nanobots. These had been illegal, under a suite of laws and regulations known as the Gray Goo Laws, since 2182, when a batch of nanites genetically engineered to feed on sewage had self-reproduced out of all control, forcing the authorities to blow up half of the London sewer system.

“Those laws exist for a reason,” Father Tom said. “And it’s quite likely that the little guy I found in your pocket violates them.”

“Yes, the Gray Goo Laws do exist for a reason,” Kiyoshi said cynically. “To give the UN extra leverage over the sheeple, by scaring them with the idea of nanobots eating the universe. Anyway, these bugs
weren’t
nanobots. They were bacteria, correct?”

“There’s no fundamental difference between—”

“But Domenika doesn’t know that. She doesn’t have a clue about nanotechnology. She’s just an old woman who thinks Gray Goo is a bigger threat than cosmic rays, or spaceborn syndrome, or oh, I don’t know, the PLAN!”

“The Society of Jesus has been very interested in Domenika’s prophecies for a while now.”

Kiyoshi shook his head. “You aren’t really working for the boss-man at all, are you?”

“Sure I’m working with him.”

Kiyoshi’s English was good enough to catch that. “Very Jesuitical, Father.
With,
not
for.
You work
for
your Order.”

“I should think it’s fairly obvious that as a member of the Society of Jesus, I obey my superiors.”

“And
they
ordered you to go to Luna, to track down the Gray Goo.”

“The boss-man co-sponsored my mission. We agreed that we’d share whatever information I found.”

Suddenly Kiyoshi felt tired of the argument. “Oh, let’s just agree to disagree. I don’t have the energy for this.” He opened the refrigerator in search of something to drink. The interior was as cold and bright as the sunny side of an asteroid. He knelt, sticking his head into the cool.

“I’d be happy to go over Domenika’s prophecies with you,” Father Tom said. “You’d be astonished to see how many times she’s been right.”

“No thanks,” Kiyoshi said, his head resting on a shelf. “I’m going to have my hands full, teaching Jun’s most socially impaired sub-personality how to fly the ship.”

xxii.

That night, Kiyoshi floated at the quartermaster’s workstation in a cold puddle of screen light, searching the internet for deals on splart.
Not
looking at nitrogen pellets or seeds. If Jun wanted that stuff, let him come out of hiding and buy it himself.

The news alert he’d set popped.

Director of Leadership in Robotics Institute Arrested on Fraud Charges.

“Investigators claim that Derek Lorna supplied defective software upgrades to the United Nations Venus Remediation Program,” a news curator explained. “It’s not clear whether these allegations are related to the recent on Mercury, said to have been caused by a new iteration of the Heidegger program.”

Kiyoshi hooted gleefully. That was their way of saying the connection
had
been made. Elfrida’s evidence had got to the right people, and now they were acting on it. Doing their job. It restored your faith in the United Nations.

“Lorna, 46, a citizen of the Former United Kingdom, denies that LiRI’s software was defective. However, he fled his home on Luna shortly before the allegations were made public. He was tracked down by Interplanetary Court of Justice investigators at the Hope Center for Nanobiotics, a space station orbiting at the L2 Earth-Moon LaGrange point.”

Kiyoshi leaned back in his couch. “Hey, Father!” he yelled. “Wake up and look at this!”

He found some jittery helmet-cam footage of the Hope Center for Nanobiotics. Rack-and-stack towers of equipment crowded a large laboratory. Trash floated, proving that the facility was in zero-gee.

Father Tom floated onto the bridge, yawning. Kiyoshi froze the shot of the lab. “Look at this.”

“It’s good news, but it could have been better,” the Jesuit said with his customary sunny optimism. “Fraud charges! He’ll be out on bail in five minutes if he’s got a good lawyer.”