What was that, ship? he asked.
What was what? said the flier.
Justinian sounded puzzled. It looked like something falling from the sky.
There was a moments hesitation before the flier spoke. I just did a ten-second replay. I couldnt see anything, although I should remind you I am working with severely curtailed senses. My status as a Turing machine may also mean that patterns in the data that might be discernible to a full AI will not be apparent to me.
Justinian was suddenly confused. He was trying to remember something, something that was just on the tip of his tongue.
Do you want me to go back? the flier asked.
No. Ive got a ship to catch, Justinian said, but he sounded unsure.
Sorry, Leslie said, appearing at his side. I shouldnt have said that about Anya.
Wordlessly, Justinian looked at the downcast robot.
I wanted to say, too, that were near the Bottle. That could be what caused the illusion of something falling.
Justinian headed to the other side of the flier.
Not that youd want to go down there. You havent got the time.
Justinian felt a spasm of annoyance at the robots words. I know.
There is an AI in the Bottle. It could still be active, for all we know. Its probably best avoided, though.
Why?
I just think you should avoid it, thats all. I wonder if it can see out? It might recognize you.
A pause. The robot spoke on carelessly: Not that it matters. We havent got the time to get down there anyway.
Yes, we have, said Justinian. The flier can always go faster. Ship, take us down to the Bottle. Now.
Justinian never doubted the rumors that the EA could influence your actions without you knowing it; that all free will died when the AIs assumed power after the Transition. How could he doubt it, when he himself was part of that process, working as he did for Social Care? Still, he liked to retain the defining human belief that he was the master of his own destiny. So the gradually creeping realization that Leslie
had manipulated him into making a detour during his spontaneous journey to catch the shuttle off planet came as a real blow to his ego. Here he was taking his child into further danger when he should be wasting no time in leaving this planet. What buttons had Leslie successfully pressed in order to persuade him to make this unnecessary landing?
But maybe the landing wasnt unnecessary; maybe there would be a clue He dismissed the thought quickly. That was just his ego trying to salvage some semblance of control. He had to face the facts: humans may choose the individual steps, but it was the AIs who chose the dance.
He should tell the flier to resume its course to the spaceport right awayand yet, and yetHe felt to do so would lose him face in front of the robot.
It was ridiculous. Even when he knew he was being manipulated, he couldnt back down.
And now the flier was touching down and the rear hatchway was dropping open and red shards of light were dancing around the interior of the cabin.
Just for a moment, he was sure he saw his own face, projected onto the orange wall of the flier, formed in the patterns of the dancing red lights.
An idea occurred to him. He opened his travel bag and pulled out a thin packet. Quickly, he slipped it into his pocket.
The flier perched at an angle on a tilted slab in the Minor Mountain range. Even with its rear landing treads extended as far as they would go and the forward treads pulled in tight, the craft could still not be leveled. Justinian stumbled down the ramp towards the impossible red jewel of the Bottle. If you looked at it from the corner of your eye, the Bottle looked a little like a dome, roughly the size of the flier itself. If you looked at it straight on, your eye got lost in following the strange curves, and then the Bottle looked like nothing that could be described. Someone had once said it was like a Klein bottle given an extra twist, but that was a human perspective. In the absence of fully functioning AIs, no one had managed to expand further on that explanation.
The air was thin and cold up here, the sky a pale dome above the blue-grey slabs and tilted ledges that formed the jagged landscape. When the thirty-two AI pods of the Gateway terraforming project had become operational, and the first trickle of the ensuing flood of Schrödinger boxes had begun to flicker across the planet, it had been the pod located in this inhospitable terrain that had first requested to study them. Its claim was a sensible one; there was little to do up here in the primary stages of planetary conversion, and during this phase its processing spaces were intended to provide little more than backup for the other, busier AIs. The other pods had concurred with its request, and so Pod 16 had begun its study of the Schrödinger boxes.
That study had lasted just under thirty-five seconds before it was abruptly terminated. The pod had made an urgent broadcast to the other thirty-one pods that was cut short before completion: a fragment of complex eleven-dimensional code, then the beginning of a plaintext message. The code seemed to describe two Calabi-Yau spaces; the plaintext message consisted of sixteen bytes: UrgentAbando-.