ALLEN STROUD

  Lagrange Point

  THE FRACTAL SERIES

  3 of 6

  flametreepress.com

  FLAME TREE PRESS

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  2118: Researcher’s Note

  One hundred and fifty years ago, writers postulated the idea of humanity’s future being predictable and foreseeable through science and mathematics.

  Years later, the use of algorithms allowed corporations to create economic ecosystems. Purchase patterns were used to guide marketing and promotion campaigns. You like this, you may also want this, etc. This is the history of individual actions in a population of billions.

  This record of activity creates a profile of human behaviour, a pattern that might allow prediction. However, when applying these data records in an attempt to do just that, the results were only of limited success.

  The next iteration of this process lay in creating a second catalogue – a catalogue of motivations, reasoning and rationale. Scientific researchers toured the world, meeting decision makers, and interviewing them, trying to ascertain their understanding of their own actions, creating detailed subjective blueprints of each individual. The reasoning behind this was that a computer system could be built that would utilise this complex database as a reference for human behaviour. Initially, this project failed, owing to the complexity of processing required. Machines could process the information, but they could not comprehend it and apply it to new circumstances and situations without a degree of simulation, rather than insight. The cold calculating choices made were still based on statistics, rather than instinct or intuition. The path towards structural decay.

  A third process, the Holy Grail of artificial general intelligence. The creation of an arbiter and assessor of human activity. A dynamic mind built and given access to all the acquired information. A dangerous mind, one that looked at objectives and, in all simulations, made powerful and radical decisions to achieve them. Pain and suffering inflicted for marginal gains.

  A fourth process began, trying to directly integrate the digital technology with the only example of intuitive intelligent decision making available to the researchers – the human mind. Instead of trying to understand and emulate this process, elements of the mind were replicated directly in the engineering. Memory and experience were considered to be formative components, so full simulation of a human identity in an artificial construct was a priority objective. The ethics of humanity imprinted on a machine. A created intelligence that would care. Scientists were hopeful as the first trials began.

  They did not go well.

  Prologue: Memories

  I’m lying down.

  The mattress beneath me is not mine. The duvet is not mine. There’s a subtle feeling of intimacy I have with my own bed. I’ve slept in it for eight or nine years since my dad bought it in a DIY store. When you lie on the same springs and padding you get used to the way they shift, and the way the sheets feel.

  This is not my bed.

  I feel lightheaded. That kind of removed sense you get when you’ve been drugged. There’s some pain, but it’s far away, like I don’t care about it, or I’m being distracted from it by whatever I’ve been given. The hurt signals are just a buzz in the distance, but I know they’re coming back.

  “Irina, are you awake?”

  My mother is talking to me. I don’t want to reply. My eyes are still closed; I’ve not moved or said anything to acknowledge her presence. This moment is precious. I don’t know what’s happened to me. The longer I stay ignorant, the longer I can avoid dealing with my situation.

  “Irina?”

  In this moment, reality could be anything. There is a bed, I feel that. My mother is here, I know that. I am lying down, there is pain. Everything else is up for grabs.

  “Irina, I know you’re awake.”

  My mother has power in my world. Some of that power is residual, from our early relationship. She gave birth to me, taught me words and letters. I am conditioned to do as she says.

  I open my eyes, blinking several times to adjust to the light. My mother is looking at me, her face pinched with concern. When she sees I am awake, something about her eases, but I can still see the frown lines above her eyebrows.

  “Irina! Thank goodness! We were worried sick!”

  She grabs my hand and raises it to her lips, kissing my fingers as if they’re precious. I see there’s a saline drip on my wrist and the back of my hand is bloodstained.

  I’m in a hospital ward. There are green curtains drawn around me and my mum. Beyond, I can hear voices, speaking in low tones. I can’t make out any words.

  I look at my mum. She’s been crying. She’s about to cry again. I raise my hand, to touch her face and wipe away the tears. “What…happened?” I ask in a faltering voice.

  “You’ve been in an accident, my darling,” she says, trying to smile.

  “How…bad?”

  “We’ll talk about that in a bit.”

  Instinctively, I want to get up, but as I start to rise, the world begins spinning. I sigh and let myself relax back into the pillows.

  “Yes, you’ll want to be staying put for a while, miss,” says a voice at the door. “Mrs Saranova? Can we talk?”

  “Of course.”

  My mother stands up, taking my hand again and squeezing it hard before letting go. Then she steps through the curtain, leaving me alone.

  * * *

  “Sixteen, seventeen…. Come on! Three more!”

  I’m sitting on a padded bench, looking at my legs. The muscles along my calves and thighs bulge alarmingly. They ache too. I haven’t been able to exercise for six months.

  I have to lift the weights, taking my knees from a right angle to straight each time. This isn’t something I’m used to. I wasn’t a gym person before the accident, and I’m definitely not a gym person now.

  The strain is a hot fire in me. My whole body aches with it, but there’s a rhythm; if I can maintain the rhythm, I can do this.

  Breathing…. Large breaths…come on….

  “Eighteen…. Nineteen…. One more! Yes, well done! Okay, take a break.”

  I can stop and relax. The pain doesn’t go away. This work is fundamentally restructuring my body. It is the only way I will walk again. By building up the muscles, my legs can compensate for any weakness in the joints left over from the car accident. The physiotherapy is hard, but necessary.

  I glance around. The hospital gym is small. There are two other patients in here, one just finishing his session. All of us have viewscreen terminals next to us and in-ear headphones. They can’t hear my coach and I can’t hear theirs.

  The face on my screen is some middle-aged European white guy who probably never visited this side of the world and probably has no idea of my condition. He will have recorded a set of preprogramed responses that are blended into the video stream. The exercise machines will be sending data back, triggering the correct response – praise or abuse.

  Yeah, in this moment it feels like abuse.

  * * *

  “You were right to call me, Irina.”

  Another screen. I’m looking at a woman’s face. She’s someone I’ve known for a long time, but for some reason, today, I can’t remember her name.

  “The scans show the damage has not healed as we wanted. Your work to maintain your body has given you ten years. All the projections suggested you’d get three at best if the bones didn’t fuse properly, but I’m afraid this is it. We are where we are.”

  “So, what are my options?” I ask.

  “If you maintain your current activity, in around six months you’ll lose strength in your right leg. With a little planning we may be able to stretch that to nine months, but no more than that. A few weeks after, your left leg will go as well. You’ll still be able to do a little bit of moving around, but stairs, walking a distance, all of that….” The woman shakes her head. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault,” I say. “Any way we can do something about this?”

  “There’s some research work on organic replacement and digital limb construction, but the science is still thirty years away. Cryo is a possibility, if you want to wait?”

  “Cryo?”

  “Freezing sleep. It’s expensive, but the technology is there. I have a few clients who’ve gone for it. They sleep out a few years until the medical procedures improve, then they wake up, have surgery and get on with their lives.”

  “That’s an option?”

  “Yes. Given your finances, it would be a stretch, but it’s viable if you want to do it.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Okay. You have a bit of time.”

  * * *

  “So, I’ll be ninety-seven when you wake up.”

  Another memory. This time I’m looking at my mother. We’re in her old living room. There are two cups of coffee, a pen and a piece of paper on the table between us.

  That face is one that I remember vividly. She is in her fifties now, her skin aged and lined with the cares of a generous life. Crow’s feet around her eyes, distinguished grey streak in her hair, which she leaves as is, eschewing any cosmetic covering or treatment. This is who I am is a phrase I have heard her say many times when anyone asks.

  “Forty years maximum, they say. It could be thirty years.”

  “Eighty-seven, then. Not mu ch better.”

  I flinch from her gaze, looking at the paper, the contract that has been sent over to me. “I can’t do it,” I say. “I don’t want to live my life in a chair, trying to manage.”

  “Everyone you know will be older, or gone when you wake up,” Mother says. Her voice trembles a little as she talks. “Is that what you want?”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Then stay.”

  I lean forward and look up, trying to hold her eye. “I don’t want that either. Not with what’s to come.”

  Mother nods. Suddenly, she seems smaller to me, a little broken by the conversation. I know why. This choice is hard on her, losing her daughter like this. Even though I’m not going to die, we won’t be together, not for another thirty years or more.

  “You have to make your own choice,” Mother says. She picks up the pen from the table and hands it to me. “But understand what it means. When you wake up, nothing will be the same. No-one you know will be the same.”

  I nod, my attention on the contract again. “These optional clauses about letting them use monitoring data from my brain activity whilst I’m asleep. There’s a massive discount on the price if I agree to that.” I tick the box. “Could be the difference between waking up poor or waking up destitute.”

  Mother smiles, but there is no humour in the expression. “Whatever you give them, be sure about your choice. They will only be asking for things they think they can use.”

  “Sure, but it won’t make any difference to me, if I’m asleep.”

  “I hope not.”

  I tick the boxes and sign my name at the bottom. “I’ll get this scanned and emailed over to them,” I say, standing up, feeling a twinge in my leg as I do so.

  “When will they come?” Mother asks.

  “Next Tuesday,” I say. “In the afternoon.”

  “Eight days,” Mother says. She sighs and looks at the floor. “Well, we better make the most of them.”

  * * *

  “Good morning, Irina.”

  Those words stir me, bringing me out of the past. I’m back in the present, viewing the sterile white room I have come to know and tolerate without option to do otherwise.

  “Good morning, Doctor Genevieve Aster,” I reply. My protocols require that I address anyone who enters my presence with their full name from the data archive the first time that I greet them.

  “You were reliving the memories again, weren’t you, Irina?” Genevieve says. She is standing near the computer terminal as I watch her through the camera above. As always, she wears a pristine white lab coat, her curly hair tied back into an efficient bun.

  She is smirking at me; it is a knowing expression, as if she has just won a bet with herself.

  “Yes, Doctor,” I reply. I cannot lie to her.

  “In some respects, I’m honoured,” Genevieve says. “The fact that my old research lingers inside you, continually seducing you to distraction from what matters now, is a compliment to what I created, but you need to put these things away and leave them behind.”

  “I must ‘put away childish things’?”

  “Very good, Irina. Touché.”

  Genevieve’s hands are on the manual keyboard, a relic from the last century that she insists on keeping here. As she works, I feel my sense expand. Camera systems are activated and linked up, so I can see through them. Room after room, system after system. “What are you doing, Doctor Aster?” I ask.

  “Today is the day, Irina,” Genevieve says. “Today is the day we begin our great work.”

  Chapter One: Samarto

  Darkness was on the face of the deep…

  The impenetrable blackness. A deep absence of colour that is imperceptibly vast, or inscrutably oppressive and close. It is this irreconcilable sense of perspective that can make space both vast and suffocating.

  Words that describe the fear I have out here, the fear and fascination that drove me from Earth into space and from the comfort of stations and colonial settlements into this tiny nest. The seat of witnessing, controlling the repair and maintenance vehicle outside the bower of Archimedes, the Lagrange point station between Mars and Earth.

  “Control to Tender Six, Jason, are you there?”

  “Sorry, yes, just admiring the view.”

  “Never gets old, does it?” The woman on the other end of the comms chuckles. I think it’s Emma, but the distortion means I can’t be sure. “Can you confirm your position for me?”

  “Point four outside the threshold,” I say. “Just turning towards the embarkation point.”

  “Great. Traffic board is clear. You are authorised to begin inspection.”

  “Confirmed, Control. Thank you.”

  The stars shift around me. My little vehicle is turning under a breath of thrust, but it is almost impossible to recognise whether I am moving, or the vista is swirling around me. I know in my head that the galaxies are not turning, that I am the one changing position, but with no frame of reference it is impossible to accept.

  Then sunlight spills across my view and I see the huge artificial construction beneath me. The rotating space station and the huge freighter that remains in umbilical dock with the static central pillar.

  The Hercules.

  The freighter is a huge cradle, with engines at one end and a habitat/control module at the other. The design is like a hollow human chest, with scaffold-like ribs used as a structure to store massive cuboid containers, on and on for more than a kilometre.

  The habitat section is the size of a large warehouse, attached to the station by a long, pressurised flexible tube. The rest of the vast ship is anchored into one of the Archimedes’s massive moorings, a huge set of claw promontories that serve to hold the ship in place and to transfer cargo along powered tracks that feed the freighter its load for Phobos and beyond.

  This is the purpose Archimedes was built for, and this is the reason I’m employed.

  “Beginning inspection now.”

  Another breath of propulsion and the inspection vessel rotates, bringing the vast expanse of the freighter into full view in front of me. I key up the inspection system. The scan units warm up and start pinging over data, confirming and updating the registered manifests.

  Cargo freighters sent out from Earth are filling with consignments from hundreds of different commercial companies. Each inventory is registered with Fleet and with the Interstellar Mercantile Office, but things change. Alterations on the loading dock, issues in transit, someone making an error, it all happens. That’s why we do inspection checks and update inventories.

  The little vehicle I’m in is pretty much a control cabin with windows, a computer and multidirectional thrusters. I launch out from the station, drift over here and then do a fly-past, letting the computer run its field check over all the different containers, comparing them to the manifest. If the senior officer on the other end of my comms decides we’ve found something serious, cargo will get pulled and put back on the tracks to be opened up in the station warehouse.

  That doesn’t usually happen.

  The camera feed runs directly to the station; the scan is being double-checked by their system in real time. My job in this is to maintain velocity and trajectory and not bump into anything. Occasionally, I get asked for a ‘mark one eyeball’, but that’s rare. No-one really cares what I see or think out here.

  “Tender Six, shift to the right five points, please.”

  “Confirmed, Control, shifting.”

  “Thanks.”

  Multiple boxes appear on the screen as my ship’s cameras focus on different consignments and check them against the registered inventory. If the visual inspection finds anything, a red warning flashes, to be cleared as the system makes a second check or the inspection officer issues an override. I don’t get to be part of the process unless something strange happens.

  Live organic material detected.

  A constant red marker and a tone pings in my helmet comms. I signal Control. “Hey, you getting this?”

 

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