"Bad Asteroid Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martinez Steve)

Bad Asteroid Night
by Steve Martinez
The author works as a clerk at a public library. He’s single, fifty years old, and lives with his brother in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Mr. Martinez has an undergraduate degree in philosophy from George Mason University in Virginia, and an undergraduate degree in math from the University of New Mexico. He tells us, “I’m happy to be living in such interesting times in the worlds of science fiction and scientific discovery.” This is his second published story. The first, “One Hand Clapping,” appeared in our May 1995 issue.
* * * *

Sometimes, Trina envied the robots. There was never anything they’d rather be doing. Give them a new assignment and it became their whole reason for being. For four years, they had been trusted to work asteroid T-Berg 020, mining and replicating with no human presence. But somewhere in that span of time, someone had given them a new purpose, and managed to make off with nearly three billion dollars worth of processed ore and equipment, including a breeding stock of the very latest in self-replicating robots. And not one robot had sounded an alarm. In fact, the remaining robots continued to file a whole history of false reports to cover the theft. By the time a resupply ship with its crew of six arrived, the robots had conveniently forgotten everything that could incriminate them and were hard at work as if nothing had happened, a good two years behind schedule.
At least the hole was still there, properly dug and sealed off. Some of the precious volatiles were back in production. But there was no clue to what had happened. At least nothing Trina could see. Whoever had pulled this off had been thorough. She had almost given up looking for traces of memory, and had been trying to hack the security system to see how it might have been done. She was the official robot jockey of the crew, so everybody was counting on her, especially the captain, so she pushed herself to exhaustion.
It was getting so bad that now Trina’s dreams were blending into reality. She had fallen asleep at her desk with her cheek on one of her flat panel displays. In her dream, she pushed the color-coded program modules all over the screen like layer upon layer of jigsaw tiles, pushing them right off the screen onto the table as she went after something hiding beneath them, if only it would hold still, she was so tired, but she had to go on even when she began turning up pieces of teeth with long crusty roots and tiles covered with mucous, and bones that she cracked open, using one jagged piece to dig little white worms out of the marrow of the other.
She was awakened by the beeping of the com link, and scowled, confused to find her messy desk so similar to her dream. “Yes,” she replied, looking sleepily over the array of data screens for the one that had beeped. It was the task scheduler, one of the robot overseers, asking for some kind of confirmation. It took a minute for Trina to look over the data and get a sense of what project she was being asked about. Apparently one of the robots, Willie 1-9, had gotten himself stuck down a fissure, and the vapors he’d kicked up before he broke his torch had frozen him solidly in place. “Current status?”
“Attempting to extricate Willie 1-9,” replied a synthetic voice.
She grimaced and shook her head at the diversion of resources the scheduler was proposing. This was ridiculous. It would be cheaper to make a new Willie. “Interrupt task. Download Willie 1-9, memfile, all.”
“Task interrupt. Download in progress.” A string of corrupt file messages filled her screen, then, “Download complete.”
“End task. Abandon Willie 1-9. Reassign task, task manager, um, Oversee 2-0.”
“Confirm end task. Query. Task ‘extricate Willie 1-9’ does not exceed current budget parameters. Do you wish to reset current budget parameters for task ‘extricate Willie class worker’? Estimate hours. Estimate resources. Estimate task priority. Please choose reset parameter.”
Funny, the budget parameters were set way high. So then, why was it even asking for confirmation? Oh well, check into it later. “No. Retain current parameters. End task. Abandon Willie 1-9 through exception handler.”
“ID confirmed. Authority confirmed. Resource protocol exception. Abandon Willie 1-9. Reassign task. Task manager Oversee 2-0.”
Now she was wide awake. It could be nothing. Perhaps some strangeness of the dream had carried over—perhaps that and nothing more. Still, she was about to do a little digging when the light from the doorway was blocked by Captain Anders, suited up for an excursion except for his helmet and gloves. He held another spacesuit beside him, dangling like some poor crewman’s fresh-peeled hide.
“Here we go off to the salt mines,” he said, as if talking to the empty spacesuit, “while little miss princess gets to stay behind so she doesn’t get her face dirty. What do we think of that?” Then he changed his voice and spoke out the side of his mouth while dangling his puppet beside him. “We think it sucks.”
“Hey, this was your idea,” said Trina, turning to face him. She expected him to sit across from her in her mini couch, but instead he came beside her and sat against the desk, his ankles crossed.
Up close, Trina recognized the spacesuit he was holding as her own and said, “Oh, did you change your mind?”
“No, I just didn’t want to leave this by the airlock. We don’t want you-know-who to see you’re still here.”
Trina didn’t say anything. She just pulled her lips in and made a slight chewing motion, as she did sometimes when lost in thought, unaware of how monkeylike she looked. She came out of it blinking and puzzled by the amusement on the captain’s face.
“Oh, and your transponder,” he said, carefully removing it from the chest of her suit. “We’ll take this with us so your blip will show up with ours in case he checks the roster.”
“Seems like a lot of trouble.”
“It’s not so much trouble.” He let the spacesuit hang folded over his hands like a dead animal, casual, or suggestive, Trina wasn’t sure. “We’ll only be gone a few hours. I’d take him along just to get him out of your hair, but then he’d be in my hair.”
“I still don’t see what’s the big deal. We work together just fine.”
“Yes, I know you do. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have any problem. But this isn’t normal.”
“What you mean is, he’s not normal.”
“Oh, that’s what it is. You think this is personal? Trina, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to trust you if you think I’m just going on some personal grudge against him.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Look, if he was a regular crewman, I wouldn’t care how many arms he had, as long as he can do the work. But he’s not a regular crewman. He’s a protocol officer. What the hell is that? Have you seen his job description? Some kind of glorified safety inspector, is all I can make of it. With special authorities he can invoke. Hell, I don’t even know if I outrank him. Let me ask you this—how come we never knew we needed one before? We sure as hell didn’t need a protocol officer when we set up this place, so why now?”
“It’s not his fault.”
“I know. When you come right down to it, nothing is his fault. He didn’t ask to be born, or made, or uncorked—whatever you call it. He didn’t buy out our contracts. I hate to mess up your dreams, Trina, but I hope you weren’t planning on working up to your own time-share condo on this berg or any other. You’re working for Gnomonics, now.”
“Doesn’t matter. They’ve still got to honor our contracts.”
“Your contract was with Novinco, back when people thought human beings would be settling out here. That’s history. Novinco is just a subsidiary now. It’s cheaper to breed ganglies to live in space. They’re designed for it.”
“But we’ve still got a contract.”
“And what I’m saying is, we used to have a contract. Now we’ve got a contract plus a pair of beady little eyes to go along with it, watching over us. For our own safety. Right.”
“Okay, so we just don’t give them any grounds....”
“That’s going to be a little tricky right now, don’t you think? I mean, we are missing a few billion dollars’ worth of company property. Do you realize how they’d love to pin it on us?”
“But we’re innocent!”
Captain Anders opened his mouth and slapped his head, then held up the spacesuit in front of him and spoke to it. “So what are you worried about, old timer?” When he released the suit, its beginning-to-fall was so slow it almost seemed to stand. Then he pushed it and it caved in like an octopus, descending into a gentle collapse on the couch. Trina copied the motion and sank back into her chair, feeling stupid.
“It’s a perfect set-up,” Anders continued. “The timing couldn’t be better. That lawsuit with the Consortium has a lot of weight behind it. They could pull the plug on Gnomonics. In effect, Earth’s ban on monkeying with human genes would be extended to the whole solar system. And all they have to prove is what’s true, that the ganglies have been unlawfully deranged.”
“I wouldn’t call Rakshasa deranged.”
“Whatever you call it. He’s a piece of the company mind. There are certain thoughts he can’t think because he has an unnatural loyalty to the company that made him.”
“You can be a company man without being a gangly.”
“Yeah, but at least a company man is still a man. Or a woman. We’re all company men on this boat, but at least what we do is out of greed or lust or pity, whatever. I’m telling you, these guys have it inbred into them not to be able to think outside the company box. That’s why he’s here, because they want something here that’s not one of us, someone who will file reports on us without the inconvenience of friendship or affection getting in the way.” He frowned.
“They don’t even have to find us guilty of anything, just drag us into a courtroom and raise a cloud of suspicion. Because we’re human, so, to their minds, that means we could be bribed, we could have been greedy, whatever. So some shareholders get to thinking maybe a special breed of demented workers doesn’t look so bad after all. And Rakshasa is going to see everything the way the company wants him to see it. He’ll stack all the facts against us in the worst light. The only way to really get off the hook is to come up with the big clue ourselves. Now do you see why I don’t want him working on this with you?”
She nodded, and the captain continued. “Besides, I’d feel kind of guilty about leaving you alone with him if he knew you were here, you know what I mean?” She gave him a blank look. “It’s just that, um, I don’t think an artificial species can leave everything behind all at once, in one step. Because if I was him, I don’t think a ganglyoid female would look all that—”
“Okay, I get it.”
“Are you sure? I know you feel sorry for him.”