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FEBRUARY 5,-28 LD
2097 CE

… Convoy Seven has been assigned the mission designated Noumenon, the express purpose of which is to visit the star LQ Pyx, determine the cause of its variable output, conduct in-depth proximity research for two decades, and return home to educate earthbound researchers with regard to its origin, scientific significance, and viability as a resource …

The sweet smell of buttercream frosting mixed with the pungent scent of black coffee. Under the fluorescent lights of the campus meeting hall, toasts were made and welcomes were given. It was supposed to be a party—the first time all of Reggie’s team members were together in the same place—but he wanted nothing more than to get down to business.

His team consisted of a baker’s dozen head thinkers, each in charge of a subteam—people Reggie had never counted on meeting—who would really make the work come together.

Now his team leaders were all here, in person. They represented five countries, and two thirds of them were still jetlagged. They only had a few short days together before everyone was expected back at their respective posts and day jobs, so a party—even one as casual as this—felt like an unnecessary drain on their scant resources.

“Breathe, my boy. Relax. Give them all a chance to unwind before you throw new loads on their backs,” said Dr. McCloud. He’d retired after convincing the dean to hire Reggie, but had returned to share in this meeting of the minds.

“But we don’t have much time. And teleconferencing is a bitch.”

“Oh, I know, I know.” A sly grin crossed McCloud’s lips, an expression akin to one Reggie had seen many times during his graduate work.

“What?” he asked cautiously. “That look used to mean all-nighters.”

“No, no. I’m—you’re going to make an old fool say it, aren’t you?”

“Say what?”

“That I’m proud of you, Reggie. You’re so sure, so focused. You’ve gained so much confidence since that day I soiled your pants for you.”

“Some people need a slap in the face—apparently I needed a lap full of beer.”

“I don’t think that little incident is what did it.”

“Then what?”

McCloud threw out his arms toward a comely Greek woman headed their way. “Confidence, thy name is Abigail Marinos.”

“Leonard.” She smiled warmly and accepted his hug. “I’m so glad you could make it.”

“What, and miss our boy in action? Not in the cards. He won’t shake me till I’m a stiff.”

She laughed. “I hope not. I’ll be right back, Reggie. I have to go check on a group of students.”

“Afraid they’ll start tearing out pages for paper airplane material?” McCloud asked, clearly delighted by the idea.

“More afraid they’re all chatting on their implants instead of focusing on the assigned chapters. I swear—they adore pontificating about how much they love books, but most of them haven’t read squat.”

McCloud slapped Reggie on the back. “Knew plenty of those in my day.”

“What? I was a great student!”

McCloud laughed. Abigail leaned in and kissed Reggie. “Well, I know you’re great,” she said, then promptly left the room.

“Have you proposed to her yet? I’m not getting any younger, and I’d like to dance with her at your wedding before I die. Consider it a last request.”

Reggie patted McCloud’s tweed-covered shoulder. “Oh, you’ll be around for plenty more than that. She and I have talked about it—getting married. For a long time I was afraid to broach the subject.”

“Why was that?”

Reggie gestured around.

“Because of the project? I’ve heard a lot of lame excuses for a man keeping his emotions all knotted up in his bowels—”

With a light touch on the arm, Reggie interrupted him. “Because of the possibility. You know, that I might …”

“That they might put you onboard.”

“Exactly.”

Laughter erupted in a corner of the room, pulling them from that somber thought, and they both looked over to see Donald Matheson—the mission expert on social systems—doing a drunken chicken dance on one of the flimsy folding tables. His blue shirttails dangled freely from his trousers, and he made a strange sort of beak-like gesture around his overtly-large and very Roman nose.

“He’s going to hurt himself,” Reggie mumbled, moving in the direction of the ruckus.

McCloud stopped him. “You reap what you sow. Adults are the same as children—let them touch the stove once and they won’t touch it again. You were explaining why you haven’t driven off the cliff of marital bliss just yet.” Reggie tried, halfheartedly, to pull away, but the professor’s grip was firm. “Someone will catch him if he falls, Reggie. Damn it, I don’t get to see you that often these days, Straifer. Speak.”

Reggie shifted restlessly on his toes and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I asked years ago if she could come. The consortium made it clear that no nonessential personnel would be allowed. If I were to go, she couldn’t.” McCloud nodded; Reggie continued. “And it’s not like I’d be a soldier going off to war, with some slim chance of returning. It would be the end.”

“So, what was your plan? To break up? ‘Nice knowing you, kid, but duty calls’?”

McCloud tried to catch his eye, but Reggie avoided the stare. “Something like that. Hell, most relationships can’t survive being separated by state lines. You think one could stand up against AUs of disconnection with no chance of reunion?”

“So you didn’t talk about marriage because you were afraid of making a commitment to a relationship that might become intangible.”

“Right. It wouldn’t be fair to either of us. Especially her. She’d be here, going about life just the same, but without me. Without someone. I didn’t want to rob her of the chance to have a real partner, you know? To be bound and loyal to a ghost, when there are so many flesh-and-blood possibilities …”

“But now you’ve talked about it. What changed? You decided to stay?”

Reggie smiled. “The decision was made for me. The consortium knows how it wants to populate the convoys, and I’m not on the list.”

“Ah. So now you’ll finally pop the question.”

“Yeah. And I know she’ll say yes. I just have to find the right ring and the right time.”

“Oh, don’t give me that. Now that you’ve made your choice, the right time is always now. After all, I’m not the only one that time’s pushing along. If you want to get her pregnant you’ll have to do it soon.”

Reggie frowned—he was amused, but Heaven forbid McCloud know that. “You’re toeing the line there, professor.”

“I’m not anyone’s professor anymore. Just some old blowhard tossing his BS at a wall, hoping some will stick. Let’s grab some of that cake, get a good sugar-high going, and talk to some of your colleagues here, eh? I know you’re champing at the bit. And look, Mr. Matheson is still with us—all in one piece.”

A few minutes later Reggie had the team gathered round. On a party napkin he drew a quick diagram while speaking through a mouthful of cake. He had C operating on his tablet, and it was synched with a wall screen. “There are going to be nine ships—is that correct?”

“That is correct, sir,” said C, bringing up proposed concept sketches for some, and a few basic schematics for those that were already rolling on production lines.

“Thanks, but I was asking Nakamura.”

Nakamura Akane, head of the specialty-ship design team, nodded concisely. Her eyes were a dark brown-and-gold under harshly cropped black bangs. Her expression carried the utmost seriousness, and her powerful, pointed movements were what Reggie might have expected from a strapping Russian man, not a petite Japanese women.

Matheson pointed flippantly at the tablet. “You still have an IPA? I thought those things were extinct. Nobody likes them. Too chatty.”

“Its name is C—it’s not a beer,” Reggie said. “And I like it. It’s been with me a long time. Keeps me on schedule, and keeps me company in the lab.”

“No picking on my lad for his choice of friends,” McCloud said.

“Can we get back to the ships?” asked Dr. Sachta Dhiri in her heavy, bubbling accent. Her focus was observational tactics and strategy. She was a plump woman, and wore a well-loved green-and-gold salwar kameez; the long tunic and billowing trousers were faded from many years of washing. “What on Earth—pardon the expression—is the use of nine? They’d need shuttles to travel to and from. Think of the extra fuel that would require. Not to mention the wear and tear accrued. Isn’t it more practical to put everything into one ship?”

“No,” Matheson said plainly.

“Care to elaborate?”

“We on the design teams think each research division could use its own ship,” Akane jumped in. “And then there are the supplies. It’s not practical to make each ship entirely self-sustaining, what with the number of crew members the consortium wants the convoys to consist of: sixty to one hundred thousand. So, while some food and water, etcetera, will be kept aboard each ship, the majority of the supplies will have to be stored and maintained separately. Otherwise we’d need ships larger than we can currently build.”

“One hundred thou … That’s—that’s over a million people. Twelve convoys and a million people,” Dr. Dhiri said. “They want to send one million people into space? Where are they going to find that many volunteers—expert volunteers? Do they want to send as many of our scientists, engineers, and thinkers off-world as they can, and hope everyone else picks up the slack?”

Reggie and Akane shared a look. “I know,” said Reggie, lapping at a smear of buttercream at the corner of his mouth. “I thought it sounded crazy, too. Before I talked to Matheson and learned exactly what the consortium has in mind.”

All eyes turned to Matheson. He sobered up quickly. “Um, yeah. My preproject research focused on social stability in isolated societies. And what’s more isolated than a bunch of self-contained space cans, am I right? Obviously there are thousands of factors that go into societal consistency, but one is size. Size in terms of both population and area. If you have too many people in a small area, you get claustrophobic reactions. Too few people in too large an area and you get subgroups, like rival tribes.

“What we want is a single, united convoy. But not a trapped convoy—that’s why the social practicality of several ships outweighs the engineering practicality of trying to cram it all into one space. People need to feel like they can move or else they start feeling like they’re prisoners; like they’re entombed. The multiple ships and the ability to travel between them will give them a sense of range and movement unachievable otherwise.

“It’s more than that, though. Because while the crew members will be divided by department, we don’t want them to become competitive. That’s why it’s essential there be a home base—a place everyone thinks of as the place they collectively belong. A unifying location, if you will. That means a ship whose sole purpose is housing. Then each research division gets its own ship. And finally, there’s got to be a ship fully dedicated to resources—food and water processing. Specialization will ensure each ship be tailored for optimum efficiency. No worries about making it suitable for multipurpose.”

“Okay,” interrupted Dhiri, “but what does that have to do with a crew of one hundred thousand? Wouldn’t it work just as well with ten thousand? Or two hundred?”

C spoke up. “According to the files I have marked Scale Studies one through sixty-three, two hundred people would be thirty-seven percent more likely than ten thousand to incur full crew psychological breakdown, which may lead to hallucination, mutiny, and murder. It is the perfect size for a mob.”

“Like the PA says: No,” said Matheson. “Not for our purposes. It’s all about checks and balances. You need a certain number of people in order to put pressure on those who might be disruptive. And a certain number of people to compensate if something drastic happens.

“We have to remember that the crew members aren’t from a society that’s always been isolated. Their group will have been dramatically severed from its parent culture, and they will be fully aware of that parent culture and what they’re not getting from it. Psychologically, they will go through identity crises. This could potentially tear them apart, but we’ll be giving them every opportunity to band together.”

“More people equals a greater shared identity,” Reggie added. “It means for each person who wants to reject the situation, there should be hundreds who can apply direct pressure to accept the situation.”

“And the nine ships should give such a large population enough room to roam,” said C. Blue digital wire skeletons lit up on the wall, revealing distances from end-to-end for each ship as well as all available passenger floor space.

“But how do you know there’ll be an acceptable internal-breakdown to external-pressure ratio? What if they all get cabin fever and start clawing at the walls? Madness can feed madness,” said McCloud. He wiped the corner of his mouth with his hanky.

“That does pose a problem. Along with the sheer number of volunteers it would take. But we think we’ve found a solution. Success is still not guaranteed, but it ups our chances considerably.” Though his tone carried confidence, Matheson paused and scratched his chin, hesitant to continue.

“A solution, yes.” Nakamura nodded, but didn’t look happy. “A controversial one.”

“Eighty-six percent of experts presented with this idea rejected it outright upon initial suggestion,” said C.

“Are you going to tell us what it is, or do we have to keep listening to this saying-without-saying, nonconversation?” McCloud asked.

“The solution—”

“To give you a half answer, Professor: genetics,” Reggie said, temporarily hitting mute on the PA’s feed, cutting C off. “The crew has been chosen based largely on their DNA and histones. On top of that, the consortium is getting full psych evals and family histories. There are predispositions that have been left out. Those with violent tendencies won’t be aboard, or those who lack loyalty, or those who are flighty—”

“No anarchists allowed, eh?”

Reggie nodded. “Or dictators, or psychopaths, misogynists, etcetera. No matter how intellectually brilliant they are, without the proper emotional factors—emotional intelligence, if you will—they will hinder societal stability, and could endanger the mission’s success.”

“Utopia?” McCloud ventured.

“I doubt it. But hopefully less chance of dystopia.”

“Interesting.” McCloud lost himself in thought for a moment. “So, if we’re discussing stability and assuring positive interactions, that must mean the consortium intends for the crew—the entire crew—to be awake at all times? No automated birthing systems for a payload of frozen embryos or the like?”

“Right. I supported the mech-based auto-birth option, but they’ve since rejected it. Said the risk of malfunction and mission failure were too high.” Reggie shrugged.

The old professor was clearly determined to hold on to his skepticism. “A hundred thousand people, all awake, all volunteers—no embryos—all as stable intellectually and emotionally as we can screen for, right?”

“That’s the plan,” Matheson said.

“And how does the consortium propose to get all these lovely people in one place?”

“There are no guarantees,” Reggie said. “It’s not foolproof.”

“Is anything?” chimed in Nakamura.

“Exactly,” Reggie said.

McCloud glanced between them, cynicism furrowing his brow. “The geneticists have their work cut out for them. What, do they expect to test all nine billion of us on the planet and just hope they end up with the right number of volunteers with the right set of traits?”

“That’s why I love you, professor,” said Reggie, slapping the old man’s shoulder.

“Because I bring the obvious to the table?”

“Exactly,” he said again, this time with a wink. “If we allow generations to pass, we can’t control who the convoy carries for the majority of its journey. We’re being denied frozen embryos, and we don’t have the technology to freeze and thaw adults. We also can’t be assured the consortium will find one million people who fit their remarkably narrow criteria. So, what’s the answer?”

“I don’t like riddles,” McCloud said. “Clearly you, Matheson, and Nakamura here already know what’s happening, so spit it out.”

Nakamura bowed her head graciously. “I apologize, but you must understand our hesitancy to … It won’t be announced publicly for years. The consortium doesn’t want the real plan out yet, because public knowledge could equal complications. There’s a bit of a moral dilemma surrounding their top option.”

“Which is?” McCloud leaned in.

She looked to Reggie, and he nodded reassuringly, adding, “He’ll stay quiet. If not, I know where to find him.”

She turned back to McCloud. “They want to send clones.”

Reggie unmuted C, who immediately said, “Isn’t that interesting?”

MAY 29,-26 LD
2099 CE

When Reggie stepped out of customs at London Heathrow, C exclaimed, “He’s over there, over there!”

Reggie had his phone synced with his implants. As his eyes scanned the crowd—passing over families decked out in Union Jack T-shirts, business people in gray suits, and security guards with drug-sniffing dogs—C had run a facial recognition app for its creator: Jamal Kaeden.

Reggie waved at the man C indicated, and the two swam through the throngs, dodging baggage carts and people too focused on their implants to watch where they were going. Jamal was only perhaps half a foot taller than Reggie, but his lankiness gave the impression that he was a tower of a man. Neatly sheared dreadlocks were gathered in a ponytail at the base of his neck. He smiled broadly while they shook hands, and his smile shone bright white in his dark face.

“And this is C,” Reggie said, holding up his phone to display the open PA avatar. C presented as a shifting green-and-purple fractal design. While the system allowed the user to set whatever avatar they wanted from an extensive list of customizable displays—everything from human faces to insects to galaxies—Reggie had let C choose its own form.

“All right, C?” Jamal greeted the program, but then looked at Reggie quizzically. “You didn’t rename it? C is just its personality type indication—you’re supposed to call it whatever you want.”

“Oh, I know. I had a hard time coming up with one, though, and it seemed happy enough referring to itself as C, so I left it. Not very creative of me.”

“C is a good name,” C agreed.

Jamal smiled again, clearly tickled. “My colleagues—blinkered sometimes, the lot of ’em—keep asking why I continue to create patches for the Cs now that AI personalities have fallen out of style, but I knew someone out there must enjoy them as much as I do. I used to patch Gs and Ks, but no one was downloading them. C is the only one still hanging on. Can I tell you a secret, C? You were always my favorite anyway. I still use C on my tablet.”

“Thank you, sir,” it said, sounding genuinely flattered.

Jamal showed Reggie to his tiny electric car. The project had taken Reggie all over the place, and he’d learned to travel light, so cramming his baggage into the two-door wasn’t much of a hassle. They drove to Reggie’s hotel with the windows down. Rain had soaked the city a few hours before, and everything smelled damp and renewed.

“You have an interesting accent,” Reggie noted during the ride.

“Algerian,” Jamal explained. “Lived there until I was ten. It’s my mother’s home country.” He explained that she’d come to the UK for university, where she’d met his father. After graduation they married and went to Africa to teach. They lived there for fifteen years until Jamal’s paternal grandparents had fallen ill and the family had relocated to London. “I’m a man of two nations.”

After dropping off Reggie’s luggage, they went to Jamal’s firm for a tour. “I thought you’d be knackered after your flight,” Jamal said when they reached his workspace. Four monitors sat in a semicircle on the desk, each covered with a series of Post-it notes and conversion charts and reminder stickers. “Was going to spiff up the place tomorrow morning.”

“I’m too wired. And C probably couldn’t wait,” he said with a small laugh. “Besides, it’s fine. My workspace is ten times worse.”

The computer engineering firm took up the forty-third floor in a glass high-rise within six blocks of the famous Gherkin. They had a hardware subgroup and a software subgroup, and Reggie had done enough research on Mr. Kaeden to know he did a lot of crossover work. He was the best AI specialist in the world, as far as Reggie was concerned.

Which meant the mission needed him.

They strolled over to the long bank of windows and Jamal showed off the view. He pointed out several of the visible London highlights. “So, why are you here, Dr. Straifer?” he asked when they’d finished with the cursory pleasantries. “None of the other project leaders have wanted to visit the firm, let alone asked to have a chin wag with me specifically. It’s the ship engineers who’re most interested in the computer systems.”

“My lead engineer—Dr. Akane Nakamura, you might have heard of her—told me that none of the convoys are set to use intelligent personal assistants in their user interfaces.”

Jamal shrugged. “Because most people think they’re duff. Irritating window dressing. Sorry, C.”

“What is ‘irritating window dressing’?” C asked. Both men ignored it.

“Well I don’t think it’s, uh, duff. And I want my project to have one,” Reggie insisted. “Actually, I want it to have C.”

Jamal sat quiet for a moment. He seemed pleased, but concerned. “That’s smashing,” he eventually said. “But it won’t be easy to sort. C’s line isn’t set up for personalization on the order we’re talking about—no PA has ever had to tailor itself to so many users. I couldn’t, for instance, just copy your version of C and upload it into the system. I’d have to start from scratch.”

“But could you make it like C, or use parts of C? There’s got to be a reason it’s hung on so long when the rest have gone extinct.”

“The basics can be the same, sure. But I don’t know if I can mirror its growth pattern. It’s easy to develop basic response algorithms these days for a single user, but … Imagine it’s a person, right? We learn how to interact differently than an AI. We’re far more responsive to nuanced variations. An intelligent PA isn’t like that. The more users it interfaces with, the less likely it is to develop a unique personality, because it becomes an amalgamation that imitates the larger pattern. In other words, I don’t know that I can give you your C, or anyone else’s C. Even if it starts off as a basic C right out of the package, it might stay that primitive forever.”

“What if you had over twenty years’ worth of funding to focus on developing a convoy-wide, hundred-thousand-count user base Intelligent Personal Assistant? I don’t want every device to have its own PA, I want a singular entity that can interact with everyone.”

“And you’ve got the funding for that?” Jamal shoved his hands in his trouser pockets, his lips pursed skeptically.

“I’ve been given discretionary funding so that I can find private, invaluable people to work with. People the consortium may have overlooked.”

“And you want me?”

“I want you and C. This way, I get two invaluable people for the price of one.”

“AIs aren’t people.”

Reggie shrugged. “They can seem like people.”

Jamal nodded. “Yes, they can.”

“I think so, too,” said C.

Both men burst out laughing.