Scorpius 22, m0039, continued
Along with civilian-model vacc suits, the team have hired a heavy rover, which is now available to them - although they do spend a few moments discussing whether they need to head out to the crash site. It's a couple of hundred miles from the Zeus Resort - they should be able to make the run inside a day, if it looks like good use of their time. The rover really is the only option; at this altitude, the only flying vehicles capable of operating and of landing in the wilderness are a few specialised, fuel-hungry, and expensive vectored-thrust flyers with very little carrying capacity.
So they review more data. Quentin has now pulled some strings and acquired some imagery of the incident from weather satellites; it's not great for resolution, but it's usable. It shows the Zeppelin's gasbag failing - perhaps quite rapidly - and a descent that looks, at least to a trained pilot like Florence, to be fairly controlled at first, but with rapidly increasing instability. However, Florence can't say much for certain; she's not qualified on airships.
Jianwei decides that a personal visit to the Emergency Response Team's HQ is in order, and the rest of the team might as well come along. He talks his way quickly past the receptionist - avoiding "crank" or "time-waster" tags on support NAI displays really isn't very hard - and gains a brief interview with Captain Brooks-Carter, who is polite, though clearly busily engaged with multiple VR displays even while he's talking to them. Jianwei says that the team would like to visit the crash site, and while the Captain is a little cautious about the possibility of them getting underfoot, he doesn't ask them to refrain. They offer to transport any small items that might be useful on the site; while the Captain doesn't come up with much, he does say that they might take a shipping box of additional rescue gear.
So the team set out. Samadhi plots a route and Florence drives (breaking for lunch on a relatively flat stretch where she trusts the supplied vehicle NAI to manage safely enough). Meanwhile, Jianwei mostly naps, and Vajra and the team's support AIs collect and collate information on the crash as it appears on the Web. It seems that there were ten organic beings on the airship: the three European citizens, two Chinese tourists - Peng Chiang-Kwan, now reported deceased in the crash, and Teng Sui-P'ing - three American citizen passengers - Alan Becovani, a resident of Mars, and Sarah Louise-Smith and Ira Solway-Cortez, both up from Earth - and two crew with Nix Olympica citizenship - Carl Davidson, the captain/pilot, and Eugene Marquez, the steward.
After a few hours, the rover is approaching the crash site, and Jianwei wakes up and begins checking local data feeds and streams. He calls the E.U. citizens, who are still here receiving medical attention; they are still recovering from the stress of the accident, but are currently feeling relatively comfortable, with no immediate special requirements.Actually, it soon turns out that the medical personnel on site feel that it's about time to transfer the crash survivors to better, static, medical facilities; the ambulance rovers will be leaving shortly - before the team have actually quite reached the site, in fact.
Still, the team do reach the site, hand off the case of rescue gear to a robot which says a polite thank-you, then start moving around the area, avoiding getting in anyone's way while taking visual images from multiple viewpoints for future reference and recording all the v-tags that they can identify. After a while, when they pause a couple of medical personnel and another rescue worker wander over for a chat and to accept the team's open offer of tea. This lets the team pick up some more knowledgeable gossip about the crash; it seems that everyone involved is finding the details a little odd. Eventually, the team ask if they can give anyone from the rescue teams a lift back to civilisation, and some of the techs consider this.
After a while longer, a call comes in via satellite relay. The caller identifies himself as Kai Ssung-So, an agent of the insurance company which was providing medical cover for the Chinese passengers on the airship. He seems smoothly courteous; the team get the impression from various details that there may be another person present and monitoring the call at his end, but can't pick up any other details. Ssung-So too has an obvious interest in the incident, and understands that the team is picking up independent information; he would appreciate access to anything which they are prepared to release. He is evidently far too sophisticated to offer payment, but he can promise future favours, should anything the E.U. embassy need fall within his capacity...
Jianwei, knowing the value of favours on Mars, takes the time to contact Ambassador Schmidt, obtains clearance, and agrees to Ssung-So's request. He'll be sending checked and, where necessary, edited information, of course, but Ssung-So is smoothly grateful.
Although the site is currently being illuminated by an orbital mirror or two, sunset is still noticeable, and the team feel that they've done what they can for the day, and settle down in their vehicle for the night.
Scorpius 23, m0039
Waking and rising fairly early, the Europeans set out. The injured tourists have been taken to a scientific station with good medical facilities about half-way back to Nix Olympica, a little way off the direct route, and the team have decided to detour that way to check how things stand; two of the rescue team decide to accept a lift there. As Florence drives a little too fast over the rocky ground (but recovers from her mistakes quickly enough to avoid accidents) and everyone talks to the two techs about what they saw at the site, Vajra receives an anonymous Web message, suggesting that he might like to check the ownership of that Chinese insurance company, or its agent's past employment records. With little else to do with their time for an hour or two, the team quietly take up the suggestion, digging through financial records and personal pages on the Web.
These don't turn up any obvious dirt, but the company's ownership is dispersed and only lightly documented. There's no proof, but on Mars, this kind of paper trail might well hint at Triad ownership or strong Triad influence. As for Ssung-So - his consultancy work has involved a number of companies, all culturally Chinese, but is only lightly defined - and the companies are almost all in the import-export business, which hints at Triad smuggling operations. Is he somebody the Triads might want to use as a consultant whenever possible, for some reason? Or could he actually be some kind of Triad troubleshooter? And who might have sent this tip-off, if he is?
Florence, who doesn't like the Triads at all, is muttering under her breath.
The team stop for lunch at the medical facility, where their passengers leave them with polite thanks. They've determined that Mahler and Melk are happiest to stay there for now - Melk seems not to want to travel too much yet, and there's no good reason for her husband to leave her - but Giovanna D'Aquila would like to get back to civilisation and has been well patched up. As they have spare space in their rover and are supposed to be offering what help they can to E.U. citizens, the team are more than happy to give her a lift. Indeed, this gives them a good chance to chat with her about the crash, and she's happy to cooperate and to give them access to her wearable's recordings of the period in question.
Apparently, she had recently retired for the night when the airship's emergency alarms sounded, and within seconds she, the other passengers, and the steward were following the standard emergency procedures which were being quoted at them by their AIs, including suiting up for vacuum, while the pilot attempted to manage things from the control compartment. To judge by the mounting verbal responses from there, the airship's behaviour degraded progressively and unexpectedly as it went down, until it hit the Martian surface painfully hard. As the team had already gathered from other sources, Peng Chiang-Kwan was simply horribly unlucky, getting in the way of a shattering structural member during the impact; it apparently punctured his suit and his torso. Whether the medical services can restore him, as an organic individual or as software, remains to be seen.
The team take another look at technical issues. The pilot blew the second, undamaged gasbag immediately after impact, very correctly; could the mechanism intended for that purpose on the first gasbag somehow have been triggered? After all, that would reduce the entire incident to a single cause - massive software malfunction, possibly malicious. (Although it would have to be an implausibly broad failure that both blew a gasbag and scrambled the airship guidance controls.) Unfortunately, everything says that the emergency gas release mechanism really shouldn't be that easy to trigger. Anyway, software sabotage that blew one gasbag could surely almost as easily blow both, producing a more guaranteed catastrophe that would be easier to pass off as an accident than this pair of problems without a close connection...
Meanwhile, Florence has engineered a detour for the rover. She hasn't seen the edge of the Olympica escarpment before, and it's not far out of their way. Unfortunately, the team's AIs do an unusually poor job of route planning, and Florence finds that she's having to compensate for a twenty-degree slope for some distance. Fortunately, her skills are up to the task.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Dogs and Cats and Zeppelins
Scorpius 18, m0039, continued
In the aftermath of that last incident, Jianwei gets a call, routed through one of the mini-dirigible camera cybershells that showed up to see what the excitement was about. It's "DD", the freelance bartender-reporter, and while Jianwei is politely fobbing her off with a few snippets of harmless information, the team's AIs check the traffic incoming from her, and decide that the lag time is low enough that she's probably in Port Lowell.
Florence picks up on this, and asks her if she'd like to go out for a drink that evening. DD presumably decides that this is an opportunity to work on developing these interesting contacts, and accepts the invitation; they agree on a bar, and the other members of the team politely decline any invitations to come along. Florence claims that this is partly an attempt to find out more about shadier parts of Port Lowell by discussing bar options with the well-informed DD, but DD never does come up with anything interesting on that score. Well, there are distractions.
Of course, what happens is, come the evening, a female Felicia and an Ishtar woman walk into a bar, unaccompanied, with predictable results in terms of male attention. One of the males - a rather ugly but charismatic fellow - is notably charming at Florence, but she, with her conditioning for omnivorous tastes in these things (something that the EU psychologists decided it would unduly intrusive to try and "correct"), has decided that DD is the most interesting ... prospect ... this evening. DD, on the other hand, has generally conventional tastes; then again, she is an Ishtar, which means a high level of instinctive competitiveness, and the sense that she and Florence are attracting roughly equal amounts of male attention sets that off, especially after a drink or two.
The psychosocial dynamics of the next couple of hours get a little complex and probably beyond the grasp of anyone who wasn't there. Suffice it to say that Florence and DD end up back in Florence's apartment, along with two of the men from the bar, who presumably think either that this is their lucky evening, or that they've been drawn into a vortex of female competition. Or, probably, both. Everyone's recollections may be a little muzzy, but that's what personal wearable or implant computers are for. (It may in fact be just as well that everyone knows that certain classes of posting to MarsTube just lead to complicated, messy, and expensive multi-jurisdictional civil law suits.) DD does manage to extract a very little pillow talk out Florence during a lull in proceedings, but probably nothing too unfortunate, so far as Florence's memories or Dougal's recordings show.
Scorpius 19, m0039
The next morning, after Florence has briefly cornered DD in the bathroom for some reason that isn't anyone else's business, all four participants head out for breakfast. One of the men is evidently still recovering his equilibrium, as he takes a deep breath as he steps out of the building front door without putting his air mask on first, but he suffers no permanent ill-effects, and once he's finished coughing and gasping, they locate a rather indifferent coffee bar that's the best that Florence can suggest just now. The two women are quieter and more reflective than a few hours previously; DD isn't sure what she's learned about herself, except perhaps that she really shouldn't drink that fast and that she can find Florence quite charming, but she does now know a bit more about Florence's work; Florence hasn't learned much at all, but she feels happy enough about the process.
But anyway, DD gets onto the Web and contacts a friend who needs an extra hand on a land convoy heading back towards New Shanghai. So she now has authentic excuses to make when she disappears after breakfast. She's moving on, if as erratically as is her style.
Scorpius 20-21, m0039
And, again, things go quiet for a couple of days. Vajra, though, is making connections in the local AI citizen community, which he thinks should be interesting, and maybe even useful.
Scorpius 22, m0039
It's the small hours of the morning when the next important incident arises, and the two organic team members are fast asleep when Quentin calls. (Vajra is presumably engaging in whatever counts as hobbies for an AI.) Quentin apologises, but time is somewhat of the essence in this case; anyway, he tells the team, he's got a courier buzzbot on its way to the apartment building with a delivery of wake-up nanodrugs.
Next time, Florence tells him, he should simply tell Dougal, "and he'll drool all over me."
"That's the kind of thing you organic life-forms enjoy, isn't it?" replies Quentin, who has made some study of the classics.
"Anyway, lady, gentleman, and AI," Quentin goes on, "the word for today is 'zeppelin'. One of the tourist airships operating out of the Zeus Tourist Resort has apparently gone down over Olympus Mons - and gone down hard enough for there to be casualties."
This triggers some raised eyebrows among the team, who know enough about modern technology and the sort of safety factors applied to tourist craft - even on Mars - to reckon that this sort of thing should not happen. But happen it has, and it's going to rate as a newsworthy event. And yes, Quentin can tell them that there's an E.U. interest in the case; three of the eight passengers on the airship are European citizens. A fast response is indicated, if only to show that the embassy takes these things seriously, and this time, the team are going to be based in or near a community with such civilised facilities as an aerospace port.
Which is why things are so urgent. Quentin has received budget clearance and arranged them passage on a ballistic ramjet, which will get them to that port - which serves both Nix Olympica and the Zeus Resort - in bare hours. The scheduling system triggered when bookings pass a critical threshold means that the ramjet will be taking off very soon indeed. A taxi is on its way.
After a whirl of packing (or at least bag-grabbing) and quick use of that taxi, the team board the ramjet, and once it's in flight, they - especially Jianwei - start making calls and collating information. It appears that there were eight passengers aboard the airship, of whom three were European citizens: Hans-Christian Mahler and Juta Melk, a married couple who appear to be tourists from Earth, and Giovanna D'Aquila, a resident of Mars who was presumably taking a break. There's little publicly-available data about the incident so far, so Jianwei pushes through the bureaucracy and makes contact with Captain Yinghuo Brooks-Carter, of the Olympus Mons Emergency Response Service, who seems to be managing the response, establishing good businesslike relations with him. Brooks-Carter gives the team access to a package of standard data feeds from his people, and suggests that they base themselves at Zeus when they arrive.
Meanwhile, Vajra has been looking for meteorological data on the area around the crash site, on the grounds that this might well be relevant to understanding what has happened. However, this doesn't turn up much; although the airship was flying low enough for there to be an atmosphere in which a lighter-than-air vehicle could function, it was above a lot of Martian weather - anyway, there was nothing that would rate as a storm in the area at the time of the crash. So Vajra moves on to data feeds from the airship itself, but discovers that those are being somewhat strangled back; it looks as though there might be something interesting there that someone doesn't want getting out straight away.
So the team resort to the airship builders' published information to find out more about the vessel. They determine that it consisted mostly of just two gasbags, linked by a rather minimal framework of very advanced, very lightweight materials. This sounds hopelessly flimsy when compared to older airship designs, but it's light, which is important in a Martian atmosphere, and it was built to modern standards and subject to modern continuous safety monitoring; it really should be very safe. Unforeseen events might conceivably lead to the loss of one gasbag, but the craft would still be capable of a controlled landing in that case. What the team has available from the data feeds in this case, though, suggests a faster - dangerously fast - descent.
The team do now have a location for this incident, though, along with data streams showing that units of the Emergency Response Service are closing on the site as rapidly as possible - in rovers, as nothing that can fly fast at that altitude can hope to land there. They have a bright idea, and Jianwei speaks with the ramjet's pilot, points out the situation - and convinces him to direct the ramjet's sensor array towards the crash site. This shows that this isn't the sort of complete disaster that leaves wreckage scattered across the countryside; the airship is recognisable, if not exactly airworthy at present. It's clear that the crew or control systems have, very sensibly, deflated the gasbag after landing, as per protocols. The data feed shows that the rescue services are now closing in.
By now, the ramjet is on its approach trajectory to the Olympus Mons landing ground, but before external comms shut down entirely, as they will for a few minutes, Jianwei receives another call over low-bandwidth channels. A low-res cartoon avatar of a humanoid dog pops into his field of view in the empty seat next to him, and DD asks what he can say about this situation. DD herself is still on that ground-level caravan, but knows an interesting story when she sees one on the feeds. Jianwei says that the E.U. are still assessing the situation, and then asks casually if DD had a good evening out with Florence. DD plays back a library of "No Comment" responses.
Then the ramjet makes its approach run, lands, and disgorges its passengers. The aerospace port is equidistant from Nix Olympica and the Zeus Resort, and the team have accommodation arranged in a hotel in the latter complex. So they use the standard public transport system, completing their journey by tram. Once they get there, they find that the rented vacc suits that they'll need at this altitude have been delivered to their rooms; Florence and some of the team's AIs check these over, and conclude that they are fine.
By now, the first news is starting to come back from emergency teams arriving on the crash site. Nine of the ten organic beings which were aboard the airship are alive...
In the aftermath of that last incident, Jianwei gets a call, routed through one of the mini-dirigible camera cybershells that showed up to see what the excitement was about. It's "DD", the freelance bartender-reporter, and while Jianwei is politely fobbing her off with a few snippets of harmless information, the team's AIs check the traffic incoming from her, and decide that the lag time is low enough that she's probably in Port Lowell.
Florence picks up on this, and asks her if she'd like to go out for a drink that evening. DD presumably decides that this is an opportunity to work on developing these interesting contacts, and accepts the invitation; they agree on a bar, and the other members of the team politely decline any invitations to come along. Florence claims that this is partly an attempt to find out more about shadier parts of Port Lowell by discussing bar options with the well-informed DD, but DD never does come up with anything interesting on that score. Well, there are distractions.
Of course, what happens is, come the evening, a female Felicia and an Ishtar woman walk into a bar, unaccompanied, with predictable results in terms of male attention. One of the males - a rather ugly but charismatic fellow - is notably charming at Florence, but she, with her conditioning for omnivorous tastes in these things (something that the EU psychologists decided it would unduly intrusive to try and "correct"), has decided that DD is the most interesting ... prospect ... this evening. DD, on the other hand, has generally conventional tastes; then again, she is an Ishtar, which means a high level of instinctive competitiveness, and the sense that she and Florence are attracting roughly equal amounts of male attention sets that off, especially after a drink or two.
The psychosocial dynamics of the next couple of hours get a little complex and probably beyond the grasp of anyone who wasn't there. Suffice it to say that Florence and DD end up back in Florence's apartment, along with two of the men from the bar, who presumably think either that this is their lucky evening, or that they've been drawn into a vortex of female competition. Or, probably, both. Everyone's recollections may be a little muzzy, but that's what personal wearable or implant computers are for. (It may in fact be just as well that everyone knows that certain classes of posting to MarsTube just lead to complicated, messy, and expensive multi-jurisdictional civil law suits.) DD does manage to extract a very little pillow talk out Florence during a lull in proceedings, but probably nothing too unfortunate, so far as Florence's memories or Dougal's recordings show.
Scorpius 19, m0039
The next morning, after Florence has briefly cornered DD in the bathroom for some reason that isn't anyone else's business, all four participants head out for breakfast. One of the men is evidently still recovering his equilibrium, as he takes a deep breath as he steps out of the building front door without putting his air mask on first, but he suffers no permanent ill-effects, and once he's finished coughing and gasping, they locate a rather indifferent coffee bar that's the best that Florence can suggest just now. The two women are quieter and more reflective than a few hours previously; DD isn't sure what she's learned about herself, except perhaps that she really shouldn't drink that fast and that she can find Florence quite charming, but she does now know a bit more about Florence's work; Florence hasn't learned much at all, but she feels happy enough about the process.
But anyway, DD gets onto the Web and contacts a friend who needs an extra hand on a land convoy heading back towards New Shanghai. So she now has authentic excuses to make when she disappears after breakfast. She's moving on, if as erratically as is her style.
Scorpius 20-21, m0039
And, again, things go quiet for a couple of days. Vajra, though, is making connections in the local AI citizen community, which he thinks should be interesting, and maybe even useful.
Scorpius 22, m0039
It's the small hours of the morning when the next important incident arises, and the two organic team members are fast asleep when Quentin calls. (Vajra is presumably engaging in whatever counts as hobbies for an AI.) Quentin apologises, but time is somewhat of the essence in this case; anyway, he tells the team, he's got a courier buzzbot on its way to the apartment building with a delivery of wake-up nanodrugs.
Next time, Florence tells him, he should simply tell Dougal, "and he'll drool all over me."
"That's the kind of thing you organic life-forms enjoy, isn't it?" replies Quentin, who has made some study of the classics.
"Anyway, lady, gentleman, and AI," Quentin goes on, "the word for today is 'zeppelin'. One of the tourist airships operating out of the Zeus Tourist Resort has apparently gone down over Olympus Mons - and gone down hard enough for there to be casualties."
This triggers some raised eyebrows among the team, who know enough about modern technology and the sort of safety factors applied to tourist craft - even on Mars - to reckon that this sort of thing should not happen. But happen it has, and it's going to rate as a newsworthy event. And yes, Quentin can tell them that there's an E.U. interest in the case; three of the eight passengers on the airship are European citizens. A fast response is indicated, if only to show that the embassy takes these things seriously, and this time, the team are going to be based in or near a community with such civilised facilities as an aerospace port.
Which is why things are so urgent. Quentin has received budget clearance and arranged them passage on a ballistic ramjet, which will get them to that port - which serves both Nix Olympica and the Zeus Resort - in bare hours. The scheduling system triggered when bookings pass a critical threshold means that the ramjet will be taking off very soon indeed. A taxi is on its way.
After a whirl of packing (or at least bag-grabbing) and quick use of that taxi, the team board the ramjet, and once it's in flight, they - especially Jianwei - start making calls and collating information. It appears that there were eight passengers aboard the airship, of whom three were European citizens: Hans-Christian Mahler and Juta Melk, a married couple who appear to be tourists from Earth, and Giovanna D'Aquila, a resident of Mars who was presumably taking a break. There's little publicly-available data about the incident so far, so Jianwei pushes through the bureaucracy and makes contact with Captain Yinghuo Brooks-Carter, of the Olympus Mons Emergency Response Service, who seems to be managing the response, establishing good businesslike relations with him. Brooks-Carter gives the team access to a package of standard data feeds from his people, and suggests that they base themselves at Zeus when they arrive.
Meanwhile, Vajra has been looking for meteorological data on the area around the crash site, on the grounds that this might well be relevant to understanding what has happened. However, this doesn't turn up much; although the airship was flying low enough for there to be an atmosphere in which a lighter-than-air vehicle could function, it was above a lot of Martian weather - anyway, there was nothing that would rate as a storm in the area at the time of the crash. So Vajra moves on to data feeds from the airship itself, but discovers that those are being somewhat strangled back; it looks as though there might be something interesting there that someone doesn't want getting out straight away.
So the team resort to the airship builders' published information to find out more about the vessel. They determine that it consisted mostly of just two gasbags, linked by a rather minimal framework of very advanced, very lightweight materials. This sounds hopelessly flimsy when compared to older airship designs, but it's light, which is important in a Martian atmosphere, and it was built to modern standards and subject to modern continuous safety monitoring; it really should be very safe. Unforeseen events might conceivably lead to the loss of one gasbag, but the craft would still be capable of a controlled landing in that case. What the team has available from the data feeds in this case, though, suggests a faster - dangerously fast - descent.
The team do now have a location for this incident, though, along with data streams showing that units of the Emergency Response Service are closing on the site as rapidly as possible - in rovers, as nothing that can fly fast at that altitude can hope to land there. They have a bright idea, and Jianwei speaks with the ramjet's pilot, points out the situation - and convinces him to direct the ramjet's sensor array towards the crash site. This shows that this isn't the sort of complete disaster that leaves wreckage scattered across the countryside; the airship is recognisable, if not exactly airworthy at present. It's clear that the crew or control systems have, very sensibly, deflated the gasbag after landing, as per protocols. The data feed shows that the rescue services are now closing in.
By now, the ramjet is on its approach trajectory to the Olympus Mons landing ground, but before external comms shut down entirely, as they will for a few minutes, Jianwei receives another call over low-bandwidth channels. A low-res cartoon avatar of a humanoid dog pops into his field of view in the empty seat next to him, and DD asks what he can say about this situation. DD herself is still on that ground-level caravan, but knows an interesting story when she sees one on the feeds. Jianwei says that the E.U. are still assessing the situation, and then asks casually if DD had a good evening out with Florence. DD plays back a library of "No Comment" responses.
Then the ramjet makes its approach run, lands, and disgorges its passengers. The aerospace port is equidistant from Nix Olympica and the Zeus Resort, and the team have accommodation arranged in a hotel in the latter complex. So they use the standard public transport system, completing their journey by tram. Once they get there, they find that the rented vacc suits that they'll need at this altitude have been delivered to their rooms; Florence and some of the team's AIs check these over, and conclude that they are fine.
By now, the first news is starting to come back from emergency teams arriving on the crash site. Nine of the ten organic beings which were aboard the airship are alive...
Monday, December 27, 2010
Shapes Shifted
Scorpius 15-17, m0039
And, yet again, things turn quiet for a while for the team, as diplomatic activity continues frenziedly behind the scenes.The E.U., however, can afford to stand back, look politely neutral - and work out how to exploit its new knowledge of the identity of a couple of great power agents and a US Air Force orbital weapons platform. Lipinski is politely persuaded to play along with all this, while the insurance company eventually accepts the evidence filed by the team and re-instantiates Prof. Zajdel - in various artificial environments and rented cybershells at first, as her explorer-research shell is a bespoke model and getting a new one built will take a few days.
Scorpius 18, m0039
Indeed, this is what leads to the next interesting call on the team's time, as late one morning, the embassy's NAIs inform Jianwei that they have a report that may be of interest; it looks like a routine commercial dispute, but the name attached has links to himself.
It is indeed Prof. Zajdel, who is happy to speak to Jianwei - she's only had brief conversations with him before now, and she's politely grateful for his part in sorting out what happened to her recently. However, this call is about business. She has in fact recently visited Port Lowell, and rented a cybershell for the purpose - a standard-model polypede. Her visit ended a few hours since, and she returned the cybershell to the rental company office. However, a little later, her AI aide reported that the company, Cruz & Cruzcampo Shell Hire, was continuing to bill her account for the rental; its systems insist that it hasn't been returned.
There's obviously an anomaly here, and a curious one - management systems are usually more reliable than this - so Jianwei calls up the other two team members, and they decide that a personal visit to Cruz & Cruzcampo would be indicated. Florence extracts herself from the dojo where she's keeping her martial arts training honed, and goes home to change, while Vajra simply disconnects from the Web work that he's performing. They all meet up a couple of blocks from the hire company office, and approach the place together. It's essentially a warehouse-garage with a small front office, and a group including two biomorphs showing up in person causes the management systems to escalate matters promptly to their human manager, who is polite but insistent - despite what Zajdel's logs may say, their records show no sign of the polypede being returned.
The team get in touch with Zajdel, and she authorises the hire company to activate the polypede's transponder - something covered by the hire contract's privacy clauses. However, the attempt doesn't actually work; whatever is running the cybershell currently is evidently exploiting its built-in privacy controls. The Cruz & Cruzcampo manager admits to being a little concerned at all this, and pulls some imagery off the building cameras, which does indeed show the polypede arriving when Zajdel claims to have returned it - and leaving very soon afterwards. It's a modular, reconfigurable, multi-purpose unit, but it appears to be using its standard mobile configuration - basically, that of a large spider. Attempts to pull more relevant data off the company systems run into problems, however; privacy laws and agreements can be a nuisance sometimes.
So the team wonder how to track the unit. It's not an unusual design - a rugged multi-purpose industrial model, but that sort of thing is not overly rare on Mars - but it does have a moderately distinctive finish. (Florence comments that Prof. Zajdel seems to have a taste for heavy-duty shells; the others point out that she is a geologist.) The team dives into the Web.
They make an inspired guess and go looking for hobbyist bot-spotters. Yes, the breed exists, and it soon becomes clear that there is some serious snobbery about the difference between personal observation and mere NAI-monitored camera logging. Aunty fails to locate many of their Web sites, though. Meanwhile, Dougal has been searching through recent MarsTube posts, but not finding anything relevant here; it doesn't seem that the polypede can have been doing anything very odd in public. So he takes over Aunty's search, and tracks down the hobbyist discussions, then hands the addresses off to Jianwei. Jianwei in turn assesses the memetics of this subculture, and begins posting as a new enthusiast.
And Vajra has been working through a list of E.U.-owned businesses in this neighbourhood, politely requesting recordings from their external security cameras. Collating these, he's able to track the polypede as it made its way through the industrial-commercial quarter of Port Lowell - up until a point when it simply stops showing up, an hour or so ago. The team heads for the area where it was last observed. As they go, Jianwei's probing around the bot-spotter sites, with careful mentions of an "interesting polypede" dropped as bait, elicits more imagery. Once they are in the right area, the team are able to narrow their tracking efforts down to one building - a warehouse and shipping centre owned by a company called Thorium Logistics.
Thorium are in the industrial equipment supply business; essentially, they hold stocks of assorted industrial components for purchase by local users who discover more or less urgent needs. Thus, their building has a front office open to personal visits - a sales counter, in fact.
First, Jianwei talks to the NAI on the door, which quickly decides that there is some kind of issue here ("stolen property?") beyond its authority, and escalates matters to a human supervisor. Meanwhile, Vajra probes local Web space, looking for a ping response from the polypede; he gets a brief response, but a moment later, that address no longer shows any reaction. He decides that they are closing in on their search subject, and heads round the back of the Thorium building to monitor the fire exit door there, while putting a swarm of observation microbots into the air.
The Thorium management become uncomfortable when confronted with Jianwei's questions and Vajra's Web traffic logs, which seem to indicate some kind of anomaly in their building management systems, and shift the problem over to a legal advisor, one Joseph Kwak. Jianwei explains the situation yet again, and persuades Kwak to get Thorium to let himself and Florence into the building. As they glance around, Aunty analyses the imagery that she's getting off Jianwei's optic nerve, and identifies a relevant anomaly, which she highlights obligingly in Jianwei's vision. It appears that the polypede has got into the depths of the warehouse, reconfigured itself into work arm configuration and locked onto one of the shelving units, and is accumulating a small stack of shipping boxes and modules.
Jianwei relays this instantly to Kwak, who swears audibly and relays the problem to the Thorium management team. Their technical advisor instantly sets the warehouse management systems to restart themselves, and the polypede appears to notice that; it detaches itself from the shelving unit and begins shifting into its spider configuration.
Jianwei and Florence decide that things are turning dangerous. Jianwei backs rapidly out of the building while Florence drops down below the level of the counter, draws her pistol, and begins taking careful aim. She's determined enough about the polypede design to realise that, unfortunately, the sort of ammunition she can employ legally in this area won't penetrate its outer casing - but that its camera systems aren't especially protected.
The polypede rushes for the counter (and the doorway beyond), and Florence lets it come quite close; she's only going to get one chance here, after all. Then she opens fire. Her Felicia precision and trained skill serves her well, as one of her first three bullets slams through one of the polypede's camera lenses, and two more go into the other. The cybershell careens into the other side of the counter, and Florence vaults over it and lands on the polypede's back - but this second part of her plan proves superfluous, as her fire has taken out one of the modular machine's local processing nodes - the one assigned to sensory processing - and it has shut down completely.
Her two team-mates cautiously enter the building, as other observers appear on the scene - including a dirigible flying camera which, it turns out, is being teleoperated by "DD", who is evidently continuing to watch the team's career with interest. Vajra carefully links his own shell up to the damaged polypede, and manages to gain access to some of its memory stores; actually, a non-sentient process in one of its subsidiary processors makes a rather crude attempt to copy and run an executable process to his systems. His firewalls block that with trivial ease, and he takes a copy of the program.
At about this time, more cybershells show up; Marshall Kirkowicz is responding to reports of gunfire, and for that matter suggestions of some kind of rogue AI, and her remote cybershells are quickly on the scene. She's feeling a little jaundiced today, and she's also alert enough to note that Vajra has been interfacing with the disabled cybershell; she instantly warns him to be careful with the data copies that she guesses he's acquired. Then, as she acquires more information on the likely nature of the problem from somewhere, she becomes increasingly terse and firm on the topic; in the end, Vajra and Jianwei undertake to retain only encrypted copies of the data, in secured storage.
In fact, the nature of this incident becomes clear over the next few hours, as everyone talks to everyone else and some people insist on openness. It appears that this problem originated in the Belt, where an enterprise called Skyward Mining attempted to develop a Von Neumann-style mining system - a set of modules with self-replicating capability. Unfortunately, they neglected to include enough safety interlocks into the code, and the design went rogue. It's not actively malicious, and the software involved is non-sapient, although that in itself might make it more dangerous in some circumstances; it simply seeks to replicate itself at every opportunity. Unfortunately, it was designed to interface with Thorium Logistics inventory and shipping systems, and it still seems to have extensive backdoor access to that software. The polypede was, it turns out, rented for short-term use by Skyward before their problems were detected and their R&D site in the Belt was sterilised, and the rogue code managed to secrete itself in one of the thing's modular, distributed control system modules. Prof. Zajdel returning the thing happened to give it the chance to boot itself into a control module, and it set to work trying to build more mining complexes on Mars.
This isn't, so far as anyone can tell, a major threat to life and limb - more of a nuisance, and enough of an embarrassment to a lot of people that they've gone to the trouble of keeping it relatively quiet. Well, talk of rogue self-replicating AIs does tend to get humans all nervous and panicky...
And, yet again, things turn quiet for a while for the team, as diplomatic activity continues frenziedly behind the scenes.The E.U., however, can afford to stand back, look politely neutral - and work out how to exploit its new knowledge of the identity of a couple of great power agents and a US Air Force orbital weapons platform. Lipinski is politely persuaded to play along with all this, while the insurance company eventually accepts the evidence filed by the team and re-instantiates Prof. Zajdel - in various artificial environments and rented cybershells at first, as her explorer-research shell is a bespoke model and getting a new one built will take a few days.
Scorpius 18, m0039
Indeed, this is what leads to the next interesting call on the team's time, as late one morning, the embassy's NAIs inform Jianwei that they have a report that may be of interest; it looks like a routine commercial dispute, but the name attached has links to himself.
It is indeed Prof. Zajdel, who is happy to speak to Jianwei - she's only had brief conversations with him before now, and she's politely grateful for his part in sorting out what happened to her recently. However, this call is about business. She has in fact recently visited Port Lowell, and rented a cybershell for the purpose - a standard-model polypede. Her visit ended a few hours since, and she returned the cybershell to the rental company office. However, a little later, her AI aide reported that the company, Cruz & Cruzcampo Shell Hire, was continuing to bill her account for the rental; its systems insist that it hasn't been returned.
There's obviously an anomaly here, and a curious one - management systems are usually more reliable than this - so Jianwei calls up the other two team members, and they decide that a personal visit to Cruz & Cruzcampo would be indicated. Florence extracts herself from the dojo where she's keeping her martial arts training honed, and goes home to change, while Vajra simply disconnects from the Web work that he's performing. They all meet up a couple of blocks from the hire company office, and approach the place together. It's essentially a warehouse-garage with a small front office, and a group including two biomorphs showing up in person causes the management systems to escalate matters promptly to their human manager, who is polite but insistent - despite what Zajdel's logs may say, their records show no sign of the polypede being returned.
The team get in touch with Zajdel, and she authorises the hire company to activate the polypede's transponder - something covered by the hire contract's privacy clauses. However, the attempt doesn't actually work; whatever is running the cybershell currently is evidently exploiting its built-in privacy controls. The Cruz & Cruzcampo manager admits to being a little concerned at all this, and pulls some imagery off the building cameras, which does indeed show the polypede arriving when Zajdel claims to have returned it - and leaving very soon afterwards. It's a modular, reconfigurable, multi-purpose unit, but it appears to be using its standard mobile configuration - basically, that of a large spider. Attempts to pull more relevant data off the company systems run into problems, however; privacy laws and agreements can be a nuisance sometimes.
So the team wonder how to track the unit. It's not an unusual design - a rugged multi-purpose industrial model, but that sort of thing is not overly rare on Mars - but it does have a moderately distinctive finish. (Florence comments that Prof. Zajdel seems to have a taste for heavy-duty shells; the others point out that she is a geologist.) The team dives into the Web.
They make an inspired guess and go looking for hobbyist bot-spotters. Yes, the breed exists, and it soon becomes clear that there is some serious snobbery about the difference between personal observation and mere NAI-monitored camera logging. Aunty fails to locate many of their Web sites, though. Meanwhile, Dougal has been searching through recent MarsTube posts, but not finding anything relevant here; it doesn't seem that the polypede can have been doing anything very odd in public. So he takes over Aunty's search, and tracks down the hobbyist discussions, then hands the addresses off to Jianwei. Jianwei in turn assesses the memetics of this subculture, and begins posting as a new enthusiast.
And Vajra has been working through a list of E.U.-owned businesses in this neighbourhood, politely requesting recordings from their external security cameras. Collating these, he's able to track the polypede as it made its way through the industrial-commercial quarter of Port Lowell - up until a point when it simply stops showing up, an hour or so ago. The team heads for the area where it was last observed. As they go, Jianwei's probing around the bot-spotter sites, with careful mentions of an "interesting polypede" dropped as bait, elicits more imagery. Once they are in the right area, the team are able to narrow their tracking efforts down to one building - a warehouse and shipping centre owned by a company called Thorium Logistics.
Thorium are in the industrial equipment supply business; essentially, they hold stocks of assorted industrial components for purchase by local users who discover more or less urgent needs. Thus, their building has a front office open to personal visits - a sales counter, in fact.
First, Jianwei talks to the NAI on the door, which quickly decides that there is some kind of issue here ("stolen property?") beyond its authority, and escalates matters to a human supervisor. Meanwhile, Vajra probes local Web space, looking for a ping response from the polypede; he gets a brief response, but a moment later, that address no longer shows any reaction. He decides that they are closing in on their search subject, and heads round the back of the Thorium building to monitor the fire exit door there, while putting a swarm of observation microbots into the air.
The Thorium management become uncomfortable when confronted with Jianwei's questions and Vajra's Web traffic logs, which seem to indicate some kind of anomaly in their building management systems, and shift the problem over to a legal advisor, one Joseph Kwak. Jianwei explains the situation yet again, and persuades Kwak to get Thorium to let himself and Florence into the building. As they glance around, Aunty analyses the imagery that she's getting off Jianwei's optic nerve, and identifies a relevant anomaly, which she highlights obligingly in Jianwei's vision. It appears that the polypede has got into the depths of the warehouse, reconfigured itself into work arm configuration and locked onto one of the shelving units, and is accumulating a small stack of shipping boxes and modules.
Jianwei relays this instantly to Kwak, who swears audibly and relays the problem to the Thorium management team. Their technical advisor instantly sets the warehouse management systems to restart themselves, and the polypede appears to notice that; it detaches itself from the shelving unit and begins shifting into its spider configuration.
Jianwei and Florence decide that things are turning dangerous. Jianwei backs rapidly out of the building while Florence drops down below the level of the counter, draws her pistol, and begins taking careful aim. She's determined enough about the polypede design to realise that, unfortunately, the sort of ammunition she can employ legally in this area won't penetrate its outer casing - but that its camera systems aren't especially protected.
The polypede rushes for the counter (and the doorway beyond), and Florence lets it come quite close; she's only going to get one chance here, after all. Then she opens fire. Her Felicia precision and trained skill serves her well, as one of her first three bullets slams through one of the polypede's camera lenses, and two more go into the other. The cybershell careens into the other side of the counter, and Florence vaults over it and lands on the polypede's back - but this second part of her plan proves superfluous, as her fire has taken out one of the modular machine's local processing nodes - the one assigned to sensory processing - and it has shut down completely.
Her two team-mates cautiously enter the building, as other observers appear on the scene - including a dirigible flying camera which, it turns out, is being teleoperated by "DD", who is evidently continuing to watch the team's career with interest. Vajra carefully links his own shell up to the damaged polypede, and manages to gain access to some of its memory stores; actually, a non-sentient process in one of its subsidiary processors makes a rather crude attempt to copy and run an executable process to his systems. His firewalls block that with trivial ease, and he takes a copy of the program.
At about this time, more cybershells show up; Marshall Kirkowicz is responding to reports of gunfire, and for that matter suggestions of some kind of rogue AI, and her remote cybershells are quickly on the scene. She's feeling a little jaundiced today, and she's also alert enough to note that Vajra has been interfacing with the disabled cybershell; she instantly warns him to be careful with the data copies that she guesses he's acquired. Then, as she acquires more information on the likely nature of the problem from somewhere, she becomes increasingly terse and firm on the topic; in the end, Vajra and Jianwei undertake to retain only encrypted copies of the data, in secured storage.
In fact, the nature of this incident becomes clear over the next few hours, as everyone talks to everyone else and some people insist on openness. It appears that this problem originated in the Belt, where an enterprise called Skyward Mining attempted to develop a Von Neumann-style mining system - a set of modules with self-replicating capability. Unfortunately, they neglected to include enough safety interlocks into the code, and the design went rogue. It's not actively malicious, and the software involved is non-sapient, although that in itself might make it more dangerous in some circumstances; it simply seeks to replicate itself at every opportunity. Unfortunately, it was designed to interface with Thorium Logistics inventory and shipping systems, and it still seems to have extensive backdoor access to that software. The polypede was, it turns out, rented for short-term use by Skyward before their problems were detected and their R&D site in the Belt was sterilised, and the rogue code managed to secrete itself in one of the thing's modular, distributed control system modules. Prof. Zajdel returning the thing happened to give it the chance to boot itself into a control module, and it set to work trying to build more mining complexes on Mars.
This isn't, so far as anyone can tell, a major threat to life and limb - more of a nuisance, and enough of an embarrassment to a lot of people that they've gone to the trouble of keeping it relatively quiet. Well, talk of rogue self-replicating AIs does tend to get humans all nervous and panicky...
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Political Analysis
Scorpius 14, m0039, continued
Their assailant has chosen his ground well; the trio are in a steep-sided gully, and would have to make ten or fifteen feet of height to get out of it and clear of the rocks, while there are few buttresses or projections to screen them. Florence, who is in the lead, decides on a simple solution; she takes a run straight at the oncoming rocks, then jumps, passing clear over them. The other two, lacking her training, opt to move more laterally; Jianwei jumps well up the side wall of the gully, but then finds himself hanging on by his fingertips, while Vajra finds himself falling back into the path of the rocks.
Florence makes a graceful landing despite the very uneven ground as Jianwei clambers laboriously onto a more level spot and Vajra's cybershell suffers a bruising impact from the first, smallest oncoming rocks. Florence charges the attacker, and is pleased not to find herself facing any kind of weapons fire; Jianwei twists around to watch, but can't do much else; Vajra scrabbles aside from the rockfall and begins desperately scrambling up the side of the gully, barely clinging on as the rocks pass below his feet.
Covering the last few yards of the distance with a leap, Florence aims a flying kick at her opponent, but he seems to have a little martial arts training (not unusual on Mars); he twists aside and hits her with a rock that he's gathered up. Fortunately, her protective environment suit absorbs the blow. They face off, and then Florence hears Jianwei; he's calling on the man to surrender, but the man evidently lacks her Felicia ears, and the call didn't carry well over the distance in the thin Martian air. She takes up the idea, echoing Jianwei in identifying the team as EU consular services employees - and faced with a skilled and aggressive catgirl fighter at close quarters, the man deflates and gives up. Jianwei and Vajra clamber back down to join Florence; fortunately, the damage to Vajra's cybershell is light.
The attacker is, as expected, Piotr Lipinski. Confronted with an accusation of foul play against his partner by people who identify themselves as EU agents, Lipinski defends himself; so far as he was concerned, he and Professor Zajdel were attacked, together - with orbital weapons! - and he didn't know who to trust. So he fled, and hoped to drive off anyone who came after him. He had ideas of contacting unspecified friends when he'd got far enough.
It sounds an odd story, but the team escorts Lipinski back down the slope to their rover, listening to him as they go. He is able to illustrate his claims; as he describes things, he and Zajdel were camping out, and her physiological software model was still on Mars University time, so she took a late-night "stroll" down to look at the site which they were set to study while he watched before retiring for the night.
His NAI wearable's video recording of that scene for the important few seconds show a single glowing line suddenly appearing from above to strike the rock face, which trembles and then collapses onto Zajdel's exploration shell before she can get away. The image certainly looks like a hypersonic kinetic strike arriving from orbital altitudes - although the frame rate of the recording limits the details that can be derived. Of course, it would be trivial to fake such imagery, given modern video editing technology - Lipinski's wearable doesn't have any kind of secure evidence-bonded encrypted storage, and this really wouldn't stand up in court - but arranging such fakery would have been tricky in the circumstances, and overall, the team start to trust Lipinski's account. His actions of the last few days may have been unwise, but they were quite understandable, given what he says and shows them. On the other hand, as murder attempts go, this one was both bizarre - no one would even have known that Zajdel's cybershell was where it was, unless they used some quite intensive satellite imagery analysis - and wildly excessive - an orbital weapon against one or two civilians?
The group reaches the rover, and they remember the other puzzle; the mass of accounting data that reached them recently from an anonymous source. They briefly wonder if this was some kind of distraction attack, but decide that the timing was probably pure coincidence. (Lipinski denies all knowledge of this stuff.) So they and their companion AIs review the data. A quick check suggests that it's apparently all valid and mostly public material, but it's been carefully examined by someone, and a number of seemingly innocuous entries have been neatly highlighted for attention. Looking at these, the team are driven to conclude that Chen's business, while well enough run over the decades, received a fair amount of very subtle assistance from various other enterprises - most of them Chinese, and some known to be either government-run or closely associated with the government. In other words, the Singaporean Chen was in cahoots with the Chinese authorities, or had otherwise given them good cause to support him over the years. The likeliest guess would be that he was an agent of influence within the Singaporean business community.
As the rover moves off, the team also download some analysis software and run it against Lipinksi's image of the orbital strike. This contains enough information that they can project the glowing line up to orbit, and then cross-reference with standard navigational databases. The likely candidate for a point of origin of the attack is an unmanned US-owned satellite, marked as a non-functional meteorological survey unit - which, strangely enough, showed a very small "undocumented orbital trajectory change" at the time of the strike. This was small enough that anyone who noticed it would put it down to a micrometeorite impact or a bit of out-gassing - but it could also reflect a projectile launch.
So this looks like a US attack, from one of the military units that no one admits to having in Mars orbit but everyone assumes that other people have. But what was it for? Lipinski has no idea, and as murder attempts go, it was imprecise and expensive. It's conceivable that the Americans didn't even know that Zajdel was near the strike zone. The team confer as the rover drives itself southwards; they decide that Maria Vega almost certainly is an SIA agent, but what's her mission? And what was Hua's call of earlier in the day about? Why was he concerned?
Jianwei makes a decision. He writes up events so far, and files his report with the embassy, marked for prompt attention. Within minutes, Colette Schmidt responds, agreeing with his provisional analysis and offering support; she authorises hire of a four-seat hopper, which will meet the team at an arbitrary point in the wilderness and bring them back to Port Lowell, hopefully before anyone hostile with orbital weapons to use can locate them.
And so the rover changes course slightly as the embassy makes arrangements. As they travel, the team talk more, and Lipinski kills time by asking for access to the geological data that the team accumulated from various sources concerning the landslip site; he wants to know what may have provoked the attack. By the time they reach the rendezvous site, he's drawn a provisional conclusion; the landslip exposed geological materials that suggest significant deposits of rare earths - quite valuable stuff, in fact. This is news to him, and he isn't sure if anyone else could have known about it; like most of Mars, that area has been surveyed a little, but so far as he knows, only cursorily and from a distance. Still, it's possible that someone could have put enough information together to guess at the possibility.
So - intentionally or otherwise - the strike exposed this fact, right in front of a pair of trained geologists, in fact. But the team can't work out why anyone would have taken this approach. However, reviewing recent communications traffic from the site, they realise that although Maria Vega has now flown away, she's left some kind of active communications node there. One likely guess would be that it's the snakebot that was riding in her hopper. If she knows about the rare earths deposit, it could act as a claim marker, although it's not doing so at this point.
At the rendezvous site, everyone transfers to the hired hopper, and Vajra uses a microbot swarm to sanitise the rover, seeking to eliminate any evidence of Lipinski having been on board. Then, they send the unmanned rover back towards New Buffalo, and take off towards Port Lowell. There'll necessarily be some refuelling stops along the way, but before the first of those, Jianwei receives a call - from Maria Vega. She's pretty clearly fishing for information about the EU's position and intentions - albeit politely - and he straight-faces in response. He does mention the snakebot, and Vega confirms when asked that it might serve as a marker on a geological claim. So when that call ends, Jianwei calls Hua to ask about his current situation, letting slip more or less deliberately in the process that they believe that Mr Chen may be intending to change his national allegiance in the near future.
The hopper lands at a field outside Port Lowell, and the team take a taxi back to town, from which they intend to call the ambassador - except that she calls first, to tell them that, well, whether through their efforts or otherwise, a large cat now seems to be out of the bag. Mr Chen has declared the intention to apply for Chinese citizenship, and the Chinese have responded favourably - which will mean that a Chinese citizen's residence is deep in the middle of American territory, with a good claim to much of the surrounding area under "fair use" conventions. The Americans have responded by registering a formal claim to the mineral deposits on and around the landslip site (with, yes, that cybershell acting as their claim marker). Everyone is doubtless scowling at everyone else.
The team admit that they're still not sure what happened, but Schmidt, the long-time career diplomat with experience of the politics of Mars, is able to make some educated guesses. Her guess is that the Chinese identified the mineral deposits first, from some previous survey or whatever, and decided to use their agent of influence to move into that area. However, the SIA must have identified Chen as a Chinese patsy, worked out what was going on, spotted the deposits themselves once they had cause to look at that area, and decided to do something about it. Schmidt doubts that the kinetic strike was meant to be homicidal - the Americans probably honestly didn't know that Zajdel was in the danger zone. Rather, the intention was probably to expose the rare earth deposits to the geologists when they came to examine the site the next day, on the plausible (and correct) assumption that, although they had been hired by Chen, they were neutral parties - giving the American Commonwealth an excuse to move in.
However, after Zajdel's late-night excursion got her temporarily killed and thus drew so much attention, everyone had to scramble and improvise. Vega was doubtless sent in to try and salvage the situation, and Chen and his handlers have been forced to show their hand in response. So both sides were trying to exploit the E.U.'s neutrality to their own ends, and will doubtless continue to do so - which may turn out to be beneficial, or just annoying. Coming out of this with provisional identification of Hua and Vega as, respectively, Chinese and US agents, and with that "dead" satellite identified as a clandestine American orbital weapons platform, is all bonus.
Anyway, Schmidt tells the team to bring Lipinski into the embassy for personal debriefing, and he's willing to go along. They assure him that, even if they weren't pretty sure that no one is aiming orbital weapons now, this is a safe place - the effect of which is only spoilt when he meets a cluster of maintenance cybershells, and is told that they are just completing the repairs occasioned by the last armed assault on the place.
Their assailant has chosen his ground well; the trio are in a steep-sided gully, and would have to make ten or fifteen feet of height to get out of it and clear of the rocks, while there are few buttresses or projections to screen them. Florence, who is in the lead, decides on a simple solution; she takes a run straight at the oncoming rocks, then jumps, passing clear over them. The other two, lacking her training, opt to move more laterally; Jianwei jumps well up the side wall of the gully, but then finds himself hanging on by his fingertips, while Vajra finds himself falling back into the path of the rocks.
Florence makes a graceful landing despite the very uneven ground as Jianwei clambers laboriously onto a more level spot and Vajra's cybershell suffers a bruising impact from the first, smallest oncoming rocks. Florence charges the attacker, and is pleased not to find herself facing any kind of weapons fire; Jianwei twists around to watch, but can't do much else; Vajra scrabbles aside from the rockfall and begins desperately scrambling up the side of the gully, barely clinging on as the rocks pass below his feet.
Covering the last few yards of the distance with a leap, Florence aims a flying kick at her opponent, but he seems to have a little martial arts training (not unusual on Mars); he twists aside and hits her with a rock that he's gathered up. Fortunately, her protective environment suit absorbs the blow. They face off, and then Florence hears Jianwei; he's calling on the man to surrender, but the man evidently lacks her Felicia ears, and the call didn't carry well over the distance in the thin Martian air. She takes up the idea, echoing Jianwei in identifying the team as EU consular services employees - and faced with a skilled and aggressive catgirl fighter at close quarters, the man deflates and gives up. Jianwei and Vajra clamber back down to join Florence; fortunately, the damage to Vajra's cybershell is light.
The attacker is, as expected, Piotr Lipinski. Confronted with an accusation of foul play against his partner by people who identify themselves as EU agents, Lipinski defends himself; so far as he was concerned, he and Professor Zajdel were attacked, together - with orbital weapons! - and he didn't know who to trust. So he fled, and hoped to drive off anyone who came after him. He had ideas of contacting unspecified friends when he'd got far enough.
It sounds an odd story, but the team escorts Lipinski back down the slope to their rover, listening to him as they go. He is able to illustrate his claims; as he describes things, he and Zajdel were camping out, and her physiological software model was still on Mars University time, so she took a late-night "stroll" down to look at the site which they were set to study while he watched before retiring for the night.
His NAI wearable's video recording of that scene for the important few seconds show a single glowing line suddenly appearing from above to strike the rock face, which trembles and then collapses onto Zajdel's exploration shell before she can get away. The image certainly looks like a hypersonic kinetic strike arriving from orbital altitudes - although the frame rate of the recording limits the details that can be derived. Of course, it would be trivial to fake such imagery, given modern video editing technology - Lipinski's wearable doesn't have any kind of secure evidence-bonded encrypted storage, and this really wouldn't stand up in court - but arranging such fakery would have been tricky in the circumstances, and overall, the team start to trust Lipinski's account. His actions of the last few days may have been unwise, but they were quite understandable, given what he says and shows them. On the other hand, as murder attempts go, this one was both bizarre - no one would even have known that Zajdel's cybershell was where it was, unless they used some quite intensive satellite imagery analysis - and wildly excessive - an orbital weapon against one or two civilians?
The group reaches the rover, and they remember the other puzzle; the mass of accounting data that reached them recently from an anonymous source. They briefly wonder if this was some kind of distraction attack, but decide that the timing was probably pure coincidence. (Lipinski denies all knowledge of this stuff.) So they and their companion AIs review the data. A quick check suggests that it's apparently all valid and mostly public material, but it's been carefully examined by someone, and a number of seemingly innocuous entries have been neatly highlighted for attention. Looking at these, the team are driven to conclude that Chen's business, while well enough run over the decades, received a fair amount of very subtle assistance from various other enterprises - most of them Chinese, and some known to be either government-run or closely associated with the government. In other words, the Singaporean Chen was in cahoots with the Chinese authorities, or had otherwise given them good cause to support him over the years. The likeliest guess would be that he was an agent of influence within the Singaporean business community.
As the rover moves off, the team also download some analysis software and run it against Lipinksi's image of the orbital strike. This contains enough information that they can project the glowing line up to orbit, and then cross-reference with standard navigational databases. The likely candidate for a point of origin of the attack is an unmanned US-owned satellite, marked as a non-functional meteorological survey unit - which, strangely enough, showed a very small "undocumented orbital trajectory change" at the time of the strike. This was small enough that anyone who noticed it would put it down to a micrometeorite impact or a bit of out-gassing - but it could also reflect a projectile launch.
So this looks like a US attack, from one of the military units that no one admits to having in Mars orbit but everyone assumes that other people have. But what was it for? Lipinski has no idea, and as murder attempts go, it was imprecise and expensive. It's conceivable that the Americans didn't even know that Zajdel was near the strike zone. The team confer as the rover drives itself southwards; they decide that Maria Vega almost certainly is an SIA agent, but what's her mission? And what was Hua's call of earlier in the day about? Why was he concerned?
Jianwei makes a decision. He writes up events so far, and files his report with the embassy, marked for prompt attention. Within minutes, Colette Schmidt responds, agreeing with his provisional analysis and offering support; she authorises hire of a four-seat hopper, which will meet the team at an arbitrary point in the wilderness and bring them back to Port Lowell, hopefully before anyone hostile with orbital weapons to use can locate them.
And so the rover changes course slightly as the embassy makes arrangements. As they travel, the team talk more, and Lipinski kills time by asking for access to the geological data that the team accumulated from various sources concerning the landslip site; he wants to know what may have provoked the attack. By the time they reach the rendezvous site, he's drawn a provisional conclusion; the landslip exposed geological materials that suggest significant deposits of rare earths - quite valuable stuff, in fact. This is news to him, and he isn't sure if anyone else could have known about it; like most of Mars, that area has been surveyed a little, but so far as he knows, only cursorily and from a distance. Still, it's possible that someone could have put enough information together to guess at the possibility.
So - intentionally or otherwise - the strike exposed this fact, right in front of a pair of trained geologists, in fact. But the team can't work out why anyone would have taken this approach. However, reviewing recent communications traffic from the site, they realise that although Maria Vega has now flown away, she's left some kind of active communications node there. One likely guess would be that it's the snakebot that was riding in her hopper. If she knows about the rare earths deposit, it could act as a claim marker, although it's not doing so at this point.
At the rendezvous site, everyone transfers to the hired hopper, and Vajra uses a microbot swarm to sanitise the rover, seeking to eliminate any evidence of Lipinski having been on board. Then, they send the unmanned rover back towards New Buffalo, and take off towards Port Lowell. There'll necessarily be some refuelling stops along the way, but before the first of those, Jianwei receives a call - from Maria Vega. She's pretty clearly fishing for information about the EU's position and intentions - albeit politely - and he straight-faces in response. He does mention the snakebot, and Vega confirms when asked that it might serve as a marker on a geological claim. So when that call ends, Jianwei calls Hua to ask about his current situation, letting slip more or less deliberately in the process that they believe that Mr Chen may be intending to change his national allegiance in the near future.
The hopper lands at a field outside Port Lowell, and the team take a taxi back to town, from which they intend to call the ambassador - except that she calls first, to tell them that, well, whether through their efforts or otherwise, a large cat now seems to be out of the bag. Mr Chen has declared the intention to apply for Chinese citizenship, and the Chinese have responded favourably - which will mean that a Chinese citizen's residence is deep in the middle of American territory, with a good claim to much of the surrounding area under "fair use" conventions. The Americans have responded by registering a formal claim to the mineral deposits on and around the landslip site (with, yes, that cybershell acting as their claim marker). Everyone is doubtless scowling at everyone else.
The team admit that they're still not sure what happened, but Schmidt, the long-time career diplomat with experience of the politics of Mars, is able to make some educated guesses. Her guess is that the Chinese identified the mineral deposits first, from some previous survey or whatever, and decided to use their agent of influence to move into that area. However, the SIA must have identified Chen as a Chinese patsy, worked out what was going on, spotted the deposits themselves once they had cause to look at that area, and decided to do something about it. Schmidt doubts that the kinetic strike was meant to be homicidal - the Americans probably honestly didn't know that Zajdel was in the danger zone. Rather, the intention was probably to expose the rare earth deposits to the geologists when they came to examine the site the next day, on the plausible (and correct) assumption that, although they had been hired by Chen, they were neutral parties - giving the American Commonwealth an excuse to move in.
However, after Zajdel's late-night excursion got her temporarily killed and thus drew so much attention, everyone had to scramble and improvise. Vega was doubtless sent in to try and salvage the situation, and Chen and his handlers have been forced to show their hand in response. So both sides were trying to exploit the E.U.'s neutrality to their own ends, and will doubtless continue to do so - which may turn out to be beneficial, or just annoying. Coming out of this with provisional identification of Hua and Vega as, respectively, Chinese and US agents, and with that "dead" satellite identified as a clandestine American orbital weapons platform, is all bonus.
Anyway, Schmidt tells the team to bring Lipinski into the embassy for personal debriefing, and he's willing to go along. They assure him that, even if they weren't pretty sure that no one is aiming orbital weapons now, this is a safe place - the effect of which is only spoilt when he meets a cluster of maintenance cybershells, and is told that they are just completing the repairs occasioned by the last armed assault on the place.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Geological Research
Scorpius 13, m0039, continued
Reckoning that time is still of the essence in all this, the team make their excuses and leave Mr Chen's house as soon as they have eaten. Florence takes control of the rover, and drives them - quickly and efficiently - to the site of the incident. Specifically, they first visit the Poles' camp site, which proves to have been ignored by the automated rescue mission to the actual landslip. They take a proper forensic approach, with Vajra first sending in an aerobot swarm, leaving the ground and all material objects untouched. Vajra shares the data feed with Aunty, who has the skill sets to process some of it usefully, and it is she who identifies and catalogues the various footprints and exploratory cybershell track-prints in the surrounding dust.
Applying criminological software to the task, Aunty's first conclusion is that this doesn't look like a crime scene; there are certainly no signs of violence. Vajra, however, notes that there is no sign of any kind of comms base station, as a two-person expedition in the Martian wilderness might be expected to use. Professor Zajdel's cybershell may have had good comms capability on board, but this does seem like a curious oversight.
So the team next move in carefully, sweeping the camp with EM scanners. They pick up no signals, and a quick look at the equipment lying around finds little with much in the way of sentience or memory. Looking round, they find other, perhaps more significant, lacks; there's not much in the way of food, and those party members with training in survival skills see other bits and pieces of equipment missing that they'd assume should be present. There's also at least one set of tracks, heading north, which might be compatible with a human leaving and not having returned.
This causes them to examine the Web access logs for the two Poles more closely, and Vajra notes that Zajdel seemingly dropped out of communication entirely about ten minutes before Lipinski. The team begins trying to construct hypotheses to fit all this data. They're now suspecting some kind of criminal action on Lipinski's part - but if that's correct, whatever he did, he didn't engage in much intelligent planning. Of course, a lot of crime is opportunistic or generally unintelligent...
Anyway, the team promised to find a landing site for Maria Vega. Jianwei calls her, but she says that doesn't plan to come out to the site that night. Florence, the trained pilot, looks around for sites, but doesn't find very much at this point.
So now, the team looks at the automated systems working on the landslip site. These turn out to consist of a cluster of small "swarmdozers" (with non-sapient control systems with a certain amount of communal intelligence) under the authority of a low-sapient program in a static unit. These haven't found much that the LAI judged it necessary to report as yet, but the team run analyses on the samples which the burrowing swarmdozers have accumulated, and turn up a few volatiles and metallic micro-fragments to suggest an area to search for Professor Zajdel's cybershell. The LAI acquiesces to their suggestion, and Vajra sends in a small "surveillance worm" and works with the rescue systems. This leaves the two organics free to go and take a look higher up the landslide site. They don't pick up much in the way of geological evidence there, though, or find any tracks. Vajra, meanwhile, has some problems, mainly with the tunnel behind his worm collapsing (the LAI had problems plotting a safe mining scheme), but does find some metallic fragments. Forensic assessment suggests that these come from the missing cybershell - although only from the outer casing.
Vajra doesn't have to sleep, but the other two do, so they head back to Mr Chen's house, leaving Vajra and the other AIs working. Chen has retired to bed by the time they arrive, but two people are still up and showing an interest in what they might have to report; Maria Vega, who Jianwei realises is maybe carefully judging what she says and how she says it, and the servant named Hua, who they have down as Mr Chen's secretary (in the most traditional sense) or personal assistant, who is coolly bland. The four individuals share green tea and engage in subtly guarded conversation, before the Europeans retire to bed. On an instinctive judgement, Jianwei tells Aunty to research possible links between Ms. Vega and Lipinski while he sleeps. Meanwhile, the team have also asked Quentin, back at the embassy, to acquire some thermal imaging data for a wide area around this location from satellite sources; they suspect that it might locate Lipinski.
Scorpius 14, m0039
Vajra and the LAI rescue system work through the night, but there's one small accident in that time - Vajra's surveillance worm gets trampled by a swarmdozer, disabling it. Still, by the time the sun rises, the swarmdozers have recovered enough fragments of manufactured material for Vajra to conclude that some hardware, including computer systems, was crushed by the landslide, and everything about the finds is compatible with it having been Zajdel's cybershell.
Meanwhile, Jianwei and Florence awake to news from Quentin; the IR imagery has indeed picked up a trace of what looks like a one-person camp, at a distance that might well rate as a couple of day's walk north of the landslide site. Quentin also has messages from some of Professor Zajdel's friends in the academic community, who have been applying their skills to the puzzle of their colleague's misfortune; they've been analysing available imagery, including the reports that Vajra and the other AIs have recently filed from the site, and combining it with the seismic traces from the time, and their conclusion is that the landslide looks to have been triggered by some kind of abrupt and not very natural-looking shock or impact.
Aunty, on the other hand, has little to report; if there are any signs of Lipinski and Vega having any kind of association, she hasn't been able to locate them on the Web. However, when Jianwei takes a few minutes to casually review the raw data which Aunty has acquired, he notes that Vega is a very mobile sort of operative; it looks as though working for the Martian Commonwealth not only keeps her busy, but almost permanently on the move, in person. Then, in a moment of inspiration, Jianwei looks again at some wilderness travel plan filings from about a year ago - and realise that she was most likely in the region west of Olympus Mons at exactly the time when Dr Tiberius Vartex had his nigh-fatal hopper crash. That could just be coincidence, of course.
Jianwei begins the process of filing confirmation that Professor Zajdel's processor has been destroyed, which will allow the insurance company to begin the process of releasing her latest backup to run and covering the cost of a replacement cybershell - although they'll probably cautiously wait a little longer to complete the process. He also decides to tell Vega some but not all of what they know, including Vajra's discovery of the cybershell remains, to provide her with some of the visual imagery that they acquired the previous day (but not much from the camp site), and to make another effort to find a landing site for her hopper. She flies over to the site quite promptly, and when she arrives, Vajra notices a spike in local network traffic; her snakebot is hitting the rescue-system LAI with lots of queries for accessible data.
The European team meet up and head back to the camp site, but only take a quick look there. Then they slip behind a ridge, hoping to avoid Vega's attention as they head north in pursuit of (they assume) Lipinski. Jianwei and Florence both have tactical training, which pays off here in helping them to be subtle about this. They do make a call to Mr Chen, though, to thank him for his hospitality and to bid him farewell.
They find the site which they picked up on the satellite IR images, but it's now been abandoned, so they continue to track their quarry northwards. It's slow going, though; they spend a lot of their time out of the rover, walking ahead of it while scanning the Martian dust from as close as possible. This carries them through the late morning and afternoon, and they find that they are now moving into an area of rising hills. Florence's driving skills enable them to keep the rover with them for quite a while - albeit sometimes with only three of its six wheels on the ground at a time - but eventually, they enter a seriously rocky region, and have to leave the vehicle behind.
As they climb, they receive a call from Hua, who wants to ask them to place the data which they've accumulated under a diplomatic seal - not making it a secret, but certifying it and protecting it against tampering, the better for use in, say, future court cases. Hua now seems increasingly cagey; Jianwei doesn't perceive him as a servant any more. When Jianwei suggests that he make the same request of Ms Vega, he demurs; "your employers' neutrality is much respected", he adds, slightly gnomically.
Then, as the party ascends a slope, Jianwei spots a figure, waiting and lurking behind a stack of rocks further up. Those rocks begin to slide, tumbling down the slope towards the group - and at that same moment, their AI aides report that a large volume of data is arriving in their in-boxes. It appears to be a great deal of accounts data relating to Mr Chen's past business career...
Reckoning that time is still of the essence in all this, the team make their excuses and leave Mr Chen's house as soon as they have eaten. Florence takes control of the rover, and drives them - quickly and efficiently - to the site of the incident. Specifically, they first visit the Poles' camp site, which proves to have been ignored by the automated rescue mission to the actual landslip. They take a proper forensic approach, with Vajra first sending in an aerobot swarm, leaving the ground and all material objects untouched. Vajra shares the data feed with Aunty, who has the skill sets to process some of it usefully, and it is she who identifies and catalogues the various footprints and exploratory cybershell track-prints in the surrounding dust.
Applying criminological software to the task, Aunty's first conclusion is that this doesn't look like a crime scene; there are certainly no signs of violence. Vajra, however, notes that there is no sign of any kind of comms base station, as a two-person expedition in the Martian wilderness might be expected to use. Professor Zajdel's cybershell may have had good comms capability on board, but this does seem like a curious oversight.
So the team next move in carefully, sweeping the camp with EM scanners. They pick up no signals, and a quick look at the equipment lying around finds little with much in the way of sentience or memory. Looking round, they find other, perhaps more significant, lacks; there's not much in the way of food, and those party members with training in survival skills see other bits and pieces of equipment missing that they'd assume should be present. There's also at least one set of tracks, heading north, which might be compatible with a human leaving and not having returned.
This causes them to examine the Web access logs for the two Poles more closely, and Vajra notes that Zajdel seemingly dropped out of communication entirely about ten minutes before Lipinski. The team begins trying to construct hypotheses to fit all this data. They're now suspecting some kind of criminal action on Lipinski's part - but if that's correct, whatever he did, he didn't engage in much intelligent planning. Of course, a lot of crime is opportunistic or generally unintelligent...
Anyway, the team promised to find a landing site for Maria Vega. Jianwei calls her, but she says that doesn't plan to come out to the site that night. Florence, the trained pilot, looks around for sites, but doesn't find very much at this point.
So now, the team looks at the automated systems working on the landslip site. These turn out to consist of a cluster of small "swarmdozers" (with non-sapient control systems with a certain amount of communal intelligence) under the authority of a low-sapient program in a static unit. These haven't found much that the LAI judged it necessary to report as yet, but the team run analyses on the samples which the burrowing swarmdozers have accumulated, and turn up a few volatiles and metallic micro-fragments to suggest an area to search for Professor Zajdel's cybershell. The LAI acquiesces to their suggestion, and Vajra sends in a small "surveillance worm" and works with the rescue systems. This leaves the two organics free to go and take a look higher up the landslide site. They don't pick up much in the way of geological evidence there, though, or find any tracks. Vajra, meanwhile, has some problems, mainly with the tunnel behind his worm collapsing (the LAI had problems plotting a safe mining scheme), but does find some metallic fragments. Forensic assessment suggests that these come from the missing cybershell - although only from the outer casing.
Vajra doesn't have to sleep, but the other two do, so they head back to Mr Chen's house, leaving Vajra and the other AIs working. Chen has retired to bed by the time they arrive, but two people are still up and showing an interest in what they might have to report; Maria Vega, who Jianwei realises is maybe carefully judging what she says and how she says it, and the servant named Hua, who they have down as Mr Chen's secretary (in the most traditional sense) or personal assistant, who is coolly bland. The four individuals share green tea and engage in subtly guarded conversation, before the Europeans retire to bed. On an instinctive judgement, Jianwei tells Aunty to research possible links between Ms. Vega and Lipinski while he sleeps. Meanwhile, the team have also asked Quentin, back at the embassy, to acquire some thermal imaging data for a wide area around this location from satellite sources; they suspect that it might locate Lipinski.
Scorpius 14, m0039
Vajra and the LAI rescue system work through the night, but there's one small accident in that time - Vajra's surveillance worm gets trampled by a swarmdozer, disabling it. Still, by the time the sun rises, the swarmdozers have recovered enough fragments of manufactured material for Vajra to conclude that some hardware, including computer systems, was crushed by the landslide, and everything about the finds is compatible with it having been Zajdel's cybershell.
Meanwhile, Jianwei and Florence awake to news from Quentin; the IR imagery has indeed picked up a trace of what looks like a one-person camp, at a distance that might well rate as a couple of day's walk north of the landslide site. Quentin also has messages from some of Professor Zajdel's friends in the academic community, who have been applying their skills to the puzzle of their colleague's misfortune; they've been analysing available imagery, including the reports that Vajra and the other AIs have recently filed from the site, and combining it with the seismic traces from the time, and their conclusion is that the landslide looks to have been triggered by some kind of abrupt and not very natural-looking shock or impact.
Aunty, on the other hand, has little to report; if there are any signs of Lipinski and Vega having any kind of association, she hasn't been able to locate them on the Web. However, when Jianwei takes a few minutes to casually review the raw data which Aunty has acquired, he notes that Vega is a very mobile sort of operative; it looks as though working for the Martian Commonwealth not only keeps her busy, but almost permanently on the move, in person. Then, in a moment of inspiration, Jianwei looks again at some wilderness travel plan filings from about a year ago - and realise that she was most likely in the region west of Olympus Mons at exactly the time when Dr Tiberius Vartex had his nigh-fatal hopper crash. That could just be coincidence, of course.
Jianwei begins the process of filing confirmation that Professor Zajdel's processor has been destroyed, which will allow the insurance company to begin the process of releasing her latest backup to run and covering the cost of a replacement cybershell - although they'll probably cautiously wait a little longer to complete the process. He also decides to tell Vega some but not all of what they know, including Vajra's discovery of the cybershell remains, to provide her with some of the visual imagery that they acquired the previous day (but not much from the camp site), and to make another effort to find a landing site for her hopper. She flies over to the site quite promptly, and when she arrives, Vajra notices a spike in local network traffic; her snakebot is hitting the rescue-system LAI with lots of queries for accessible data.
The European team meet up and head back to the camp site, but only take a quick look there. Then they slip behind a ridge, hoping to avoid Vega's attention as they head north in pursuit of (they assume) Lipinski. Jianwei and Florence both have tactical training, which pays off here in helping them to be subtle about this. They do make a call to Mr Chen, though, to thank him for his hospitality and to bid him farewell.
They find the site which they picked up on the satellite IR images, but it's now been abandoned, so they continue to track their quarry northwards. It's slow going, though; they spend a lot of their time out of the rover, walking ahead of it while scanning the Martian dust from as close as possible. This carries them through the late morning and afternoon, and they find that they are now moving into an area of rising hills. Florence's driving skills enable them to keep the rover with them for quite a while - albeit sometimes with only three of its six wheels on the ground at a time - but eventually, they enter a seriously rocky region, and have to leave the vehicle behind.
As they climb, they receive a call from Hua, who wants to ask them to place the data which they've accumulated under a diplomatic seal - not making it a secret, but certifying it and protecting it against tampering, the better for use in, say, future court cases. Hua now seems increasingly cagey; Jianwei doesn't perceive him as a servant any more. When Jianwei suggests that he make the same request of Ms Vega, he demurs; "your employers' neutrality is much respected", he adds, slightly gnomically.
Then, as the party ascends a slope, Jianwei spots a figure, waiting and lurking behind a stack of rocks further up. Those rocks begin to slide, tumbling down the slope towards the group - and at that same moment, their AI aides report that a large volume of data is arriving in their in-boxes. It appears to be a great deal of accounts data relating to Mr Chen's past business career...
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Hydraulic Engineering
Scorpius 4-11, m0039
And so, as Ferdinand goes into therapy, the team find things going comfortably quiet for over a week. They continue to handle routine administrative and PR work for the embassy, and settle down to life on Mars.
Scorpius 12, m0039
Then, the team all get an early-morning call from one of the embassy LAIs (Quentin is being required not to work 24-hour days, as it looks bad on the embassy's staff management records, which don't necessarily know how much of that time he spends playing Robo Rally); an incident has occurred which seems to require a formal E.U. presence. Unfortunately, the incident has occurred some way around the planet; the LAI has monorail reservations for everyone, and suggests that they take themselves to the station promptly.
Once they're settled on the train, the three embassy employees get a full briefing from the AI systems - although details of the matter are still hazy or being collected. It appears that a pair of Polish citizens, named Piotr Lipinski and Professor Jolanta Zajdel, have been working as consultants for a Singaporean citizen, a Mr Pao-Wen Chen (no relation of Jianwei's), who is building a house for himself well out in the Martian wilderness, 1,500 miles or so east of Port Lowell. (This sort of project obviously demands considerable private resources; Mr Chen will find himself numbered among the "Millionaires of Mars" if and when he comes to public notice.) Lipinski and Zajdel are geologists, specifically specialists in the hydrology of the Martian landscape; Zajdel teaches at the University of Mars, and Lipinski, it will emerge, is a graduate student working under her. Presumably, they're conducting some kind of site survey for Mr Chen. Anyway, they were apparently working out in the desert a few miles from Chen's home last night, when they both dropped off-line. The AIs managing their Web links began raising alert flags when the loss drew out long enough to appear exceptional, and then some smart system correlated that with reports from various areophysical monitoring services of a brief but significant seismic spike from near to the pair's last known location. Satellite imagery soon confirmed a probable emergency; there appears to have been a fairly major landslip - some hundreds of metres across - at that site.
Mr Chen's household were alerted, and responded appropriately. They didn't have excavation gear of their own, and rapid acquisitions are a problem - any cost issues aside, they don't have landing space for sub-orbital transports - but they were able to arrange deliveries of excavator and rescue cybershells by fast cargo hopper, and acquired appropriate AI operation systems over the Web. This stuff is still being delivered, but everything they've found so far indicates the worst, especially as Lipinski and Zajdel's personal systems are still off-line.
The team aren't expected to be able to assist much with any rescue efforts - it'll take them too long to reach the site, and Chen appears to be doing pretty much everything that's possible - but they should do what they can, try and discover what happened, and provide formal statements and affidavits. This is likely to become especially important because, although Lipinski is or was an organic human, Zajdel is a ghost, who was operating a specialist exploration cybershell. She can be restored from her last backup, but the insurance company will require a very reliable death certificate. They're very correctly cautious about accidental xoxing - but on the other hand, their clients tend to be quite touchy about being left inactive for too long a period.
The embassy LAI has now made all the transport arrangements. As the team's specific mission can't be assigned maximum urgency, they'll be travelling on the surface all the way; it will take them all this day to reach the small American monorail halt at New Buffalo, and then they'll spend the night there before picking up a hired rover with sufficient range to cover the 250 or so miles to Mr Chen's house. They briefly discuss driving overnight, but the hire company wouldn't be happy about anyone driving over rough and poorly-mapped Martian terrain in the dark (yes, even with modern night vision gear), and Jianwei and Florence would have trouble sleeping on the vehicle.
With all this covered, the team discuss what they might find, including the possibility of malfeasance - but they don't have any indication of such a thing at present. Vajra does a quick Web background search on Mr Chen, who had a long and prosperous past career in business in Singapore, but although he certainly had fingers in many pies, there are no obvious signs of criminality there.
So Vajra arranges to receive imagery of the incident site, with updates as frequent as is feasible. Florence takes a look at these, and her training in Martian wilderness survival enables her to spot a lot of details. The Polish duo were looking at a feature that would be assumed to have been a river valley, billions of years ago, and that will probably become one again as terraforming increases the volume of liquid water on the surface and sends rivers once more flowing through this region towards the North Polar Ocean. The landslip appears to have happened where a substantial bluff overlooks a bend in the dry river. It's the kind of thing that happened a lot a couple of decades ago; it's not so common today, but not entirely unknown.
Meanwhile, Jianwei has put a call through to Mr Chen's house, and has found himself explaining the team's assignment to a suave AI named Shen, who evidently functions as Chen's housekeeper. He asks if there's anything that the team can bring with them to help with the emergency work, but Shen says politely that it can't suggest any such needs at this point - everything that any relevant expert systems can suggest has already been acquired, or at least arranged for acquisition as soon as possible.
And so there doesn't seem to be much more that the team can think to do, as the maglev train skims around the Martian equator. By the end of the day, it reaches New Buffalo, which proves to be no more than a halt on the maglev track, with one capsule hotel, a basic bar or two, and a field that's been bulldozed level to act as a landing spot for hoppers and a marshalling area for rovers, including those from the hire company. Jianwei has anticipated the lack of resources and arranged to acquire the necessary components for a meal off the train, so at least he and Florence can enjoy a passable dinner. Beyond that, the evening proves remarkably unexciting, and they retire to their capsules and enjoy a night's sleep, while Vajra powers his cybershell down and spends the night on Web, occasionally monitoring relevant satellite imagery.
Scorpius 13, m0039
The organic team members wake up in the morning and eat what they can scrounge up by way of an acceptable breakfast, and soon, their hired rover emerged from the clutter of hire vehicles on New Buffalo's vehicle park and pulls around to the front of the capsule hotel. As the team are loading up their gear, they see another arrival; a light hopper drops out of the sky, lands smoothly on the other side of the field, and taxis over to the public pumps to refuel. As it does so, the canopy opens, and a lone human emerges - a woman of indeterminate apparent age or ethnicity, dressed for flying but smartly. She looks around, notices the group, and strolls over to say hello.
She introduces herself as Maria Vega, an employee of the American Martian Commonwealth. When Jianwei admits that the team are heading north, she says that she's going the same way - it seems that her employers are taking an interest in the incident there. This might seem odd, but the Americans do tend, very politely, to classify this whole region of Mars, east of Marineris, as their domain; whatever territoriality the Singaporean Mr Chen may claim for his house, the Americans are likely to claim at least a neighbourly interest. Jianwei judges that Ms Vega is being a little guarded, but she may have her reasons; she's outwardly entirely polite, suggesting that she and the team might exchange information when they've got some. Then she boards her fuelled hopper, and the team notes that the second seat is occupied by some kind of non-humanoid cybershell - probably a snakebot model - before the canopy closes and she takes off northwards.
The team speculate about this encounter. For some unclear reason, they decide that Ms Vega must surely be an SIA agent, but they can't currently see any reason why the Agency would be taking an interest in this matter. But once they are on their way, they do take another look at the accumulated satellite imagery of the incident scene, and spot one more detail; a set of small, clearly artificial objects or structures a few hundred metres from the landslide. The likely guess is that it's the hydrologists' camp site. They also tap various data feeds to track Ms Vega's flight path, but that shows no unexpected deviations.
They reach Mr Chen's house by early evening. Shen evidently detects their approach and greets them over the radio, and a pair of humanoid cybershells meet them at the door to take their bags and show them to the rooms which have been assigned to them. The house currently consists of a number of semi-permanent modules that were doubtless delivered in the form of a road train, and subsequently dug in and partly covered with local soil to improve insulation and radiation protection. It's a substantial but not terribly luxurious looking dwelling now, but it could serve as the start of a more extensive and impressive mansion in years to come, and the interior is more than comfortable enough. Shen tells them that a buffet meal will be served when they've had time to freshen up.
Over the meal, they are able to meet the suave Chen and also to renew their acquaintance with Ms Vega, whose hopper was parked outside when they arrived. Mr Chen expresses regret and concern over the fate of the hydrologists, but it's clear that he regarded them as temporary employees rather than anything more; he seems genuinely concerned about them, but not to be taking this incident personally. He is, he is happy to explain, looking to settle here for some time (which could, given modern medicine, be a very long time), and the house, which is safely on a hilltop, should acquire a view of the restored rivers when they begin to flow through those valleys. The hydrologists were hired to assess exactly how these things should develop. All this fits well with the guesses and assumptions that the team made in advance.
As for Ms Vega - she too seems happy to talk, and admits that she hasn't been able to find out much yet, despite having been here for most of the day. She did over-fly the accident site, and she offers the E.U. team free access to the images she accumulated; in return, she asks that, if they get out to the incident location first, they check for possible landing sites for her hopper.
And indeed, the team are keen to get out there, telling Chen that they'd like to do so once they've eaten. So that seems to be the next step...
And so, as Ferdinand goes into therapy, the team find things going comfortably quiet for over a week. They continue to handle routine administrative and PR work for the embassy, and settle down to life on Mars.
Scorpius 12, m0039
Then, the team all get an early-morning call from one of the embassy LAIs (Quentin is being required not to work 24-hour days, as it looks bad on the embassy's staff management records, which don't necessarily know how much of that time he spends playing Robo Rally); an incident has occurred which seems to require a formal E.U. presence. Unfortunately, the incident has occurred some way around the planet; the LAI has monorail reservations for everyone, and suggests that they take themselves to the station promptly.
Once they're settled on the train, the three embassy employees get a full briefing from the AI systems - although details of the matter are still hazy or being collected. It appears that a pair of Polish citizens, named Piotr Lipinski and Professor Jolanta Zajdel, have been working as consultants for a Singaporean citizen, a Mr Pao-Wen Chen (no relation of Jianwei's), who is building a house for himself well out in the Martian wilderness, 1,500 miles or so east of Port Lowell. (This sort of project obviously demands considerable private resources; Mr Chen will find himself numbered among the "Millionaires of Mars" if and when he comes to public notice.) Lipinski and Zajdel are geologists, specifically specialists in the hydrology of the Martian landscape; Zajdel teaches at the University of Mars, and Lipinski, it will emerge, is a graduate student working under her. Presumably, they're conducting some kind of site survey for Mr Chen. Anyway, they were apparently working out in the desert a few miles from Chen's home last night, when they both dropped off-line. The AIs managing their Web links began raising alert flags when the loss drew out long enough to appear exceptional, and then some smart system correlated that with reports from various areophysical monitoring services of a brief but significant seismic spike from near to the pair's last known location. Satellite imagery soon confirmed a probable emergency; there appears to have been a fairly major landslip - some hundreds of metres across - at that site.
Mr Chen's household were alerted, and responded appropriately. They didn't have excavation gear of their own, and rapid acquisitions are a problem - any cost issues aside, they don't have landing space for sub-orbital transports - but they were able to arrange deliveries of excavator and rescue cybershells by fast cargo hopper, and acquired appropriate AI operation systems over the Web. This stuff is still being delivered, but everything they've found so far indicates the worst, especially as Lipinski and Zajdel's personal systems are still off-line.
The team aren't expected to be able to assist much with any rescue efforts - it'll take them too long to reach the site, and Chen appears to be doing pretty much everything that's possible - but they should do what they can, try and discover what happened, and provide formal statements and affidavits. This is likely to become especially important because, although Lipinski is or was an organic human, Zajdel is a ghost, who was operating a specialist exploration cybershell. She can be restored from her last backup, but the insurance company will require a very reliable death certificate. They're very correctly cautious about accidental xoxing - but on the other hand, their clients tend to be quite touchy about being left inactive for too long a period.
The embassy LAI has now made all the transport arrangements. As the team's specific mission can't be assigned maximum urgency, they'll be travelling on the surface all the way; it will take them all this day to reach the small American monorail halt at New Buffalo, and then they'll spend the night there before picking up a hired rover with sufficient range to cover the 250 or so miles to Mr Chen's house. They briefly discuss driving overnight, but the hire company wouldn't be happy about anyone driving over rough and poorly-mapped Martian terrain in the dark (yes, even with modern night vision gear), and Jianwei and Florence would have trouble sleeping on the vehicle.
With all this covered, the team discuss what they might find, including the possibility of malfeasance - but they don't have any indication of such a thing at present. Vajra does a quick Web background search on Mr Chen, who had a long and prosperous past career in business in Singapore, but although he certainly had fingers in many pies, there are no obvious signs of criminality there.
So Vajra arranges to receive imagery of the incident site, with updates as frequent as is feasible. Florence takes a look at these, and her training in Martian wilderness survival enables her to spot a lot of details. The Polish duo were looking at a feature that would be assumed to have been a river valley, billions of years ago, and that will probably become one again as terraforming increases the volume of liquid water on the surface and sends rivers once more flowing through this region towards the North Polar Ocean. The landslip appears to have happened where a substantial bluff overlooks a bend in the dry river. It's the kind of thing that happened a lot a couple of decades ago; it's not so common today, but not entirely unknown.
Meanwhile, Jianwei has put a call through to Mr Chen's house, and has found himself explaining the team's assignment to a suave AI named Shen, who evidently functions as Chen's housekeeper. He asks if there's anything that the team can bring with them to help with the emergency work, but Shen says politely that it can't suggest any such needs at this point - everything that any relevant expert systems can suggest has already been acquired, or at least arranged for acquisition as soon as possible.
And so there doesn't seem to be much more that the team can think to do, as the maglev train skims around the Martian equator. By the end of the day, it reaches New Buffalo, which proves to be no more than a halt on the maglev track, with one capsule hotel, a basic bar or two, and a field that's been bulldozed level to act as a landing spot for hoppers and a marshalling area for rovers, including those from the hire company. Jianwei has anticipated the lack of resources and arranged to acquire the necessary components for a meal off the train, so at least he and Florence can enjoy a passable dinner. Beyond that, the evening proves remarkably unexciting, and they retire to their capsules and enjoy a night's sleep, while Vajra powers his cybershell down and spends the night on Web, occasionally monitoring relevant satellite imagery.
Scorpius 13, m0039
The organic team members wake up in the morning and eat what they can scrounge up by way of an acceptable breakfast, and soon, their hired rover emerged from the clutter of hire vehicles on New Buffalo's vehicle park and pulls around to the front of the capsule hotel. As the team are loading up their gear, they see another arrival; a light hopper drops out of the sky, lands smoothly on the other side of the field, and taxis over to the public pumps to refuel. As it does so, the canopy opens, and a lone human emerges - a woman of indeterminate apparent age or ethnicity, dressed for flying but smartly. She looks around, notices the group, and strolls over to say hello.
She introduces herself as Maria Vega, an employee of the American Martian Commonwealth. When Jianwei admits that the team are heading north, she says that she's going the same way - it seems that her employers are taking an interest in the incident there. This might seem odd, but the Americans do tend, very politely, to classify this whole region of Mars, east of Marineris, as their domain; whatever territoriality the Singaporean Mr Chen may claim for his house, the Americans are likely to claim at least a neighbourly interest. Jianwei judges that Ms Vega is being a little guarded, but she may have her reasons; she's outwardly entirely polite, suggesting that she and the team might exchange information when they've got some. Then she boards her fuelled hopper, and the team notes that the second seat is occupied by some kind of non-humanoid cybershell - probably a snakebot model - before the canopy closes and she takes off northwards.
The team speculate about this encounter. For some unclear reason, they decide that Ms Vega must surely be an SIA agent, but they can't currently see any reason why the Agency would be taking an interest in this matter. But once they are on their way, they do take another look at the accumulated satellite imagery of the incident scene, and spot one more detail; a set of small, clearly artificial objects or structures a few hundred metres from the landslide. The likely guess is that it's the hydrologists' camp site. They also tap various data feeds to track Ms Vega's flight path, but that shows no unexpected deviations.
They reach Mr Chen's house by early evening. Shen evidently detects their approach and greets them over the radio, and a pair of humanoid cybershells meet them at the door to take their bags and show them to the rooms which have been assigned to them. The house currently consists of a number of semi-permanent modules that were doubtless delivered in the form of a road train, and subsequently dug in and partly covered with local soil to improve insulation and radiation protection. It's a substantial but not terribly luxurious looking dwelling now, but it could serve as the start of a more extensive and impressive mansion in years to come, and the interior is more than comfortable enough. Shen tells them that a buffet meal will be served when they've had time to freshen up.
Over the meal, they are able to meet the suave Chen and also to renew their acquaintance with Ms Vega, whose hopper was parked outside when they arrived. Mr Chen expresses regret and concern over the fate of the hydrologists, but it's clear that he regarded them as temporary employees rather than anything more; he seems genuinely concerned about them, but not to be taking this incident personally. He is, he is happy to explain, looking to settle here for some time (which could, given modern medicine, be a very long time), and the house, which is safely on a hilltop, should acquire a view of the restored rivers when they begin to flow through those valleys. The hydrologists were hired to assess exactly how these things should develop. All this fits well with the guesses and assumptions that the team made in advance.
As for Ms Vega - she too seems happy to talk, and admits that she hasn't been able to find out much yet, despite having been here for most of the day. She did over-fly the accident site, and she offers the E.U. team free access to the images she accumulated; in return, she asks that, if they get out to the incident location first, they check for possible landing sites for her hopper.
And indeed, the team are keen to get out there, telling Chen that they'd like to do so once they've eaten. So that seems to be the next step...
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Go Fetch Rover
March 28-Scorpius 2, m0039
The next couple of days are fairly quiet, giving the team a chance to review their various financial and practical positions. Actually, as they're collecting extended-hours and hardship-posting rates, the team have no significant financial problems; Florence (who's getting pretty good money for someone in her effective social situation) sees a chance to establish a secure financial and social position, while Jianwei is saving as he anticipates a year or two's sabbatical when he returns to Earth at the end of this assignment.
Scorpius 3, m0039
And then another call comes in, passing the non-sapient filters to arrive at Jianwei's virtual desk.
"Good morning," the caller says with the calm smoothness of an AI. "My name is Callisto-Capri. I act as local negotiator for the Granadine Partnership. We are a European corporate entity, so I have been advised to contact you about this matter."
"Uh, good morning. What can we help you with?"
"My dog appears to have gone missing. Local law enforcement is proving unwilling to assist very efficiently."
Jianwei blinks a little at that, but patches the other two into the conversation while he asks for more details. (Vajra is performing routine data management for the embassy; Florence is visiting a local school, playing the part of the friendly free European bioroid for the kids.) "How long has your dog been missing?"
"Just over two hours now..."
It does rapidly emerge that "Ferdinand", the dog in question, is a K-10A uplift - if nothing else, the pictures that Callisto-Capri provides show the distinctive slightly expanded skull structure. The team are a little bemused by this problem - and they can certainly imagine how Marshall Kirkowicz will have reacted if Callisto-Capri called her first - but it does seem to be a legitimate worry. The Granadine Partnership, it emerges, is a Europe-wide association of design consultancies which does enough business on Mars (in the form of numerous small contracts) to justify maintaining a presence here. Callisto-Capri handles negotiations, aided by an assortment of non-sapient software, while Ferdinand acts as a porter and "physical representative". It might seem more sensible for Callisto-Capri to rent cybershells as necessary, but Jianwei and Vajra recognise some pretty routine memetic finesse here, especially when they get hold of the company's Web brochure, and perform a quick and cynical analysis. By employing an organic being as part of their team, the Partnership projects an image of sympathy for organic needs and concerns - doubtless essential for a consultancy specialising in ergonomic design issues. On the other hand, Ferdinand was produced locally (with Mars adaptations built in from the embryo stage); he's a cheap organic employee. Florence swears that Dougal is muttering about Ferdinand's job being to look cute and get scratched behind the ears...
Jianwei is feeling a little unsure about the status of this problem - but then, thinking about the legal situation of uplifts, he mentally classifies this as akin to a missing child case. Well, it might work like that, or a theft... It does seem to merit some attention.
Ferdinand may not be a full citizen by EU law or that of many other jurisdictions active on Mars, but as Granadine's only organic employee on the planet, and an individual with many individual rights under EU law and convention, he does have a small apartment of his own in one of the accommodation blocks scattered around the city - and that was where he was last seen. He apparently left as he would for work that morning, but then dropped out of contact. The team start looking for accessible cameras that might allow his movements to be traced - with only limited success - and Jianwei cross-examines Callisto-Capri about its knowledge of various relevant topics. The AI denies any knowledge of business rivals who might have any likely motive for stealing/kidnapping or attacking Ferdinand - Granadine really aren't in that sort of business. When it comes to questions about the dog's social life and acquaintances, though, it rapidly becomes clear that the AI has a typical low-sapient level of emotional cluelessness. It claims to think of itself as Ferdinand's friend, while not being very sure about his off-duty activities, friendships, or interests.
Anyway, camera records from Ferdinand's apartment block do show him setting out that morning, alone, and a quick cross-check of time stamps suggests that he went off-line at about that time. He has a wearable AI aide, of course, but it's non-sapient; he can probably order it to cut communications with little difficulty. Poking around his financial records, which Callisto-Capri, as his de facto guardian, can access and provide, suggests that his main hobby is participation in a quasi-Neolithic virtual world. In fact, he plays the part of a dire wolf there. So do a lot of humans, mind, and he seems to have some casual friends in his pack; judging by the conversations on the game's associated discussion group, they may or may not know his real-world nature.
A little more poking around accounts and cross-questioning of Callisto-Capri determines that, when the Granadine staff need transport, they hire rovers from a company in the city - and Ferdinand has enough access to company accounts to get hold of one of these. It then turns out that the hire company is based just a couple of blocks from Ferdinand's residence, in the direction in which he seems to have been heading when last sighted.
By now, Florence has made her excuses and slipped out of the classroom, and the team decides to head to the hire company in person. They find another office operated by a LAI - but one which proves quite cooperative, especially given Vajra's skill in interfacing techniques. The company, while not especially dubious, is a relatively cheap, casual sort of outfit, and yes, they rented a light rover to Ferdinand just that morning. After all, he's a known regular customer, and his wearable is certified as a competent driver, so it can have full access to the control systems... But the rover has a locator beacon that can't be turned off, and the LAI is happy to check where it is right now - which proves to be some miles out in the desert, moving but not heading in any particular direction, and not responding to radio calls.
The team look at each other, put one of the hire company's heavy rovers on the consulate account, and set out after the missing dog, as Jianwei installs an uplift-dog psychology skill set on Aunty. They make good progress - Florence is a skilled driver - and find Ferdinand's rover soon enough. It's still not going anywhere in particular, but is chasing round and over various dunes. The team have magnifying optics with them, and are able to make out Ferdinand, alone aboard the other vehicle and looking rather excited.
He sees them, too, and promptly drives straight at them. It seems that he's got his NAI doing exactly what he asks, with neither that nor the vehicle's own systems providing any sort of safety overrides. The team have an exciting few moments, with Ferdinand testing Florence's driving skills in a game that seems too much like chicken, giving them a better view of his expressions; Aunty's conclusion is that he's gone mildly atavistic. Eventually, though, Ferdinand decides that he wants to get away from them; fortunately, both rovers have similar performance, and with better driving skills aboard, the team are able to stay with him.
At this point, Florence decides on a rather dramatic plan to deal with this problem. Having confirmed that the hire company can provide override codes to unlock and open any of the rovers' doors, she leaves the team's vehicle under the control of Samadhi, who seems to be the second-best driver available, opens a side door (ignoring any automated safety system warnings), and clambers up onto the roof of the rover. Then, when the two vehicles are a reasonably stable distance apart, she jumps the gap with elegant precision. Once she's safe on the smaller rover's roof, she tells the automatic systems to open a side door, and somersaults in.
Of course, Ferdinand has seen her coming, and doesn't appear pleased to see her, attempting to slam her out straight away. She deflects the attack and gets the door closed - but then a vulgar brawl ensues in the footwell of the rover, with Ferdinand attempting to sink his teeth into the opponent who he seems to be abusing as an "Uncle Tom". (He also turns out to have some police dog-style training.) After fending him off for a moment, Florence brings her stun glove into play, and even manages to paralyse him at one point - but he shakes off its effect too soon. On his part, he manages to land a bite on her arm, although that's protected by an armoured sleeve, and hangs on until she lands a headbutt on him that makes him let go. Then, she has a thought and grabs at his wearable with her shock glove. This knocks out its electronic systems for long enough that the rover's own computer takes over and slows the vehicle to a halt.
Ferdinand is still fighting, though, and Florence is getting annoyed enough that she resorts to more or less beating him senseless. She's even setting up for a kick with her high-heeled boots when the door opens again; the other two of the team have brought their own rover up to the scene, and Vajra has emerged with a vortex pistol. A well-aimed blast of tranquilliser gas batters Ferdinand down - and more importantly, renders him unconscious.
Florence is left muttering that her martial arts lessons neglected to cover techniques for fighting in the footwell of a moving land vehicle, and resolves to press her sensei about this subject, the next time she gets the chance. As she dusts herself down, Vajra applies cufftape to immobilise Ferdinand, and Jianwei arrives, and - aided by software running on Aunty - makes sure that none of their prisoner's wounds are serious. Then Jianwei and Vajra load him and themselves onto their own rover, Florence takes charge of the smaller vehicle, and they all turn back to Port Lowell.
Jianwei takes the opportunity to carefully cross-examine Ferdinand - who, it rapidly emerges, has not only gone somewhat atavistic, but has absorbed a large dose of the "Animal Reparations" meme. (All the Reparationist literature which he's been downloading recently - including chimp-uplift David Pan's Dominion - would have been a clue.) Along with his attitude to Florence, he dismisses Jianwei as an oppressor and Vajra as a "lick-spittle pawn of the humans". Granadine aren't going to be getting much work out of their employee, and are going to be facing a serious bill for specialist therapy...
And so the team return to the embassy - and the discovery for Florence that the EU psychiatrists who worry for her most have requested full implant sensory records for the day. While Jianwei is prepared to vouch that a flying leap between fast-moving vehicles wasn't really as crazed idea as it might sound - for her - she is going to have to spend a lot of time reassuring them about how she felt about all this.
(Analysis of the logs is also reported to reveal that Dougal was wearing his virtual Stetson and yelling "Ride 'em cowboy" while Florence was on the roof of the rover, and "Yee haa!" when she jumped, followed by "Watch out, you've got me onboard!" on landing. Florence swears she wasn't paying much attention to non-priority items, and didn't notice at the time. The psychiatrists put a note on the "influence over AIs" section of Florence's file.)
The next couple of days are fairly quiet, giving the team a chance to review their various financial and practical positions. Actually, as they're collecting extended-hours and hardship-posting rates, the team have no significant financial problems; Florence (who's getting pretty good money for someone in her effective social situation) sees a chance to establish a secure financial and social position, while Jianwei is saving as he anticipates a year or two's sabbatical when he returns to Earth at the end of this assignment.
Scorpius 3, m0039
And then another call comes in, passing the non-sapient filters to arrive at Jianwei's virtual desk.
"Good morning," the caller says with the calm smoothness of an AI. "My name is Callisto-Capri. I act as local negotiator for the Granadine Partnership. We are a European corporate entity, so I have been advised to contact you about this matter."
"Uh, good morning. What can we help you with?"
"My dog appears to have gone missing. Local law enforcement is proving unwilling to assist very efficiently."
Jianwei blinks a little at that, but patches the other two into the conversation while he asks for more details. (Vajra is performing routine data management for the embassy; Florence is visiting a local school, playing the part of the friendly free European bioroid for the kids.) "How long has your dog been missing?"
"Just over two hours now..."
It does rapidly emerge that "Ferdinand", the dog in question, is a K-10A uplift - if nothing else, the pictures that Callisto-Capri provides show the distinctive slightly expanded skull structure. The team are a little bemused by this problem - and they can certainly imagine how Marshall Kirkowicz will have reacted if Callisto-Capri called her first - but it does seem to be a legitimate worry. The Granadine Partnership, it emerges, is a Europe-wide association of design consultancies which does enough business on Mars (in the form of numerous small contracts) to justify maintaining a presence here. Callisto-Capri handles negotiations, aided by an assortment of non-sapient software, while Ferdinand acts as a porter and "physical representative". It might seem more sensible for Callisto-Capri to rent cybershells as necessary, but Jianwei and Vajra recognise some pretty routine memetic finesse here, especially when they get hold of the company's Web brochure, and perform a quick and cynical analysis. By employing an organic being as part of their team, the Partnership projects an image of sympathy for organic needs and concerns - doubtless essential for a consultancy specialising in ergonomic design issues. On the other hand, Ferdinand was produced locally (with Mars adaptations built in from the embryo stage); he's a cheap organic employee. Florence swears that Dougal is muttering about Ferdinand's job being to look cute and get scratched behind the ears...
Jianwei is feeling a little unsure about the status of this problem - but then, thinking about the legal situation of uplifts, he mentally classifies this as akin to a missing child case. Well, it might work like that, or a theft... It does seem to merit some attention.
Ferdinand may not be a full citizen by EU law or that of many other jurisdictions active on Mars, but as Granadine's only organic employee on the planet, and an individual with many individual rights under EU law and convention, he does have a small apartment of his own in one of the accommodation blocks scattered around the city - and that was where he was last seen. He apparently left as he would for work that morning, but then dropped out of contact. The team start looking for accessible cameras that might allow his movements to be traced - with only limited success - and Jianwei cross-examines Callisto-Capri about its knowledge of various relevant topics. The AI denies any knowledge of business rivals who might have any likely motive for stealing/kidnapping or attacking Ferdinand - Granadine really aren't in that sort of business. When it comes to questions about the dog's social life and acquaintances, though, it rapidly becomes clear that the AI has a typical low-sapient level of emotional cluelessness. It claims to think of itself as Ferdinand's friend, while not being very sure about his off-duty activities, friendships, or interests.
Anyway, camera records from Ferdinand's apartment block do show him setting out that morning, alone, and a quick cross-check of time stamps suggests that he went off-line at about that time. He has a wearable AI aide, of course, but it's non-sapient; he can probably order it to cut communications with little difficulty. Poking around his financial records, which Callisto-Capri, as his de facto guardian, can access and provide, suggests that his main hobby is participation in a quasi-Neolithic virtual world. In fact, he plays the part of a dire wolf there. So do a lot of humans, mind, and he seems to have some casual friends in his pack; judging by the conversations on the game's associated discussion group, they may or may not know his real-world nature.
A little more poking around accounts and cross-questioning of Callisto-Capri determines that, when the Granadine staff need transport, they hire rovers from a company in the city - and Ferdinand has enough access to company accounts to get hold of one of these. It then turns out that the hire company is based just a couple of blocks from Ferdinand's residence, in the direction in which he seems to have been heading when last sighted.
By now, Florence has made her excuses and slipped out of the classroom, and the team decides to head to the hire company in person. They find another office operated by a LAI - but one which proves quite cooperative, especially given Vajra's skill in interfacing techniques. The company, while not especially dubious, is a relatively cheap, casual sort of outfit, and yes, they rented a light rover to Ferdinand just that morning. After all, he's a known regular customer, and his wearable is certified as a competent driver, so it can have full access to the control systems... But the rover has a locator beacon that can't be turned off, and the LAI is happy to check where it is right now - which proves to be some miles out in the desert, moving but not heading in any particular direction, and not responding to radio calls.
The team look at each other, put one of the hire company's heavy rovers on the consulate account, and set out after the missing dog, as Jianwei installs an uplift-dog psychology skill set on Aunty. They make good progress - Florence is a skilled driver - and find Ferdinand's rover soon enough. It's still not going anywhere in particular, but is chasing round and over various dunes. The team have magnifying optics with them, and are able to make out Ferdinand, alone aboard the other vehicle and looking rather excited.
He sees them, too, and promptly drives straight at them. It seems that he's got his NAI doing exactly what he asks, with neither that nor the vehicle's own systems providing any sort of safety overrides. The team have an exciting few moments, with Ferdinand testing Florence's driving skills in a game that seems too much like chicken, giving them a better view of his expressions; Aunty's conclusion is that he's gone mildly atavistic. Eventually, though, Ferdinand decides that he wants to get away from them; fortunately, both rovers have similar performance, and with better driving skills aboard, the team are able to stay with him.
At this point, Florence decides on a rather dramatic plan to deal with this problem. Having confirmed that the hire company can provide override codes to unlock and open any of the rovers' doors, she leaves the team's vehicle under the control of Samadhi, who seems to be the second-best driver available, opens a side door (ignoring any automated safety system warnings), and clambers up onto the roof of the rover. Then, when the two vehicles are a reasonably stable distance apart, she jumps the gap with elegant precision. Once she's safe on the smaller rover's roof, she tells the automatic systems to open a side door, and somersaults in.
Of course, Ferdinand has seen her coming, and doesn't appear pleased to see her, attempting to slam her out straight away. She deflects the attack and gets the door closed - but then a vulgar brawl ensues in the footwell of the rover, with Ferdinand attempting to sink his teeth into the opponent who he seems to be abusing as an "Uncle Tom". (He also turns out to have some police dog-style training.) After fending him off for a moment, Florence brings her stun glove into play, and even manages to paralyse him at one point - but he shakes off its effect too soon. On his part, he manages to land a bite on her arm, although that's protected by an armoured sleeve, and hangs on until she lands a headbutt on him that makes him let go. Then, she has a thought and grabs at his wearable with her shock glove. This knocks out its electronic systems for long enough that the rover's own computer takes over and slows the vehicle to a halt.
Ferdinand is still fighting, though, and Florence is getting annoyed enough that she resorts to more or less beating him senseless. She's even setting up for a kick with her high-heeled boots when the door opens again; the other two of the team have brought their own rover up to the scene, and Vajra has emerged with a vortex pistol. A well-aimed blast of tranquilliser gas batters Ferdinand down - and more importantly, renders him unconscious.
Florence is left muttering that her martial arts lessons neglected to cover techniques for fighting in the footwell of a moving land vehicle, and resolves to press her sensei about this subject, the next time she gets the chance. As she dusts herself down, Vajra applies cufftape to immobilise Ferdinand, and Jianwei arrives, and - aided by software running on Aunty - makes sure that none of their prisoner's wounds are serious. Then Jianwei and Vajra load him and themselves onto their own rover, Florence takes charge of the smaller vehicle, and they all turn back to Port Lowell.
Jianwei takes the opportunity to carefully cross-examine Ferdinand - who, it rapidly emerges, has not only gone somewhat atavistic, but has absorbed a large dose of the "Animal Reparations" meme. (All the Reparationist literature which he's been downloading recently - including chimp-uplift David Pan's Dominion - would have been a clue.) Along with his attitude to Florence, he dismisses Jianwei as an oppressor and Vajra as a "lick-spittle pawn of the humans". Granadine aren't going to be getting much work out of their employee, and are going to be facing a serious bill for specialist therapy...
And so the team return to the embassy - and the discovery for Florence that the EU psychiatrists who worry for her most have requested full implant sensory records for the day. While Jianwei is prepared to vouch that a flying leap between fast-moving vehicles wasn't really as crazed idea as it might sound - for her - she is going to have to spend a lot of time reassuring them about how she felt about all this.
(Analysis of the logs is also reported to reveal that Dougal was wearing his virtual Stetson and yelling "Ride 'em cowboy" while Florence was on the roof of the rover, and "Yee haa!" when she jumped, followed by "Watch out, you've got me onboard!" on landing. Florence swears she wasn't paying much attention to non-priority items, and didn't notice at the time. The psychiatrists put a note on the "influence over AIs" section of Florence's file.)
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