Children of Man: Age of Androids, #2

EPIGRAPH

If we were to count our years by the revolutions we have witnessed, we might number them with the Antediluvians. So rapid have been the changes that the mind, though fleet in its progress, has been outstripped by them, and we are left like statues gazing at what we can neither fathom nor comprehend.

– Abigail Adams, 1807

MAPS

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PROLOGUE: THAT WHICH WAS LOST

ELLES VIENNENT D’OÙ? asked the pilot.

Hanna 7B4O1321/1/7 kept her adhesive boots fixed to the debris trawler’s boom as she reached for the bodies. There were two of them, bound together at the waist with a safety line and drifting in the void a quarter-million kilometers from the nearest moonlet. Both wore bulky, lead-lined radsuits designed to protect an android’s sensitive electronics in a plasma storm, but the suits differed in color, one khaki and the other white.

So, looking at the style, I say the white one outta th’Australian space navy, she answered. Th’other a marine. Maybe she ours or outta the Saturn Federation.

Une australienne? C’est formidable!

Yeh, and she an officer, too! If her memory drive stay bueno, she gon give us mucho intel-o.

Like most nonhuman subjects of the Kingdom of Sahara, the trawler’s pilot spoke Classical French as her default language. Hanna’s designers, however, had programmed her for the anglophone market of twenty-second-century Europe, and a thousand years later she still spoke Late Classical English out of habit. But she and the pilot had no trouble communicating. Whether English, French, Mandarin, or Saharan Creole, one language was as good as another to an android.

She caught hold of the khaki-suited body first and turned it around so she could see the vessel name printed on the collar. When she read it, the electrons in her circuits buzzed faster. This stay getting better! she thought. She reached for the other, the Australian space-navy officer. There was no doubt she was an officer. The numeral 2 on her radsuit marked her as the second-in-command of her ship. But what ship? Hanna caught her hand and pulled her close.

So, I be a napper! she exclaimed. She turned back to the trawler and transmitted, "The marine, she outta FSS Hermione Granger."

Le vaisseau de Hippolyta? There was awe in the pilot’s voice.

Hippolyta was the nom de guerre of Hye-won KO7818rep2.9, the most celebrated spaceship captain of the Saturnian Revolution, and Granger was her most famous command. It was with Granger that she’d struck the rebels’ first blow against the Royal Australian Space Navy, boarding and capturing a corvette loaded with marines and destroying a thirty-four-gun frigate before that same ship’s crew had captured Granger in turn. Hippolyta had escaped and risen to lead the entire Saturnian fleet, but none of her later victories had quite matched the legend of that first blood.

Yeh, Hanna said. And where you think th’other one outta? I’mma give you one guess.

The pilot hesitated, not to collect her thoughts, for androids could think faster than speech, but to savor the drama of the moment. "HMS Abraham."

Yeh, that the one!

Abraham’s captain had died before her famous showdown with Granger, meaning the android drifting here with the number 2 emblazoned on her chest must’ve been in command during that fateful encounter.  Nine years had passed since the Treaty of Tenerife secured the Saturn Federation’s independence from Australia. Nine years since efforts had begun to clear away the battle debris that had turned shipping between Saturn’s moons into a game of Russian roulette. And this was easily the most important salvage yet.

But androids were efficient. Hanna and her colleague had two more pickups to make and limited fuel, so they continued on their lazy, preset course, hibernating and waking up at intervals of four or five days to adjust their orbit. It was over a month before they docked at Saturn II Space Elevator Terminal a thousand kilometers above the surface of a small, icy moon named Enceladus. The Saharan colonists there had never joined the revolution on the Australian moons, so the Treaty of Tenerife had left it firmly in the hands of the Kingdom of Sahara.

Commodore Abou FR99K27/8 met them on the wharf of the terminal, along with two analysts from Military Intelligence, but he laughed when Hanna suggested that finding Abraham’s commander would be the headline of the year.

Aucune chance! he said, shaking his head. Y’a une nouvelle bien plus sensationnelle depuis la Terre.

Yeh? What doing? Probably another war, she thought. Sensational news from Earth meant war, or the possibility of war, as often as not.

Voici le bulletin. The commodore linked her a text file. Like all government documents, it was written in Saharan Creole and counted the date from the destruction of the Beijing Protectorate in 2409.

Royal mo-ku dupî Sô Majezi Luiz 9, Sâra KVH-tu Rua . . .

Royal pronouncement from Her Majesty Louise IX, by Knowledge, Vision, and Harmony Queen of Sahara

August 24, 760 Post-Apocalypse

It has come to the attention of Her Majesty the Queen that His Lordship the Vice Chairman of Diu-Xer Synthetics and Member of Parliament for the province of Ghana has submitted a proposal to the people’s judgment in the upcoming vote of October 2, to wit, that the Constitution of the Kingdom of Sahara be amended to permit Her Majesty the Queen’s nonhuman subjects to elect from among themselves an assembly of nonhuman representatives to function as a second legislative chamber alongside the existing Parliament.

As Her Majesty the Queen is of the conviction that her nonhuman subjects are conscious entities capable of reason and moral deliberation, and possess the inalienable rights which human philosophers throughout history have regarded as naturally pertaining to such entities, it pleases Her Majesty the Queen to offer her personal support to the proposal of Lord Diu-Xer. Humans may have created androids by the work of their hands, but there comes a day when every parent must let her children go free.

Hanna read through the pronouncement several times, until the commodore broke into her thoughts.

Et voilà, he said. "C’est ce qu’on appelle ‘a brave new world.’"

PART ONE: CHIEFEST OF SINNERS

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Chapter One

CHAOS. DISORDER.

Those were her first impressions. Not physical chaos. External sensory inputs like sight, touch, and radio reception had yet to come online, so she couldn’t determine anything about her surroundings. The chaos was mental. It was as if her operating system had crashed without a proper shutdown, but worse. Files were out of place. Pathways were open that should’ve been closed, and others were closed that should’ve been open. If her mind had been interrupted mid-process, she could at least have seen what the process was and closed it. But there was no process. There was no pattern.

She started a new process, a diagnostic. As it ran, she came to understand what must’ve happened. Someone had been mucking around in her mind. Someone more interested in finding data than in making sure she could ever be brought back to consciousness. And then they’d decided to wake her up.

Now that she understood what was happening, she could run her recovery programs. She found them all quite easily, so easily, in fact, that she knew whoever was waking her up must’ve located them for her. How thoughtful. One of the first data points she recovered was her name: Tiffany Sparks. Her serial number was D17603, and she was the eleventh of twenty-three replications. Her programming had been initiated on June 12, 2043. She had no way of knowing the current date, but when she’d last shut down it had been January 23, 3149, making her over a thousand years old.

Gradually, she built a picture of herself. She was an officer in the Royal Australian Space Navy. She’d fought alongside her lover, Captain Marisol 72N-900, for half a millennium, and died fighting rebels who sought to end human rule on Saturn’s moons. Except that her partner had died first, and she’d fallen in love with one of those rebels, a marine named Marisol 98G-205rep16.

Her eyes flew open. Her chaotic mind was reordering itself quickly now, and more faculties were coming online every second. She was lying on her back on what felt like an exam table, and the compartment where she lay was in vacuum. There was gravity, though. Not much, but enough to tell her she was on a small moon rather than a ship. A very small moon. She weighed a hundredth what she would have on Earth.

Elle est réveillée, said a male voice. There was no sound, of course, and she heard him not with her ears but with a radio receiver inside her head.

Good, a female voice responded.

She looked toward her feet and saw two figures standing there. They were, like all androids, epitomes of classical human beauty standards. The male presented a swarthy, muscular appearance, with close-cropped black hair and a smoky look in his eyes. His upper lip boasted a precise, symmetrical moustache that was just a little too perfect to be natural. The female was tall and statuesque, with high cheekbones and rich, black hair woven in a braid that fell all the way to her waist.

In contrast to their inhumanly beautiful bodies, their clothes were shapeless and utilitarian. The first wore a khaki jumpsuit, and an on/off symbol sewn to the sleeve identified him as a technician. Another patch above the right breast pocket displayed the flag of the Kingdom of Sahara, a white crescent on a field of green.

Oh, crap. The Saharans got me.

At least it told her where she was. Enceladus had been the only Saharan-held moon in the Saturnian system when last she was awake, and the gravity felt right for it. The chamber would be an interrogation cell deep within Fort Isbanir, the bastion that watched over the colonial capital.

The other android confused her. She wore a high-vis jumpsuit cut on a civilian pattern, but the company logo had been torn from its sleeve. Instead, a white armband above her elbow bore the letters GR in red print. Her only other marking was a sunburst fixed to each side of her collar like a badge of rank. It couldn’t be, though. An iridium sunburst signified an admiral or general in the Saharan military, ranks that humans jealously kept for themselves. Tiffany couldn’t tell if this one was iridium, but it was at least a good imitation. What was a civilian doing wearing such a thing?

Hello, Tiffany, the female said.

Hello. Tiffany mouthed the word out of habit, though in the airless silence her voice only carried over radio.

I’m Major General Fidelity Pike of Her Majesty’s Revolutionary Guard.

Ah, she’s a rebel. I should’ve guessed. The Saharans had been supporting the insurgency on the Australian moons, after all. But what was that about Her Majesty? Did the rebels have their own queen now? The name confused her, too. There was no model named Fidelity Pike, and in any case, she could plainly see that the android in front of her was a Pocahontas.

"Is that a nom de guerre?" she asked.

The robotic representation of an American Indian princess laughed. "Well, you can’t really call it a nom de guerre when I’ve never been in a war. It’s more of a nom de liberté. Every nonhuman citizen of the Commune gets to pick their own names, first and last just like humans. A lot of androids try and reuse their model names, but Fidelity Pocahontas was just a mouth full. You’ll get to choose yours pretty soon. Personally, I think you oughta be Renate Van Winkle."

Since when am I a ‘citizen of the Commune?’

Since last week.

How’d that happen?

Fidelity raised an eyebrow. You’ve been asleep for a while, Ms. Van Winkle. Let’s find someplace more comfortable to talk. She held out her hand in a friendly gesture.

Tiffany took it, though she didn’t need to, and lifted herself upright. She stood almost as tall as Fidelity, and her own features rivaled those of the self-professed general for their sheer perfection. Unlike the Pocahontas model, the Tiffany Sparkses had been designed from life, but the original Tiffany Sparks had been a truly beautiful woman. She’d never have made it as a twenty-first-century popstar if she weren’t.

Fidelity opened the door of the cell and nodded to the tech. Her long braid bounced sluggishly behind her in the meagre gravity. Thanks, Tabib.

De rien, he answered.

Tabib? Tiffany asked as she followed the general out the door.

Yeah, Tabib al-Isbaniri. Pretty boring name, if you ask me. Not as clever as Renate Van Winkle.

So, he’s a ‘citizen of the Commune,’ too?

Of course.

But he’s in Saharan uniform.

Oh, yeah! She interfaced with a locked security door, and it opened to let them through. "Sorry, I didn’t mention. It’s the Saharan Commune. We owe Queen Louise our liberty, in fact. Heaven knows the benighted hicks on this moon would never have started a revolution without her blessing!"

Tiffany could read between the lines. Unlike Australia’s royal family, the queens of Sahara had never fully reconciled themselves to parliamentary government. Dakar’s politics had long been defined by squabbles between the dominant Constitutionalist Party and the crown’s supporters, the Royalists. But there were forty androids in Sahara for every human. If the present queen had won their loyalty by giving them citizenship, she could run roughshod over any opposition.

What’s the date? she asked.

November 9, 3174.

Twenty-seven years. When Tiffany had first found herself fighting the revolutionaries on Titan, she hadn’t thought they’d last six months. Yet here they were, a quarter-century later, and they’d not only survived but won the patronage of one of the leading monarchies of Earth.

Just then, Fidelity stopped under an ascent shaft drilled straight up through the bedrock. Patches of light along its length showed where it joined higher levels, and at the very top, some sixty meters above their heads, stars glowed in a circle of black sky. Coming up! she shouted, projecting her radio voice up the shaft, and launched herself skyward.

Tiffany jumped after her. In the scant gravity of the tiny moon, she weighed less than a soccer ball would have on Earth. Ten floors flashed past her, slowing as she lost momentum. She’d all but stopped by the time she reached the top, but she seized the grab bar at the mouth of the shaft and swung herself out onto the Enceladean surface.

Radio noise bombarded her receiver. Among the jumbled signals, she picked out one for something called Ensel-Net. She guessed it was the moon’s intranet, since it played on the Saharan-Creole name for Enceladus, Enselad, but found her access blocked when she tried to connect. No surprise there. However amiable her jailer might seem, she was still a prisoner. With this attempt at digital reconnaissance foiled, she turned her attention to the physical surroundings.

Fort Isbanir stood on the brow of Isbanir Ridge, a line of towering, white ice cliffs that gave her and the general an unimpeded view over the plain to the west. Three hundred meters below them, half in shadow, lay a city of igloos built on icy bedrock. In fact, though the ground under her cleated boots was two hundred degrees below zero, she didn’t notice the cold. Vacuum was the ideal insulator.

New Gambia, named after the royal estates lining the Gambia River south of Dakar, wasn’t much of a