AI lacks consciousness, until it borrows self-awareness from a human host.
Dustin “Dusty” Gordon is a man without a world. The son of a rocket scientist mother, and the commander of the first mission to Mars, he possesses the talents of neither. Instead, he likes to tinker.
Born on Mars, he returned to Earth with his parents, but struggled under Earth’s oppressive gravity, and the weight of his famous parents’ expectations. After graduation he returned to Mars but finds fitting in with the blue-collar guilds difficult.
Unrest is afoot. The guilds chafe at COO Randall Skinner’s plans to upgrade their brain implants and train their own AI-controlled replacements.
Sent to repair a faulty train switch, Dusty’s exoskeleton suit shorts out, exposing him to the icy cold of Mars miles from help. Retrieved severely hypothermic and hypoxic, Dusty is saved by the very neurosurgeon who upgrades the brain implants. Using a higher concentration of nanite electrodes, he replaces Dusty’s brain function lost in the accident.
The solar system’s first cybernetic mind must now navigate the guilds, who accuse him of collaboration with the COO, and Randall Skinner himself, who perceives Dusty as his greatest obstacle to his own control and wealth.
AI lacks consciousness, until it borrows self-awareness from a human host.
Dustin “Dusty” Gordon is a man without a world. The son of a rocket scientist mother, and the commander of the first mission to Mars, he possesses the talents of neither. Instead, he likes to tinker.
Born on Mars, he returned to Earth with his parents, but struggled under Earth’s oppressive gravity, and the weight of his famous parents’ expectations. After graduation he returned to Mars but finds fitting in with the blue-collar guilds difficult.
Unrest is afoot. The guilds chafe at COO Randall Skinner’s plans to upgrade their brain implants and train their own AI-controlled replacements.
Sent to repair a faulty train switch, Dusty’s exoskeleton suit shorts out, exposing him to the icy cold of Mars miles from help. Retrieved severely hypothermic and hypoxic, Dusty is saved by the very neurosurgeon who upgrades the brain implants. Using a higher concentration of nanite electrodes, he replaces Dusty’s brain function lost in the accident.
The solar system’s first cybernetic mind must now navigate the guilds, who accuse him of collaboration with the COO, and Randall Skinner himself, who perceives Dusty as his greatest obstacle to his own control and wealth.
Dustin “Dusty” Gordon walked down radial hall R17 to inspect his exoskeleton for tomorrow’s assignment on Mars’s surface. He had returned late from his field work yestersol, so had left it charging near the east hall airlock rather than in the Mechanics’ control center. The paint scheme of the hall walls switched from dark blue to lime green, indicating he had passed from the Mechanics Guild sector into Fabricators Guild territory.
He spied his exo a hundred meters ahead. Just beyond a group of half a dozen Miners and Tunnelers guilders were gathered around the airlock. He slowed as he approached the six burly men, all dressed in their orange jumpsuits with torn-off sleeves, exposing their well-muscled and tattooed arms. Their orange jumpsuits reminded him of the prison garb he had seen on vids back on Earth. Dusty’s dark blue jumpsuit, the Mechanics Guild colors, hung loosely on his underweight body.
Motion behind the airlock hatch’s round window caught his eye. To his horror, he recognized the face of his friend, Tommy George, from the Engineers Guild. Tommy pounded wildly from inside the viewport, screaming and wild-eyed. The control panel was partially obscured, but Dusty could just make out the flashing red indicator. These goons were locking his friend.
“Hey, that’s my friend. Let him out!” His voice came out more as a squeak than a shout, causing him to hesitate momentarily. Dusty hardly cut an imposing figure. His mop of wavy, strawberry-blond hair rested atop the skinniest frame in Ep City. He appeared more like a gangly teenager than his actual twenty-five Earth years. His prominent Adam’s apple bobbed comically when he was anxious. And at this moment, it was all he could do to keep his knees from knocking.
One of the M&Ts turned in his direction. His crooked nose and cauliflower ears revealed he was a rugby player. Those in Ep City’s rugby sevens league were the Mars equivalent of professional athletes—minus the compensation. He growled, “Get lost twerp, or you’ll join him.”
Dusty’s heart raced. He’d had run-ins with this guy before, out at the mine, Site 43. Behind the hulk, Tommy’s eyes rolled back, and he dropped from view. “Tommy!” Without thinking, Dusty sprang to cover the thirty-meter distance to the hatch.
The remaining goons turned to face the approaching commotion, their expressions marked by curiosity more than concern.
When he reached them, Dusty stretched for the control panel, but he was held back by two M&Ts. “Let me go. He’s gone unconscious.” He struggled to no avail to free himself from the iron grips that restrained him. Every man there outweighed him two-to-one.
“Is there a problem here?”
Dusty twisted free to see a pair of olive-green camo jumpsuits. The City Security officers, faceless behind their visors, were approaching from the same direction he had just come. Like all Security officers, they had shock batons and holstered coilgun pistols hanging from their utility belts. The one doing the talking still wore both weapons on his hips, but his partner held his baton in a two-handed grip. He thumbed the safety, starting the soft, ascending tone of its charging capacitor.
Dusty wanted to say, Is there a problem here? Yes! These clowns are locking my friend. But the grips on his shoulders and arms squeezed so tightly he almost screamed.
Instead, he said, “No problem. My friend was inside testing the pump cycle when the control panel malfunctioned. But I’ve got it working now.”
He shrugged off the two men, whose grasps had loosened, then spun and punched the cancel button on the panel. A harsh susurration announced that the airlock chamber was refilling with air. When the indicator turned steady green, Dusty shoved his way to the hatch. He spun the handle and pulled the heavy door open.
Tommy lay on the floor, clad in his brown Engineers Guild jumpsuit, gasping great gulps of air. A bloody spot was growing in his left eye from burst capillaries.
Dusty knelt and slid an arm under his friend’s shoulder and whispered in his ear, “You’re okay now. I’ve got you. Can you sit up?”
Tommy nodded, his breathing easing a bit. Dusty helped him sit.
“Your friend don’t look so good. He should see a doctor. You want us to call a cart to take him to emergency?” asked the first officer. He held his baton now too, slapping it against his open palm. His smirk gave away his desire to do some damage to the M&Ts, who had retreated as he approached the open hatch.
More than anything, Dusty wanted to walk Tommy the one-and-a-half kilometer distance, to use the time to talk some sense into him. Tommy had been vocal in his siding with the exec comm for forcing the blue-collar guilds to train their own AI replacements. As a guild, the Engineers were all for it, but most members were circumspect when around the blues, who were in open rebellion.
And one glance at the M&Ts still glowering at them told him the odds were they’d both be dead before they ever reached the hospital. Miners and Tunnelers routinely carried sheathed knives strapped to their hips. No doubt the Security officer, still eyeing the M&Ts, felt the same way. “Yeah, thanks. You’re right, Officer. I don’t think he could walk that far.”
As the man called for an autocart, the M&T to Dusty’s right turned to him. “Quick thinking, kid. Nice work.” He slapped Dusty’s shoulder hard enough to convey the message: friend or no friend, if he got in their way again, he’d be joining Tommy inside the airlock.
When the cart arrived, Dusty helped Tommy on and sat down beside him. The two officers stood by, their legs spread shoulder-wide, their batons held in a two-handed grip, humming at the high, steady tone that signaled fully charged capacitors. As the autocart slipped down the hall toward the hospital, the goons followed behind them toward the R5 ring hall, deeper into Ep City, their shortest route to their turf on the west side of town without walking through the executive sector inside R5.
Ep City was arranged like a bicycle wheel, with eight primary radial halls connected to the central hub. Every hundred meters, these halls were intercepted by ring halls, expanding the base in an ever-growing circle. Ep City was really a collection of hundreds of underground domes buried beneath Mars’s loose Hellas Planitia regolith, connected by this framework of underground arched hallways. Fixed-route autoshuttles ferried people through the eight primary radial halls and ring halls R5, R10, R15, and R17. As the city grew, new airlocks were added to the new outermost ring hall. The city had grown over the past twenty-six years to its current seventeen rings. By Dusty’s observation, someplace was always under construction, though the pace had slowed. With a diameter of 3.7 kilometers, Ep City supported a population of just over a hundred thousand.
The Security officers hung their shock sticks back on their utility belts and continued their rounds along R17.
* * *
Dusty pushed open the hatch to The Stardust and let Tommy enter first. Ellen, dressed in her sky-blue Information Technology Guild jumpsuit, waved from a table across the floor. Her straight, mousy, midback-length, dishwater-blond hair swung from side to side with her arm movements. Her thin smile shone across the room, but the dim light masked her light blue eyes.
The pair made their way to her through the intervening tables and smattering of sky blue-clad patrons. By unspoken rule, Ep City was divided up into several sectors, by guild. Residential units were strictly rented to members of the appropriate guild, especially so for blue-collar areas. Bars, gyms, tattoo parlors—they were all frequented by only the guild that controlled their turf. Middle guilds like Ellen’s Info Techs or Tommy’s Engineers welcomed other guilds into their spaces. But blue-collar guilds like Dusty’s Mechanics practiced a more grudging tolerance.
A solo keyboardist sang a syrupy love song in a thick Russian accent, presiding on a low-rise stage off to one side. Ilia’s pants and tee were the “uniform” of the unguilded. The Stardust was on Info Techs turf, but the proprietor and patrons alike had grown used to Ellen’s oddball male trio of friends—Dusty clad in his dark blue, Tommy in his brown, and the unguilded singer. Had The Stardust been on M&T turf, the four of them would have been candidates for a locking.
When Dusty and Tommy arrived, Ellen stood and hugged both men. She pushed away from Tommy but held him at arm’s length. “You look awful. What happened?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Tommy sat down in the seat across from Ellen and crossed his arms, scowling.
Dusty told her, “He got locked by a group of M&Ts. He’s lucky I came along when I did.”
“M&Ts locked an engineer?”
Dusty was unsure if Ellen was mocking or serious. “All six of them wore orange. Their biceps were bigger than my thighs and covered in tats. I’m pretty sure they were M&Ts.”
Ellen gave Tommy a skeptical stare. “You must have really pissed them off for them to be willing to risk an Engineers’ boycott. The last time your guild did that, the M&Ts caved in less than two weeks.”
“Nothing gets their attention faster than not getting paid,” Dusty interjected. “Or forcing them to train their own AI-powered replacements.”
She looked at Tommy. “Did you talk about that in front of them?” she asked, wide-eyed.
He mumbled unintelligibly, sliding lower into his chair.
“When are you going to learn to keep your mouth shut? You know how mad all the blue-collars are about the brain chips,” she scolded, then cast a glance at Dusty. “And you outmuscled those gorillas?”
Dusty swallowed hard, sending his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Well technically, I had a little help. They weren’t going to let me release him, but a couple of Security officers happened to come along.”
Training Ep City’s Quantum AGI to automate mining and manufacturing had become a hot topic. During early Mars colonization, a quarter of a century earlier, several companies, plus China, had scrambled to create a base on Mars for mining Rare Earth Elements, known as REE. Another company, BMAC, nearly beat out EPSILON at establishing the first base here, and later China even fought EPSILON for dominance in the Hellas Planitia basin. But EPSILON had won out in the end, thanks to Dusty’s parents’ heroic efforts.
Then asteroids were discovered to have REE, bringing in other competitors. EPSILON had been trying in recent years to regain its market share from the asteroid mining companies. They brought in MAGIQ, a Multimodal Artificial General Intelligence Quantum computer, ostensibly to optimize the city’s fusion reactor. But soon it was streamlining business operations as well. And it worked—to an extent. But the use of similar technology on Earth had nearly resulted in an automated nuclear war. Governments worldwide had banned such computers to all but a strict set of uses—and then to only one use on that short list at a time. When the US government caught a whiff of Ep City’s illegal multimodal AI technology, they demanded that EPSILON restrict the AI to regulating the city’s sole power source.
But the asteroid competition was proving to be an existential crisis for EPSILON. Rather than complying, the company sent a new COO, Randal Skinner, to implement an AI-mediated automation program featuring autonomous exoskeletons remotely directed by MAGIQ. Along with Skinner, they sent neurosurgeon Dr. Robert Jenner to Mars. Jenner had perfected a radical new nanite electrode system to replace the hardwire electrodes used with standard brain implants, which in turn allowed an operator to exquisitely control drones and exos via a UHF connection.
According to the hype, MAGIQ, through the application of a magnetokinetic cap, remotely directed the assembly of the nanite particles into an electrode net. The new electrodes rested against neuronal axons and dendrites. There, they sensed the fluctuations in the electromagnetic fields generated by the ever-changing voltage potentials within the brain.
In essence, the AI monitored and recorded in minute detail the subject’s brain activity while they operated a drone or exoskeleton. The enhanced electrodes also gave MAGIQ access to the operator’s emotional state to complement its understanding of the device’s successes or failures within its work environment. Through reinforcement machine learning, MAGIQ would not only learn what to do, but what not to do. And more importantly, it would learn what to do when something went wrong. For the first time in history, a computer would learn to mimic the human trait of common sense. With this knowledge, the AI could simultaneously direct hundreds of vehicles and machines that heretofore human brains had controlled through the old-style brain chip electrodes.
The blue-collar guilds recognized that their members’ contracts would be cancelled once MAGIQ learned to do their jobs. Plus, according to Randall Skinner’s edict, the electrode replacement was mandatory, but their removal was not. No one had a clue what the long-term health effects of such an extensive electrically conductive network in the brain were.
Tensions were fierce. Skinner was adamant about restoring EPSILON’s market share and the profits it had once enjoyed on Mars. The guilds were determined to hold on to their personally lucrative contracts. Shortly after the first group of miners were forced to undergo the procedure, ore hauler trucks mysteriously began to run off course. Some were high-centered on rock outcrops; others drove over ledges and overturned. The highspeed rail from the south polar dry and water ice mines and carbon cracking refineries ran slower due to objects on the tracks and faults at the switches.
Now, the three friends sat together at dinner and faced the very personal consequences of that dispute.
“She’s right, Tommy,” Dusty said. “The blues are deadly serious about keeping their jobs, especially the M&Ts.”
Tommy squinted in anger. “If we don’t automate, those jobs will disappear anyway.”
Dusty lowered his voice, nervously scanning the smattering of other blue-collar jumpsuits in the room. “I don’t disagree. But it’s not a matter of being right or wrong. It’s a matter of being right or dead.”
Tommy huffed, his scowl unchanged.
“All I’m saying is just don’t talk about it when you’re in the field. These guys are really pissed off.”
Ellen chimed in, “Please, Tommy. We’d miss your winsome demeanor.”
“Not,” Dusty muttered under his breath.
Tommy stared intently at the tabletop. Then he exhaled, his shoulders slumping. “Okay.”
At that moment, the keyboardist stopped singing, leaned his instrument against the wall, and stepped off the stage. He walked up to the table and sat between Ellen and Tommy, opposite Dusty. Dusty thought the unguilded man had an everyman’s face. No distinctive features, except for his gel-spiked, jet-black hair. Dusty felt it made him look like he had contacted an electrical circuit without GFI protection.
This foursome—Dusty, Tommy, Ellen, and Ilia—had two things in common maintaining their friendship. The first was their ostracization by their coworkers. They simply had no one else to turn to for friendship. The second was their shared mutual love of first-person shooter video games. Halo 23 had recently released, and they already had the highest group score in Ep City, which only reinforced their coworkers’ animosity.
“Hey, Ilia. Was that a new song?” Dusty asked.
The musician smiled broadly. “Yes. I composed it for my muse, here.” He turned and smiled at Ellen, who made a face in return.
Tommy rose and said, “Sorry to break up this love fest, but I’ve got to write up my daily report.” He started to leave.
“You’re welcome,” said Dusty.
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Thanks.” He strode through the tables and disappeared out the hatch.
“He’s got the social grace of a rhinoceros,” Dusty mumbled to no one in particular.
Ellen giggled and placed a hand on Dusty’s arm. “Yep, there goes our favorite curmudgeon. I do hope he reins himself in when he’s around those trogs at the mines and job sites.”
“I’m afraid I must leave, too. I have a delivery gig this sol.” Ilia pushed his chair back.
“You have a gig?” Dusty was genuinely surprised.
“Yes. I’m running medical records while the hospital switches over to MAGIQ.”
“That will last all of a sol?”
“Normally, yes. But I have an inside connection.” He patted Ellen on top of her head. “Be sure to cross network cables for me.” He winked at her and left.
Dusty and Ellen sat in awkward silence for a while. Then she spoke. “That was very brave of you, saving Tommy like you did. He may not say it, but I’m sure he’s grateful, too.”
Dusty realized her hand was still on his arm. “Listen Ell, I’ve got to go. I’ve got an early start tomorrow.” He pulled his arm away.
Ellen said nothing, just stared at him in silence. He was unsure how to interpret her gaze. Desire? Anger? Disappointment? He settled on disappointment. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. Then he turned and left.
Wake, Wary, Worrier to Warrior?
Dustin (Dusty) Gordon likes to keep to himself, as a perpetual outsider. Born on Mars he has a low gravity physique and can’t measure up to the blue-collar guilders born on Earth – let alone his famous parents. Although he does have a kind-of-home at The Stardust, where he has three kind-of-friends who are outcasts like him: Tommy, Ellen and Ilia.
Mars is at the brink of civil war. Chief Operating Officer (COO), Randall Skinner has installed an illegal Multimodal Artificial General Intelligence Quantum computer (MAGIQ), and has instigated a program of upgraded brain implants to allow MAGIQ to control the workers. The soon-to-be jobless guildmembers are outraged that they are expected to rain their own MAGIQ-controled replacements before being shipped back to Earth.
The most militant of the guilds is the Miners and Tunnelers (M&T), who have embarked on a program of sabotage – the other guilds might prefer to strike, but their contracts forbid it – and M&T doesn’t like any talk of compromise or negotiation. Then Dusty comes across M&T enforcers in the process of evicting Tommy through an airlock — locking is their solution for dealing with those they see as taking management’s side.
As Dusty comments: “It’s not a matter of being right or wrong. It’s a matter of being right or dead.” Soon Dusty is the one lying comatose, hypothermic and hypoxic. But the neuroimplant surgeon tries some experimental surgery with five times the nanites used for the implants – and they get more than he bargained for. Somehow his brain links with MAGIQ’s and both the M&Ts and the COO see him as a threat…
The backdrop to the story is a pretty familiar mining-the-solar-system theme, with tensions between Earth and Mars, as well as between the guilds and with management. The emergent cybernetic mind reminds me of Robert J Sawyer’s Wake, Watch, Wonder trilogy. Author, Brian H Roberts shows that he’s done plenty of research – and reveals it appropriately without too much infodump, and with accurate terminology rather than scifi technobabble.
I wish I’d thought of the MAGIQ acronym – it’s perfect!
Overall this a great bit of near future hard scifi, without being too hard to read. There is plenty of action, and some troublesome romance. The book is a solid contribution to the solar system mining subgenre, as well as being a provoking setup for the exploration of man-AGI symbiosis.
Solidly recommended to those who like their scifi close to home, realistic, with a message about who we are as humans, and what we might become. I'll look forward to the sequels!