Bright Light. Ian Douglas

the realization bothered him.

      “Flight time to Geneva,” the robot announced in Gray’s head, “fifteen minutes.”

      The flier accelerated, leaving the gleaming towers of the new Manhattan vanishing below the horizon astern.

       New White House

       Washington, D.C.

       1602 hours, EST

      “Captain Gray is on his way,” Konstantin said quietly in President Alexander Koenig’s thoughts. “As you directed.”

      Koenig was seated at his desk in the newly grown White House, located approximately on the site of the original. For several centuries, Washington, D.C., had been submerged, its buildings and monuments in ruins, its grounds flooded and engulfed by mangrove swamps. As with the Manhatt Ruins, dams and flood walls had been nanotechnically grown across the tidal estuary to the southeast so that the swamps could be drained. The reclamation was far enough along that the seat of the USNA government had only weeks before been moved from Toronto back to its historic seat in the District of Columbia.

      Koenig sat back in his chair, looking over the reconstruction. The work was ongoing and expensive … but progress was being made.

      Now, other kinds of progress needed to be made.

      “Good. Did he put up much of a fuss?”

      “Not really. He is suspicious of the Pan-Europeans, of course, and, as expected, he trusts neither my motives nor yours. He does not like being manipulated.”

      “Hardly surprising. You pulled a damned dirty trick on him, you know.”

      “Yes, I do. But if the threat to Earth is as severe as I believe it now is, we cannot afford to have him tied down by the traditional chain of command.”

      “Maybe not. But at least we could have told the poor son-of-a-bitch …”

      “Mr. President, this is something we must not leave to chance … or to human will and fallibility.”

      Koenig scowled. “Sometimes, Konstantin,” he said slowly, “I get the feeling that you don’t trust humans.”

       Geneva

       Pan-European Union

       2217 hours, GMT+1

      It was raining and dark as the flier shrieked in over Burgundy, dropping swiftly from its cruising altitude of forty thousand meters, its outer surface reconfiguring from hypersonic mode to landing. “Going from sperm mode to turkey mode” was how fighter pilots described it, as the ship morphed from a sleek teardrop to a flattened, domed box with wings for landing. A former Navy pilot, Gray wondered if he would have to edit those memories sometime soon. They were a part of him, sure … but they were of damned little use now beyond pure nostalgia.

      The lights of Geneva Spaceport glared up ahead, with the European capital’s urban sprawl delineating the black emptiness of Lake Geneva beyond. They touched down on a commercial pad, where an embarkation tube attached itself to the flier as the gravs were still spooling down.

      Elena Vasilyeva, a tall woman in black with colorful abstract animations writhing over her face and hands, was there on the passenger concourse to meet him. “Captain Gray?” she said, extending a hand. “It was good of you to come on such short notice.”

      It’s not like I had a whole lot of choice, he thought, but he kept it to himself and shook her hand. She was speaking Russian, but he heard the words in English as his in-head software translated them in real time.

      “No problem,” he replied. “A pleasure. I’m sorry you had to stay at work so late in order to meet me.”

      “It … what is the expression? It goes with the territory. This way, if you please.”

      They traveled by mag-tube to the Ad Astra Confederation Government Complex, and a large meeting room a couple of hundred meters up, near the top of the tower. The space’s floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the aptly named Plaza of Light and its titanic monument, Popolopolis’s statue Ascent of Man.

      A number of other people were already present in the room, including several European military officers. Gray stopped at the threshold. “I was given to understand that this would be a civilian operation, Ms. Vasilyeva.”

      “It is, Captain Gray,” a European Spaceforce admiral told him. “Operation Cygni, a joint European-American scientific and first-contact expedition to the star Deneb. However, as you must be aware, there are serious military and governmental implications to this mission.”

      “Admiral Duchamp is correct,” an AI voice said in Gray’s thoughts. “In any event, we all wished to meet the man who would be commanding the expedition.”

      “You could have done that in virtual reality,” he said.

      In fact, the real reason for his transatlantic jaunt this afternoon had been bothering him quite a bit. With VR, people could meet in cyberspace, within AI-created realms with such resolution and fidelity to detail that it was quite impossible to tell illusion from reality.

      “Perhaps,” the AI told him, “but we would not have known whether we were meeting the avatar or the actual person.”

      “Nikolai is quite protective of us,” Duchamp told him. “He wanted us to get a good feel for the man who will be leading Operation Cygni.”

      “ ‘Nikolai?’”

      “For Nikolai Copernicus,” Vasilyeva explained. “An artificial intelligence housed here in Geneva analogous to your Konstantin.”

      “A pleasure to meet you, Nikolai.”

      “I am delighted to make your acquaintance. Until now I knew you only through back channels with Konstantin, and through intelligence reports and strategic analyses. To be frank, some of our people feared that you are a … I believe the Americanism is ‘cowboy.’ Shooting first, asking questions later.”

      “And is that how you see me now?”

      “Oh, most certainly not, Captain,” Duchamp told him. “We have all seen the reports of your encounters at Tabby’s Star. And many of us have been wondering why your senior staff would have retired you. It seems a poor use of a valuable asset.”

      “Having met you, Captain,” Nikolai said, “and having spoken with you directly, I can unreservedly recommend that Operation Cygni proceed as it is currently organized, with our xenosophontological team under Captain Gray’s direct command.”

      “So how about it, Konstantin?” Gray used a private channel to communicate with the AI without being overheard by the others. “I haven’t heard of this AI before.”

      “Nikolai has only come on-line in the past few weeks,” Konstantin told him.

      “A baby, huh? Can he be trusted?”

      “As much as I can be trusted.”

      Had that been sarcasm, Gray wondered? Or humor? Or a subtle rebuke? He found it difficult to understand what a super-AI was feeling—if feeling was the proper term—when he spoke with one.

      “That’s not saying a great deal.”

      Konstantin ignored the jibe. Gray wasn’t even certain that it was possible to insult the AI. “Nikolai,” Konstantin told him, “is several orders of magnitude faster, more powerful, and more compact than I. The Europeans wish to include a copy of him on the expedition to Deneb.”

      “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” Gray said, transmitting on the group’s shared channel again. “The Omega virus, remember?”

      “Nikolai was designed in part to be immune to Omega,” a sophontologist told him, “as well as to other potential e-threats.”

      Gray wondered