Lyssa's Dream - A Hard Science Fiction AI Adventure (The Sentience Wars - Origins Book 1) Read online

  LYSSA’S DREAM

  THE SENTIENCE WARS: ORIGINS BOOK 1

  James S. Aaron

  M. D. Cooper

  The Aeon 14 Universe is Copyright © 2010, 2017 M. D. Cooper

  Lyssa’s Dream is Copyright © 2017 James S. Aaron & M. D. Cooper

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Art by Laércio Messias

  Editing by Tee Ayer

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PART 1: RABBIT COUNTRY

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  PART 2: CRUITHNE STATION

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  PART 3: CRUITHNE ON FIRE

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  PART 4: TRAFFIC

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  PART 5: BURN

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  PART 6: MARS 1

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  EPILOGUE: LYSSA’S DREAM

  AFTERWORD

  THE BOOKS OF AEON 14

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  DEDICATION

  For parents everywhere who found themselves in Rabbit Country but didn't give up.

  FOREWORD

  Although I began the Aeon 14 universe with Outsystem—long after the rise of sentient artificial intelligences—I thought long and hard about what their birth would be like, and what effects it would have on humanity.

  I knew there would be a war, and laws would be put into place governing humanity and AI. Those laws were contained within the Phobos Accords, the treaties drawn up and signed after the Sentience Wars.

  When I began to look at co-authors, I sincerely hoped that one would want to write about this period in the Aeon 14 universe, and James stepped up to the plate with a great vision for how the story of the Sentience Wars begins.

  I have truly enjoyed writing this book with James, and am eager for you to share in it with us.

  M. D. Cooper

  LONG BEFORE OUTSYSTEM & TANIS RICHARDS…

  Before the Sol Space Federation, and the days of Tanis serving in the Terran Space Force, the Sol System was a far wilder place.

  No central government sat overtop the many planets and groups of asteroids and habitats—though the SolGov assembly tried to maintain some order.

  Many of the great megastructures had been built, such as High Terra and Mars 1, but many others had not. Most importantly, there are few sentient AI, and those who do exist are unwelcome, and often illegal.

  In a future without faster-than-light travel, teleporting, artificial gravity, or advanced shielding, a ship in space is just one small collision away from destruction.

  This is the Sol System we find ourselves in at the close of the thirtieth century, and the dawn of the age of AI.

  PART 1: RABBIT COUNTRY

  Chapter One

  STELLAR DATE: 07.24.2981 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Sunny Skies

  REGION: Greek Asteroids, Jovian Combine

  The airlock was stuck again.

  Vibrations throbbed through the bulkhead as the mechanism struggled to catch. A long screech followed that set Andy’s nerves on edge. Finally, Airlock One’s warped doors slid open slowly, revealing the Big Dark outside. Beside him, the service drone his kids had named Alice, disengaged its magnetic anchors and floated through the opening, bobbing like a happy puppy.

  “Doors are open,” Andy announced over the ship’s comms. They only used one channel on Sunny Skies. Cara and Tim, Andy’s kids, weren’t allowed their own channel after they had conspired to play pranks on him. He grinned at the thought, his breath steaming the inside of his face shield.

  How do you encourage their complex thinking without finding your last working EVA suit full of cleaning foam? As a father, these questions weighed on his mind.

  “Alice can see you, Daddy,” his twelve-year-old daughter Cara announced. She always tried to sound serious when assisting with repairs, then tacked on a ‘Daddy’ that melted his heart.

  His fogging face shield reminded Andy that his helmet’s climate sensors were about to fail. He adjusted the suit’s temp down until he shivered, checked the magnetic locks on his boots then followed the robot outside the ship.

  Sunny Skies was thirty-one days outside Cruithne Station in InnerSol, carrying a load of sealed crates from Kalyke, one of Jupiter’s moons. The ship had been burning for 4.8AU and was now in the long deceleration. Sunny Skies used a helium-3 fusion drive for most operations. The drive could transition to deuterium as fuel during trips through Inner Sol, where the element was cheaper, but Andy didn’t like Inner Sol. It wasn’t like he was avoiding a bad neighborhood. He hadn’t seen another human being other than Cara and Tim in the two months since he had picked up the cargo for Cruithne. He preferred it that way.

  Every time he left the ship, Andy thought about what would happen if he died. The thoughts were a holdover from his time as a pilot in the Terran Space Force. Every mission meant thinking through the consequences of not making it home. Now, he had pre-recorded messages for the kids as well as a dead man’s switch on his personal security tokens.

  Alice waited for him outside the airlock, little puffs of stabilizing steam shooting from its body. The harsh light from his helmet made it more apparent the robot needed a coat of paint. Like everything on Sunny Skies, it was probably at least three hundred years old.

  “What do you see, Dad?” Tim asked. At ten, his world was all absolutes. He loved rules and facts, along with any opportunity to correct another family member—especially Cara.

  Andy stepped over the edge of the airlock and positioned himself perpendicular to the long body of the ship. Originally built as a recreational vehicle for people with more credit than he had seen in his life, Sunny Skies was a long, thin cylinder with bulbs, boxes and rectangles bolted onto its once-sleek body. The cylinder formed an axle for the habitat ring spinning about three-quarters down the length of the ship.

  Airlock One was near the bow of the ship, where the first set of sensor arrays and communications equipment was located. Andy had turned on the maintenance lights before coming out, so portions of the ship where the light system still worked shone against the dark of space. The glare allowed him to see the fat habitat ring and sails amidships, followed by the bulb-shaped drives at its stern. Sensors in his helmet read the element signature Sunny Skies blasted into the dark—which was technically toward Cruithne Station—as they completed a slowing burn.


  “I can see the whole ship,” he said. “Lots of scars and beauty marks like the long-lived lady she is.”

  “Ships don’t have scars,” Tim corrected.

  “Sure they do. Just like people. You get somebody who doesn’t really know what they’re doing working on a ship and you get lots of scars.”

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” Cara asked.

  “That’s what I’ve got you for. You’ve got the database up, right?”

  “Why don’t you just use your Link?”

  Cara was reaching the age where she longed for her own Link access, something Andy had decided he wouldn’t even consider until she was twenty and her brain had—maybe—finished developing.

  “This is how you learn,” he said. “Besides, the connection out here is spotty.” That was a small lie but he wanted her to feel some ownership in what he was doing. If something happened to him, she was going to have to figure it out. All it would take was one stray micro meteorite, an electrical flare in a conduit, any number of a hundred ways Sunny Skies might kill him at any moment. Even Alice might glitch and decide to open his suit with its plasma torch.

  His wife, Brit, had called him a pessimist once and he had agreed, adding, “But I do look on the bright side sometimes.”

  He could be a damn good pilot when it mattered, and he could fix most anything with instructions in the database. Not that Sunny Skies required much piloting. It required more worrying about everything that might go wrong, and then deciding between what to fix that was already broken.

  In this case, the item at the top of the list was a power conduit running from Airlock One to a sensor array just behind the ship’s nose. He had powered down the array before entering the airlock so he wouldn’t get bathed in microwaves, which meant a higher likelihood of the ship’s sensors missing any incoming objects. You had to choose your preferred ways to die. Besides, with the spin, it was likely the other arrays would pick up anything incoming. As long as they didn’t malfunction.

  “Where’s the coupler, Cara?”

  He imagined her reading through the schematic, biting her lower lip. She read the panel number and he counted among the sections in front of him, finding the one she had indicated.

  “It should have the box right in the middle,” she said.

  “I see it. Looks like it lost its cover somewhere.”

  His boots clicked and released as he worked his way over the alloy skin of the ship toward the control box. Up close, the skin was far from smooth. Knee-high nodes, boxes, conduit, any number of other elements he barely understood, wrapped the ship in a barnacle-like layer of cruft. Long-gone were his days of running a hand along the smooth side of a close-combat fighter.

  Reaching his destination, Andy knelt beside the exposed control box and pulled up the schematic over his link. Scorch marks made it obvious where the short had occurred. He tried not to imagine the fire making its way inside the ship. The heat necessary to cause this would have burned his hand off if he’d been here when it had happened. He scanned the nearby couplers for heat signatures and found only normal electrical activity. Whatever had caused the box to short had burned itself out.

  “Dad?” Tim asked.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you done yet?”

  “No, Tim. I’m just getting started.”

  “I have a question.”

  “All right. What’s your question?”

  “Why are there no dinosaurs on Mars?”

  Andy groaned inwardly. This was a continuation of a cyclical conversation from the night before. He should have spent time thinking of some better answers. The question also troubled him because it demonstrated how, while Cara acted older than her age, Tim continued to revert.

  “We talked about this before. No one has discovered a fossil record on Mars.”

  “So there were dinosaurs on Mars. Just no one has discovered them yet.”

  Trying to concentrate on the coupler, Andy said, “Sure.”

  “But there hasn’t been any kind of organic material found, Dad. How could there be fossils if there wasn’t even the material?”

  “Maybe there is the material, Tim. Maybe in the rush to terraform, they didn’t record things like they should have. People make mistakes. People do things for their own reasons. What about this? What if Mars is hollow? Have you thought about that?”

  “Dad,” Tim said, scandalized. “There is no scientific evidence that Mars is hollow.”

  “Do you know that? Didn’t you say before bedtime that Mars has no tectonic activity? Why couldn’t it be hollow? I think the dinosaurs are in the center of Mars.”

  “I’m going to find it in the database,” Tim said. “I’m going to find where you’re wrong.”

  “We’ve got nine hundred years of survey data you can check, Tim. I think there must be something in there about the likelihood of a fossil record.”

  “He wants to find aliens,” Cara said. “That’s what he really wants.”

  “Somebody has to find them,” Andy agreed. “Might as well be Tim Sykes.”

  “Can I name them if I find them?”

  “That’s how it works. You find the first dinosaur on Mars and you can call it the Sykasaur.”

  “What if I want to call it the Timasaur?”

  “You could do that. I’m sure all the other Tims in Sol would appreciate the gesture. In fact, that would be very kind of you, Tim, to share your discovery like that.”

  As Alice floated over with a new cover for the control box, Andy grinned as the sound of his son grumbling came across the net.

  With the drone’s help, Andy eased the cover over the repaired coupler and tacked it down with two quick welds. He stood, stretching, and peered into the dark. He found the blue disc of Earth, about three centimeters across, glittering with the silver band of High Terra.

  The darkening function on his visor sputtered, momentarily showing him Sol’s full light. He squinted, reminding himself he needed to keep moving before his suit’s environmental controls failed and he cooked.

  Turning toward the airlock, he started thinking of the checks he needed to run on the cargo in preparation for customs at Cruithne Station. He had a feeling the manifest was going to get extra scrutiny so the shipping company could try to claim damage. He couldn’t afford anything less than what the deal had promised.

  “Cara,” he said. “I’m far enough away now. Go ahead and power the sensors back up.”

  “Should I run the diagnostics first?”

  “Of course, sweetheart. We always run diagnostics first. The control system should prompt you. Do you see it?”

  “I did it.”

  “Good job. Any faults?”

  “No. It’s almost online.”

  Andy sent Alice ahead to meet him in the airlock. “What should we have for lunch?” he asked. “You guys want some pasta? We can roll out pasta and make cheese sauce.”

  “I hate cheese sauce,” Tim said.

  “I know you do. That’s why I always suggest it.”

  “The sensor’s online, Daddy.”

  Andy was about to tell her “Good job” again when the proximity alarm shrieked in his helmet, warning of exterior danger. Sunny Skies had just entered an unmarked debris field.

  Chapter Two

  STELLAR DATE: 07.24.2981 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Sunny Skies

  REGION: Greek Asteroids, Jovian Combine

  Andy was aware of Cara screaming at him in the background as his helmet display highlighted the incoming debris. Or maybe the sound was the warning klaxons coming over the open channel.

  “Cara, honey,” he said, blinking as his face screen filled with floating red dots that reminded him of chaff. “Calm down. Tell me what’s on the screen.”

  “The sensors didn’t see it,” she said. “The torch already hit a bunch of debris and even a meteor, I think. It’s hitting all over the ship. What do I do? There are so many more. They’re going to hit you.”

 
A calm had settled over Andy. He usually experienced stress as an opposite tunnel vision. He saw all the factors in front of him, though it didn’t mean it was any easier for him to choose the right path out of danger. It might have been his training from the TSF—or what his wife Brit liked to call his inability to feel anything—but he understood deeply that he was more worried about his daughter being scared than he was about his own well-being. But he absolutely had to worry about his own well-being because he hadn’t done a good enough job teaching her how to read the nav station’s data flow.

  Obviously, he would have to focus on that later.

  He was probably fifty meters from the airlock, an obstacle course of knee-catching trip-hazards between him and the relative safety of its recessed entrance.

  “Cara,” he said. “Listen to me. Send Alice back to me. Can you do that?”

  For a minute, there was only sniffling across the channel, then she answered, “I can do it. I have her controls up.”

  “Are you there, Dad?” Tim said. “Why are there alarms going off?”

  “We’re flying through somebody else’s trash. It’s like getting shot at.”

  “We’re getting shot at?”

  “No, son,” Andy said, voice still calm. “We’re moving a whole lot faster than the things we’re flying into, so they hit us like bullets. It would be safer if I was inside Sunny Skies.”

  “Then why don’t you come inside? Do you want me to open the airlock?”

  “No, Tim,” Andy said carefully, struggling to keep his voice calm. “Don’t open any airlocks. I’m on my way back inside. Your sister is sending Alice to pick me up.”

  The thought of Tim hearing fear in his voice and opening the airlock too soon filled Andy with dread. He pushed it away.

  Alice appeared in the distance, and Andy could barely make out the spray of the drone’s steam jets. Next to him, a silent hole appeared in a rectangular casing and he hoped there wasn’t anything critical inside. Conceivably, there was enough shielding between the crew areas of the ship and the outer shell that any damages too small to register on the sensors wouldn’t hurt them.