The Salvage Crew Read online

  Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Interlude: Simon

  Interlude: AMBER ROSE

  Interlude: Shen

  Interlude: Anna

  Interlude: Milo

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  ***

  FROM THE PUBLISHER

  THE SALVAGE CREW

  ©2020 YUDHANJAYA WIJERATNE

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the authors.

  Aethon Books supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Aethon Books

  PO Box 121515

  Fort Worth TX, 76108

  www.aethonbooks.com

  Print and eBook formatting by Steve Beaulieu. Artwork provided by Stuart Lippincott.

  Published by Aethon Books LLC. 2020

  Aethon Books is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead is coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Foreword

  Much of the poetry you see in this book is actually AI-generated. To wit, OpenAI GPT2-117M,[1] trained on a selection of my favourite translated poetry—notably the ancient Chinese Tang Dynasty poets Du Fu and Li Bai. I’ve performed some minor editing—sometimes stitching poems together, sometimes editing a word or two in a poem—but let me assure you that I was more surprised than you were at gems like “maidenhood is done away with the midnight bell.”

  The planet of Urmagon Beta does not exist. It was created by my modified version of Zarkonnen’s planet generator code.[2] You can see a live demo on itch.io if you look for it: it’s beautiful.

  The weather, I suppose, could also be called “AI-generated,” but let’s shy away from that term for things that don’t learn. The weather system is a simple Markov chain; a series of states and transitions encoded, with the equivalent of a die roll at each transition.[3] Probability of rain, sir?—rolls digital die—none, but we’re having snow. The characters’ emotional states, too, were designed this way, as were various events. I wrote the whole thing, but I didn’t decide when Milo and Anna had those fights.

  So this book represents something of a technical innovation to me, one step further along my adherence to chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov’s Human + AI thesis.[4] Kasparov, who got his ass kicked by IBM’s Deep Blue, knows firsthand what it’s like to be beaten by a machine; the arts, once considered immune, are now slowly waking up to the reality of neural nets and a weekend with Tensorflow and a good dataset.

  Welcome to the future? No, welcome to the present. If anything, I’m quite behind the field. We all are.

  This book, and the books that follow, are an homage to Richard Garriot, Will Wright, Tarn Adams, Tynan Sylvester, and all others who pursued the Simulation Dream.

  Loosely, it is this: it should be possible to create a world, with enough systems—people, weather, objects—interacting with each other to generate complex stories, that most sacred lifeblood of the human race. Tynan Sylvester, writing on the subject,[5] spoke of apophenia, the phenomenon where the fantastic pattern-recognition in our brains stitches together random incidents to create a meaningful narrative: which explains, if you stretch the idea a bit, how a lot of religions came to be. The same wetware phenomena that drove people to write Boatmurdered generates the gods, monsters and demons that we live amongst.

  Of course, these worthies applied this thinking to games. You may have heard of them: Ultima Online, The Sims, Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld. There are others.

  I started chasing this dream; for a few months I pursued the idea of creating an engine that could let me simulate characters, worlds, everything. But, reader, I gave up. That way lay a substandard clone of RimWorld, and quite possibly five years of bashing my head into a wall.

  However, a few months of research is a considerable time. I ended up with the ingredients I wanted: a planet generator (thanks, Zarkonnen!), and Markov chains for weather simulation and emotion; a poetry generator that I eventually gave an Instagram account to;[6] and, from my childhood, “Ulysses,” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose words I learned from The Golden Treasury of English Verse. That poem never really went away, but kept repeating itself in my dreams as a starship casting off into the depths of space.

  By now my own sense of apophenia had kicked in like a mule—and we were off—I, the writer, and my assistants in the form of little pieces of Python code. This approach, of course, will be outdated by the time you read this book, so now I have to do something more interesting for the next one.

  The rest of it arrived as it usually does: in fragments picked up from my other interests. I thought a little bit about how an alien AI would communicate, and how best to put that in a story in a way that didn’t sound like endless tables of character vectors: I ended up taking the language games from Wittgenstein,[7] arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and the right person to read if you want to get right down into language. The opening sequence of the AMBER ROSE-Beacon conversation I took from mathematician Carl DeVito and linguist R. T. Oehrle, who took a crack at examining a language for communication between alien societies.[8] While I didn’t use their language, I used their base assumptions:

  1. Both societies can count and do arithmetic.

  2. Both societies recognize the chemical elements and the periodic table.

  3. Both have made a quantitative study of the states of matter.

  4. Both know enough chemistry to carry out chemical calculations.

  And of course, my publishers, Steve and Rhett
, my writing partners R. R. Virdi and Navin Weeraratne, and data scientist Yasiru Dhanike Ratnayake not only put up with me gabbing about all this stuff, but also understood what I was trying to do and helped keep the fire going. I took a fair bit of patience from them.

  Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn, and cauldron bubble! And voila: the text you’re reading now appeared. Pop. Fwoosh.

  But enough of all these explanations. At the end of the day, yes, I wanted to be smart and wild and bleeding edge about how I went about all this, but I also wanted to tell a story. About three humans and a less-than-Zen AI stuck on a backwater planet. Of the UN and the ORCA and all the other things that I couldn’t code, except by wrapping them up in the symbols of English and throwing them out here for you to taste.

  I hope you enjoyed it. The next book will come, you can bet anything you have that the games aren’t stopping here.

  — Yudhanjaya Wijeratne,

  Colombo, Sri Lanka, 14th July, 2019.

  1

  I want to make one thing clear: I did not, I repeat NOT, ask for any of this.

  I did NOT ask to be promoted.

  I did NOT ask to be made Overseer.

  And I certainly did not ask to be strapped down in this tin-can body of a drop pod, hurtling down with three idiots screaming their lungs out inside me.

  The Company promised me an A-Team. The kind of people Joe Haldeman wrote about in The Forever War. Astrophysicists who could blow a man’s head off at five hundred meters. The best of the best—you know, the Master Chiefs and all that. The kind of people who go in, get shit done, leave a nice calling card, and live to strike a heroic pose.

  Did we get what it said on the label? Well, let’s look around.

  Exhibit A: Simon Joosten. Simon is my geologist. He’s thirty-five-ish, biological time, and looks like someone stuck eyeballs on a mop. They told me Simon would be reliable—he’s good at everything to do with rocks and earthquakes; he’s scored well in the shooting sims, can do CPR and basic medical aid, and looks like your average nerd trying too hard to be cool. He’ll make a fine crewmember.

  But here’s what they didn’t tell me. Simon grew up on the brutal world of Old New York. He was sold to a corporation as a child. They stuck a needle into the center of his brainstem and jacked him into a virtual fantasy world so they could broadcast his feed as reality TV. His entire childhood was spent being beaten up by gangs and digging holes in fake ground so nobody could hear him crying in the fake darkness—except for the audience, of course, who must have had a hoot, the sick bastards.

  Old New York had its times: after the Mercator/Rissek Rebellion, the UN jumped in and did a number on them. Including yanking all those poor souls out of reality TV and setting them free. For some reason, I don’t think this man ever really recovered.

  I’m not saying Simon is a bad person. I’m saying what doesn’t kill you makes you stranger. I’m saying a traumatized reality TV slave-star is the last person I want dropped into an unexplored planet on my first landing mission.

  Exhibit B: Anna Agarwal.

  Anna is an odd fish. She’s got twenty years on Simon. But unlike Simon, Anna grew up with everything she ever wanted. I’ve checked her degree transcripts. They’re through the roof. High social skills. And then somewhere along the line she decided to ditch everything and become an Army doctor.

  Doesn’t compute. You know why it doesn’t compute? Because Anna Agarwal doesn’t exist. I don’t know who the hell this person is, but the real Anna Agarwal, as verified by her gene sample, died on the microplanet Wayward Child. This imposter, let’s call her Fake-Anna, showed up on Arjuna III and has been hopping planets ever since, always moving outwards. Deus Olympus. Boatmurdered. Karthika Highway. This kind of stuff is real easy when delays between databases are measured in light-years. Fake-Anna picked up a gunshot wound somewhere on the way. Left leg. And now she’s on my mission, on the very edge of human space.

  Right now she’s cradling Simon as he screams, which, excuse me, Anna, is the stupidest fucking thing you can do while strapped inside a tin can plummeting through atmosphere. Dammit, Anna. Go back to your seat.

  Exhibit C: Milo Kalik. Finally, a sane choice. Milo, thirty-seven, is an inventor. He can shoot, yes, but also make stuff and argue Machiavelli and Chanakya by the fireside. Master’s degree in engineering from the Oort Academy. There are some irregularities; he’s been demoted three times so far—each time by a woman commander; that’s odd. And he’s spent a weird amount of time in cryosleep—almost three centuries. But right now I don’t have much to go on, so he’s my golden boy. Look at him smile. He’s enjoying this. He’s enjoying being alive after all that time in the freezer. Don’t let me down, Milo.

  Simon pukes all over him. All over me. Oh, Gods.

  This isn’t an A-Team. This is a D-Team with a paintjob. The real heroes are probably out somewhere in the Inner Rim, discovering alien civilizations while looking heroic in their armor. Me, I get the backwater planet and the salvage job. Go dig up an old crash site, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.

  Which brings us to myself.

  I’m the drop pod.

  Yes, go ahead, laugh. I’m a 4.4-ton safety capsule hurtling through a sky the color of topaz. Inside, I’m a state-of-the-art computer equipped with weapons, seed stock, building materials, people. And, of course, myself, to instruct the baselines how to do their job. In turn, the theory goes, the humans ask the right questions, make the right pseudorandom moves, nudge your thinking in all the right ways—ways that a machine can’t. Humans evolved to survive, and they’re fantastically good at it. The combination of myself and a human crew is supposed to make us better, faster, a little more chaotic, yes, but a lot more survivable.

  This is what happens when PCS thinks you’re smart enough to be an Overseer. You end up knee-deep in theory with Simon’s puke all over your instrument panels.

  For fuck’s sake, Anna, strap yourself in.

  It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

  2

  You know those weird little directorial gimmicks old filmmakers used to pull? Record scratch, freeze frame. Cue narrator. So you’re wondering how I ended up here.

  I feel like pulling one of those now. Mostly to stop thinking about how my hull temperature is over 1800 Kelvin right now. One panel out of place and we all cook in here.

  Once upon a time, I used to have eyes and hands and feet, like these three idiots. I joined PCS for the same damn reasons as anyone else. Go forth into the universe. See C-beams glitter off the Tannhauser Gate. Take a selfie with attack ships off the shoulder of Orion. And if I was reasonably nice to the universe, and did my job with some baseline diligence, the universe might reward me with a planet that wasn’t an overpopulated hellhole. The kind of place where you can actually see the sunset, you know, instead of skyscrapers and traffic jams. Do my time, settle down with a nice girl, maybe a cat and a few hundred acres. Karma would sort the rest out.

  PCS felt like the kind of place where I might rack up some good points. I mean, look at the name. Planetary Crusade Services. End-to-end interstellar colonization support. We sound like the Pope blessed us to go conquer Space Jerusalem.

  And that’s how the media talked about us all the time. PCS landing parties protecting terraforming operations or Sangha chapters, holding their own against waves of xenos. PCS rescue teams patching up ships stranded in deep space. PCS scientists making new breakthroughs in gravity-drive tech. The prototypical PCS spaceman, a sort of weathered Ulysses with more worlds under their belt than they can even count, descending from on high in the nick of time to save a local government, and flying away a legend in their own time.

  Except that’s just the PR. PCS is a corporation, and worse, it’s an interstellar corporation. Which means we need to keep our transport costs low and our margins high. PCS’s actual assets are Overseers like me—digitized humans who can be beamed at light speed to a destination via the Odysseus relays, and then we’re resurrected in some 3D-p
rinted tin-can ship they’ve knocked up on that end. We’re literally the only real asset they have. Everyone else is a hired gun picked up from the closest local system. They’re paid via interstellar money transfer from the closest PCS cell, again at light speed. Really, PCS is just a software company. They get to save enormous amounts on transport costs and actually get to the target a hell of a lot faster.

  So those square-jawed eagle-eyed PCS supersoldiers you see on the ads? They’re just mercenaries stuffed into shiny uniforms.

  Took me a while to figure this stuff out.

  My first assignments were fairly simple, and they kept me out of the bigger picture. There was an abandoned station off Brutus—a methane moon next door to Cassius, where I was born; we orbited the same planet—a superJupiter-class gas giant called Caesar.

  The best I know it, the UN could have gone in there, but they were cost-cutting in our system, so they contracted the job to PCS. PCS put out a call.

  I’d just passed my engineering exams—not good enough to get into an off-world university, but top of the district nonetheless. I could patch a suit and take a methalox engine apart blindfolded. My ancestors had spent the last four hundred years scratching out an existence on a minor moon, so I knew a lot more about hardship than those inner colony soft toys.