Stargods by Ian Douglas (best summer books TXT) 📕

Firsters, for instance. They were derisively referred to as“Huffers,” as in they would huff and puff and blow the SAIs away. Koenig had not thought them a serious threat, but he wasbeginning to have some second thoughts about that.

God, things were bad in D.C. And he’d sent Marta into the middle of all of that . . .

The wall announced the arrival of an aircar, and Koenig heard the guard outside greet someone. Marta walked in the door amoment later and Koenig breathed a deep and heartfelt sigh of relief. He’d been worried about her being out and about on herown, and her safe return meant she hadn’t been spotted and identified . . . or caught in the anti-AI riots.

He did not want Marta to go through this kind of danger again, though Marta, for her part, seemed perfectly happy to run his occasional“errands.”

It didn’t look like Marta, though. She was wearing a face, a kind of organic mask grown from human tissue that gave her thelook of a much older woman. In a second, though, she peeled the mask off, and they kissed.

“I’m so glad you’re back!” he told her. “I was worried sick . . .”

“I was fine. The new software worked perfectly.” Her ID, he sensed, was already changing. By law, all AI robots were required to broadcast signals that could be picked up by the cerebral implants of people around them, a tag proclaiming them to be robots, not people. Heaven forbid that a robot be mistaken for a real person! For her mission to D.C., she’d been given a slick bit of highly illegal computer code that IDed her as human, complete with fictitious background, address, employment status, and hobbies. The mask had been there to enhance the deception.

“So how’d it go?” he asked, releasing her.

“Phillip is concerned,” she told him. “He believes the President is about to enact a new directive calling for the eliminationof all SAIs such as Konstantin.”

“Shit . . .”

Phillip Caldwell was a former director of the National Security Council and an old friend. He’d been one of Koenig’s key advisorswhen he’d been President. After Koenig had left office, Caldwell had taken a position as the head of Cybersec, a Washingtonthink tank specializing in AI security. There’d been rumors for weeks that they were going to pull the plug on Konstantinand others like him, and secondary rumors that they would be calling for the registration of AI robots and restrictions ontheir manufacture and use. Koenig had asked Marta to travel to D.C. and speak with Phillip in person. Koenig himself was toowell-known, but a robot, especially one as lifelike as Marta, would be able to pull it off . . . if she was disguised as human.

Evidently, she had.

“Phillip says they’re keeping it a deep, dark secret, of course. There’d be too much opposition from the pro-tech groups . . .or from pro-robotics countries like North India, Japan, or the Hegemony.”

“What, they’re just going to spring it on people out of the blue?”

“That’s what he believes. An executive order, letting Walker bypass Congress.”

“He has enough support in Congress to get away with it, too.” He was remembering the applause from the Congressional floorwhen Walker talked to them about the Singularity. That had been absolutely chilling.

“He doesn’t have as much support as some believe,” Marta told him. “If Walker pulls the plug, Phillip believes, there is going to be massive unrest and economic displacement. AIs already control a huge percentage of both government and industry. People aren’t trained to just step in and replace them. Besides, the AIs are just too good at what they do. Can you imagine the educational download system being run by a human? Or the healthcare bureau? Or—”

“Marta, some days I seriously question whether humans are capable of dressing themselves without help. I honestly don’t know how he thinks he can pull this off without having a civil war on his hands.”

“Phillip says the government has very quietly been stationing troops around the country and enacting protocols that will allowhim to deploy them in the event of civil unrest.”

“Damn it, the guy’s gone rogue. We need to stop him.”

Marta cocked her head to one side. “How do you do that within the strictures established by the Constitution?”

“Carefully, Marta. Very, very carefully.”

“There’s something more that Phillip thought you should see.”

Koenig sighed. “Show me.”

The news image of a silently pontificating Michaels on the living room viewall was replaced by a graphic showing the solarsystem, with the orbits of the planets out to Jupiter shown in green, and a bright white line extending out from the middleof the asteroid belt.

“What’s that?”

“It hasn’t been announced,” Marta told him, “but a High Guard ship picked this up on April 6—twelve days ago. A small, heavilycloaked vessel of unknown configuration broke solar orbit and accelerated out of the system. It moved very slowly at first,as if it didn’t want its drive wake to attract any attention, but then it accelerated to c, engaged something like an Alcubierre Drive, and vanished. It was on a direct heading to . . . here.”

The image changed, showing the scattered stars of a patch of sky, the hazy cloud of the Milky Way stretched across the center. A red circle and two lines of numbers marked precise coordinates.

“Seventeen hours, fifty-two minutes, twenty-eight seconds,” Koenig said, reading the coordinates. “Plus thirteen degrees,forty-one seconds, twenty seconds. Okay, constellation of Sagittarius, and in toward the galactic core. Intelligence doesn’tknow who that was?”

“No, Alex.”

“And why hasn’t this been reported?” Koenig asked.

“Phillip said that Navy Intelligence received pretty explicit instructions not to make this public. Too much chance of panic.”

“Panic. About what? Someone keeping an eye on us?”

“I don’t know,” Marta said. “Naval Intelligence reported it as an alien spacecraft. They did not know who—or what—was operatingit.”

“Phil is just full of good news,” Koenig said. “Okay, Marta. You did a splendid job. Thank you! And, again, I’m sorry to havehad to send you in there.”

“I was never in any real danger. The riots are in the peripheral sectors of the city. I was in the central government area—youknow, tourist Washington? Cybersec’s offices