“It’s another old quote,” the captain said. “Joseph Heller.” He added, “Maybe you should be.”

  The captain was Nigerian, she thought. His name was Martin Okoli. He ate another chunk of nutriblock dressed up as beefburger.

  “Nice suit,” he added.

  “This old thing?” Elfrida riposted, flicking a realistic fingernail against the forearm of her new phavatar. It had slim feminine wrists. Its skin even had pores.

  “What is that, a stross-class?”

  “Yeah.” Elfrida had been assigned the new phavatar for the 11073 Galapagos job. It had been customized to mission specs at the UN’s Luna plant and secretly delivered to the Kharbage Can by a Hyperpony fast courier. “It’s the absolute last word in telepresence. It’s even got taste receptors. Which, to be honest, I could do without. This burger tastes like regurgitated seaweed.”

  “Cut us some slack, Agent. We’re just a recycling company, trying to make ends meet without the advantage of unlimited taxpayer funding.”

  That remark got Elfrida thinking about money. Money for rocks … money for recyclables … It was common knowledge that recycling outfits like Kharbage, LLC profited handsomely from UNVRP’s business, regardless of whatever Martin Okoli said. Rumors of all sorts had swirled around the asteroid capture program since its inception, including the persistent one that it was a massive kickback scheme to benefit a) Ceres b) the private sector c) illegal AI research; pick one or all of the above …

  She shook her head at her own wandering thoughts. Captain Okoli was talking to her again.

  “I didn’t know the stross-class had even been rolled out yet.”

  “This is one of the first units. It’s so special it’s even got a name of its own: Yumiko Shimada.” Elfrida made the phavatar roll its eyes.

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “It introduced itself while you were sleeping the sleep of the just.”

  “Oh.” Of course. Yumiko Shimada was the name of the onboard MI assistant as well as this spendy chassis. Elfrida was still getting used to how smart the MI was. It could cover for her while she was not logged in, and also give her operational support while she was. In fact, it was trying to get her attention right now.

  ~I recommend that you watch out for this guy, it said in a soft, breathy voice that Elfrida, on her couch, heard through her headset. ~He’s trying to pump you for information about me. My specs are classified, so please don’t tell him anything he shouldn’t know.

  ~I don’t know your specs to rattle them off, even if I wanted to, Elfrida told the MI coldly.

  She disliked working with assistants, always had. But given the sheer scale of interplanetary distances, there was no alternative to MI-assisted telepresence for sensitive missions.

  Robots had been indispensable to the human colonization of space from the very beginning, and now were even more so. These days, machine intelligences (MI) were required by law to operate below the threshold of autonomy. That constraint, however, admitted a vast speciation of competences. There were housekeeping bots, self-driving cars, and wholly-automated mining rigs that could propel themselves through space and dismember an asteroid in 24 hours flat. There were robotic pets, sexbots, drones, sprites, phaeries, and climate daemons that seeded Earth’s clouds and moved her solettas around. There were armies of software-based MIs with no physical existence, such as tutors, secretaries, and paralegals. And then there were phavatars, a coinage from ‘physical avatar,’ which combined robotic and MI capabilities. They could either support human telepresence or function independently in the capacity for which they were designed.

  ~You can log out if you like, Yumiko suggested to Elfrida. ~It’s almost time for your break, anyway.

  She did have a legally mandated exercise break coming up. And she wanted to grab something to eat that didn’t taste like regurgitated seaweed. ~OK, she subvocalized. ~Be nice to Captain Okoli.

  ~Ha, ha! The MI’s laughter sounded realistic. ~I’ll try, but if he keeps prying, I might be just a tiny bit rude.

  ~Just be yourself. Joke, joke, Elfrida subvocalized. She logged out and went in search of a cheese sandwich.

  As the Kharbage Can coasted towards 11073 Galapagos, she had to rely more and more on Yumiko to manage her interactions with the ship’s personnel. Sometimes a two- or three-second lag was perfectly acceptable. Sometimes you had to react faster. Yumiko proved adept at stalling, utilizing her repertory of temporizing phrases, until Elfrida transmitted her reaction. Alternatively, she could react without reference to Elfrida, based on her growing dossier of Elfrida’s quirks and speech mannerisms. This function creeped Elfrida out. She would rather not have used the assistant at all. But 11073 Galapagos was presently twenty light seconds from Venus. She would have to get used to working with Yumiko Shimada. Did they have to give her a surname, too?

  Chapter 4

  They even had conversations.

  * * *

  Elfrida had grown up knowing that she was half-Japanese. Her father took a melancholy pride in it. Over her mother’s objections, he had insisted on immersion lessons that allowed her to experience life in the country she would never see, because it no longer existed.

  In 2235, Mount Fuji had erupted. Actually, to call this event an eruption was a severe understatement. The flood of lava from the volcano buried Tokyo. The accompanying earthquake broke windows in New York. Buckling the earth’s crust, it triggered a tsunami that inundated the archipelago. When the sea retreated, only the tops of the Japanese Alps remained recognizable. The rest of the country was a graveyard.

  “I was five years old,” Elfrida’s father, Tomoki, had once told her. “My parents both worked for the UN. We were living in Zululand. I remember my mother screaming, lying down on the floor. That’s my first memory, actually.”

  Elfrida, only five herself at the time of this conversation, had glanced worriedly at her own mother. Might Mom scream and fall on the floor without warning?

  “Don’t frighten her, Tommy,” Elfrida’s mother said.

  “She needs to know that the world is a frightening place … Hora! Don’t cry. It’s all right, it’s all right. It happened once, but it won’t happen again. They say it was a once-in-ten-million-years eruption.”

  When her mother had gone to work, Elfrida pestered him for more. After some prodding, Tomoki Goto began to speak of ghosts.

  “They’re still there. Seventy million of them, still trying to get away. If a Japanese person visits the islands, a ghost may attach itself to him and leave with him on the airplane.” Tomoki touched his torso, under his ribcage.

  “Don’t go to Japan, Daddy!”

  “I won’t. There’s no reason for me to go. My whole family is dead. My Baba and Jiji—my grandparents, your great-grandparents—my aunts and uncles, everyone.”

  Elfrida met some of those ghosts a year later in her immersion lessons. Tomoki Goto, a software artist, had tailored the off-the-shelf program using old vid data of his family. For an hour a day, she lived with Baba and Jiji—eliding a generation, she called them that—in Tokyo circa 2015. Of course, Baba and Jiji themselves had not even been born in that century. But it was the earliest setting the software supported, and Tomoki had blithely inserted his family into that era, preferring quaintness over accuracy.

  ~Didn’t he think about the effect it would have on your developing psyche? Yumiko asked her.

  ~What effect? Elfrida subvocalized. ~When I applied for this job, I passed my psychological evaluation on the first try. I didn’t even need any therapy.

  ~You learned to love the past, to see it as a safe and welcoming place. It wasn’t! In 2015, there were no less than seven wars going on. The death toll from the Arab Spring was nearing half a million. The annexation of Taiwan was only ten years off. Climate change and species-level extinctions were accelerating. The population of Earth was larger, sicker, and unhappier than it had ever been before.

  ~Well, it wasn’t like that in Japan.

  Yumiko remained silent for a few moments. Then she changed the voice Elfrida could hear in her headset to one as contrite as an MI could produce. ~Sorry if I offended you. It’s just that I get a bit passionate about these things. So many people have a rose-colored view of the past, and it just wasn’t like that. But I want you to know that I really do value your diversity. It gives you a perspective I think is incredibly useful in our work out here.

  Elfrida bristled at the patronizing bromides, and particularly that our. Yumiko often spoke as if she were an actual employee of the Space Corps, when in fact she had just rolled off the production line with a memory crystal full of pre-digested opinions.

  ~That’s fine. I just want to draw some boundaries here, Elfrida said. ~Respect my privacy, and I’ll return the favor. A weak joke, a peace offering. They had to work together.

  ~Deal, Yumiko said, without seeming to get it.

  * * *

  In fact, growing up half-Japanese had been tougher than Elfrida let on. Every time the Gotos moved, the Chinese kids would try to recruit her, only to reject her, as if she were the one at fault, when they found out that she wasn’t half-Chinese but half-Japanese.

  Fuji had wreaked considerable havoc on China’s urbanized east coast, adding a new grievance to the Middle Kingdom’s oft-replenished stock of grudges against its island neighbor. It was averred on the sinanet to this day that the Japanese had somehow done it on purpose.

  Incidental to that, reactions to Elfrida’s parentage generally fell into two camps: embarrassed silence, or pity. The latter was harder to bear. She rarely even dared to try and imagine what it must be like to be her father, a pre-Fuji pureblood.

  Pureblood.

  The term carried a complex charge of revulsion, envy, and mockery. History’s tangle had knotted it together with the fate of the Japanese, who’d preserved their ethnic homogeneity like a blind community preserving their treasured defect, right up until their extinction.

  * * *

  ~What do you know about the Mars Incident? Yumiko asked her.

  ~What everyone knows. It happened in 2140. The AIs running the UN colony on Mars went berserk and killed millions of people because they’d read too much German philosophy.

  Yumiko laughed appreciatively. ~More or less. It was a nanoengineered tectonic event. The death toll was in the low five figures. And Mars was run at that time by the United States, not the UN.

  ~The United States?

  ~Of America. Oh, and it wasn’t just any German philosoph—

  ~I know that, Elfrida interrupted, but due to the signal delay, she still had to hear Yumiko saying Heidegger, a bad word—thanks to the philosopher’s role in the Mars Incident—that Elfrida had purposely avoided saying.

  Wanting to shut down the topic, she subvocalized brightly, ~ And that, boys and girls, is why we have restrictions on AI today.

  ~Ha, ha! I’m not that smart. Or, maybe you could say I’m smart enough not to waste my time marinating in Teutonic nihilism. Anyway, the reason I brought it up—

  Before the last words reached Botticelli Station, Elfrida had interjected, ~I’m also half-Austrian. My Viennese relatives are the happiest people I know. Not nihilistic at all.

  ~Touchy, much? Yumiko replied. ~I only asked because I thought maybe you had some funny ideas about AI. You know, political convictions or something.

  Elfrida was stumped for a reply. What business had Yumiko asking about her political convictions? Not that she had any, as such.

  But the question touched on an uncomfortable reality. A century and a half had passed since the Mars Incident. The very fact that opposition to AI was now thought of as a political position, rather than common sense, hinted at the difficulty of sustaining it while simultaneously relying on variously regulated, override-enabled, and deliberately crippled machine intelligences to support human colonization of the solar system.

  In short, humanity was embroiled in a titanic ideological struggle whose outcome remained unpredictable.

  Elfrida was vaguely aware of this, and she felt it as a tension in her relationship with Yumiko.

  ~I just wondered why you keep me disabled so much of the time, the MI said humbly.

  ~I do not, Elfrida defended herself. ~I mean, you covered for me while I was busy on 5597 Mahandra, for example.

  This was perfectly true. While Yumiko travelled towards 11073 Galapagos aboard the Kharbage Can, Elfrida had completed a preliminary assessment on 5597 Mahandra, supervised the evacuation of 12846 Elvis, and written up a recommendation that 8033 Vasilov not be purchased for the Project, based on its status as a net contributor to local trade networks. For each of these missions she had used a different phavatar. None of them were stross-class. None asked her about her private life. And none got their feelings hurt because she disabled them from time to time.

  ~Sorry, she subvocalized, thinking how ridiculous it was that she should be trying to soothe a machine intelligence’s bruised ego. ~I just like to make my own decisions.

  ~I totally admire that! Yumiko exclaimed. ~It’s just that I’m really excited about this mission, so don’t shut me out, ’kay pleeeease?

  Elfrida promised she wouldn’t, while promising herself that she would not put up with this emotionally draining crap a minute longer than she had to. 11073 Galapagos was gradually overhauling Venus. During the Kharbage Can’s 5.9 million kilometer journey to the asteroid, that 20-second latency period would dwindle to 10. The scheduled 30-sol duration of her mission would see it shrink all the way down to 3 seconds, on the edge of plausible solo operation.

  * * *

  Despite her promise, she backgrounded and muted Yumiko when they reached 11073 Galapagos. She was determined to manage their initial encounter with the residents herself.

  The Kharbage Can decelerated, matched the asteroid’s velocity, and anchored itself to the clamps installed where the squid’s mouth would have been, if 11073 Galapagos were the cephalopod it resembled. Elfrida climbed into a spacesuit—Yumiko’s high-end frame did not actually need protection from radiation or the vacuum, but she had to keep up appearances—and followed Captain Okoli out. Half a dozen blue berets came with them, toting shoulder-mounted flechette cannons that made them look like mutant beetles.

  The asteroid’s gravity was next to nil. Elfrida clipped a tether onto her suit. When she stepped off the base of the landing platform, she floated down to a dusty layer of regolith marked by overlapping bootprints.

  “But where is everyone?” she said.

  “Hey! Over here!”

  The shout rudely blanketed all the local communication frequencies. Yumiko painted a blood-red route to its origin, complete with blinking arrows, on Elfrida’s heads-up display. Muted or not, she was obviously straining at the leash to participate.

  Elfrida detached her tether and bounded over the surface of the asteroid on her gecko grips. A blue beret yelled for her to come back. Screw that. This was her mission.

  She risked drifting off into space with every step, but if she did, the Kharbage Can would retrieve her, so all she really risked was looking dumb. Anyway, Yumiko’s reflexes were a dream. Sailing spinwards across the terminator, she passed from day into night. Stars hailed across the sky, and Yumiko let out a parp of excitement.

  “Stop right there. Any further’n that,” said the all-frequencies voice, “and they c’n recycle you.”

  Elfrida looked down. On her chest glowed the angry red cross of a laser targeting system.

  Ten seconds had passed, of course, between this moment and her experience of it. Realizing that Yumiko might by now be a spreading cloud of debris, she lost control of her bowels. She flinched at the warm gush of solids and liquids into her diaper, but with a huge effort she maintained her concentration. She flung out a passionately sincere appeal for civility.

  The crosshairs vanished. Elfrida bounded back across the solar mesh. The asteroid tumbled her into blazing sunlight, and across the terminator stalked several spacesuits. Rad-shielded faceplates reflected the ungainly silhouette of the Kharbage Can. Splart-patched elbows cradled projectile rifles.

  “What the fuck, Yonezawa,” Captain Okoli complained. “You scared the pants off of my little friend here.”

  “You try living in this neighborhood,” said the rude male voice.

  Elfrida couldn’t believe this was happening. She tight-beamed a plea to Major Roy, the commander of the peacekeeping platoon. “Can’t you do something?”

  But her appeal had lagged events. Before it could reach the major, she saw eight sparks dart out of a port in the Kharbage Can’s crew capsule. They moved too fast for the human eye—but not Yumiko’s optic sensors—to follow. Deploying microcable grapples, each one pounced on a Kalashnikov and carried it off, like a tiny hawk with a giant rabbit. They danced into low orbit with their prizes.

  “Couldn’t have done anything,” Major Roy tight-beamed back to her. “No electronics in those antiques. Nothing to emp. It’d have come down to bare knuckles, metaphorically speaking.”

  Okoli gloated, “Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but you can’t argue with offensive drones. If I give the order, Yonezawa, they’ll need an electron microscope to find what’s left of you. Well?”

  “You wouldn’t do that,” Yonezawa said with a smug conviction that seemed to Elfrida very much unwarranted.

  “That decision would be his,” Okoli said, saving the face of Major Roy. “But I will never hesitate to put my firepower at the disposal of the United Nations for the purposes of peacekeeping in the solar system. Now have your popguns back, and next time don’t aim them at your best friend in this volume.” He pointed at Elfrida.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’m Yumiko Shimada.” Space Corps protocol dictated that agents use aliases, to avoid any potential contamination of their real identities by complaints from disgruntled colonists. Since this phavatar had a name, she was using it. “Hajimemashite. I’m here from the Space Corps, under contract to the United Nations Venus Remediation Project, to conduct a preliminary assessment of this asteroid’s human population. As you know, 11073 Galapagos is on the shortlist of entities which may be purchased by the Project for Cytherean terraforming. My assessment will be submitted for the consideration of the requisitioning committee that will make the final decision with regard to this matter. That’s just to let you know I haven’t got powers of life and death here. Laugh.” She punctuated her spiel with the emoticode for a laugh, one of the codes that had spread from text-only communication into regular speech. Emoticodes were handy when the other person couldn’t see your face, for instance when a tinted faceplate was in the way. “I’ll just be taking a look at how you live, your standards of living, any unique cultural and ethnic factors that may impinge on your potential resettlement, and submitting that data to headquarters.”