The heist: part 4

It absolutely will not stop, ever

This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. New chapter every week.

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: The former SDC detectives have stolen an old relic from the New Rhodes museum, in orbit around the Moon. All they need to do now is escape…

Space. Somewhere between the orbits of Earth and Venus.
2550.

The speed of light was really quite slow, when you wanted to get something done. Just Enough was far enough from Earth that a radio signal took a minute and a half to travel between them and the Beagle. Not nearly fast enough for taking quick actions, which had necessitated uploading a standalone shard onto the private yacht’s own system. Fully autonomous, the shard was making the moment-to-moment decisions, but was hampered by the Beagle’s comparatively tiny computational capacity. It was a luxury ship, but was a very distant relation to a quantum AI megaship.

They were closing the gap, burning towards the Moon at the maximum acceleration that the Archimedes engine would allow. That still meant an eight hour trip, which wouldn’t do the detectives and their Palinese friend much good. Just Enough received continual updates from the Beagle and could issue commands and corrections, but the transmission round-trip was an uncomfortable three minutes.

It would have to do.

There had been an energy spike through the museum’s systems shortly after Just Enough had killed the lights in the exhibition hall. Lola and Yana were already on their way back towards the ship, but Just Enough’s attention was on that spike. The intervention to turn off the lights may have been one risk too far.

Lunar orbit. The New Rhodes Orbital Museum.

“Back on Mid-Earth I’d have been upset about getting this dress covered in dirt and alcohol,” Lola said, as she and Yana strode past exhibits and from one room to the next. The museum seemed somehow larger, now that they were trying to leave it. “But they can just print new ones here. I can’t get my head around how easy everything is.”

“They don’t seem to realise the good fortune of their lives,” Yana muttered, trying to avoid eye contact with other guests and the service robots. She could feel the heft of the journal pressing on her stomach. Half of it, at least. She’d be having words with Lola about that once they were safely back on board the Beagle.

Kaenamor’s journal, in her possession! She hadn’t thought it possible. If it contained everything she hoped, it would unlock the wizard’s final spell, his long-hidden secret. She’d be able to complete it, or at least attempt to, and perhaps fix the broken portals on Max-Earth and Palinor, connecting the two dimensions at long last. Mid-Earth’s London would no longer be the centre of the triverse: it would break the stranglehold of the Kingdom of Great Britain, and the Joint Council, and disrupt all the power structures that Baltine had spent so many years building. The journal represented hope, for all of Palinor.

She’d have to get to Bruglia, of course, to the university, and the site of the original spell. That wasn’t a simple prospect, with the war raging back home.

But one thing at a time — the first of which was departing the museum.

She looked at an exhibit, the skull of a huge Palinese creature. It seemed familiar, and she couldn’t decide if it was because they’d gone past it on their arrival, or that they were lost. “Are we going the right way?”

“I think so,” Lola said, pointing at a glowing sign. “To the dock. That’s where we need to be.”

Music could be heard from Matheson’s office, muffled and distant. The party was in a different part of the station, away from the administrative area.

Probably Better stood in the corner, scanning the network, trawling through the museum’s surveillance records. The incursion had been localised to the VIP room, a hall ordinarily off limits to visitors. The power had momentarily tripped, causing the lights to turn off for just over ten seconds. None of the systems in the New Rhodes Museum were that fragile. Ten seconds was an eternity, and a legitimate glitch would have been found and fixed in less than a second. Unless the situation were being manipulated.

Sabotage, then.

They checked the records from the VIP room, analysing facial capture for everyone present. Matheson was there. Most of the guests were known, and regular visitors or contributors to Matheson’s projects. Two women were fresh faces. Their identity cards were mostly convincing, but there were signs of fabrication in the code, signals that would be difficult for anything but a quantum brain to spot. False IDs, then.

The two women were moving with haste through the museum. Probably Better rewound back through the station logs, tracing their movements, and immediately noted that the journal on display in the VIP room had a different appearance before and after the lights were disabled. Theft and a clumsy replacement.

They sped back through time, following the women as they walked backwards, all the way back to the docks and their arrival. There were others with them: two men and a third woman. Cross-referencing their faces with all available databases found a match: Lola Styles, Zoltan Kaminski, Yannick Clarke and Nisha Chakraborty, all fugitives from Mid-Earth. Styles had been missing, presumed dead, for years. All of them, former detectives in the Specialist Dimensional Command. The last woman was unrecognised and had not been part of the SDC.

The intrusion into the space station’s systems was certainly by an AI. The SDC team had prior involvement with Just Enough. The same entity that Probably Better had encountered in London five years earlier, and which had been interfering ever since. The network, led by Just Enough, had been launching countermeasures and firewalling entire planets in an attempt to stop Probably Better’s advance.

Assessing all of the station’s surveillance data, it was a simple matter to locate each of the fugitives. Still aboard and seemingly unaware that they had been identified.

All of this took a fraction of a second.

Probably Better blinked, then opened the door and left the office.

He’d had no eyes on the journal, but Clarke had at least got a handle on the calibre of guest at the party. It was an exclusively human gathering, no other Palinese species in attendance. Other than that, and not knowing much about fashion, it seemed to be a cross-section of the triverse. Money flowed freely, in a way he hadn’t noticed since arriving on Max-Earth. This side of the triverse was as close to a utopia as he could imagine, at least in terms of resources. It was not a scarcity environment, and yet the guests were relishing signing themselves over to Matheson’s vision. There was a fervour in the room, and it wasn’t just the booze talking.

Whispers of taking back control. Of a new golden age. Of halting the advance of the non-humans. It was manifest destiny, and Clarke had heard it all before.

It would have been useful to have a way to communicate with the others, but Justin had warned against it, saying that any transmissions would have been easily detected by the station’s security monitors. That meant continuing to wander the halls, in search of the journal or anything else that might be useful. He’d moved to the far side of the Parthenon, pretending to peer at objects while instead listening to snippets of conversation.

A waiter approached with a tray of tall-necked drinks. Clarke deposited his empty glass and took a fresh one, marvelling again at the sheer number of host robots attending to the partygoers. No expense had been spared, clearly.

There was an awkward pause as the waiter stood next to him, not moving away. It stood to attention, staring into the middle distance. Clarke was tempted to push it, to see if it would fall over. He didn’t trust all the hosts that Max-Earth relied upon, though he couldn’t deny their usefulness when off-planet. Then again, Ceres had managed mostly without.

The waiter blinked and turned its head slowly towards Clarke, its behaviour clearly different. He felt a tightening in his gut.

“Get back to the ship,” it said, then blinked again and walked off to continue distributing drinks.

Clarke didn’t need to be told twice.

“I secretly quite like museums,” Chakraborty said. “On my days off I’d sometimes go into one of the big London ones and just wander about. It’s a bit like time travel.”

Kaminski shrugged. “Not really my thing. They make my legs hurt and I want to take a nap.”

Across the room, a drunk guest tipped onto the floor with a crash. The party was awash with drinks; an endless parade of wines, shots and brightly coloured cocktails. There was a time she’d have been all-in, and it all felt so tantalisingly easy to slip back into old habits. She was glad to be on a mission, rather than enjoying it as a social event.

For a time, she’d convinced herself that her life was sorted. Her and Kaminski, in Future India, living their lives like normal, bickering people. Sure, he still missed his dad, and she missed — well, nothing in particular. But it had felt like a life, one she’d be happy with for as long as it lasted. It was never going to be that simple, not while Earth First remained in power back home, not while Lola had still been missing, not while the rogue AI was out there making a mess of things. Sooner or later, they were going to be pulled back into the thick of it.

Turned out to have been sooner.

Another waiter was approaching, with tray of drinks to waft in her direction. And still no sign of this journal that Lola was so keen to get her hands on. It felt like a fool’s errand, a bunch of made-up nonsense. Which is how it had always tended to go when Palinor was involved in a case. There was a heightening whenever something came through that portal. Still, Lola knew what she was doing. Chakraborty could get on board with the plan, if Lola thought it mattered. Still, she looked forward to returning to the house in New Delhi, sitting on the balcony with Zoltan, eating good food and sipping tea.

Kaminski hadn’t noticed, his attention typically turned towards a nude statue, but the waiter seemed to be walking faster than usual. The liquids in the glasses were sloshing into the tray and onto the floor. One of the glasses tipped, rolled off and smashed to pieces. The waiter was still heading in their direction, its gaze fixed upon them.

The host robot dropped the drinks tray, then reached out with both its arms as if to grab at them. It was stopped only by the intervention of another waiter bot, which stepped in from the side and restrained the first. Engaged in an odd wrestling hold, neither of the waiters could move, though she could see the servos in the limbs straining against each other.

“What the fuck?” Kaminski was alert to the situation, and pulled at Chakraborty’s arm, moving them away from the duelling waiters. They were both clad in white tuxedos and black trousers, lending the slow motion stalemate a comical appearance.

Rotating until its neck had spun 180 degrees and the false flesh was beginning to tear, the second waiter, the one that had intervened, stared at them and spoke a word: “Run.”

Emerging onto the main concourse, Lola tried to get her bearings. The station was a loop, at least in theory, with the concourse running all the way around. They’d left the exhibition halls via a different route and needed to find their way back to the airlock that connected to their ship.

Yana made an exasperated sound. “Left or right? Everything here confuses me.”

“Left,” Lola said, realising that there was a series of coloured lines marked on the floor, with yellow pointing the way to the docks. She hoped she was right, as they didn’t have time to be going in the wrong direction.

The concourse was less busy than the exhibition halls, the restaurants and bars that served the museum’s normal visitors shut down for the party. The arc of the station was more noticeable than in the halls, with the floor curving up and out of sight. That lack of a horizon or a proper end wall gave Lola the distinct feeling that she was in a constant state of falling. She focused on the guiding yellow line as they walked, tracing their way back towards the lift that would return them to the Beagle.

“Who is that?” asked Yana, nodding to something up ahead.

Looking up from her feet, Lola saw a tall woman in a red dress walking purposefully towards them from a bank of elevators that led to the other floors.

A lone member of station security, standing near the doors to the docking ramps, moved from their post and began running across the concourse. Had the missing journal already been spotted? They’d have to somehow get past the security officer and into the lift.

The officer wasn’t coming directly towards them, she realised, but was instead on an intercept course with the woman in red. They closed the distance and violently tackled the woman, trying to knock her to the ground. When that didn’t work, the officer started grappling her.

The woman in red paused and looked down at the struggling officer. There was a flicker of a smile, then she took hold of the officer’s shoulders and tore them in half, the destroyed body slumping to the floor in a widening pool of milky-white sludge.

Lola let out a cry of shock, taking a second to recognise that the officer had been a robot servant, rather than a human. The strength that had been demonstrated, though: the woman in red had to be a host body as well. And she was advancing on them again, faster this time.

“Go!” Lola shouted, pushing Yana, and they broke into a run, aiming for the docking area. The woman in red was faster, and would get to them before they were able to make it through the doors. Yana had none of her powers, and Lola had nothing. She was a patchwork of human and vaen’ka and aen’fa, but none of that meant anything this side of the Max-Earth portal. At best, they were about to be apprehended. At worst, they’d suffer the same fate as the security officer.

From the lounges and exhibition halls burst more of the support staff: waiters, security, curators, all of them robots of one type or another. They bounded through the doors, over tables and chairs, flinging themselves over railings and steps. They moved individually and as one, swarming to the red woman and enveloping her, until she disappeared beneath a mass of writhing robot bodies. The movement was that of liquid, or of a massive shoal of fish writhing in a net.

Lola reached the doors to the lift and pressed her finger to the button. The doors slid open and they darted inside, the uncanny fight between the servant robots and the red woman still ongoing.

Across the concourse she saw Kaminski and Chakraborty emerge, then Clarke from a different door. The old man was slower, and behind him there seemed to be a confrontation between half a dozen waiters.

“What’s happening?” Yana was wide-eyed, panicking, even more lost in this world of the future than Lola. “Why have they all lost their minds?”

Lola gestured for the others to hurry, keeping one eye on the swarming barricade. It had to be Justin, slowing down whomever, or whatever, was coming after them.

Clarke, Kaminski and Chakraborty finally made it to the lift and piled inside. The doors sealed shut and the lift dropped them away from the concourse. Clarke was breathing heavily, bent over, his hands on his knees. Lola allowed herself a moment of relief as they were lowered out of the station and onto the docking arm.

Kaminski raised a hand. “Did anybody get the fucking book?” He looked to each of them, desperation on his face.

“We got it,” Lola said, patting her dress.

The lift stopped and the doors opened. From a speaker came a voice. “This is Justin. Please hurry. I am under considerable strain. You are not safe.”

Glancing at each other, they dashed from the lift and into the airlock, which took a minute to cycle until it released them back onto the Beagle. The moment they were aboard, the ship detached from the station with a violent jolt, sending them all sprawling. The centrifugal gravity provided by the station’s spin fluttered away and Lola found herself tumbling through the cabin, clutching at the back of chairs to try to steady herself.

“Justin,” Clarke shouted, “we’re not strapped in.”

“Then I suggest haste. I will be engaging a full burn in sixty seconds.”

None of them were experienced space travellers, Lola and Yana especially, and it was a chaotic minute during which they somehow managed to each find their way to a seat and seal the harness.

“This will be uncomfortable,” Justin said over the ship’s speaker.

The seat harness Lola was wearing expanded, additional straps moving into place around her chest, legs and arms, and the headrest moved in and around to brace her neck and shoulders. Then she was punched in the chest, harder than any impact she’d ever felt, and the pressure spread across her entire body and onto her face. The straps around her wrists tightened to prevent her arm from whipping away from the armrest. It was a punch followed by a prolonged compression, as if someone was sat on her, preventing her from breathing. Her breaths were shallow, lungs under too much strain to inflate.

“Adjusting oxygen supply to cabin,” Justin said. “Applying survival cocktail.” She felt a pinprick in her side, and realised that she’d been injected with something. Her vision smeared and ears pounded and the room dilated, stretching around her. All she could hear was the grinding and creaking of the ship’s hull under acceleration.

No, not the hull. It was her teeth.

The dark side of the Moon.

A disturbance in the powdery lunar surface, and from deep below came forth a black shape, rising up into darkness. The grey regolith poured from its top and sides, drifting in the low gravity, hanging in the air, clinging to the shape like iron filings to a magnet.

It hovered in place, a giant, cigar-like wedge, a Frankenstein’s monster of a megaship, rotating with precision. Reaching its intended orientation, its target locked in, it accelerated like a bullet fired from a gun.

All that was left was a silhouette of dust, hanging in space.

Photo by Jeremy Perkins on Unsplash

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Meanwhile.

We all need a bit of courage at the moment, and this sketch from

Meaghan McIsaac

does the trick:

A stack of new comics showed up in the mail yesterday: Transformers, G.I. Joe, The Power Fantasy, Saga. For a time I’d shifted everything digital, and read a lot of comics via Comixology. It was convenient and saved physical space in the house. After Amazon bought an enshittified the service, I moved back to ordering comics from a comic shop and haven’t looked back since. Receiving the package through the front door is an absolute joy. There’s a childlike anticipation there, of imminent good stories.

Talking of which, here’s a hubristic segue into notes about today’s chapter…

Author notes

I was going to include an entire cyberspace layer in this chapter, depicting a virtual tussle between Just Enough and Probably Better. There are still hints of that, as we get the opening from JE’s point of view, and PB’s scanning of the network. My original plan was to intercut the physical fighting with a cyberspace equivalent, each AI hacking and counter-hacking, trying to sidestep each other’s defences.

Not unlike the Jarvis/Ultron sequence, I suppose. Ultimately it seemed like one element too many, plus I’m generally suspicious of scenes which depict virtual interactions. There’s always a risk of them feeling like watching someone playing a game, instead of actually playing the game. A bit like those mid/late-2000s novels that took place inside MMO-style games, which were never very compelling.

Structurally, this chapter is meant to be tense and uncomfortable. There are more POV shifts than usual, so that the reader can never settle comfortably into what’s going on. Each POV shift advances the threat, and we, the readers, have more knowledge than any of our protagonists. There’s a tension in that gap: we know that PB is waking up and coming for them, and we desperately want them to figure it out and get the hell out of there.

They do manage to escape, leaving a trail of smashed-up bots in their wake. That’s going to be tricky for Matheson to explain. And, of course, the real threat emerges at the very end — their ‘escape’ is far from over.

I’m a child of the 80s, so The Terminator and Alien are large influences on my imagination. Later, Asimov and Banks and Kim Stanley Robinson expanded my understanding of science fiction, and of robots and AI generally. And here we are in 2025 with ‘AI’ of a sort upending most of our lives.

The setup in Triverse is that the superintelligence network is benevolent, largely by chance. The only reason Max-Earth is habitable, and humans haven’t obliterated themselves, is due to the intervention of AI. But, as Justin has pointed out, that benevolence was an accident, or a stroke of luck, rather than by design. It reminds me of an episode of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, from way back in 2017, which looked at the early days of the nuclear age, and how close we came to annihilation on multiple occasions.

Carlin’s point is that we scraped by largely because of the leaders we happened to have at the time in the US and Russia. They were at each other’s throats, but they were not insane. History could have tipped in another direction very easily. It was, in a way, luck.

That’s how I’m positioning AI in Triverse. And Matherson and his gang, by creating Probably Better, have upset that delicate balance of luck.

Give the wrong people the wrong power at the wrong time and you’re done.