Flight From the Ages and Other Stories by Derek Künsken

Author:Derek Künsken
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

Flight from the Ages

3113 C.E.

The artificial intelligence Ulixes-316 was the sole occupant of the memory banks and processing algorithms of the customs and tariff ship called The Derivatives Market. From this position, Ulixes-316 was pressuring the Epsilon Indi Bank to deny credit to the Merced Republic Insurance Company. Merced was liable for paying an enormous indemnity, one that would halve its stock value. The holder of Ulixes-316’s lease was orchestrating a hostile takeover of Merced, and Ulixes-316 did not want the Epsilon Indi Bank offering a bailout.

Then, the message arrived. It was an encrypted sub-AI, carried by a courier ship through a series of small wormhole jumps, and transmitted to Ulixes-316 as soon as the courier was in-system.

Break off current negotiations and prepare for reassignment.

Ulixes-316, an Aleph-Class artificial intelligence, was baffled. It stood not only to earn its leaseholder a sizeable profit, but would reap its own percentage of the deal.

Not possible, Ulixes communicated back. Negotiations at delicate point. Deal at risk.

The CEO is aware of opportunity cost, replied the sub-AI. Break off negotiations and prepare for secure instructions.

The CEO. What was big enough to have the CEO reaching down to her mobile agents? Was the market crashing?

The board will hear about this, Ulixes-316 messaged, and I’m invoking article 41(a) of the leasing agreement, for leaser-induced business losses and compensation.

Understood, was the reply. Compensation is already being processed.

Cold comfort. The takeover was worth ten times the compensation. Ulixes instructed its legal subroutines to file a suit against the bank for the losses. Then it switched over to secure communications as it prepared the engines surrounding the three attometer-sized black holes that powered The Derivatives Market. The secure instructions passed cryptographic analysis.

To: Ulixes-316 and Poluphemos-156

From: CEO, First Bank of the Anglo-Spanish Plutocracy

Mission: Proceed immediately to the Tirhene Red Dwarf system. Investigate the abrupt end of tachyon emissions from the Praesepe Cluster.

Distaste. This is what Ulixes felt.

This was worth blowing a trillion peso acquisition? Some kind of environmental crisis in an uninhabited system? The science of tachyons, only eight hundred years old, was still broadly considered to be in its infancy. Tachyon detectors were an imprecise set of eyes with which to interrogate the cosmos, even if they provided better-than-instantaneous communications across the vast gulfs between the stars.

More worrying, whatever bonuses to be had in this new mission would have to be shared with Poluphemos-156, another Aleph-Class AI, and a competitor.

Ulixes filed this as evidence with its subroutine for the legal suit and processed the rest of the message.

The blackout of tachyons is centered on an event that will occur in the Tirhene system, and is being roughly localized to a window some time in the next seven to nine days. The Bank is treating this as a threat.

Background—Tachyons: Tachyons travel faster than light and react very little with sub-luminal matter. They permeate space omnidirectionally but show a great deal of structure. It is theorized that they are the equivalent of cosmic microwave background radiation but move backward in time from a Big Crunch event at the end of the universe.

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