City of Reason

By Matthew Jarpe
Originally published January 2005 by Asimov's Science Fiction. Copyright © 2005 by Matthew Jarpe.



I quickly reprogrammed the ‘bot and sent it to intercept the lifeboat, then I suited up and headed over to the JAFR. I wanted the bomb to get my full attention, and even if the ‘bot couldn’t handle getting the lifeboat back, it would at least be able to stop it from doing whatever it was supposed to do. I could deal with more variables once the bomb was no longer a threat.

I reached the JAFR and didn’t bother with the airlock. I just cut my way inside, carving through the ice with chemical welding sticks, kicking out loose rocks behind me as I tunneled to the center. I reached the bomb in just a couple of minutes and had the whole trigger device schematic mapped out in a couple more. I popped the screws on the trigger housing, wedged my screwdriver under the manual trigger input, and pried it off. Now I could relax. I pulled out the rest of the trigger and disconnected it from the bomb. Then I dismantled the arming device and threw the loose parts up the tunnel behind me. Finally, I physically removed the explosive charges that would have compressed the deuterium/tritium mix and vented the fuel into vacuum.

The whole operation took me just under ten minutes. As I worked I eavesdropped on the conversation between Jesse and Shaunasie.

“He’s inside, he’s inside the ship.” Jesse was frantic. “What do I do?”

“There isn’t much you can do, Jesse.”

“But he’s taking apart the bomb. Should I detonate it?”

“We’re not close enough. It wouldn’t do any damage to the City.”

“I’ve got to stop him or the mission will be a failure. I’ll be a failure. Why did they send me? I can’t do anything.”

I got to admit I felt sorry for the kid. He was as easy to read over a voice connection as he was in person. I could hear his sobs clearly. It was too bad they had run into me. Too bad there was someone with money who wanted them to fail. Then again, most Damagers who took this contract would have simply destroyed their ship and collected the fee. The oversight board wouldn’t question the use of lethal force in this circumstance. So in a way Jesse was lucky. I don’t work that way.

It was obvious right away that Shaunasie was in the boat. She had seen the bot and was taking evasive action. She flew better than I had given her credit for, but the boat wasn’t very maneuverable and the ‘bot was closing. When my robot caught up with the boat Shaunasie brought out the guns. I was pretty sure she had them, but I didn’t know what I would have to do to flush them out. She took out the ‘bot with a rail gun and resumed course. I had had about enough of her. Since I had no compunctions about blasting a silk puppet into atoms, there was no longer any reason not to hang fire on the lifeboat. I was just about to relay that command to my ship when the defenses of the City of Reason made themselves evident.

The lifeboat and the JAFR were both snagged in a delicate carbon fiber web. The One in the Hand was far enough back that it managed to see the threat and brake in time to avoid it. I pulled myself out to the end of the tunnel, analyzing the situation as I went.

It was a simple and effective defense. The web was invisible to radar because the threads were much smaller than the wavelength of radio waves. Individual threads weren’t strong enough to stop even a weak ion drive, let alone a chemical rocket or a fusion torch. But they were arranged in such a way that any ship driving towards the City would pull more and more threads in, getting hopelessly tangled before it ever reached the center. It was also a pretty expensive defense. There was enough carbon nanofiber in the cloud to make a sky hook for Mars. Even as I tried to figure out if I could get back to my ship through the holes in the net I was wondering how they had managed to manufacture so much nanofiber with the limited resources of a homesteader. Then I remembered Seymour telling me that they were remarkably well equipped for people who had left their homes to escape persecution or prosecution. They were not typical homesteaders at all. They even had some kind of sugar daddy in the inner system who was paying me to make sure they weren’t harmed.

It looked like I needn’t have bothered. Even if I hadn’t shown up, the City of Reason would be just fine. The property of the webs was such that the lifeboat and the JAFR were being pulled together the more they struggled to get free. I decided to hold off on killing Shaunasie until I figured out what her plan had been.

In the meantime, our presence at the gates of the City had been well announced. If Jesse and Shaunasie had been counting on stealth for their plan that was ruined. We were getting pinged by whatever passed for traffic control in a place that never had any traffic, and I responded with my standard identification.

“Licensed Damager,” I told them with a data squirt. “You are under attack. I have neutralized the threat and the situation is well in hand. Not to worry, folks. No cause for alarm.”

Shaunasie was outside the boat as it drew closer. She was wearing state of the art battle armor and carrying three powerful weapons. She had the rail gun she had used against the ‘bot on an articulated targeting arm mounted behind her shoulders, a laser canon ran along her right upper arm and was aimed by hand, and there was a rack of guided missiles on each leg. I had the welding torch, a spring powered bolo thrower, and a pretty damned good defensible position down in the tunnel. I had the One in the Hand quietly burning me an escape route on the far side so I could be out the other end before Shaunasie knew what I was doing.

I had multiple views to scroll through every few seconds trying to keep track of what she was doing out there. The sensors I had seeded over the hull of the JAFR were showing the lifeboat’s approach. The twisted metal remains of my robot was still feeding me video of her activities on the far side of the lifeboat. She was paying close attention to the nanofibers that were cocooning the boat, making sure she wasn’t trapped against the hull.

I stuck my head out of the hole long enough to launch a tether to the boat. The line snaked through the nanofiber net and the grapple bumped the hull and scuttled along to find something to grab onto. Once the boat was secure with one more line, I could move it where I wanted it to be. I poked out to fire another tether and Shaunasie launched a missile at me. I ducked back into the hole and the missile tried to follow. But the guidance system got confused en route and the charge exploded harmlessly in space. I crawled back up the hole to throw the other line and she used the laser. I let my suit take the hit and I got my line on. As I backed up down the hole I bled the excess heat into the ice. I used the remote winches at the ends of the tethers to crank the boat around to a more advantageous position.

I had a pretty good shot with the bolo and Shaunasie’s rail gun was hung up in the web so I pulled myself back to the mouth of the hole. I hadn’t figured on Jesse. I had dismissed him as too timid to join the fight, but damned if he didn’t come up from underneath me and hit me with a ball of epoxy.

I got the bolo fired and Shaunasie incapacitated before I turned on Jesse. The epoxy had immobilized my legs in seconds, but you really don’t need your legs that much in zero G combat.

I could see easily through Jesse’s visor that he was enraged. He came at me with surprising fury for someone who had been shaking in his boots a few minutes earlier. He fired the epoxy gun again and just missed completely smothering me. I lit the welding torch. Much as I hated to use the non-lethal weapon on the creature outside and the lethal one on this poor kid, I had my survival to think of.

He backed away down the tunnel, the fear on his face as clear as the anger that had been there before. But he didn’t drop the gun. He turned down my new escape route and I followed. But as I turned the corner I hit a wall of newly setting epoxy. I started working the edges with my torch when the wall of liquid helium hit me from behind. Before I could figure out where the hell it had come from I was frozen.


“He’s coming around.”

“You mean he really is alive?”

“He’s probably got some enhancements. He’d have to in his line of work. Didn’t you want him to survive?”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

“You could have fooled me. You set the perfect trap. It isn’t easy to trick a Damager like that.”

She had a point. How had he managed to trick me? I had him pegged as completely useless and here he transforms himself into an instant genius.

“I guess I just got lucky. The coolant pipe was buried nearby, and I was able to seal off enough of the tunnels that the helium filled the whole chamber.”

“Well, you did good. We might need him alive.”?

“Why?”

“Did you hear what he said just before I attacked him? He told the City that he had the situation in hand. They haven’t sent anyone out here to investigate. He bought us some time. We need to use it to our best advantage.”

“So why do we need him?”

“We might need him if we have to buy more time. We might need to reassure the City that everything is under control and they just need to stay put.”

“But he isn’t going to help us,” Jesse said.

“I have ways of getting him to do what we want.”

“Are you talking about torture?”

“More like mind control,” Shaunasie said.

This much I knew: I was immobilized, naked, and I wasn’t getting any radio coming in. I tried getting messages out, but I didn’t receive any acknowledgement from the One in the Hand. That could be bad. If the ship didn’t hear from me in a certain amount of time it would start thinking for itself, and you don’t want to be around when it does that. I couldn’t tell how long I’d been out. I opened my eyes.

“You’re making a serious mistake,” I told the two young people hovering in front of me. I was strapped to a board by sheets of carbon nanofiber. It looked like it might have come from the web that had probably encased the entire ship by now.

“I knew you would say that,” Shaunasie said. “No one is going to come and rescue you. Nobody will avenge your death all the way out here.” I looked at her face and smiled in spite of myself. The crystal teardrop on her right cheek had been covered by a band-aid. Nice touch. She had shut off access to her core programming. She had probably figured out what I had done before. Very nice.

“What time is it? How long was I out?”

Jesse started to answer but Shaunasie stopped him. “Let’s not tell him anything. Any information he has he will try to use.”

“Six hours,” I said. “When I’ve been silent for six hours, my ship wakes up. And it wakes up angry. Do the math, and tell me if we have anything to worry about.”

I could read the answer in Jesse’s face. We had time, but not much. “I’m guessing less than an hour.” Jesse’s flinch was a confirmation, and Shaunasie shot him a dirty look.

“We’ve got to get moving,” she said.

“Do you think he’s serious? What if he’s bluffing?”

“We should move as quickly as we can anyway.”

“Jesse, there’s something you should know about your comrade here.”

Jesse stopped and looked at me, then at Shaunasie. “He’s stalling,” Shaunasie said. “Don’t listen to him. He’s going to use whatever he can to stop us. Remember that.”?

“You forget, girl. I don’t give a shit whether you succeed or fail. It isn’t my job.”

“Is that why you took apart our bomb?”

“Somebody paid me to stop you from setting off the bomb. They didn’t say anything about your other plans. If you have another objective, feel free to go about your business. You do have another objective, don’t you? Something you didn’t bother to tell Jesse?”

Jesse continued to look from me to Shaunasie and back. His emotions were, as always, perfectly clear on his face. He was confused, curious, and determined all at the same time. It was a potent mix to work with.

“Did you know that A Better Way has a score to settle with the City of Reason? They were allies back on Titan, but they had a falling out. Now here they are again, twenty years later. It’s a good thing that A Better Way found the High Fantastic Empire to dupe into taking action for them.”

Jesse looked back at Shaunasie. “You knew them on Titan? You told us you wanted to help us.”

“The City of Reason never attacked you, Jesse. That was A Better Way. All part of the plan. So was sending along a pretty girl to help you with the bomb. Only she isn’t a girl, Jesse. She’s a bundle of sophont silk riding in a girl’s body. Go ahead, ask her how she plans to control my mind.”

“Where do you come up with this stuff?” Shaunasie said, shaking her head. “Sophont silk? Jesse, think for a minute. You have no reason to trust this man. You’ve worked with me for a long time. You just met him. You know me, he’s a stranger. He wants to stop us from doing what we came here to do.”

“But the bomb is gone,” Jesse said. “We can’t do what we came her to do.”

“We can do other things, Jesse. The bomb was just plan A. Let’s go talk about the other plans and see what we can do to salvage the mission.”

“These other plans, why didn’t you tell me about them? Is this what you were going to do when you went off in the lifeboat?”

“I told you, Jesse, I was doing reconnaissance. I didn’t have another plan until he took the bomb apart.”

“So what can we do now?”

“The City of Reason has vulnerable points ...”?

“There was no way I was going to get through undetected,” Jesse blurted out. “You claimed that they had no defenses. This nanofiber web is incredibly sophisticated.”

“And undetectable. We couldn’t have known ...”

“You said you’d analyzed their colony, you knew the weak points. Was that just a lie? Was the bomb even real? I was a decoy, wasn’t I?”

Ah, that’s my boy. He was finally starting to think with his brain.

“Watch out, kid,” I told him. “She’s not going to let this mission fail just because it smells bad to you.”

Jesse glanced at me and that was Shaunasie’s opening. I saw the knife flash behind him, and before I could shout a warning she had buried it in his back. Again, the young man surprised me. He doubled up, slapped his hands on the floor, and mule kicked her right across the little room. He followed on his own trajectory and pinned her to the bulkhead with his knee.

Shaunasie’s reflexes were good. To a machine, fighting is just another mathematical puzzle. If you’ve got the right software, you can work a counter to just about any move. I was expecting her to give him a shot in the pills, but apparently her software found that far too obvious. She managed a good nose smash, then when she worked her way free a kick at the still embedded knife. Then, only after she had lined up an escape path and fought free of his hands, she gave him a shot in the pills.

Jesse was in bad shape. He didn’t go after her, but he hadn’t had all the fight beaten out of him yet. Instead he jumped toward me. As he worked his way around behind me I briefly imagined he was going to set me free to help him fight her. I was wrong. He pulled the board free and used me as a shield to rush her.

By now Shaunasie had reached a weapon, a little steam knife that works great in close combat on a ship. The superheated water vapor comes out with enough force to cut flesh but not metal, and the heat even cauterizes the wound so you don’t get the room fouled up with a lot of messy blood droplets. And I was sailing across the room right towards it.

I didn’t have radio any more for some reason, but I still had the laser in the corner of my right eye. And the little band-aid on Shaunasie’s right cheek was torn off. I focused on the tear drop lens and hacked like I’d never hacked before. I had a couple of seconds before the short range weapon would be able to slice me to ribbons.

I had gotten a lot of information out of her before, but she had shut off all the access routes I had used. There was one fairly simple command structure I was able to get into, however. It was a subroutine that had been loaded up recently but hadn’t yet been used.

What I had in mind was only going to slow her down for a few seconds. I wasn’t sure if Jesse would be able to take advantage of the opening that would give him. He was a strange kid, volatile and inexperienced, but capable of wild brilliance at times.

Then it hit me, the whole meaning of the trans-emotional thing. The manifesto had said something about tapping into emotions to solve problems the intellect couldn’t handle. The little subroutine Shaunasie had queued up but never deleted would invoke a strong emotional response in Jesse. If I was right, that response would save both our asses.

Seemed like a long shot, but, as I said before, couple of seconds. Tick tick. What the hell? I kept my laser on target and sent the command. She let go of the knife and it drifted away. “I’ve been thinking about what you said before, Jesse,” she told him. “And you’re right. It’s time we take this relationship to the next level.”

Jesse let go of the board I was strapped to. “What?”

I put all of the command I could into my voice. “Jesse, move quick. Grab her.”

To his credit, Jesse did move quickly. He grabbed her shoulders and held her. The back of his shirt was soaked and droplets of his blood floated in the air between them.

“Jesse,” she said with a breathy tone. “I love you.” Jesse looked deeply into her eyes.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, he’s falling for it. “Jesse,” I snapped. “It’s a trick. Throw her in the airlock.”

They were both lost to me, wrapped up in the programming their elders had installed in their brains. I had a pretty good idea how long Shaunasie would be controlled by the romantic macro I had activated. I had no idea whether Jesse would snap out of it before she did. I couldn’t afford to wait around and find out.

I couldn’t see very well because my board had spun away from the action. When I looked back at the place I had been held I noticed that there was a wire cage, hastily constructed, against the wall. A faraday cage. That was how they had blocked my radio. I put in a call to the One in the Hand right away. In its strange mechanical way the ship had missed me. It was only six minutes more until it woke up and built another copy of me to download my latest backup. Just in time to avert that nightmare.

I had already modeled the entire tactical situation in my own dataspace, and now I had the ship’s targeting computer to run a large series of simulations. The positions and trajectories of the JAFR and the One in the Hand, the two kids starting to wake up from their ill timed romantic interlude, the open airlock door and the emergency evacuation button, and me. In less than a second I had the answer to my problem.

Making a lump of ice like the JAFR dance with a laser is pretty easy. Drilling the escape tunnel without spinning the ship took a lot more precision. I calculated the perfect angle, told the ship to fire, and prepared myself for an uncomfortable encounter with a bulkhead. The ship swung about, propelled by steam escaping from the side, and the open airlock loomed up to swallow Jesse and Shaunasie whole. At the same time the corner of the board that held me prisoner drifted toward the emergency evac button. I slowly turned in time to see the two of them drifting into my trap.

They seemed just about to kiss, but I could see Shaunasie’s hand reaching down Jesse’s back to twist the knife. He looked completely lost in the moment, lust and longing on his face. Then I noticed his legs spreading apart and that didn’t fit his expression. As they reached the airlock door Jesse let go of Shaunasie and spread his arms wide. His hands and feet just managed to stop him outside the little chamber, as I hit the emergency evacuation button. The inner door slid shut with Shaunasie inside and the outer door opened without the chamber pumping down first.

Shaunasie held on to the inner door as best she could. She stayed conscious a lot longer than an unenhanced human would have. I couldn’t see her, but Jesse watched the whole thing through the window and I could see his face clearly. That was all I needed to know that she was dead.


The City of Reason finally agreed to let Jesse go. I had vouched for him, and he genuinely seemed sorry for what he had done. They did ask for Shaunasie’s body, and eventually I figured out why. They needed her to complete her mission. Not the mission that she had told Jesse about when they left the High Fantastic Empire, and not the secret mission she thought she was supposed to carry out once they got here. It turns out there was yet a third mission, so secret even she didn’t know about it. Not even the elders of A Better Way knew about it. It was the mission given to her by the City of Reason.

I managed to get a lot of data out of her once she was dead. I had a device in my space suit that could map the quantum storage bits in the sophont silk in her skull without a trace. That was important, the no trace thing, because the City of Reason specifically prohibited me from examining the body while they shuttled out and unwound the JAFR from the nanofiber web.

I didn’t get to analyze the data until after the inquest, after Jesse and I had been escorted back through the one safe passage through the web and were back on my ship. I thought I was going to find out more about what A Better Way had been up to. I did, but it wasn’t what I was expecting.

The people who had set up A Better Way had been rivals of the people who had set up the City of Reason. But before that they had been collaborators. Experimental Cognition supplied the hardware in the form of enhanced and augmented human brains, and the Institute for Introspection provided the software, the thought structures that would run on those brains. It seems they gave Ex Cog a little something extra. Without even knowing it A Better Way had been working on a prototype for the perfect posthuman as designed by the citizens of the City of Reason.

And I had just delivered that prototype to the designers.


“I still can’t believe she wasn’t human,” Jesse said after I finished showing him my ship. “I really felt something for her. I thought she felt something for me. And now to find out it was all a fake. That thing she said right at the end, the last thing she said to me, that was probably just a programming glitch. She was probably going to use that against me, and it just came out at the wrong time. She never loved me at all.”

“Ain’t that a corker?” I said. I pulled myself into the command chair in front of the main console and winked at the picture of my mother. It was good to be back again. I had made a tidy sum on this little mission, even though I had probably not done what my client hired me to do. It’s a caveat emptor thing, you know? If they wanted me to kill Shaunasie before she got to the City of Reason they should have just told me to kill her. All this pussy footing around is no way to get things done.

Ah, well, at least I lived to tell the Coordinator Group what was going on out here among the dirty snowballs. To think how narrowly I’d escaped having to confront a restored copy upon returning. The existential headaches, the legal hassle, not to mention the sleeping arrangements.

“Posthumans,” Jesse said, shaking his head.

“Posthumans,” I agreed. “Fuck ‘em.”

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