Providence - Max Barry Page 0,77
Providence program was a colossal mistake. It made her wonder whether they could win.
“But not for a while,” Nettle said. “Say hello to David.”
* * *
—
She caught a shuttle from Arlington to New York, arriving late. David was asleep, so she extracted herself from her uniform and crawled beneath the sheets and snaked her arms around him. He was the world’s heaviest sleeper, but she knew he would get there. Finally his eyes cracked open. “Hey.”
“Hi.”
“How were they?”
“Young.”
“Mmm,” he said. “We were, once.”
“Not like that.”
He was silent awhile. “So you’re not going out?”
“No,” she said. “Of course not.”
“Good.” He kissed her hair.
* * *
—
David was very patient, which she hoped one day to deserve. She felt like she had tricked him. Pulled a bait-and-switch. They would be strolling together, or eating dinner, and she would drift into a universe of shredded polymer, where salamanders unpeeled from nowhere and everyone began to die, and she wouldn’t even realize until she saw his face. It had been six years and she was still clawing her way through therapy and Service-approved medication toward the person she used to be, the young, happy, ambitious bride David had married, before Fornina Sirius crawled into her head and turned her into this.
Nettle sent her back to Camp Zero three months later. Then three months after that. Then six months later again. By then, the first Providence, Fire of Montana, was almost complete, a bright star in the early evening sky. It had a named crew. She watched their interviews and felt not the tiniest mote of regret.
“Who’s picking these people?” she asked Nettle on their next call. She had been surprised by at least two of the selections, whom she knew from Camp Zero.
“AI.”
She had suspected. “So now you’re letting software choose the crew on your new ships that will be run by software?”
“Yes,” said Nettle.
“Boy,” she said.
She heard the shrug in his voice. “Welcome to the future. It works.”
“But you don’t know how it works.” She didn’t even want to learn about the AI; it only made her more angry. But she couldn’t stop herself from picking at it like a scab. “It’s made from computers writing software no one can understand.”
“But it works.”
“Boy,” she said again.
* * *
—
The candidates did grow on her. She became somewhat inured to their ignorance, their self-centeredness, their wildly optimistic worldviews. There was even something charming about their irrepressibility, how they would run three miles through snow with a ninety-pound pack and no hesitation. She watched a class of Intel candidates perform a Task To Completion Under Stress, where NCOs roamed around screaming at candidates attempting math puzzles. “You ugly piece of dog shit!” one yelled at a girl in the front row. “I hope you’re smart, because your face makes me want to puke!” Most candidates exhibited defensive reactions of one kind or another, revealing the extent of their distraction, but there was a young man at the back who seemed genuinely oblivious and only registered the torrent of abuse with a small jump in his eyebrows when he’d finished the task, like he’d forgotten that was going on.
“Isiah Gilligan,” an NCO told her when she inquired. “Surplex civvy. He’s provisionally scheduled for Providence launch five.”
She told David about her experience in a New York diner, slurping noodles, thinking he’d find it amusing. Instead, he grimaced. “Ugh. That sounds horrible.”
“What does?”
“The test. It’s cruel.”
She said nothing.
“Did I say something wrong?”
“We shouldn’t hurt their feelings?” she said. “Before we send them to war? Is that what you think?”
He eyed her. “All right.”
She dumped her fork and walked out. She was choked with a ridiculous seething rage and didn’t even know where it was directed. What David had said—that complacency and ignorance was everywhere. Sometimes even in her: She would watch a report about Fire of Montana sweeping away salamanders and just for a moment it would feel