Sky2: Detritus Machine

By William Amerman

The Sky series continues.

Ten years before the events of Sky1, Nick embarks on the assignment of a lifetime, descending deep within the World to Ground 42, the city of Muldoin. In this city, personal space is shockingly restricted and scarcity governs all aspects of life.

Nick's job is to investigate recent government polices that are more brutal than any the world has seen. Then, people start showing up. People who don't belong there. Men who wish only to perpetrate violence on the repressed population. A woman searches for a life without killing while the city aches for release, shuddering with anticipation of open rebellion.

This is the legend of Muldoin, the story of Nick and Anna.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Amerman
• Release date: Apr 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310775192

William Amerman

William Amerman was born in Houston, Texas and obtained his Bachelors degree in English from The University of Texas - Austin, way back in the last century. He lived in Austin for eight years, then moved to Denver, Colorado to explore the whole "mountain man" lifestyle. In Denver he met a cute Dutch girl on a ski slope, whom he quickly wooed and followed back to her native country, The Netherlands. He married the cute Dutch girl in 1999 and they spent the next 7 years raising two sons and a sadly over-weight hound in a suburb of Amsterdam before moving back to the US in 2003. Their third son was born in 2005.He received his MBA in Finance from Santa Clara University in 2009 and currently holds a "real" job in Information Technology in order to feed his three sons, but manages to write in the mornings and on weekends. His latest efforts are directed towards finishing a futuristic thriller series based on a simple idea he had one late Saturday morning laying in bed, looking at the sky through a skylight window in the roof; proving that getting up early can be a hazard to creative thinking!Contact information via email is: [e-mail] free to contact him to discuss any of his works, writing in general, and especially with offers of pints of Guinness.

Book preview

Sky²

Detritus Machine

William Amerman

Copyright 2014 by William Amerman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Published 2014

Cover: Diogo Lando

Edited by: Red Adept Editing

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people unless you really like it and, well, can't help yourself. Otherwise, if you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Prologue

Charles recognized his weakness for young women soon after he became a high school teacher. During the first two years, he was an unyielding stone of fortitude. Then, a couple of months into his third year, he was in the lab behind the classroom after school when someone knocked on the door.

Expecting another teacher, he called, Come in.

One of his students, Helena, entered, a notebook held close to her chest. You never told us what a cation was, she said. She laid the notebook on his desk and began flipping through her notes.

Charles pushed his hair away from his face. Perhaps you were absent that day?

I've never been absent. Please don't accuse me of that.

You got one answer wrong. In the scheme of things—

With a look of determination, she walked around to his side of the desk. Mr. Carroll, I got one wrong because you didn't cover cations.

She stood next to him. Her breasts were at his eye level, flaunting their imperviousness to gravity. He blinked and kept his hands flat on his keyboard. You should pronounce it with a hard 't', he said.

What's that? she asked, looking down at his screen.

It's a discussion forum on the difference between sentience and sapience in artificial life-forms.

Is that chemistry?

No.

Aren't you our chemistry teacher? Is this what you do instead of teaching us about things you're going to put on our tests?

Charles smiled. This is my free time. I discuss artificial intelligence with associates on different Grounds.

So you can gloat to your geeky buddies about how you made everyone miss a problem on the mid-term? Sounds like an old guy hobby.

I'm twenty-four. That's old? He decided not to mention that she was one of only three students in the class who had gotten the cation question incorrect.

Ancient.

Could you please not lean over me like that? It's my true calling—the study of artificial intelligence, or AI.

Why are you a chemistry teacher if this is your 'true calling'?

Charles glanced at the door she had closed behind her. I was considered unfit for the university system.

Wow, your grades must have been awful. So this is really like your hobby?

He took a slow sip from the coffee cup he'd refilled with water. He hadn't rinsed it very well. I'm working my way into it.

Without a degree? Good luck with that.

A degree isn't everything. I've built a reputation on these forums. In fact, one of the projects I'm collaborating on will probably result in a job offer.

Sounds horribly boring, she said and flipped her hair. You better tell me about it, though, just in case you decide to put it on our next test.

Some other time.

She crossed her arms over her chest. Fine. I'm not leaving.

He saw the resolve in her eyes. He had never talked about AI to anyone in person. Okay. You win. He told her all about it.

The more he described, the more interested she seemed to become. For two hours, she encouraged him and related to him in a way no one ever had. He forgot that she was sixteen. She had amazing hair.

After that, they met every week. He told himself he was encouraging her as any good teacher would an inquisitive student. They developed a routine. Once a week, she would go home after school, pack up some food, then meet him in the lab behind the classroom.

He would turn off the lights, set out candles, and put on some quiet music intended to promote focus. He encouraged her to form opinions about AI concepts. He showed her how to create her own forum login username and password. She even helped him with the job-offer project, which was stalled. They had mapped a theoretical artificial life-form as far as they could but had run into obstacles that seemed unsurmountable. The chemistry required to create life was turning out to be as difficult as the complexity of creating an artificial consciousness. Chemistry was Charles's area of expertise. The stalled project was a personal failure.

The project coordinator didn't check back as often and had stopped pushing him to meet deadlines. Charles feared the project would be cancelled at any time. Helena took his mind off a growing sense of desperation. She would stay for a couple of hours then rush home to prepare dinner for her father, who worked as a security guard at the incinerator plant.

They met that way for months, until the project was officially cancelled. The forum posts and collaboration space for the project was deleted. She eased his despondence and encouraged him to start a project of his own. She laughed when he protested that he had no real options, could only dream up ideas with no resources to build anything.

One day, as he stood behind her, watching her type a witty response to a troll from Ground 58 who was attacking one of Charles's new project ideas, he lowered his head to her hair and breathed deeply. The glorious smell of flowers transported him away from the room, away from the trapped walls of his life, and he floated, soared. He also exhaled on the back of her neck.

She stiffened and sat up straight. He stepped back and started to apologize, but she rushed out of the lab. He was appalled. A line had been crossed, and he was entirely at fault.

The next day, she wouldn't meet his eyes, and that continued for the rest of the week. On their next meeting day, she kept her head down in class. He almost called on her to answer a simple question. She was wearing a new yellow sweater that was tighter than anything he remembered her ever wearing. He had a hard time looking at her but a harder time looking anywhere else.

He waited after class. She didn't appear. He felt a little ridiculous at how disheartened that made him. He left the lab without posting on the forum topic of the day: if a capacity for religion should be encouraged in AI life forms. He seemed to have no interest in anything without Helena.

The next week, she still didn't come after class, but his overall emotional well-being took an upward turn. Time continued to work its magic, and days later, he bubbled with the thrill of avoided calamity, elated to have committed such an indiscretion with no repercussions.

The next night, he brought food to the lab, something he had never done prior to Helena, and settled in to catch up on two weeks of unread forum posts. As usual, no projects of real significance had been posted, but all he was looking for was a distraction. Then, he saw something that made him almost fall off the lab stool. Helena had posted in the forums.

As he read through two weeks' worth of her posts, he heard her voice in his head. Her arguments were idealistic, yet her intelligence was obvious. Her grasp of AI was advanced. He followed a thread where she dominated two experienced researchers who posted under the pseudonyms Walter and Warren.

He set down his sandwich and tried to log in with her username and password. Bad password error. She had changed it.

He thought for a moment. Then, he logged in with his own username and resumed reading her posts.

She was making fun of him, ridiculing his theories and undermining every bit of credibility he had earned among the group. Electronic words lasted forever. The damage was unrecoverable.

He read more posts, powerless to stop. She had used his own fears against him, calling out the hypocrisy of one of his positions, an insecurity he had shared right before the regrettable hair incident.

He clicked on her username and selected the Private Message feature. He typed Why? He stopped, at a loss as to how to finish the message.

He reminded himself that she was only a child. He clicked Send. Though he waited in front of his computer until late in the night, she sent no reply.

The next day in class, she wore her hair down. Her skirt line floated well above her knees, and her makeup emphasized the symmetry of her features. She might have been stopping by on her way to a photo shoot.

She tracked him with her eyes, and he stuttered through the first minutes of his lecture on hydrocarbons. Where she had been shy, girlish, and demure in the weeks since the incident, she was now bold and assertive. When she raised a hand to answer a question, he saw that she wore no bra. He suffered a coughing fit then turned away and began to draw on the board. Though he started with chemistry, he soon branched off into AI, which must have confused his class, but he needed a distraction.

His mind worked in hundreds of directions at once. He felt her eyes on his back. Emotion propelled his schematics and diagrams, leading him back to the unsolved problems of the cancelled project. He wrote these problems in the bottom right corner of the board. By the time he finished the list, he had already thought of a solution to the first obstacle. With glee, he drew the diagram.

The second obstacle was a nightmare so he skipped it, instead going back to cover the AI concepts Helena had teased him about in her forum posts. He showed his reasons, built his case. The board was filling up fast.

Without realizing it, he blew past the second obstacle, organic matter, and the living matter quagmire that usually resulted in interminable arguments about the sanctity of the human body.

After that, solutions became as apparent as if a veil was removed. He felt like the sculptor who could see angelic forms within a block of material and who only needed to chip away at everything else. The patterns were there on the board, invisible, waiting for him to trace them with the chalk. He got busy, and finished half of it. Then it hit him.

He dropped the chalk and rubbed his eyes. The connection. He stared at the board, awestruck as he examined diagrams that started in the realm of chemistry but ended in the realm of artificial intelligence. There was no need to create true sentience. Sapience could be mimicked. They could leverage what nature already provided: the human brain.

To a purist, it might seem that he had cheated. But he was not creating a new theoretical model. He was constructing a blueprint for something that could actually be built, provided he had the resources. He had somehow blundered onto the most significant breakthrough in AI that he had ever seen, that as far as he knew, the world had ever seen.

He stood for a minute, tracing the chalk lines with his finger. He found no errors. He turned to face the class, He looked at Helena. He had drawn everything for her. She could easily copy and post it in the forums. She could steal his discovery and make it her own.

The best student in the class, Matthew, looked up from his notes. Another student named Jeremy coughed into his hand.

Charles realized he had not said anything in some time. Rubbing chalk dust from his fingers, he said, Class, you are dismissed.

They sprang from their desks and hurried out as if he might change his mind.

Matthew, he called, you won't need those notes.

Matthew gave him a puzzled look then stuffed his books into his backpack.

Helena rose more slowly, eyes on the board.

Charles cleared his throat. Helena, would you stay?

She didn't respond, but she also didn't move to leave. The last student departed, leaving Charles alone in the classroom with Helena.

He asked, Could you please close the door?

She nodded and did as he asked. Why did you make me stay after class? Her tone was odd.

I, um…

I saw that you logged on yesterday, she said, walking toward her desk.

I noticed that you've also logged on.

Yes.

Why did you attack me in the forum? he asked.

It seemed like fun.

Hurting me amuses you?

Her eyes flashed to the board then went wide with an understanding that he immediately knew and recognized. Yes, he had been stupid to think she might not understand. The connection on the board was obvious. He had not merely connected the two disciplines; he had merged them. It was as if he had copied a unified theory diagram straight from the mind of God.

He closed the distance between them and put his hand on her arm. Please, come with me back to the lab. I have something to show you.

She moved her eyes from the board and smiled at him, nodding. He tugged her gently, glancing sideways at the board to admire the section outlining a renewable catalyst. Oh, that would come in handy.

She walked in front of him, and the scent of blooming flowers flooded his nostrils. Keeping his head well back from her hair, he steered her into the lab and pushed the door closed behind them with his foot. He released her and turned on the lamp on his desk. He had gotten her away from the diagrams on the board. Now what?

Is that all it took? she asked. Her gaze flitted around the room.

What do you mean?

To get your attention. She twirled, arms above her head. The tightness of her blouse showed the outline of her breasts clearly through the fabric. Is this where you want to do it?

What? He sat on the edge of the desk. Do what?

She walked toward him with a shy smile. "You know… it." She put a hand on his leg.

He recoiled, knocking the lamp off the desk. It crashed to the floor, and the room was plunged into darkness.

Wait, just stay there, he said. I'll get the overhead light. He moved toward the door. He put his hand out and felt the wall. He reached for the light switch but his hand brushed what felt like Helena's shoulder.

Oh, sorry. He took a step to get around her and tripped over a lab stool. Damn it. Disoriented, he reached for the switch again and ran his hand across the front of her blouse, feeling her breast through the thin material. Her erect nipple pressed hard into his palm. He jerked his hand away, feeling dizzy. Oh my God, I'm so sorry. Helena. Where was the damn door? Then he remembered the computer. He leaned back, flipped open the lid of the laptop, and pale light poured out into the room.

She melted against him. Tears streaked down her face, which was torqued with emotion.

He drew back from her. I'm sorry, Helena. Sorry doesn't begin to cover it.

She grabbed his hands, putting one on her breast and the other around her throat. She squeezed his fingers, cutting off some of her air. Her eyes were filled with lust.

With no warning, she dropped to her knees and started fumbling with his belt buckle. His head swam. It was as if their ages were reversed: He was a boy, she a woman. She unzipped his pants and freed him. He looked down and saw her beautiful open mouth about to take him in.

No, this isn't right. He shoved her away, harder than he had intended.

She stared up at him. The dim glow of the computer screen gave her features a wan, half-alive look. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

Helena, please. I am so sorry.

She got to her feet then rushed from the room. Charles staggered to his desk and tore open the bottom drawer.

Ten hours later, the janitor roused him. Charles tossed the rum bottle into the gray waste bin and pulled some papers over it. He wobbled home.

He didn't leave his apartment for two days. On the third day, a loud knock woke him from another drunken slumber. He stumbled to the front door.

A thin man in glasses and a shiny black coat stood on his front step. Behind him loomed two City Police officers.

The man in the black coat adjusted his glasses. His thin mustache twitched. Charles Carroll, you are being arrested for crimes against the state. He then yelled a listing of the charges as if attempting to leave impressions of sound waves on the doors of the neighbors. The list included rape and forcible sodomy.

Charles tried to slam the door, but the bigger officer stuck a foot in the doorway then pulled Charles out of his apartment. The other officer kicked him in the back of the knee. It was a feeling he would remember forever—lurching forward and downward as his knee gave out, accompanied by his brain desperately sifting through the past couple of drunken days to try to remember if he'd left the apartment.

They yanked him back to his feet, and he saw a van with little black spider webs on the windows. He held out his hands for cuffs like he had seen on the vids, knowing with certainty that he had not done any of those awful things and it would all be fine once he got a chance to tell his story. They ignored his outstretched hands and began to wrap rope around his body, pinning his arms to his sides.

He panicked. Rope? For fuck's sake, why rope? Were they going to drag him behind the van? He began screaming and pulling away.

The smaller officer shoved a rag in his mouth, while the other one finished the rope job. Charles shook his head wildly, trying to dislodge the rag. He tasted oil and something metallic. His arms were tied fast against his sides, the rope so tight that he couldn't take a full breath.

The big cop spoke into his ear. Now you know what it's like, you evil bastard. I want you to know what that poor girl felt when you tied her up and did those horrible things to her.

Charles shook his head vigorously, pleaded with his eyes for understanding, but the two policemen heaved him into the back of the van. The force of hitting the van floor knocked the wind from him but also dislodged the oily rag from his mouth. He arched his back in a vain attempt to get wind to his paralyzed lungs. After what seemed a long time, he finally sucked in a lungful of air.

The van began moving. He heard static radio chatter up in the cab. In the back, the bare metal echoed the sounds of his sobbing, choking, then weeping as the van worked through morning commute.

For two weeks, he endured a whirlwind of meetings with police and justice officials, during which his life's history was explored. He learned to accept shame and embarrassment as normal everyday emotions. During the second week, they stationed two guards in his cell at all times. When he nodded off to sleep, they hit him with a cane with prongs on the end that would shock him if they flicked the rubber switch on the handle. Most of the time they used the stick, the prongs cutting into his right thigh. Sometimes, though, they gave him the juice.

He could never tell which was coming. His heavy head would fall, then thwack, and his brain frantically tried to determine if his body was conducting fifty thousand volts. The stress left him decimated, a husk of meat and bone and blood. He had no ability to focus. His right thigh was a black and blue mess of bruises that looked like the work of an abstract painter gone wild with color. Exhaustion made his eyes feel like dry sandpaper in his sockets. He began to have fantasies of dying.

One night, two different guards replaced the normal ones. Charles was hunched in his chair, trying to sleep with