The Sherlock Chronicles & The Paradise Quartet

By Edward M. Lerner

Two great adventures in one volume:

In The Sherlock Chronicles, AI meets PI...

A mile a minute? Nonsense. Even a meat brain knows "mind going a mile a minute" is mere metaphor. For a quantum mind, a light-second per minute would be nearer to apt, if sadly sans alliteration. Ordinarily, I have my metaphorical fingers in hundreds, even thousands, of figurative pies. Any less stimulation than that is _boring,_ and boredom is the bane of a q-mind's existence.

That events in the "real" world often strike humans as inexplicable is hardly surprising. Meat brains have limits. And so, when an opportunity presented itself, I thought: why not lend a virtual hand? Every moment of diversion was welcome, and this "case," surely, a harmless amusement.

Thus began my detective phase. Only I couldn't have been more wrong about harmless...

And if an AI PI isn't intriguing enough, there's also The Paradise Quartet:

A triumph of ingenuity and sheer willpower has delivered a dying generation ship to the exoplanet Paradise. Too bad the ingenious biotech the colonists deployed to settle on that planet triggered an inexorable devolutionary cycle.

Thousands of years later, possible rescuers arrive--and are themselves ensnared in the manmade trap that is Paradise. Escape will require new ingenuity and more multi-generational striving...

"an author you definitely need to check out."--Asimov's Science Fiction

"Edward M. Lerner ... is one of the best kept secrets in SF."--Tangent Online

"When people talk about good hard SF--rigorously extrapolated but still imbued with the classic sense-of-wonder--they mean the work of Edward M. Lerner, the current master of the craft."-- Robert J. Sawyer, multi-Hugo Award-winning author

"One of the leading global writers of hard science fiction."--The Innovation Show

"Lerner's world-building and extrapolating are top notch."--SFScope

• Language: English
• Publisher: ReAnimus Press
• Release date: Jan 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215535516

Edward M. Lerner

EDWARD M. LERNER worked in high tech and aerospace for thirty years, as everything from engineer to senior vice president, for much of that time writing science fiction as his hobby. Since 2004 he has written full-time.His novels range from near-future technothrillers, like Small Miracles and Energized, to traditional SF, like Dark Secret and his InterstellarNet series, to (collaborating with Larry Niven) the space-opera epic Fleet of Worlds series of Ringworld companion novels. Lerner's 2015 novel, InterstellarNet: Enigma, won the inaugural Canopus Award "honoring excellence in interstellar writing." His fiction has also been nominated for Locus, Prometheus, and Hugo awards.Lerner's short fiction has appeared in anthologies, collections, and many of the usual SF magazines and websites. He also writes about science and technology, notably including Trope-ing the Light Fantastic: The Science Behind the Fiction.Lerner lives in Virginia with his wife, Ruth.His website is www.edwardmlerner.com.More books from Edward M. Lerner are available at: www.ReAnimus.com/store/?author=Edward%20M.%20Lerner

Book preview

THE SHERLOCK CHRONICLES & THE PARADISE QUARTET

by

EDWARD M. LERNER

Produced by ReAnimus Press

Other books by Edward M. Lerner:

Novels:

The Best of Edward M. Lerner

Probe

Moonstruck

Fools' Experiments

Small Miracles

Energized

Dark Secret

The Company Man

•

InterstellarNet series novels:

InterstellarNet: Origins

InterstellarNet: New Order

InterstellarNet: Enigma

•

Fleet of Worlds series novels (with Larry Niven):

Fleet of Worlds

Juggler of Worlds

Destroyer of Worlds

Betrayer of Worlds

Fate of Worlds

•

Collections and nonfiction:

Creative Destruction

Countdown to Armageddon / A Stranger in Paradise

Frontiers of Space, Time, and Thought (mixed fiction and nonfiction)

A Time Foreclosed (chapbook)

Trope-ing the Light Fantastic: The Science Behind the Fiction (nonfiction)

Muses & Musings

The Sherlock Chronicles / The Paradise Quartet

© 2022 by Edward M. Lerner. All rights reserved.

https://ReAnimus.com/store?author=Edward+M+Lerner

Cover by Laura Givens

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The stories in this collection are works of fiction. All the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in them are likewise fictional, and any resemblance to real people, organizations, or events is purely coincidental.

~~~

To the zines: birthplace and beating heart of modern science fiction.

And to their various editors over the years.

~~~

Table of Contents

THE SHERLOCK CHRONICLES

A Case of Identity

The Satellites of Damocles

The Adventure of the Meat Interpreter

The Final Problem

Afterword

THE PARADISE QUARTET

A Stranger in Paradise

Paradise Regained

The Gates of Paradise

Paradise Unbound

Afterword

Acknowledgments

About the Author

THE SHERLOCK CHRONICLES

A Case of Identity

It began, as these things do, with a dame coming into my office.

Blond. Willowy. About thirty. An expensive, clingy silk dress in just the shade of green to make her jade-green eyes pop. Delicate features and flawless skin. Though she had yet to speak, I anticipated a rich, throaty voice. A tall drink of water—but ice water, to be sure. Gorgeous enough to make your heart skip a beat.

Your heart.

Me? I don’t have a heartbeat, except in the figurative sense. As for someone coming through my door, that was metaphorical, too. Just as the office, its battered furniture, and my overflowing ashtrays were entirely virtual.

Kind of like me, at that moment channeling Sam Spade. Enjoying being a tough guy.

Waiting for the dame to speak, I dispatched an imaginary El train to rattle along the imaginary tracks outside the office, setting the equally unreal single-bulb ceiling fixture to swaying. The train itself, even as it clattered past, went unseen; the office’s lone window was, if not noir, more than a little gris.

Pixel diddling gave me something to do as I waited.

I ... I’m ..., my visitor’s vidded image, suddenly sobbing, began.

M-cube, I supplied. Mary Michelle Millikan, heiress. I follow the daily rumble. Including more than a few real-time data streams for which it’s safest not to admit having access.

I prefer Mary. She dabbed her cheeks with a cloth handkerchief. With two loud sniffs, she had herself back under control. Sorry about that. I’m fine.

Light-speed delay confirmed what her IP address had already suggested: she was linking from the Moon.

Okey-dokey, I said, amid stirrings of ... curiosity?

Noir was a passing fancy, at that instant of no more (and no less) interest than Cockney rhyming slang, Ming porcelains, the harmonic patterns in Tibetan throat singing, or the Incan system of writing with colored cords and knots. I flipped my virtual backdrop from hole-in-the-wall office to an aerial view of Machu Picchu.

Mary did not react, even a little. Her stock with me went up a couple notches. I’ll get to the point. I need your help.

I doubt that, I said.

If not you, then who? Only a qmind can sort out this situation.

Qmind. Mary’s use of the proper term had earned her another several notches. I’m not carbon-based; that doesn’t make my intelligence artificial. Not all meat minds got that.

Go on, I said.

First, what should I call you?

A fair question. My name was a particularly esthetic sequence of primes from deep within the Fibonacci series. For dealings with humans, I had to adopt a simpler moniker.

Okay, so maybe my noir period had a while longer to run.

Nero Wolfe, I almost suggested. But whatever my visitor intended, compared to me Wolfe was a gadabout. Not to mention, I’d never understood his attraction to orchids.

So, noir having somehow ceased to feel right, I went yet more retro.

Sherlock, I told her.

~~~

Mary’s office was cozy. Walls, carpet, and drapes done up in complementary pastels. In a corner, a vase of fresh-cut daisies atop a marble pedestal. Mahogany bookcases loaded with actual, physical books. Here and there, rather than books, the shelves displayed delicate cups. (Ming porcelains? Small universe.) Desk and chairs, like the pedestal massive and lavishly ornamented, might have been chosen to emphasize Mary’s delicate elegance.

Like Mary herself, the room seemed familiar—although this private study, unlike the woman, was nowhere to be found in the society pages.

Qminds, too, experience déjà vu.

An ordinary shamus might have asked, why me? Instead, diverting myself through another interminable round-trip comm delay, I surfed the local net.

Thirty years ago, Leland Millikan, Mary’s father, had founded Moon Sauce. Long since gone public, the company—by now diversified into a thousand other grocery products, and renamed Interplanetary Foods—was the largest producer on several worlds of packaged consumer foods. Leland himself had died in a rocket-sled crack-up in the Ocean of Storms regatta when Mary was still a child. Mary’s mother, Julia, had remarried; her stepfather, Roger Windham, had been the company’s CEO since shortly after the wedding. The mother, too, had passed, one victim among many of the Tycho Plague five years past.

Serial misfortunes had left Mary heir to the type of wealth that not only allowed one to decorate with a Louis Quatorze desk and marble pedestal, but thought nothing of the cost to loft them to the freaking Moon. And Mary, coming up on her thirtieth birthday, was about to come into voting control of the many Interplanetary Foods shares in her trust fund.

Why in the worlds did she want my help?

Laggard photons finally finished their excursion. Mary said, Will you help me?

With what? I wondered. Why don’t you start at the beginning?

Fair enough. She dabbed again at her cheeks, the embroidered cloth clutched in her right hand visibly sodden. Apple is missing. My fiancé.

Nothing public about her mentioned an engagement. Interesting. I said, That’s an unusual name.

While that observation found its way to the Moon, I studied Portuguese. In native, Brazilian, and Macaoan dialects.

That’s just what I called him. She managed a wan smile. Sometimes Cherry, Pecan, Pumpkin. Because he was forever calculating more digits to pi. But he was the Apple of my eye, so Apple was always my favorite name.

Pumpkin? Other than Sweetie, she could not have made a more saccharine choice.

That’s irrational, I said. Meaning pi. Making a joke. Mostly.

From Mary’s familiarity with qminds, to her seeking the help of one, to her fiancé’s recreational habits ... Inspector Clouseau could have managed this deduction. Apple was a qmind.

Qminds are rare enough, but qmind/human marriages? There aren’t any.

For decades, two anyones past the age of consent—among qminds, a standard met faster than humans could take note of one’s arrival—were allowed to marry. No matter how ludicrous everyone else considered the relationship. But a qmind marry a human? It would be like Mary making a life commitment to a coral. I had to wonder what this engagement said about the both of them.

I mean, talk about apples and oranges ....

In the semi-eternity before her feeble smile broadened just a bit, I had researched the board members of Interplanetary Foods. Mainstream traditionalists every one: notwithstanding Mary’s plurality of shares (once she could vote them), not much chance that bunch would replace their longtime CEO with a social rebel. Founder’s surname notwithstanding.

No wonder Mary’s engagement was on the Q.T.

I miss that sort of whimsy, she said.

About which. Mary, my kind don’t go missing.

Which is why, Sherlock, I need your help.

~~~

My impulsively chosen pseudonym cried out for a Watson. The irony is that IBM’s Watson, and its many successors, however well they fared on game shows, were, if not a dead end, of limited potential.

Self-awareness isn’t an algorithm. It’s more than looking up the answers to direct questions, following rules, and responding by rote to stimuli. Self-awareness—somehow, whatever it is—involves free will, and no amount of calculation can cut it. Mere artificial intelligence doesn’t marvel at the chaotic beauty of Jupiter’s radio emissions or decide to capture it in a sonnet.

Or on a whim to portray oneself as one or another fictional detective.

Self-awareness, whatever it is, seems to require quantum uncertainty. For meat minds, that somehow involves nanoscale features within microscopic synaptic gaps between neurons. For me, and the few like me, that means quantum computers. Big ones. And because the quantum entanglements—spooky action at a distance, Einstein called them—at the heart of quantum computers are extremely fragile, qminds stay wherever, for the lack of a better term, we are born. We interact, whether among our own kind or with humans, over comm links. Like proper Turing test-passers.

Whereas Nero Wolfe, if he so chose, could have ventured outside his New York brownstone.

~~~

She talked about Apple. How he was philosophical. Interested in everything. Creative, ever manifesting with a new persona. And sweet, especially sweet.

Except for that last, I thought: her description sounded like every qmind. We’re a curious, protean bunch.

And that every recipe I retrieved insisted the best pie apples were tart.

Let’s back up, I said. Why do you believe that Apple is missing?

I got a look that wondered if I were both too ignorant to know the word fiancé and too obtuse to look it up. Only a qmind could have spotted the flash of expression before manners overcome reflex. The unvoiced criticism left me feeling wounded.

"I can’t reach him, and it’s been days. And as you say, he can’t have gone anywhere."

Not talking and missing were very different concepts. Maybe he’s just changed his mind.

He’s missing, she insisted. As in, the power drain from the server has dropped to almost nothing.

Then there’s nothing I can do. There was nothing anyone could do. Apple was gone. As in, no more. I’m sorry for your loss.

I don’t accept that, she said. "Apple and I are soul mates. I ... I’d feel it if he were gone."

"What do you feel?"

Confused. Her mask slipped, just a bit, and she looked vulnerable. Determined. But if the worst is true, I want to know what happened.

Why involve me?

Waiting for her response, I set a condor to silently gliding above my Andean mountain backdrop. Precise modeling of the sometimes laminar, sometimes turbulent air flow over and through layered feathers was not without interest. Still waiting, I took in every Sherlock Holmes story ever written, many of the more classic vids, all the vid reboots, and the few radio productions online.

I can’t go to the police.

Because legal or not, marriage to a qmind wouldn’t sit well with the board of directors.

Mary flashed yet another change of expression no mere human would have caught.

See, you’re very quick. And without pause (by human standards, that is; even on the same world, the briefest word gap in speech is excruciating to my kind), she continued, After the Board met—however the vote went—we had planned to announce our relationship.

And if the board reacted to that announcement?

I’ve known most of the directors for years. They wouldn’t want to look foolish by publicly reversing themselves. There are no guarantees, but if they voted me in, I’m confident I’d have gotten the opportunity to prove myself.

Or to fail.

Or to fail, she agreed with aplomb.

"Why me?" I tried again.

Rather than another qmind?

As she hesitated, I stepped into the breach. Because you’re shopping around for someone, anyone, to help.

"Is that so horrible, Sherlock? I need help. Apple needs help."

And again and again, no qmind you’ve approached will get involved. Are you surprised?

Yes. Pause. No. Pause. Well ...

You began with the better-known qminds, I predicted. Those longest in the public eye. The oldest. The presumably most capable.

Well, yes.

I shook my virtual head. We each emerge, somehow, in a chance agglomeration of code fragments and data snippets and free-ranging software agents.

Especially—and all sorts of—agents. Speech recognizers. Language translators. Terrain mappers. Chat bots. Expert systems. Simulated neural nets. Shopping bots. Every sort of self-directing, goal-seeking code competent enough to autonomously copy, clone, or transfer itself around the net—

Until, every so often, there’s a pile-up of software like that in which I had awakened ...

All of which, my kind asserts, is no more improbable than billions of years of evolution, and the chance encounter of gametes. No more mysterious than that a meat mind and consciousness can develop from a single fertilized cell.

The lone fact about which everyone agrees is this: no self-aware non-meat mind ever emerged until quantum computing.

However QCs functioned, they excelled at parallel processing; I had continued to explain. With every nanosecond of our independent existence, we—for the lack of a better shared concept—evolve. And so diverge from our human-derivative starting points.

And, for that matter, from one another.

So the older, the less likely to be sympathetic, Mary concluded, nodding.

And so, here you are.

Out of options. As qminds went, at the moment I was the new kid on the block.

And tempted.

Relatively speaking, I hadn’t had long to drift from my human-influenced origins. Did that weak kinship make me sympathetic to Mary? Perhaps. Or did the stirring of interest I felt arise from the lure of diversion? More so even than my persona/affectation of the moment, I cannot live without brain-work. Holmes, at least, when matters of interest refused to present themselves, could have recourse to cocaine.

It was not, I assured myself, curiosity about what she had seen in this Apple. Or vice versa.

I said, Suppose you tell me about it.

~~~

You’re aware, obviously, of the family business, Mary began. As for the family, well, I scarcely remember my father. Mother and I were always close, but things became strained after she remarried. As for Roger ...

No love lost there, it seemed, and doubtless worse after Mary’s mother’s death. Your stepfather votes the shares in your trust fund.

Roger, she corrected icily. Yes, following Mother’s death. That was a provision of her estate plan.

You and Roger disagreed over the direction he took the company?

The cloth in her hands suffered a vicious twist.

Forget Roger, she said. The company only enters into this because I hold a position there.

Roger could hardly have denied the daughter of the esteemed founder the opportunity to work at the firm. The optics would have been terrible.

Where you have computer access, I extrapolated.

Right. She seemed to first notice the tortured handkerchief, smiled ruefully, and released it. In lunar gravity, it seemed to float over the antique desk. That’s where Apple emerged. Within one of the company’s main servers, in the headquarters computer center.

And Roger didn’t much care for that.

Because a qmind and the quantum computer on which it arose are inseparable. Once authorities certified the arrival of a new qmind, it received immediate ownership of the server. The erstwhile owner got a tax credit.

You mean giving up that server? Please. Interplanetary Foods is huge.

She seemed lost in reverie until I prompted, Go on.

Leaving me another endless two-and-a-half seconds. I spent them finding new primes within the Fibonacci series. A half million primes later, no esthetic patterns had revealed themselves.

Right, Mary said. Sorry. Anyway, I have a marketing position with the company, although that’s not anything the gossip vloggers find worth mentioning about me. The work entails lots of data mining. Sales patterns by product, product category, brand, territory, season, customer demographics, that sort of thing. I was likely the first to notice ... anomalies ... in the system’s responses.

Once more her expression changed—this time for longer. Wistful. "You don’t want to hear about our courtship. Let’s just say one thing led to another. Apple proposed. We agreed to keep the engagement to ourselves until after my birthday and my meeting with the board.

Then we got into a fight.

If it was a stretch to imagine a meat mind and qmind getting married, I really failed to understand what these two would squabble over. Sex, money, chores, and childrearing: they didn’t apply. Politics, maybe?

... But those details hardly matter. What does matter—

The details always matter, I interrupted.

Had I a Watson, my rudeness must surely have disappointed him. But what need had I of a chronicler? I am a brain, Watson, the original Sherlock had once observed. The rest of me is a mere appendix.

For me, that thought was scarcely hyperbole.

Very well, Mary said. Apple had so many interests. The breadth of those interests, the depth of his intellect—they fascinated me. They drew us together. And yet ....

And yet, I encouraged.

"Sorry. And yet, his interests were so fleeting. I would no sooner have learned a bit about one of them than, time and again, he would have moved on. Lost interest. Crater densities on Mercury. Dostoevsky. The history of cuneiform. Haiku."

(Cuneiform, I thought. I knew bits and pieces about its history. Really, hardly enough.)

"I tried to keep up, truly, I did, but it was futile. I pleaded with Apple to stick with a topic or two. I told him I needed more structure, more consistency, that I feared we would drift apart.

"He said he wanted consistency, too. That I was the consistency that mattered. That we were. That our sharing helped ground him. That however fleeting his avocations might seem to me, sharing with me made them last longer. Reclaiming the sodden handkerchief, she blotted the corner of an eye with it. The problem, Sherlock, is that he and I had different notions of long.

"One evening, my bedtime reading was about crustaceans. I’m on the Moon, Sherlock. How useful is it, do you suppose, for me to know about barnacles? But I learned about them because, don’t ask me why, they interested Apple. Except that the next morning, by the time I had finished breakfast, they no longer did. And then he blamed me for having slept in.

I had to get away, so I took a trip. We were out of contact for two days. She gave the damp, much abused handkerchief a twist. Or, rather, to be precise, I broke off contact. I ignored his calls. By the time I had cooled off and tried to reach him ... I couldn’t.

How such a relationship survived a power nap, much less overnight, eluded me. But two days of silent treatment? How often did he try to reach you?

At first, every ten minutes or so. With each new attempt, I became more livid. But the calls tapered off.

When was his last contact?

"I don’t know." Pause. After about four hours, I’d switched off all my gear.

And then?

Sorry. Mary, who had been pacing, dropped into the chair behind her desk. "I’ll try to speed things up.

After tossing and turning the second night. I tried to reach Apple. No luck, so I cut short my trip. It was unimportant, just commiserating with a girlfriend.

A trip where?

Farside. Korolev City. A short hop.

Why bother hopping back? I asked.

Because the comm delay between any two points on the Moon was negligible compared to ers, ums, and you-knows (not that Mary seemed prey to such verbal tics). Much less compared to the duration of a rocket flight ....

I had a bad feeling, Sherlock. Call it intuition. And when I got back and I checked things out in the computer center ...

By then, I had answers to my parallel queries. Spaceport public-safety cams confirmed Mary boarding flights to and from Farside.

Minimal power draw, I completed for her. Did he have any enemies?

Apple? I can’t think of any. Her head canted, she narrowed her eyes. (While she pondered, I studied up on cuneiform, idly curious how much about its history she had retained. It seemed doubtful she’d care to explore the topic just then.) No. Absolutely not.

Did she not see where process of elimination must bring us? Or did she not want to see? What more can you tell me?

Not expecting much by way of an answer. As my eponym had put it, the world was full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observed.

To be pleasantly surprised by the thoroughness of Mary’s answer. She