Cyber Rogues Read online

  Table of Contents

  THE TWO FACES OF TOMORROWPROLOGUE

  PART ONECHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  PART TWOCHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  PART THREECHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  EPILOGUE

  REALTIME INTERRUPTPROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Two classic novels from a best-selling master of SF.

  Skynet and The Matrix have got nothing on James Hogan in this great two novel collection.

  The Two Faces of Tomorrow

  Midway through the 21st century, a proposed major software upgrade—an artificial intelligence—will give the world communications system an unprecedented degree of independent decision making. Now to fully assess the system, a new space station habitat is deployed with an A.I. named Spartacus. The idea is that if Spartacus gets out of hand, the system can be shut down and the station destroyed—unless, that is, Spartacus decides to take matters into its own hands and take the fight to Earth.

  Realtime Interrupt

  Joe Corrigan awakens in a hospital to find that his life no longer exists. As director of the supersecret Oz Project, his job was to create a computerized environment virtually indistinguishable from reality. Oz failed. Now Joe, left alone to pick up the pieces of his shattered life, Joe finds himself in an unfamiliar world—a world where nothing is quite as it should be. Now Joe must discover a terrible truth about his new world—and figure out how to get out alive!

  Books by James P. Hogan

  THE GIANTS SERIES

  The Two Moons

  The Two Worlds

  Mission to Minerva

  Code of the Lifemaker

  The Immortality Option

  The Cradle of Saturn

  The Anguished Dawn

  Bug Park

  Echoes of an Alien Sky

  Endgame Enigma

  The Genesis Machine

  Inherit the Stars

  The Legend That Was Earth

  Migration

  Moon Flower

  The Multiplex Man

  Paths to Otherwhere

  The Proteus Operation

  Realtime Interrupt

  Thrice Upon a Time

  The Two Faces of Tomorrow

  Voyage from Yesteryear

  Worlds in Chaos (omnibus)

  Cyber Rogues (omnibus)

  COLLECTIONS

  Catastrophes, Chaos and Convulsions

  Kicking the Sacred Cow

  Martian Knightlife

  Minds, Machines and Evolution

  Rockets, Redheads & Revolution

  CYBER ROGUES

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by the estate of James P. Hogan.

  The Two Faces Of Tomorrow Copyright © 1979 by James P. Hogan.

  Realtime Interrupt Copyright (c) 1995 by James P. Hogan.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4767-8035-1

  Cover art by Kurt Miller

  First Baen printing, April 2015

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hogan, James P.

  [Novels. Selections]

  Cyber rogues / James P Hogan.

  pages ; cm -- (Baen ; 1)

  "A Baen Books Original."

  Summary: "The Two Faces of Tomorrow and Realtime Interrupt in one combo volume. Midway thru the 21st century, a proposed major software upgrade--an A.I.--will give the world communications system an unprecedented degree of independent decision making. A new space station is deployed to house the A.I. named Spartacus. The idea is if Spartacus gets out of hand, the system can be shut down and the station destroyed--unless, Spartacus decides to take matters into its own hands. Then, Joe Corrigan awakens in a hospital to find his life no longer exists. As director of the supersecret Oz Project, his job was to create a computerized environment virtually indistinguishable from reality. Oz failed...or did it?"-- Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-4767-8035-1 (softcover)

  1. Artificial intelligence--Fiction. I. Hogan, James P. Two faces of tomorrow. II. Hogan, James P. Real time interrupt. III. Title.

  PR6058.O348A6 2015

  823'.914--dc23

  2014043652

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  THE TWO FACES

  OF TOMORROW

  PROLOGUE

  The planetismal began as a region of a
bove-average density that occurred by chance in a swirling cloud of dust and gas condensing out of the expanding vastness of space. Gently at first but at a rate that grew steadily faster as time went by, it continued to sweep up the smaller accretions in its vicinity until it had grown to a rough spheroid of compressed dust and rock measuring fifty feet across.

  Eventually the planetismal itself came under the pull of a larger body that had been growing in similar fashion, and began falling toward it. It impacted at a speed of over ten miles per second, releasing the energy equivalent of a one-hundred-kiloton bomb and blasting a crater more than half a mile in diameter.

  Shortly afterward, as measured on a cosmic time-scale, a second planetismal fell close by and created another crater of similar dimensions; the distance between the crater centers was such that the raised rims of debris thrown up by the explosions merged together for a distance, resulting in the formation of a ridge of exaggerated height between the two basins.

  In the time that followed, the rain of meteorites continued, pulverizing the landscape into a wilderness of sharp-grained dust to a depth of several feet, the desolation being relieved only by the occasional outcrop or shattered boulder. The outlines of the craters were slowly eroded away and stirred back into the sea of dust.

  When the bombardment at last petered away, all that remained of the ridge was a rounded hummock to mark where the rims had intersected—a mound of dust and rock debris forty feet high and several hundred long. There it remained as one of the weary but triumphant survivors that were left to stare out over the gently rolling wastes that stretched to the horizon.

  From then on the ridge remained essentially unchanged. A steady drizzle of micrometeorites continued to erode the top millimeter or so of its surface, exposing fresh material to trap hydrogen and helium nuclei from the solar wind; particles from sporadic solar flares caused isolated nuclear transformations down to several centimeters, and cosmic rays penetrated slightly farther. But in terms of its size, shape and general appearance, the ridge had become a permanent feature on a changeless world.

  Four billion years later, give or take a few, Commander Jerry Fields, assigned to the International Space Administration’s lunar base at Reinhold, was standing staring up at that same ridge. Beside him, similarly clad in a blue-gray spacesuit bearing the golden-flashed ISA shoulder insignia, Kal Paskoe frowned through his visor, studying the line of the ridge with an engineer’s practiced eye.

  “Well, what do you think?” Fields inquired into his radio. “See any problems?”

  “Uh uh.” Paskoe’s reply was slow and noncommittal as he squinted against the glare of the setting sun. He turned to stare back at the metallic glint that marked the position of the base at the foot of the low hills on the skyline behind them, then returned his gaze to the ridge to register mentally a couple of salient boulders near its crest. “No . . . no problems,” he said at last. “I think I’ve seen all I need. Let’s get back to the truck and get the job scheduled. We can’t do any more here until the computers have figured out how they’re going to handle it.”

  The mass-driver at Maskelyne, over a thousand miles away on the western edge of Tranquillatis, had been in operation for almost a decade. It had been built as part of the EXPLORER (EXPloitation of Lunar ORE Reserves) Project to hurl lunar rock up into orbit for metal extraction and construction of the huge space colonies being assembled within several hundred thousand miles of Earth. In fact the title was something of a deliberate misnomer. There were of course, no true ores on the Moon—ores in the sense of metal-rich substances concentrated by weathering and geological processes. Deep below the surface however, were rich accumulations of titanium, aluminum, iron and suchlike that had been precipitated by thermofluidic processes operative during the Moon’s early history. The compounds bearing these elements had been dubbed “ores” by the media and the name had stuck

  The mass-driver was a five-mile-long, ruler-straight track banked by two “hedges” of continuous electromagnetic windings—an immense linear accelerator stretching westward across Tranquillatis. It accelerated supercooled magnetic “buckets” riding on cushions of flux at 100g to reach escape velocity in the first two miles. Beyond that the buckets were laser-tracked and computer-adjusted to eject their loads of moonrock in a shallow climb that just cleared the mountains two hundred miles away by virtue of the Moon’s surface curvature. En route the loads were electrically charged by being sprayed with electrons and fine-trimmed by massive electrostatic deflectors located at the two-hundred-mile downrange point to leave the final phase of launch with an accuracy better than one part in a million—comparable to a football being kicked between the uprights from 3,000 miles.

  From there on each load, comprising 60 pounds of “ore,” climbed steadily for two days until, 40,000 miles above the lunar surface, it fell into a “Hippo” catcher-ship stationed at the gravitationally stable L2 point. The energy needed to power the mass-driver was beamed down as microwaves from a three-mile-wide orbiting solar collector.

  Day in, day out, round the clock, the mass-driver sent up a charge every two seconds, halting only for maintenance or for occasional repairs. Every year, one million tons of moonrock fell into the waiting relays of Hippos. And farther out in space, the colonies steadily took shape.

  The project had been so successful that the powers-that-be had decided to go ahead with the construction of a second mass-driver. This one would also be located on the equator, but near Reinhold, aiming out across Procellarum. The track, the experts had decreed, would pass right over the point at which Fields and Paskoe were standing. Not a little to the right nor a little to the left, they had pronounced after extensive surveys, but right there.

  First-phase preparation would require accurate sighting with lasers, covering a stretch of terrain that extended from a mile or more behind them to several times that distance ahead, which would require an unobstructed path. The ridge was not really large—about the size of a dozen average houses set end to end—but . . . it was in the way.

  And so it came about that the form that had stood valiantly to preserve its record of events from the earliest epoch of the Solar System at last found itself opposing the restless, thrusting outward urge of Man.

  The ridge would have to go.

  “How goes it?” The voice of Sergeant Tim Cummings came through over the open channel from the nearest of the two surface-crawlers parked a few hundred feet back at the bottom of the shallow slope that led up to the ridge.

  “I think we’re about done here,” Paskoe replied. “Get some coffee on, Tim. We’re coming back down.”

  “See all you wanted from the top?” Cummings inquired.

  “Yeah. It’s pretty much as we thought,” Paskoe told him. “More or less symmetric on both sides. Probably not more than fifty, maybe sixty feet thick at the base.” He glanced automatically at the twin lines of footprints that led up to the point on the ridge crest that he and Fields had climbed to, and then led back to where they were now standing.

  “Let’s go,” Fields said, and with that turned and began heading back to the crawler. Paskoe gave the ridge one final glance, then turned to follow at a slow easygoing lope that brought him alongside Fields in a few seconds.

  “What do you reckon?” Fields asked as they bounced side by side down the slope. “Soil blower maybe?”

  “Dunno,” Paskoe replied. “There are some big boulders in there, and it’s probably pretty well compacted lower down. Might take a digger or two, probably a heavy shover too. We’ll see what the computers reckon.”

  “There’s some heavy equipment the other side of Reinhold,” Fields remarked. “If they shifted some of that over here they might get started inside a day or two.”

  “Nah—I’m pretty sure most of that stuff’s tied up,” Paskoe said. “They may have to fly something in from Tycho. Anyhow, that’s their problem. They know their schedules. We’ll just have to wait and see what they come up with.”

  “As long as
we don’t end up having to shovel it,” Fields said as they slowed down to approach the crawler. Paskoe steadied himself on the handrail and stooped slightly to clear his helmet past the entrance to the crawler’s lower cabin.

  “No way,” he declared with feeling. “I’ve seen enough Massachusetts winters not to ever wanna see a shovel again. I’ll leave it to the computers. If they say the best they can manage is a week, that’s okay by me.”

  “The boss’d get pretty mad about that if it happened,” Fields murmured as he ducked to follow the now invisible Paskoe.

  “Then the boss could come out here and damn well shovel it himself,” Paskoe’s voice said in his helmet.

  Five minutes later they had removed their helmets and were seated back at the crew stations beneath the viewdome of the crawler’s upper cabin.

  While Fields and Cummings used the viscreen to discuss the next item on the day’s agenda with Michel Chauverier, who was in command of the other crawler parked next to them, Paskoe activated the main console at the far end of the cabin to close a channel via comsat to the Tycho node of the ubiquitous TITAN computer complex. After a brief dialogue via touchpad and display screen, he had communicated the nature of his request to the system’s Executive Command Interpreter. A few seconds later the screen returned the message:

  ASSIGNED JOB NUMBER 2736/B. 72/Z72

  SCHEDULED TO SUBSYSTEM:

  SURFACE ENGINEERING P.927

  REQUIRE DATA REGARDING NATURE AND

  LOCATION OF OBSTRUCTION