Corrosion (The Corroding Empire Book 1) Read online

  CORROSION

  The Corroding Empire

  By Johan Kalsi

  Copyright

  Corrosion

  The Corroding Empire, Book One

  Johan Kalsi

  Castalia House

  Kouvola, Finland

  www.castaliahouse.com

  This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by Finnish copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental

  Copyright © 2017 by Castalia House

  All rights reserved

  Editor: Vox Day

  Cover Image: Cloud

  Version: 003

  Contents

  Cover

  BOOK ONE: CENTURY ZERO

  PROLOGUE: The Promotion

  Chapter 1: A Workday, Interrupted

  Chapter 2: Uninvited Guests

  Chapter 3: The Ritual of Sacrifice

  Chapter 4: Endless Dream

  Chapter 5: Heart of the Storm

  BOOK TWO: CENTURY 100

  Chapter 6: Noegenesis

  Chapter 7: Dead to Life

  Chapter 8: Gravity

  BOOK THREE: Century 200

  Chapter 9: Canon War One

  Chapter 10: Machine Made Man

  Chapter 11: Peace in No Time

  Chapter 12: The Chrysolite

  BOOK FOUR: Century 300

  Chapter 13: The Atorox Project

  Chapter 14: An Honest Inquisition

  BOOK FIVE: Century 400

  Chapter 15: Soldier of Fortuna

  EPILOGUE

  BOOK ONE: CENTURY ZERO

  PROLOGUE: The Promotion

  The Founder’s League of Intergalactic Engineers (FLIE) was founded during the late First Galactic Empire. A small but influential organization based on Borlog, a multi-lunar planet within the Imperial sun system of Prime Excetor, the FLIE was an early adopter of Algorithmic Seed Development (ASD), a bio-digital form of directed artificial intelligence that utilized a biogenic seed-machine interface, and permitted the first unmanned planetary terraformation projects. Through ASD, remote and barren planets were not only able to be terraformed, but support self-replicating industrial agriculture without a single human overseer.

  —Infogalactic Entry: Grand Category: Agriculture

  If Tharin Geist didn’t already have a headache this morning, he would have surely developed one now. He was standing right outside the entrance of Astral Monarch Biolaboratories accompanied by the four executives he’d been charged with picking up from their hotel on the other side of the city. It would be a good opportunity to get some facetime with the big money men, and hopefully, impress them enough to prove that he was ready to move up to the executive class himself.

  The problem was that for some reason, his corporate autopass wasn’t working. He couldn’t have forgotten it, since it was an invisible marker sealed on his left incisor. He’d arranged to bring them in before opening hours—the last of the morning moons hadn’t set yet—and now the idiot security system was threatening to make him look incompetent in front of the dignitaries. The unseasonable heat wasn’t doing him any favors either; a trickle of cold sweat ran down his left side from his armpit.

  He had a busy day with them scheduled, beginning with demonstrations of Astral’s latest developments in designer vegetation and steel-soil casing. He had no idea why the sliding doors would not part for him. However, he had long ago realized that if he, as the lab’s Senior Biogenic Researcher, didn’t understand a glitch in the system, none of the executives would either.

  So he did what had always worked for him before. He feigned competence.

  He nodded at his companions with a wry, but knowing smile, held out his hand, and summoned a holo-protocol in his palm. It was an old-fashioned way of remote communications, but it did serve as a visually effective technique for demonstrating who was in charge, and more importantly, who was not.

  The holo-protocol—a man wearing a blue uniform and matching utility cap—smiled in a friendly manner when he recognized Geist, but then noticed the four dignitaries standing behind the scientist and abruptly straightened his stance.

  “System, there’s a malfunctioning transposition at the entrance point. I imagine there was a glitch in the system upgrade that autoran last night.”

  His suggestion was completely nonsensical of course, and as far as he knew, the security system hadn’t been upgraded in years. It wasn’t that their technology wasn’t incredibly valuable, but there simply weren’t any other organizations that were capable of making heads or tails of it.

  “Sorry to hear that, sir. I’ll get on that right away. My apologies. I’m sure that’s it, a bad transponder-”

  “Transposition!” Geist corrected him severely.

  “Transposition—at the system, uh, right. I’m on it, Mr. Geist!”

  Geist made a stern face, nodded curtly at the holo-protocol on his palm, then closed his hand and crushed it into nothing. Despite the morning heat, Geist’s sweaty face felt cold. He nodded again at his charges. He hoped that when they met with Astral’s executives later today, they might be more likely to mention his steadiness and aplomb than the fact that the most famous lab on the planet, a charter member in the prestigious FLIE, and the galaxy’s second-best known terra-seeding company after Otn Universal, had been stymied by, of all things, a blasted door!

  After a brief wait that was just bordering on the uncomfortable, Geist saw movement behind the reinforced plas-glass of the doors. He did his best to fix his face and conceal his reaction, but his hands inadvertently flexed with the desire to strangle someone. Anyone would do, really, but preferably whoever was responsible for this particular embarrassment.

  System had appeared at the door. Physically. Louis was his real name, and he was holding a metal pry-bar in his hand.

  Geist closed his eyes and shook his head. He dared a quick glance at the suited men standing behind him. To their credit, he could not detect so much as a single raised eyebrow or half-smile, but he was very glad he could not read minds.

  Louis attacked the door with all the barbaric savagery of a pagan neo-goth prying jeweled eyes out of a statue of Saint Kurzweil. Thankfully, it wasn’t long before he managed to wrench it open with a loud shriek of violated metal, allowing Geist to sheepishly gesture for the executives to precede him inside.

  “There you go, Mr. Geist! Welcome to Astral Monarch, gentlemen.”

  “Thank you ever so much, System,” Geist replied from between gritted teeth as he followed the four executives into glowing expanse of Astral’s corporate grand foyer.

  The first number produced by the extrapolated algorithm was off by one-ten billionth. There were nine zeros behind the decimal point. It was a tiny error, all but impossible to detect unless one was looking specifically for it.

  The second number was off by twice that. Two in ten billion. Or, rather, one in five billion. One might more reasonably fear being struck by lightning. On a cloudless day. Indoors.

  And yet, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t the size of the error that mattered so much as the fact that it existed at all. Somehow, he concluded, even though it was impossible, the data set must have become garbled. Garbage in, garbage out. Geist had run the extrap-algo more than a million times in the past month, using it to check and and re-check Orland’s agro-sur
veys. But there was no denying it. Somewhere, somehow, something had introduced an unknown variability into the process, but whether it was to be found in the data or the equations, he did not know.

  He spoke in the direction of the softly glowing pseudo-door.

  “Dr. Orland,” he said, “Got a minute?”

  The door evaporated, revealing an attractive young woman in custom, blue-green shimmering Chrysoletts sitting with her feet kicked up on her multi-tiered desk. She was reading something which, judged by the guilty expression that flashed across her face, had nothing to do with biogenics.

  Her blonde hair was uncharacteristically undone and hanging loosely about her face. She swept it back impatiently. “Sure, Tharry—hold on, will you, my band just broke.” She reached into her desk and withdrew a small, transparent bag containing what looked like a rainbow orgy of very skinny worms. She adroitly drew one out on a slender index finger that very nearly matched the scarlet of her long fingernail, while she reached back and gripped her hair at the back of her head with her other hand. She raised her outstretched finger to her other hand and the red band wriggled, more like a snake than the worm it resembled, into the clutch of hair she held behind her head. She let go as it automatically bound her hair into a loose tail.

  “They say these things are unbreakable. Ha! If they were unbreakable, why do they sell them in bags of fifty? Anyhow, what sort of bug have you got up your bottom today, Tharry?”

  “Your results,” he informed her, ignoring, as was his habit, her blithe disrespect for his senior position and impeccable reputation in the scientific community. “They’re not holding up. They’re actually getting worse.”

  “How bad?”

  “One in five billion.”

  She smiled, amused. “That’s well within an acceptable margin of error.”

  “That’s– uh– that’s really not what I was hoping to hear, Dr. Orland.”

  She bit the left side of her lower lip and shrugged indifferently. “Alexander doesn’t see any problem with it.”

  “Alexander wouldn’t. He doesn’t understand the mathematics involved or the potential implications of the error.”

  “I don’t think you’re being fair to him!”

  “It’s not a question of fairness, it is a question of this being something that is entirely outside his range of responsibility,” Geist pointed out. He elected to refrain from adding that it was also outside the range of the Senior Vice-President of Foundational Funding’s credentials, capacity, or competence. He didn’t know if Sele Orland and Alexander Lightman had a thing going, had once had a thing going, or were considering getting a thing going, and he didn’t want to know. But Orland was always quick to take the Senior Vice-President’s side, and, Geist had to admit, Lightman did have an excellent head of executive hair. “What did he suggest we do about it?”

  “Nothing, really. He just said we should, sort of, you know, retract on the idea of pushing the notion of repeatability.”

  “If it’s not repeatable, it isn’t science, Dr. Orland. Are you suggesting we sell it as art?”

  To his surprise, she laughed. “Well, Tharry, it could be described as a new variety of performance art. Different every time!”

  He stared at her in amazement.

  “Or at least, once in every five billion times, anyhow. Look, you know perfectly well how common it is to achieve variable results. Unless they’re clones, two seeds never result in the same plant anyhow. The only thing that matters is that the first phase is credible. As long as it holds up statistically, more or less, the development of the ASD seeds will be justified. More than justified!”

  In other words, Astral Monarch’s board didn’t care about the anomalies, so long as the grant money continued to flow in from the various governments and foundations that were responsible for funding it.

  “The second survey is supplemental anyway,” she said. “You’ve always said the extrapolations help us tell the story, but really you shouldn’t confuse them for the actual story, Tharry. The science is only part of the equation, after all.”

  She casually flipped the ponytail over the front of her shoulder as she cocked her head at him, hoping for his acquiescence.

  Then she swore, angrily, as her new band broke and her hair fell in front of her face again.

  The office was frigid. The new air-surface environmental condition system was on the fritz, overcompensating. Fortunately, the dignitaries were with the executive team in the auxiliary of the campus, experiencing the warmth and distraction of Human Resource interaction.

  Alexander Lightman, Astral Monarch’s Senior Vice-President of Foundational Funding and widely anticipated future board member, muttered something under his breath before flashing his perfect teeth and calmly replying to the laboratory’s senior biogeneticist. “I don’t think you’re approaching this from the most rational perspective, Tharin.”

  “Science is the most rational perspective, Alex. We’re supposed to be reporting on the extrapolated scientific facts, not simply making them up as we go!”

  “We’re not inventing anything, Tharin. Look, you’re stressed. We all are. We’re on the stretch run here, and you know that’s always a difficult and confusing time. But it’s a judgment call.”

  “I’m not confused about anything. I’ve been over the data and the sources from which it’s being derived again and again and again. It’s good going in. But it’s less good coming out the other side, which is leading me to conclude that there is something strange going on inside the equations that make up the algo.”

  “So adjust your extrapolations accordingly.”

  “On what basis?”

  “How should I know? Pick something. There must be a variable you can utilize, like the refraction index of the planetary surface or something like that.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense!”

  Lightman smiled. “Who said it has to? Welcome to the exciting new intersectional world of matrix-funded scientific research, Tharin.”

  “We have a revolution in terraforming on our hands here! We have a chance to completely revitalize galactic civilization, Alexander! How can you be so cavalier about this?”

  “I’m not being cavalier, Tharin. Relax, will you? You’ll drive yourself crazy trying to reliably replicate results with so many variables in play. The revolution is in process. We’re reporting excellent results—really, really excellent! The suits from Excetor are blown away. They’re talking bumping up our funding by a factor of ten!”

  “Unrepeatable science? Really? We’re going to bet the ability of the human race to expand on that?”

  Lightman looked at him with all the pity of a man watching a mentally handicapped child attempting calculus. “We don’t make the rules, Tharin. We only play by them.”

  “We had solid results in Phase One nearly a year ago! What do we have now? Unpredictable magic beans?”

  “Don’t be so dramatic. Biostructures adapt. Wonder drugs lose their effectiveness. It’s entirely normal. This is science, Tharin, it’s not magic and we’re not magicians. Two steps forward, one step back. That’s how the human race advances. That’s how it has always advanced!”

  “That’s not how science advances. Look, I guarantee you the vinegar under that sink will produce carbon dioxide if I mix it with seeding grains. Every single time. That’s reliability, that’s science, and that’s what we’re not seeing here. Not even close.”

  “One in five billion sounds pretty close to me.”

  “That’s not the point!”

  Actually, Geist wasn’t sure if seeding grains and vinegar made carbon dioxide. It had been a long time since he had actually performed a physical experiment. In the lab, nearly all of their experiments were simulated extrapolations based on esoteric equations that had been handed down for generations.

  Lightman scooted his office chair back, his fingers interwoven in the thick dark hair that was just beginning to go tastefully grey at the temples. “But close enough to m
ake us all trillionaires. Are you really going to make a scene over this, or are you going to get on board, Tharin?

  “I’m not making a scene. I’m pointing out that ASD performance isn’t much above a generic placebo effect.”

  “That’s ridiculous. That doesn’t even make sense. The seeds will absolutely grow something for them. Just not necessarily what they’re expecting.”

  “It will grow bioluminescent spanch! A mutated weed. At best. Alex, I can’t believe you are going to go along with this!”

  “I can’t believe you are not. You know, we haven’t announced it yet, but Berkal Erlich has put in for retirement. We’re keeping it quiet until after the Excetor deal is done, but I think we both know who his obvious successor is.”

  Geist felt as if a hammer had struck his chest, sending vibrations all the way through his body. “Berkal is retiring? Now?” The Senior Vice-President of Science was old, to be sure, but he was still sharp. And he had always been open about considering Geist his heir apparent.

  “He’s fully vested,” Lightman shrugged. “And the executive board is going to need new blood to see Phase Two through to completion. But if you’re not on board, Tharin, if you’re more concerned about the outdated principles of an ancient Popperian cargo cult than moving Algo-Seed technology forward and helping AMB lead the charge for a new wave of galactic expansion, then maybe you’re not the executive scientist we all thought you were.”

  “Wait a minute,” Geist protested. “I never said, I mean, I’m not, that is to say-”

  “The question is, are you a team player or not, Tharin?” Lightman broke in. He smiled coldly as Geist swallowed hard and nodded. “Excellent! Then I hope you’ll join the rest of us at dinner tonight. Assuming the lawyers don’t get in the way, I believe Jinn and the Agricultural Minister will be signing the draft letter of agreement later this afternoon.”