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WHO IS THE DOMINANT SPECIES?

“We’re about to get machine intelligence, thrown in the midst of this dog pit. We’ve created something that will shatter religious belief at its core, and yet our science, our reason, our humanity isn’t ready to take on the burden of responsibility to guide mankind into a future that doesn’t involve millions dying under the dictates of crazy leaders.”

For Warwick Rowe, anthropologist, media darling and global enfant terrible, it’s all about the future of the race. Machine intelligence would usher in an age of rational scientific progress. For Ruth Shannon, his unwilling partner in the mission to Venus, it’s personal. A breakthrough in her research into AI might open a channel to communicate with her autistic daughter, and so gain her the absolution she craves. For the military that employs them both, it’s simpler still. Smart ordnance offers the best chance at supremacy.

What then of the moaners, the alien creatures in the vast, habitat-like construct on Venus? What of THEIR hopes and dreams and ambitions?

EXCERPT

Brunning stood in the engineering bay, gun raised, pointing at shadows. He was swaying, undulating, as if he was about to faint.
‘How could it cut all the feeds?’ he said.
Shannon sank against one of the piles of machinery. She felt sick. Her head was pounding. All the strength had left her body. She was about to start crying again.
‘It’s smart,’ she said.
Banging. Hard, fast, as if testing the hull. Like a man, Brunning thought, tapping a wall to see where it was hollow. Where he could punch through.
‘Firebug down?’ he called into the intercom.
‘It shorted everything,’ Magritte’s voice came back. ‘Blew all the fuses, sir. Scrambled the computers.’
‘What do you have, Jason?’ Shannon asked wearily.
‘I don’t have anything. Mechanical systems, hydraulics, heat exchanger, but --’
Scrabbling, hard and angry, somewhere above them. It was coming in through the hull.
‘Open the hatch,’ she said.
‘What?’ Brunning yelled. ‘Are you crazy?’
She leaped to her feet. Anger, irrational anger, cannibalistic in the face of the enemy, drove all the weakness out of her.
‘Listen to me,’ she yelled back. ‘It’s going to get in, either through the hull or through the hatch. If it makes it through the hull, we’re dead. If it destroys the hatch, we can’t get out of this ship, but we do still have the option of escape in the Firebug. I’d rather keep that option open.’
‘And if we can’t kill it?’
‘Retreat. One room at a time. One pressure door at a time. All the way to the Firebug.’
‘Abandon the outer ramparts,’ Brunning said. ‘Fall back to the keep.’
‘Something like that,’ Shannon said.
The noise was like a blinding white light, shooting through Brunning’s nerves and stabbing at the backs of his eyes. He felt like he was going to explode.
‘Jason,’ he whispered into the intercom. ‘Lower the drawbridge.’