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“Sissy stopped responding,” said Rachel.
We’d been drawing towards that conclusion for the last three hours. Together, Rachel and I were two-thirds of the piloting trio for Sisyphus. Clark was our third, and he wasn’t answering his phone. Rachel had taken to calling us the Three Musketeers early on; she was Aramis, I was Porthos, and Clark was Athos. I spent a week reading the book just to understand what it was she was saying, and still wasn’t sure that I liked the comparison.
Sisyphus was the world’s first attempt at asteroid mining, depending on how you wanted to classify that. The Stanford team had beaten us to an asteroid landing, but they had a less ambitious survey platform that wasn’t good for much more than science. The Oakland team had been the first to bring back a sample from an asteroid, but they’d just been doing a simple landing and retrieval, which was impressive if you went for that sort of thing, but not actually commercial activity as such. They’d brought back a few pounds of rock that had cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Sisyphus was going to move 10^11 kilograms of asteroid into orbit around the Earth. At current prices, it was worth a quadrillion dollars. Obviously there would be costs involved in moving it, and obviously the economics weren’t going to work out when we brought that much to market at once, and obviously it was going to take years to get to us, by which time there would be competition from other groups, and the steady march of technology was pushing cost-to-orbit lower at a nearly exponential rate… but we tended to ignore that long list of buzz-killing caveats and quote that number back and forth to each other.
Sisyphus had landed on the asteroid Ephyrae eight months ago, dug its claws in, and began to push. The mythological Sisyphus had been forced to push a boulder for all eternity, and Ephyrae had been his kingdom; the names had been decided long before Rachel had been brought onboard, and the mixed metaphor was a source of unending irritation for her.
Now Sisyphus wasn’t responding.
“What’s your guess?” I asked Rachel. “Hardware, software, or cosmic event?” This wasn’t the first time that Sisyphus had become unresponsive; it wasn’t anything to worry about, in theory. Most of the time, it was in standby or only pushing very weakly (therefore, Sissy) to change the asteroid’s orbit. There were times when Sisyphus was behind the Sun and out of reach, and other times when the solar wind picked up and blocked out communications. In the past eight months there had been three failures of the craft itself; one had been fixed by rebooting the computer, and the other two had been solved with a hotfix sent out over radio bit by painstaking bit. Now we weren’t getting anything from Sisyphus at all, which was worrying.
“I would guess software,” said Rachel. “But I’m an optimist, and I still want this to be something that we can hand off to Clark.”
“Still no answer?” I asked.
Rachel sighed. “I’ll try again.”
We finally got Clark on a video call. He was notorious for being late to work, but three hours was extreme, even for him. When his picture popped up, he was wearing dark sunglasses, and he was backlit by the ocean. From the way he was moving around, it seemed like he was on a boat. Rachel and I shared a look. We had expected him to be driving in, or maybe in his house.
“Hey guys,” said Clark. “‘Sup?”
“Sissy’s not responding,” said Rachel. “We think it might be software again.”
“You wound me,” said Clark with a smile. He was the one who’d written the vast majority of Sisyphus’ code. “Hey, do you guys mind if we record this? For legal?”
Rachel and I shared a look again. There were some heavy legal issues that came with a billion dollar venture and quadrillion dollar profits, especially when any issues of fault might not be uncovered for decades. The request wasn’t entirely unheard of, but Clark wasn’t big on formalities. Rachel keyed up the recording program and nodded to Clark.
“We pinged Sisyphus with the usual package this morning,” said Rachel. “We didn’t get any response back. John and I have been running through the checklist for the past three hours.” She paused slightly. I could see her measuring her words against possible legal action years in the future. “Where are you Clark?”
“Ah,” said Clark. He smiled at us. “Okay, you probably won’t find this funny right now, but some day you’ll laugh.”
“Are you on a boat?” I asked.
“I am!” said Clark. “Just don’t ask where. I’ll be shutting down the sat terminal we’re connected through as soon as this call is over.”
“Clark,” I began. “Do you know what happened to Sisyphus?”
“I took control of it,” said Clark. He was smiling wide.
I scowled at him. “If this is a prank —”
“How?” asked Rachel.
“I wrote the code that runs him,” said Clark. He always used gendered pronouns for Sisyphus; he didn’t like when we called it ‘Sissy,’ and after the second software patch had hated it even more when we’d called it ‘Fussy,’ enough that it became an action item on a team meeting.
“There were code reviews,” said Rachel. “I was even in on a few of them. Every line of every file was gone over by at least three people.”
“I had the keys to the repositories,” said Clark. “I had all the access I needed. The code review finishes, and no one ever looks at the files again. No one double-checks what’s in git, and if they had, you can’t blame a guy for making an honest mistake. But I was always the architect, the go-to guy when things needed fixing. It probably wouldn’t have flown at NASA, but getting things done is the name of the game in private spaceflight.” He was talking for the recording, I realized. “Gaining control was the easy part.”
“Shit,” I said silently. “So what, you’re holding Sisyphus hostage? Millions of dollars riding on you getting a payout?" I paused. "Are you blackmailing this company?”
Clark smiled. “Not exactly.”
“Clark,” Rachel said slowly. “Clark, please tell me that you haven’t done anything stupid.”
“Define stupid,” said Clark.
“Tell me you haven’t changed Sisyphus’s course,” said Rachel.
“Oh, well, that would take an awful lot of delta-v,” said Clark. “Of course, hypothetically, if I had exclusive control of the engines, I could alter the orbit however I saw fit, at least within the bounds of the engine’s power and the demands of orbital mechanics. With everyone else locked out, there wouldn’t be much stopping me from inputting a new set of instructions. But to say that the course is changed right now? That overstates how quickly Sisyphus can execute a course correction.”
“Shit,” I said again. I was close to asking him where he’d aimed the asteroid, but there was only really one possibility. Was Clark blackmailing the company? Not quite. He had too much hubris for that.
“They’ll shoot it out of the sky,” said Rachel.
“How are they going to do that?” asked Clark. “It took three years of planning and five years of travel to land Sisyphus on Ephyrae. Ephyrae had a nice, stable orbit with favorable launch windows. From here on out, the orbit is going to be changing in ways that can’t be so easily predicted, not when it's getting bits of thrust here and there. By the time they’re ready to launch, I’ll have made enough course corrections that it’ll be nearly impossible to hit Sisyphus. I’m not stupid. You know I’m not stupid. I planned every step of this.”
“What are your demands?” I asked.
“You’re skipping ahead,” said Clark with a cluck of his tongue. “Man, I had this great monologue prepared. I should have just recorded a video, but that seemed a little too serious, you know?”
Rachel and I both watched him. On my end it was mute horror; I have no idea what she was thinking.
“Eh,” said Clark. “Well, if you really need to know, I want to be Emperor of Earth. Go big or go home, right? The United Nations has a year to make that happen. As Emperor, I’ll have broad discretion in how to allocate Earth’s resources, complete immunity from the laws of all nations, and so on and so forth. Otherwise, kablooey.”
“This is insane,” I replied. “Literally insane. They’ll kill you.”
“He still has access,” said Rachel. “Some way to stop it.”
“Yup,” said Clark.
“Then they’re torture you, get the codes, and kill you,” I replied.
“There’s a magic sentence to get into Sisyphus,” said Clark. “It’s a string of twenty words. Any instructions you hit Sisyphus with need to use that magic sentence, or you get nothing back, which you guys have already figured out. Each time, the magic sentence changes, following a pattern that only I know, and which can’t be guessed at. There are a couple thousand anti-magic sentences that are sitting in a file on Sisyphus, and if you use any of them, Sisyphus locks down for good, follows its instructions, and slams into Earth, killing everyone here, or near enough. Torture won’t help, because they’ll never know whether I’m giving them the magic sentence or the anti-magic sentence, and torture isn’t good enough that you can bet human civilization on it. It also means you can’t brute force your way in. Everything is already loaded onto Sisyphus. It’s unbreakable.”
“Okay,” I said. “So they pretend to make you Emperor, you give the command, and then they kill you immediately afterward.”
“No,” said Rachel. “Because he wouldn’t just shut down Sisyphus, he’d turn a sure impact into a near-hit, and Sisyphus would be set on a course for impact at some point in the future. The threat is never lifted, we’re only given a stay of execution. We’re always going to need the next code from him.”
“Got it in one,” said Clark. “But look, I’ve got to go; you’ll pass the news on? We’re recording for a reason.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why do this?”
“I always wanted to be a supervillain,” said Clark. He looked out to the sea behind him. “Every time I watched a James Bond movie, it struck me how passive he was as a character. James Bond is always responding to people. He’s suave and sophisticated, and he can shoot people dead, but he never really seems to want anything. He’s not driven to greatness like his villains are. The villains are creators, engineers, businessmen who built themselves up over years of struggle. All James Bond ever did was preserve the status quo.” He turned back to the camera. “I don’t have any great sense of self-preservation. I’m sure the conversations I’ve had with my therapist are going to become public before too long, confidentiality be damned. I struggled with depression, and suicide. It was always that impossibility of greatness that got to me. In the modern world, even if you’re a specialist at the top of your game, you’re just such a small cog in this enormous machine. The age of exploration is over. There aren’t any intrepid heroes any more. So when I saw my chance, I took it, and if I die because I grabbed the world by its collar and told it to listen, or if I take us all out, so be it.”
He ended the call before we had a chance to respond.
Rachel stopped the recording and began backing up the video, then opened up a new e-mail. She stared at it for a moment, probably trying to figure out who to send it to and what needed to be said, weighed against how much scrutiny this moment would get in the coming years. I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it.
“John, I need you to keep it together,” said Rachel.
“I’m fine,” I said, but I was still giggling. “It’s just, I always wanted to be James Bond.”