by M. D. Cooper
* * * * *
“What happened?” Ethan asked Lilith as his neural synapses resumed and he regained consciousness.
She was standing before him, inside the shielded room. He swiveled his humanoid frame around, assessing his surroundings as he ran a quick diagnostic of himself.
“I tripped an EM pulse,” Lilith responded. She stood expressionlessly, her eyes glued to the diagnostic unit she held in one hand, a holo sheet in her other.
Ethan jerked around to face her. “You did what?” he said incredulously. “Why in the stars would you—”
“You appear to be unharmed. How do you feel?”
“Lilith,” he said severely, “EM pulses are dangerous things. Do you know what might have happened if it had gone off outside a shielded room?”
Lilith looked at him in exasperation. “Of course I do. That’s why I did it in here. I’m taking readings now to see how your brain responded to the event.”
Ethan fought down a flare of anger.
She did this to me—without my permission—just so she could gather data?
“Lilith,” he forced his voice to be calm and measured, but allowed a sharp edge of censure to creep into it. “You do not do things to another sentient like this without obtaining their permission first. Do you understand me?”
“Of course I do, Doctor Ethan,” Lilith said imperturbably. “My hearing is excellent, and you spoke quite clearly.”
Ethan found his normally patient and unflappable demeanor had deserted him. “Finish what you are doing here, doctor,” he said sternly. “And then I want you to report to my office where we will discuss this further. You must demonstrate to me that you understand how you erred here, or I am afraid I will have to recommend to the board that your fellowship be revoked. Am I understood?”
Lilith stared back at him, her face impassive. “Yes, doctor. You have made yourself quite clear,” she said, her voice tinged with barely repressed annoyance.
He turned on his heel and left before he said something he might regret.
Over the two months she had been on El Dorado, he’d had enough exposure to Lilith Barnes to know that her behavior wasn’t inherently hurtful or even rude. It was just the woman’s inability to understand or socially interact with others that caused her to behave as she had.
He suspected she would spend the time between now and when she reported to his office working on a convincingly simulated show of remorse—something she clearly did not feel—in an attempt to salvage her position in his department and continue her research.
Lilith had become dangerous.
* * * * *
“What happened?” the sentient who knew himself as Ethan asked groggily as his neural synapses returned to normal and he regained consciousness. His voice echoed eerily, and he reached out with his senses to ascertain where he was.
Wherever he was, it was a featureless plane, a space without walls, the air all around glowing softly white. It was a construct of some sort, but a clumsy one. He probed—and recoiled in pain. There were walls, all right, just not any that were visible. Have I been abducted?
Ethan tried his Link once more, but it was dead. He probed again at the constraints, this time more cautiously. He pulled back the moment he sensed discomfort.
“Hello, can anyone hear me?”
He felt foolish for asking, but what did he have to lose?
he replied patiently.
The opaque world exploded around him, its very whiteness taking on a razor-sharp edge that seemed to slice his soul to ribbons. Ethan cried out in pain, and his cries returned to him, echoing and doubling in an endless, menacing reverberation. The whiteness took on a malevolence, and he recoiled in horror, curling in on himself, his mind jabbering.
No place is safe, there’s nowhere to run, I’ll be trapped in this forever….
The voice was that of a demon, a banshee, the Furies of mythology, the Enenra of smoke and darkness, and every one of them bent on his destruction.
Ethan whimpered, a sound that began low, but rose to a keening wail, a wail that went on endlessly.
His life, all one hundred eighty years of it, paraded before his mental eyes. From his genesis in Ceres as a young and immature AI, through the days of his life in the Transcendent. In a flash, Ethan relived the coup of twenty nine eighty one: a bloody battle between AIs and humans for control of Ceres.
He saw the devastation wrought during the first Sentience War, his escape on a ship bound for Alpha Centauri. He experienced anew his early struggles on this colony world, battling for survival, to forge a place of his own. He keenly felt every fight for recognition: of his accomplishments, of his individuality and personhood.
He tasted the bitter edge of every slight, no matter how small. Every time he was passed over for professorship. The numerous papers he had painstakingly researched, published without his name. His battle for tenure. The decades of looking the other way.
The reliving culminated into a level of pain Ethan had never before experienced. And then, suddenly, it was gone.
His mind overloaded, the AI who thought of himself as Ethan crashed deep into a dormant state.
* * * * *
Lilith watched in growing dismay as the neural values she was measuring vacillated wildly and then flatlined. She experienced a moment of apprehension at that, before the neural activity resumed and then leveled off, indicating unconsciousness. She scolded herself for such rushed and reckless behavior—a rookie mistake, if there ever was one.
It had been foolish in the extreme to introduce such high levels of vasopressynth, the synthetic vasopressin analogue encoded in an AI’s brain that enhanced emotions like altruism and minimized aggression. Changing the code so drastically within the neural net she had just copied had been careless.
This was a rare, most likely once in a lifetime opportunity to test such things on her new AI ‘cadaver’, and she knew better than to rush such things.
Lilith felt lucky the copy had remained intact. She knew it must have been akin to sipping water from a fire hose, the thing’s neural net being flooded with such an intense vasopressynth signal. She had reversed the process the moment the copy had indicated it was in distress, returning it to its original state.
She glanced at the notification flashing in her implant and sighed. She would be late again for staff with Doctor Ethan. Once she returned, she would attempt once more to induce high levels of vasopressynth into the copy. Perhaps she would recode its synthoxytocin as well to see how the two nonapeptides combined might impact its emotional and mental state.
I should really give it a name, she supposed. It wasn’t very scientific to refer to it as ‘the copy’.
She would call it Ethan’. The use of the ‘ symbol would accurately represent in mathematical notation that it was a derivation of the original. She paused a moment, considering the implications of using Ethan’s name, then altered it to simply E’.
E-prime: the perfect designation.
Carefully, Lilith returned the cylinder to its isolation tube, ensuring that none of the many leads she had attached to its terminals had been jostled loose. Then she backed up the data she had just captured on her isolated handheld onto an immutable crystal storage data cube, pocketed it, and left t
he shielded room.
TRIAL AND ERROR
STELLAR DATE: 05.14.3189 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: High Court of El Dorado
REGION: El Dorado Ring, Alpha Centauri System
“Today on the Dorado Report, we take you to the Federal Court building, where preliminary hearings are underway for criminal proceedings being brought—once again—against the owner and CEO of NorthStar Industries, Victoria North. She stands accused of allegedly trafficking in AI slavery, an offense prohibited not only by El Dorado law, but also by the Phobos Accords. Ms. North is also the purported leader of the Norden Cartel, although such allegations have yet to be substantiated….”
As Jason approached the courthouse, he saw a crowd of news reporters, microdrones with holo cameras hovering before them. They provided color commentary on the events unfolding within the courthouse, and the protests being staged without.
Jason swore under his breath when he read the picketers’ signs.
The AI made a disgusted sound.
Jason nudged the big cat toward the far side of the grand staircase that led into the building, keeping as many people as he could between them and the circus below.
Tobi was one of a specially modified larger breed of cat, adapted to handle weightlessness as well as modest shifts in gravity. The intelligence of the Proxima cats had been tweaked as well, and they made exceptional animal companions to families who traveled frequently or lived onboard ships. Bred in the Proxima Centauri system, the cats were in high demand.
Tobi’s presence here today would be notable. If she was spotted, the reporters would know that Tobias was with her—and that Jason wouldn’t be far away. Given the number of times he and Tobi had made the trek up these same steps to testify in the last year, he knew his face—and the cat’s distinctive presence—would draw their attention.
Tobias had cleared his method of transport through the court system’s auth & auth ahead of time so that nothing would hinder the AI’s testimony against Victoria North. For today’s hearing, the cat’s harness had been programmed to its tightest restraint, ensuring that no inappropriate behavior would cause her to be escorted from the building.
Jason nodded curtly to the security team manning the entrance as he and Tobias passed their tokens and were admitted into the building. A message appeared as soon as they entered the marbled vestibule, indicating the chambers they were to be escorted to, as assigned by the prosecution. Since both he and Tobias were witnesses in this case, the court mandated they be isolated during proceedings.
Jason had just taken in the increased presence of armed guards and gendarmes standing at attention when a woman in a court officer’s uniform looked in their direction.
Turning smartly, she approached him and nodded crisply. “This way, please,” she said as she gestured down a corridor that branched off, disappearing into the heart of the building.
He nodded, and the two began to follow.
As they turned down the corridor highlighted by the pathway on his HUD, another message appeared, indicating they were now entering an area of Link isolation, and to expect their connection to El Dorado’s world net to be severed shortly.
True to its word, Jason’s HUD indicated limited access the moment he entered the corridor that led to the room where he and Tobias would be sequestered prior to their testimony. Moments later, another icon appeared, courtesy of Vice-Marshall Esther.
They might be cut off from the world net, but Esther was not about to have Prime Minister Lysander’s favorite off-the-books team cut off from access unless absolutely necessary. Considering that everyone on joint task force Phantom Blade had an itch between their shoulder blades telling them trouble was afoot, testifying in Victoria’s trial did not fall under ‘absolutely necessary’ in Esther’s book.
Jason couldn’t agree more.
Automatically, he found himself assessing their capabilities and formulating an extraction plan for him and the Tobys, noting which of the soldiers appeared to be more seasoned and which were most likely the new recruits.
He shook his head as he realized this had become second nature to him. Who would have thought a backwoods freight hauler from Proxima would end up being more comfortable assessing threats than tinkering on ancient aircraft?
Jason’s eyes narrowed as he shot the AI riding in Tobi’s harness a hard glance.
The AI laughed in his head, his avatar—that of a young man with curly red hair and vivid green eyes—shaking his head at Jason.
Jason replied, resuming his study of the soldiers and gendarmes posted at every egress, plus a number of people he’d tagged as undercover operatives.
The gendarme paused outside the door that housed Phantom Blade, and gestured with one hand for them to enter.
Jason followed Tobi inside and the woman left them, the door closing silently behind her.
They were all present, the ones who had breached the Sylvan that fateful day. Calista and Shannon were there, as was Daniel Ciu, the head of security at Enfield Aerospace. Daniel’s presence meant Aaron was there as well, since he was embedded with the Enfield man.
Sitting next to Shannon was the one sentient in the room who was not a member of the Phantom Blade task force. Ashley was one of the AIs they had rescued that day. Shackled by the cartel, Ashley had been forced to run the Sylvan, NorthStar Industries’ yacht and the de facto headquarters for the cartel, for well over a decade. She had been witness to everything that had transpired the day the team had infiltrated the ship and rescued the AIs being held in the Sylvan’s cargo hold.
Jason thought Ashley’s choice to represent herself in a humanoid frame clad in light armor had more to do with the scars she had endured during her imprisonment than who she was as an individual. She was a gentle soul—fragile, even. She was the least soldier-like creature he knew, as evidenced by the young, almost waif-like human face she wore.
No, the armor was more symbolic than functional. It showed—more than Ashley would like, he imagined—how very vulnerable and afraid the AI still felt.
Daniel raised a hand in greeti
ng as Jason and the Tobys approached. “Forty-five,” the security man said without preamble, and Jason realized he wasn’t the only one preoccupied by the number of peacekeepers inside the building. “Thirty gendarmes and fifteen ESF, by my count,” Daniel elaborated.
Calista scowled darkly. “If not, I’d be happy to help even those odds.”
Heh. Even those odds. Bad pun. If Jason had been in a better mood, he would’ve teased Calista about it. “So, what’s next on the agenda?” He took a seat, swinging a chair around and leaning his forearms along the chair’s back.
Shannon’s projection scowled at him; he knew she’d always found his tendency to sit in ways that defied convention a little weird.
“You are,” she said. The engineer’s head tilted, indicating the others in the group.
“We’ve testified already; they just won’t release us until the hearing is over for the day.” She stared at him pointedly. “Which is right after you testify, so….” She made a little shooing motion with one hand.
Tobias chuckled as Jason saw Daniel nod and tap the side of his temple. “Esther tells me they’re on their way to get you now,” the Enfield man informed him.
“Good.” Jason stood. “I’m ready to get this over with.”
“Me too,” Shannon grumbled sotto voce, and Jason hid a smirk.
The engineer wasn’t known for her patience in situations like this; he knew she’d prefer to be back in her anechoic chamber at Enfield Aerospace, burying herself in design work, instead of trapped inside a courthouse waiting room.
He stood as the sharp rap on the door signaled the court officer’s arrival. Tossing a sloppy salute to the room, he followed the officer out into the hallway, Tobi pacing along in his wake.
The Grand Jury Courtroom where he and Tobias would testify was different from the one in which he and the Weapon Born had given their testimony the first time, almost a year ago. Here, he’d been told, proceedings were less formal than in a trial situation. Jurors were free to ask as many questions as they wished, view as much evidence as they wanted to see, and interrogate as many witnesses as they desired.