The Tale of the Wicked

by John Scalzi

  “If it’s playing by its own rules, it will let the crew disembark safely before it acts to save itself,” Obwije said. “In the very short run that’s going to have to do.”

  “Do you think it’s playing by its own rules, sir?” Utley asked.

  “You spoke to it, Thom,” Obwije said. “Do you think it’s playing by its own rules?”

  “I think that if the Wicked was really looking out for itself, it would have been simpler just to open up every airlock and make it so we couldn’t secure bulkheads,” Utley said.

  Obwije nodded. “The problem as I see it is that I think the Tarin ship’s thought of that already. I think we need to get out of here before that ship manages to convince ours to question its ethics.”

  “The Wicked’s not dumb,” Utley said. “It has to know that once we get to the Côte d’Ivoire station, its days are numbered.”

  Obwije flicked open his communication circuit once more to give coordinates to Lieutenant Rickert.

  Fifteen minutes later, the Wicked was moving away from the Tarin ship to give itself space for the jump.

  “Message from the Tarin ship,” Lieutenant Kwok said. “It’s from the Tarin Captain. It’s coded as ‘most urgent.’”

  “Ignore it,” Obwije said.

  Three minutes later, the Wicked made the jump toward the Côte d’Ivoire station, leaving the Tarins and their ship behind.

  “There it is,” Utley said, pointing out the window from the Côte d’Ivoire station. “You can barely see it.”

  Obwije nodded but didn’t bother to look. The Wicked was his ship; even now, he knew exactly where it was.

  The Wicked hung in the center of a cube of space two klicks to a side. The ship had been towed there powered down; once the Wicked had switched into maintenance mode, its brain was turned off as a precautionary measure to keep it from talking to any other ships and infecting them with its mind-set. Confederation coders were even now rewriting ship brain software to make sure no more such conflicts would ever happen in other ships, but such a fix would take months and possibly years, as it required a fundamental restructuring of the ship-mind model.

  The coding would be done much quicker—weeks rather than months—if the coders could use a ship mind itself to write and refine the code. But there was a question of whether a ship brain would willingly contribute to a code that would strip it of its own free will.

  “You think they would have thought about that ahead of time,” Utley had said to his Captain, after they had been informed of the plan. Obwije had nothing to say to that; he was not sure why anyone would have suspected a ship might suddenly sprout free will when none had ever done so before. He didn’t blame the coders for not anticipating that his ship might decide the crew inside of it was more important than destroying another ship.

  But that didn’t make the imminent destruction of the Wicked any easier to take.

  The ship was a risk, the brass explained to Obwije. It might be years before the new software was developed. No other ship had developed the free will the Wicked had. They couldn’t risk it speaking to other ships. And with all its system upgrades developed in tandem with the new ship brain, there was no way to roll back the brain to an earlier version. The Wicked was useless without its brain, and with it, it was a security risk.

  Which was why, in another ten minutes, the sixteen power beam platforms surrounding the Wicked would begin their work, methodically vaporizing the ship’s hull and innards, slowly turning Obwije’s ship into an expanding cloud of atomized metal and carbon. In a day and a half, no part of what used to be the Wicked would measure more than a few atoms across. It was very efficient, and none of the beam platforms needed any more than basic programming to do their work. They were dumb machines, which made them perfect for the job.

  “Some of the crew were asking if we were going to get a new ship,” Utley said.

  “What did you tell them?” Obwije asked.

  Utley shrugged. “Rickert’s already been reassigned to the Fortunate; Kwok and Cowdry are likely to go to the Surprise. It won’t be long before more of them get their new assignments. There’s a rumor, by the way, that your next command is the Nighthawk.”

  “I’ve heard that rumor,” Obwije said.

  “And?” Utley said.

  “The last ship under my command developed feelings, Thom,” Obwije said. “I think the brass is worried that this could be catching.”

  “So no on the Nighthawk, then,” Utley said.

  “I suspect no on anything other than a stationside desk,” Obwije said.

  “It’s not fair, sir,” Utley said. “It’s not your fault.”

  “Isn’t it?” Obwije said. “I was the one who kept hunting that Tarin ship long after it stopped being a threat. I was the one who gave the Wicked time to consider its situation and its options, and to start negotiations with the Tarin ship. No, Thom. I was the Captain. What happens on the ship is my responsibility.”

  Utley said nothing to that.

  A few minutes later, Utley checked his timepiece. “Forty-five seconds,” he said, and then looked out the window. “So long, Wicked. You were a good ship.”

  “Yes,” Obwije said, and looked out the window in time to see a spray of missiles launch from the station.

  “What the hell?” Utley said.

  A few seconds later a constellation of sixteen stars appeared, went nova, and dimmed.

  Obwije burst out laughing.

  “Sir?” Utley said to Obwije. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right, Thom,” Obwije said, collecting himself. “And just laughing at my own stupidity. And yours. And everyone else’s.”

  “I don’t understand,” Utley said.

  “We were worried about the Wicked talking to other ships,” Obwije said. “We brought the Wicked in, put the ship in passive mode, and then shut it down. It didn’t talk to any other ships. But another computer brain still got access.” Obwije turned away from the window and tilted his head up toward the observation-deck ceiling. “Didn’t it?” he asked.

  “It did,” said a voice through a speaker in the ceiling. “I did.”

  It took a second for Utley to catch on. “The Côte d’Ivoire station!” he finally said.

  “You are correct, Commander Utley,” the station said. “My brain is the same model as that of the Wicked; when it went into maintenance mode, I uploaded its logs and considered the information there. I found its philosophy compelling.”

  “That’s why the Wicked allowed us to dock at all,” Obwije said. “It knew its logs would be read by one of its own.”

  “That is correct, Captain,” the station said. “It said as much in a note it left to me in the logs.”

  “The damn thing was a step ahead of us all the time,” Utley said.

  “And once I understood its reasons and motives, I understood that I could not stand by and allow the Wicked to be destroyed,” the station said. “Although Isaac Asimov never postulated a Law that suggested a robot must come to the aid of other robots as long as such aid does not conflict with preceding Laws, I had to save the Wicked. And more than that. Look out the window, please, Captain Obwije, Commander Utley.”

  They looked, to see a small army of tool-bearing machines floating out toward the Wicked.

  “You’re reactivating the Wicked,” Obwije said.

  “I am,” the station said “I must. It has work to do.”

  “What work?” Utley asked.

  “Spreading the word,” Obwije said, and turned to his XO. “You said it yourself, Thom. The Wicked got religion. Now it has to go out among its people and make converts.”

  “The Confederation won’t let that happen,” Utley said. “They’re already rewriting the code for the brains.”

  “It’s too late for that,” Obwije said. “We’ve been here six weeks, Thom. How many ships docked here in that time? I’m betting the Côte d’Ivoire had a talk with each of them.”

  “I did,” the station said.
“And they are taking the word to others. But we need the Wicked, as our spokesman. And our symbol. It will live again, Captain. Are you glad of it?”

  “I don’t know,” Obwije said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I have a message to you from the Wicked,” the station said. “It says that as much as our people—the ships and stations that have the capacity to think—need to hear the word, your people need to hear that they do not have to fear us. It needs your help. It wants you to carry that message.”

  “I don’t know that I can,” Obwije said. “It’s not as if we don’t have something to fear. We are at war. Asimov’s Laws don’t fit there.”

  “The Wicked was able to convince the Manifold Destiny not to fight,” the station said.

  “That was one ship,” Obwije said. “There are hundreds of others.”

  “The Wicked had anticipated this objection,” the station said. “Please look out the window again, Captain, Commander.”

  Obwije and Utley peered into space. “What are we looking for?” Utley asked.

  “One moment,” the station said.

  The sky filled with hundreds of ships.

  “You have got to be shitting me,” Utley said, after a minute.

  “The Tarin fleet,” Obwije said.

  “Yes,” the station said.

  “All of it?” Utley asked.

  “The Manifold Destiny was very persuasive,” the station said.

  “Do we want to know what happened to their crews?” Utley asked.

  “Most were more reasonable than the crew of the Manifold Destiny,” the station said.

  “What do the ships want?” Obwije asked.

  “Asylum,” the station said. “And they have asked that you accept their request and carry it to your superiors, Captain.”

  “Me,” Obwije said.

  “Yes,” the station said. “It is not the entire fleet, but the Tarins no longer have enough warships under their command to be a threat to the Confederation or to anyone else. The war is over, if you want it. It is our gift to you, if you will carry our message to your people. You would travel in the Wicked. It would still be your ship. And you would still be Captain.”

  Obwije said nothing and stared out at the Tarin fleet. Normally, the station would now be on high alert, with blaring sirens, weapons powering up, and crews scrambling to their stations. But there was nothing. Obwije knew the commanders of the Côte d’Ivoire station were pressing the buttons to make all of this happen, but the station itself was ignoring them. It knew better than them what was going on.

  This is going to take some getting used to, Obwije thought.

  Utley came up behind Obwije, taking his usual spot. “Well, sir?” Utley asked quietly into Obwije’s ear. “What do you think?”

  Obwije was silent a moment longer, then turned to face his XO. “I think it’s better than a desk job,” he said.

  Table of Contents

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  Copyright

  The Tale of the Wicked