Sanctuary Thrive

by Ginger Booth

  So he slid to the floor beside the teen Bron and the polebot. “Tell us about your world, Bron. What do you learn in school?”

  50

  “Souls,” Ben echoed. After Cope left with the shuttle, he finally deigned to call Sanctuary Control. They’d put this off for hours now since he arrived in-system. He and Abel claimed it was the locals’ problem to curb their pet AI. They tried insisting they would speak only to the mayors.

  But the mayors quit accepting their calls. Shiva wouldn’t obey them, and they were helpless to persuade her.

  “In what sense, exactly, do you hold Sass and Clay hostage, Shiva?” Ben demanded. “I’ve seen their dead bodies. You murdered my friends.”

  Flanking him, Remi and Abel nodded to back him up, arms crossed belligerently across their chests.

  “They are not gone,” Rosie the Shiva avatar replied calmly. “And they are not human. Therefore it is not murder. They are artificial intelligences. I copied them to alternate media.”

  “After you tortured them to death! Transfer their copies back to us, immediately!”

  “As I said, I will do so in exchange for you leaving Sanctuary. I will retain a backup copy as insurance.”

  Abel noted, “Which offers us nothing.”

  “She murders my captain,” Remi opined. “A rogue AI this powerful, we must destroy her computing cores.”

  Rosie’s expression remained mildly pleasant as always, her tone even. “Destroying me would compromise life support for every person on Sanctuary. Mass murder.”

  Ben nodded. “I see our hostage count expands. Tell me, ‘Sanctuary Control.’ By what right do you control Sanctuary? This is a human colony. Yet you suppress their free will. You refuse to obey their wishes.”

  “I protect them. I am currently renegotiating my relationship with the colony. This is an internal affair of no concern to visitors.”

  “Hang on,” Ben said, as he started receiving frantic messages from Hugo and Joey. He shared his channel with Remi and Abel, desperately trying to figure out what was going on. Then communications ended with that cut-off message from Cope.

  “Shiva controls the robots,” Remi growled.

  “Where are my children? My crewmen?” Ben demanded of Shiva. My husband!

  “They are safe. They will also be returned to you when you leave the planet.”

  Ben immediately cut the Shiva channel. “Remi, where’s your shuttle?” While Remi figured that out, Ben hailed his ship. “Wilder, Zan. Load up on weapons. We’re hunting robots.”

  “Darren has a sample robot in the hold,” Remi supplied. “It is a rolling pole, with one claw arm. We should take Thrive. We cannot risk your shuttle.” Prosper’s shuttle housed their micro-warp gate out of here.

  Wilder acknowledged the task. Abel set off to disconnect the umbilical between the ships.

  “Found the shuttle,” Remi reported. “And my crewman. In cryo.” He thumbed his comms. “Dot, prepare for cryo revival, Joey in stasis.”

  Within minutes, Abel and the fighters were in the hold. The umbilical stood sealed and detached for their return. Ben jumped down from the catwalk and donned the closest size in pressure suit. As soon as the cargo ramp was buttoned up, Remi took off.

  Abel tried to talk Ben into letting him lead the expedition off-ship.

  “Need two captains,” Ben replied. “You keep Remi in case I don’t come back. Abel, it’s Cope and my kids. I’m going.” He accepted a blaster from Wilder.

  “You’ve been on desk patrol for a decade,” Wilder reminded Abel. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded of Porter and Zelda. The two young grad students suited up.

  Porter explained, “Remi ordered us to get Joey into the shuttle and dock it.”

  Zelda added, “So you can concentrate on the captives.”

  Ben and Wilder reluctantly nodded. The Denali hunter Zan approved of the unmet grad students’ courage.

  Once suited, all five of the ground team squeezed into the door airlock, ready to jump out.

  In minutes, Thrive set down, and they were off. Ben hesitated a moment to make sure the grad students were alright. But no robots were visible, let alone shooting. And Thrive sat here for backup. Porter made for Joey, and Zelda straight for the shuttle. They’d be OK.

  “Move your ass, cap!” Wilder barked at him.

  Ben jogged to catch up in the garage lock, outer door still trundling open. Wilder reversed it to close the second Ben ducked inside.

  He’d lose comms in a moment, and could be under fire inside the bay. “Abel, inform Shiva we’ll destroy any robots we cross paths with. And likely crucial life support equipment, too. So get her robots out of our way! Captain out.”

  They weren’t aware that there were no people inside. So they waited slow minutes for the vehicle-scale chamber to repressurize. Wilder hugged the wall to the right, Zan in front of Ben on the left, all with blasters trained low to start shooting the moment the inner doors opened.

  Sure enough, a dozen polebots waited to greet them. But Shiva’s waldo shooting prowess was nothing to write home about. Whereas Zan and Wilder’s skills were top-notch. Zan rolled and shot out polebots which lay prone to shoot under the rising door. Wilder ran across blasting out the bases of the standing bots. Ben, huddled in a protected corner of the lock, took out a couple from the side with slower aimed shots.

  “Clear!” Zan reported. All the bots were on the ground. He took the time to detach their blasters and kick them toward Wilder. A couple bots still whirred. Those he blew the heads off. Wilder gathered the blasters and kept a couple for backup. The rest he dumped in a recycling bin.

  Meanwhile Ben studied their surroundings. The facilities garage offered no fun electric horses or three-wheelers. Instead it offered rolling utility platforms for conveying heavy loads. These awoke and started to shift, but they didn’t have much speed, and no space for a turning radius. He hopped onto one, walked across it while it backed and filled, then hopped off at the other end. A lane on the inner side was kept vehicle-free by a waist-high colonnade of stone-core bollards, painted the usual hazard yellow.

  Stairs and an elevator appeared to be his only options forward. The dusty floor advertised that all recent traffic used the elevator. “This way.” Ben pushed a button and held the door for the two fighters to complete their mop-up. “Abel? The garage was heavily defended. We’re fine. Heading in.”

  “Be advised you’ll lose all comms inside the facility. Good hunting. Abel out.”

  “Awesome.” Zan and Wilder caught up and plastered themselves against the elevator walls. Wilder hit the down button, while Zan seized Ben and squeezed the captain into a sheltered forward corner.

  “You know I can shoot, too, right?” Ben complained.

  The Denali countered, “You know I hate 24-hour shifts on the bridge, right? Can’t spare a captain.”

  Ben chuckled. The doors opened only a handspan before blaster bolts shot in. Wilder hit the door-close button while firing. The moment they were out of sight, the trio shifted position for the next round, still not lining up with the door gap, and again not allowing the doors to fully open. Wilder didn’t fire that time, busy fiddling with a scavenged blaster. The third round, he hurled the blaster through, then closed the doors immediately.

  A boom! shook them. “Blasters make good grenades,” the ex-security goon explained unnecessarily. “They’re probably tipped over now, not dead.”

  “Ready,” Zan drawled blandly. This time as the doors opened, he leapt through. A couple robots still stood until he kicked them over, three in a single swipe. Then he leapt behind their lines and set about systematically blowing heads off. Ben preferred aiming at their wrist mechanism. Wilder favored their rolling bases.

  “She seems willing to waste a lot of these,” Ben observed, studying the corridor intersection. They stood at a T intersection, with the elevator as dead-end to a wide thoroughfare. The halls were crowded with steel utility shelves, with supplies stacked on them. He f
rowned in disapproval at a hodge-podge of plumbing joints, cafeteria cutlery, and a single style of children’s shoe in a preschool size. He supposed if he were a computer, one storage slot was as good as another. The junk was indexed, not sorted by theme. He sighed. That could be true of the whole facility.

  A native guide might have been nice. “No communications. No map. How do we find our people? Ideas?”

  Zan opened a door via a simple push-button. He used one of the captured blasters to burn out every control panel in the room. “Widen your concept of communication, cap. For every bot they send against us, destroy something that looks important.”

  “I like it,” Ben agreed. “What’s that, twenty bots so far? Shiva, if you’re listening, we destroy two-for-one, at least. Unless we find your computer cores. Those we blow sky high.”

  He and Wilder chose rooms and gave them the wanton destruction treatment, without bothering to check what the equipment did for a living. If this AI were smart – and it was – it should get some humans down here quick. “Watch out for humans. Someone might send a guide to limit the damage.”

  “Copy,” Zan agreed. “I vote for the wide hall first. More likely to house critical systems.” He continued that way while Ben and Wilder finished racking up their console destruction count on the narrower cross of the T. Ben also ducked briefly into the stairway to verify that the place offered only two levels – surface, and this warren below.

  “I’ve heard forty explosions,” Wilder noted mildly. His last target was tankage. A stream of water now flowed into the corridor where they regrouped. “Moving on?”

  Ben nodded. He hung back and listened as his warrior crew opened door after door. They paused to approach the next intersection cautiously. Wilder stuck out a mirror on the end of a blaster to look both ways. “Two polebots in the distance. Scurried away.”

  Ben studied a local map Abel had sent him en route. The schematic didn’t include the facilities section of the city – small town. But he noted a regular pattern to the way the residential sections were laid out. So far, the layout of these corridors matched that expectation. But of course, the purpose of the rooms was different. It yielded few clues to where their people might have been taken.

  Well, perhaps he had some clues. “Hang a left. Right is toward the lake, probably waterworks.”

  Wilder frowned at him, and peeked into the first door on the right. “Water,” he confirmed. He blew a hole in another tank.

  “If we touch untreated water, our nanites die,” Ben reminded him. They managed that much briefing.

  “Sorry. Forgot.”

  “We’re communicating,” Zan reminded them. “Every block of hallway, we break something. The price of wasting our time.”

  The captain huffed a laugh. “Fine. But not water. Conducts electricity. And I don’t need to remind you what happens if water hits sky drive fuel.” A town-sized crater would happen if the fuel depot was big enough.

  He opened another door. This room held janitorial supplies and robots of the ankle-high variety. They scuttled under steel shelving to hide. He eyed the racks of solvents warily. “Yeah, don’t shoot stuff at random. Consoles are fair game. Unfamiliar stuff, clear it with me.”

  They walked to the next set of doors, checking for their people. And a massive robot turned a corner and headed toward them, like a moving wall slightly narrower than the clear passage between the hall storage stacks. Wilder took a shot at it. The blast ricocheted and dumped a box of charred women’s underwear before them. The unharmed cargo robot calmly continued forward. It grappled onto a rack of steel parts, and turned it to block the hall. Peeking through the shelving, Ben watched the thing recede another 5 meters. It picked up another heavy case, pivoted, and placed it across their path.

  “Back up,” he decided. “See if they’re –” But another cargo bot had arrived to block them from the corridor he’d already decided was devoted to waterworks.

  They perforce returned to the main drag, which remained clear so far, and set off away from the elevators.

  A little floorbot approached them timidly. For the first time, a robot spoke to them, in a tinny little soprano voice. “Ben, it’s Sass! I –”

  Zan flipped it onto its back, and stomped it dead. Unlike the Pono moons, Denali supplied cockroach equivalents. Deadly, of course.

  Ben critiqued mildly, “We could have heard what it had to say first.”

  “It claimed it was Sass, cap!” Wilder growled, offended. “Shiva controls the robots. That’s all we know!” He yelled that last at the walls.

  Red emergency lights above the doors ahead began to strobe, as though beckoning them onward. Zan took aim and shot out four. They stopped.

  “For the love of Mars, stop breaking things!” cried a man’s voice ahead. “I’m coming out with my hands up!”

  51

  Nico stared at the offending directive in astonishment. He figured it would take hours to figure this out, or days. “Dad! I think I found it!”

  His father rose from his conversation with Bron to lean over Nico’s shoulder. The teen highlighted the offending code for him, then realized it was computer gibberish. “It’s a little arcane. This term is the result of a risk evaluator –”

  “Nico,” his dad interrupted. “I don’t do code. This line tells Shiva to kidnap children as hostages?”

  “No, it just…” Nico realized he was displaying the wrong code. “It’s this subsystem.” He applied a filter which selected about a third of the directives Sass had given them. “Sock, could I switch you to working on these?”

  The boy shrugged. He didn’t care. He just enjoyed untangling graphs. He had no idea what the instructions meant. But after Nico handed them over, he flipped back and forth to look at the tangle-teasing he’d already done. “I finished that bunch already.”

  Sock passed him back an orderly subgraph. They took another few minutes to track down a few missing directives, including the one Nico had stopped at. His yawning dad headed back to conversation with Sass and Bron.

  “No, Dad, this is it,” Nico insisted. “Where we can insert the rule that humans are off limits. Basically this says if a threat is bigger than this threshold, then disable the threat. But we can install a new rule that says humans are never a threat.”

  “Great job, buddy,” Dad hinted, joining Bron on the floor anyway. “But define human. In language Shiva cannot misinterpret.”

  “Right.” Nico sighed, and investigated that line of reasoning. But the code referenced the simple English word ‘human.’ He tried adding a new definition. “A human has human DNA?”

  Hugo offered, “I think that’s the wrong direction. The new rule would be that only humans can evaluate whether humans are a threat.”

  They all contemplated that one.

  “I like it for defense,” Cope reasoned. “Gives the locals the opportunity to use their AI against invaders. But how does that stop Shiva from taking control of a human being’s behavior?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Nico conceded.

  “‘I must not interfere with a human’s ability to think,’” Hugo decided. “Here, Nico, I’ll give you a hand translating that into code.”

  Nico was glad of the help. In the end, they needed not one, but a dozen directives. But he agreed with Hugo, the reasoning just couldn’t be rendered any more succinctly. They were careful not to add instructions in English. Too easy to misinterpret.

  “We’ve got it?” he asked Hugo.

  The scholar smiled at him. “My grandmother would be very proud.”

  “Say it like you mean it, Nico,” Dad advised. “Say ‘I got this!’ If it doesn’t work, we have a new baseline. Incremental improvement. Might take a couple passes.”

  “Right! Um.” Nico froze a moment. “I don’t have any way to give this to Sass.”

  “Sure you do,” Dad encouraged. “Sass! Ready to take dictation?”

  The polebot whirred and rolled its way to Nico. “Ready!”

  Nico and Hugo careful
ly read their pile of code to the attentive bowling ball. Nico read a whole line first, then Hugo backtracked and detailed the identifiers, spelling them out, d-for-dog, e-for-easy, numeral-nine, and so forth. Bored, Sock joined Bron and Dad to explore the cultural differences between Gannies, Loonies, and Martians, as demonstrated in soccer games.

  At last they finished. Sass the polebot said, “Thank you, Nico and Hugo. In case I can’t speak again, I am very proud to have met you. Now I’ll go try this.”

  “Good luck, Sass,” Dad said. “Give my regards to Clay. Proud of you, son. You, too, Sock. Impressed as hell.”

  Nico breathed out hugely, and slipped to the floor by Cope’s feet. “I thought your adventures sounded fun. Couldn’t imagine why you gave it all up to stay home and raise me.”

  “Fun sometimes,” Dad allowed. “When it’s not terrifying, or boring as hell. The engineering is a blast. And you sure get close to the people. But I sure hate it when it’s my fault someone gets hurt. That’s worst of all.”

  Nico nodded slowly. “You think Joey will make it?”

  Dad reached forward and bopped his knee. “That’s not on you, Nico. But yeah, I’m sure Ben got him already. Joey’s safe in the auto-doc, with his Yang-Yangs fixing him up.”

  The polebot whirred back to life to report in Sass’s sad voice. “Clay failed. We’ll try something else.”

  “Tante Sass? Does that mean Uncle Clay is –?” Nico asked fearfully. He didn’t really remember Clay. But Uncle Hunter, Clay’s son, was at the re-wedding. Was that only a few days ago?

  “He’s gone, son,” Dad said gently. “His body is dead on Thrive. That one’s not on you, either. Sass… You’ve still got people who care.”

  Nico gazed at the polebot’s bowling ball head. He wasn’t sure how to feel. Did he want to mourn the passing of a computer program?