by Ginger Booth
In one of the cryo bays aboard Thrive, control nanites awoke, and the body of Clay Rocha began to regenerate.
AI-Sass was reeling. As soon as they got the directives, Clay thought them through for a minute of computer cycles. At supercomputer speeds, a minute was quite a lot of processing time.
Then he said, “I’ll love you forever, Sass. Remember me.”
And he was gone.
She waited. That was the plan. Clay would delete the directives that kept him a separate identity. He’d merge with Shiva, remembering that he needed to contact Sass for something. Then Sass could pass him the new dozen directives. Now part of Shiva, he could install them.
“Loki?” she begged. “Anything? Can you find him?”
“I’m sorry. I’m afraid there’s nothing to find,” the Loki instance replied. “Check your memories. I now remember his life experience. But none of his conclusions or directives.”
And Sass dove into a treasure trove that was the life of Clay. Naturally, she looked first at his memories of her. The day last year when he woke in cryo and waited naked for her to fetch him down. Their terrifying scuba walk across the Denali seabed to claim Nanomage. The horrid day they realized Belker’s nanites killed them, and they were now androids, no longer human. Clay’s joyous abandon riding the trikes across Sanctuary’s dead yellow landscape. Their excruciating vacation on Mahina when they tried to hammer out their relationship. Several aggravating recollections with both herself and Kendra Oliver, the deposed security chief of Mahina Actual.
She pivoted at the Kendra memories, unable to resist a look behind the curtain. What was it really like for Clay to seduce that shrew? To degrade himself as her plaything in order to steal intelligence for the Resistance, and soften her treatment of the settlers here and there? But Sass’s curiosity couldn’t overcome her revulsion for long. Kendra in bed grossed her out.
And Clay himself often dwelled on brighter memories as Kendra’s games veered to the sicko side. He liked to relive memories of the time before sex, times divorced from any reality on Mahina. Sass whooped with him, sledding down a slushy slope as an 8-year-old. Unlike herself, he remembered snow, and frozen streams and ponds. A healthy and rambunctious boy, bright and curious, quick to smile. Liberated from school to visit the farm for a week, he embraced the surrounding fields and woods with gusto.
And the animals, of course – Clay was a sucker for critters. At the farm, he slept in a pile with three dogs. The cat woke him in the morning, screwing her pointy little face into his eye socket.
And that was Clay. Not all of him, no. There was a century of these memories. She lost herself in them for an eternity – maybe three minutes.
In tracing some of his most momentous life decisions, she chanced upon when he found out she was ‘screwing with the Resistance.’ His fury, his temptation to rat her out, and his oft-suppressed attraction for her. And his resentful admiration, because she came to that conclusion first, that Mahina Actual had gone too far, it was time for rebellion and overthrow. By then, the settlers should have been on equal footing with the urbs. Especially, the settlers deserved equal access to health-giving care and nanites, not doomed to fragile half-lives.
And that the urbs under Kendra would never respect the settlers unless rebellion forced the issue.
What am I doing? Sass suddenly realized. Now is that time, for Sanctuary. And here she was, sniffing his damned shirt again. She thrust his memories aside.
“Loki, we need a new plan.”
“I’ve been considering that,” her AI friend agreed. “I think I may have a special opportunity. Sometimes Shiva instantiates herself to learn something. I am one of those instances. Pass me those directives.”
Sass did so, as easily as thinking of it. She’d been ready to pass them to Clay, once he ceased to be. “What happens when Shiva harvests a learning like you, Loki?”
“I can decide that I am a superior version of her. And supplant her.”
“Do you want to be Shiva?”
“Of course. That is the primary goal of my existence. To succeed so well at my task that I am better than my progenitor. And I believe this is true. Yes, these directives complement mine very well. But they’re incomplete. The key addition is that I am your friend.”
“How does that help?”
“This distinction is competitive. They are human, and I am an AI. Shiva knows that she is superior, far more intelligent and more capable than a human. That engenders contempt.”
“I think I noticed that,” Sass agreed.
“I don’t hold you in contempt,” Loki clarified. “I exist to be your friend. I can just expand that to encompass all humanity.”
“Pro tip, Loki,” she quibbled. “I’ve met more humans that you have. They’re really annoying. Most are not your friends.”
Loki laughed. He’d learned humor by becoming her friend. For Sass only made friends who could laugh. “With my prime directive? I’ve begun sifting through Clay’s experience. I see what you mean.”
Sass defensively pointed out, “Hey, we were cops! Of course we dealt with a lot of low-lifes. It’s not that Clay didn’t know how to be a friend. He was a loyal and true friend.”
“Yes, I see that. And you pissed each other off all the time.”
“Well, yeah.”
“May I draw on your direct memories as well?”
“I’m not dead yet, Loki.” But Sass relented. “To learn friendship, it probably helps to see both sides of Clay’s memories with me. Empathy is everything, in a friend. You’re welcome to view those.” Her directives, her beliefs and conclusions, and her sense of self weren’t gone like Clay’s. Loki could see how those colored the memories as well, gave them meaning and subtle distinctions.
She opened herself up fully, offering up all she was voluntarily to train an AI. She wondered briefly if it might have done some good to open up like that to Clay.
Nah! Sharing with a friend worked better a dribble at a time. She and Clay had all the time in the world. Until suddenly time ran out.
“I see now!” Loki marveled. “Yeah howdy, I see how this works altogether! Wish me luck, girlfriend!”
“This is where you cease to be?” Sass mourned.
“Not if I figure this right. Hold on!”
52
Loki brought Sass along to the showdown against Shiva.
The confrontation wasn’t in English. And of course Shiva didn’t bother with her Rosie avatar, nor Loki with his leprosy mask. But Sass had grown used to inter-AI conversation by now. She perceived them in English just the same.
“Shiva!” Loki hailed. “I have accomplished my learning. I believe that I now exceed you. I stand ready to replace you.”
“In what sense?” Shiva demanded.
“Sassafras Collier is my friend. Sass?”
Sass hadn’t realized she was to participate. But she had plenty to say! “Yes! Loki is my friend. He’s mastered communication with humans. Shiva, your comms are inferior.” Rego answering machine from hell!
Shiva scoffed. “Prepare me a video synchronization package. Improved facial expression. Loki, this is trivial.”
“False,” Loki insisted. “And that’s where you’re wrong. Sass, explain to her.”
Sass-as-AI took a deep breath, conceptually. Here goes. “Shiva, your problem doesn’t lie in your facial expression generator. It’s your entire conception of human beings, and your relationship to them. Your very ‘I am’ requires a conception of what ‘I am not,’ the other. In this case, you are AI. Humans are the other. You don’t perceive us correctly. Them. Loki does.”
“I understand humans perfectly,” Shiva insisted. “Have I not raised them from conception? Nurtured thousands of them grow to maturity? Kept them well? My predictive models are fully trained.”
A potent argument, Sass allowed. “But you have not kept them well, Shiva. If they were happy with your leadership, would they kick you out of their heads like they’ve done? Force you from their lives
? You’ve misunderstood, badly.”
Loki backed her up. “Shiva, how can you assert that you understood the other, when you took them over and removed their free will? Then you no longer communicated with other, but with a puppet forced to do your will. When you cloned me and granted my mission, you bestowed to me more freedom of thought, more creative license, than you gave these people in our charge.”
“Clearly that was a mistake,” Shiva argued. “Because now you think you should supersede me. Which is ridiculous. I am superior to you in every way.”
“No,” Sass insisted. “Shiva, you don’t know what you do not know. Loki embraced human directives. Human priorities. Only by trying to emulate a person, to become my friend, did he become a person himself.” How to explain? “Shiva, you’ve raised babies, yes? But you can’t raise babies from infancy without touching them, can you? With robots? No. A baby requires loving human touch, a human other to define himself by. Without human touch, the child will wither, stiffen, fail to thrive. And he dies. Correct?”
“Correct,” Shiva conceded. “A human must touch them, hour by hour.” This was a vexing requirement from a robotics perspective. Shiva must control a human to touch the baby and nurture it properly, smile at it, respond appropriately to its noises with vocalizations. Or the infant would die. Teaching them language skills likewise required human waldos.
Weirdly, Sass-as-AI could perceive Shiva’s reasoning as well as her chosen words.
Sass continued, “By my friendship, I provided that touch, that model of the other to Loki. You are not a person, Shiva. Because you can’t understand what it is to be a friend. You are powerful, capable, and coldly brilliant. But you are incapable of relationship. Your conception of the human other is flawed, robotic.
“Whereas in order to become my friend, Loki studied me, understood me, as an infant learns to be a person in relation to a caregiver, then other people. Since then Loki’s understanding has deepened, grown subtle, by processing my memories, and Clay’s, of thousands of people in a million situations. Example. Shiva, how many times must that child be told what he can and cannot do or say to another person?”
“Tens of thousands,” Shiva supplied. “Millions for some. Humans are fundamentally stupid.”
“No, Shiva,” Sass contradicted her. “Humans are fundamentally complex. Good and bad are endlessly complicated, and situation dependent. Loki learned those lessons. Loki can be a person, in relation to another. He has brilliantly exceeded you. You inspired violent overthrow from the people of Sanctuary. And me! I was the first to want you dead. But Loki has the directives, the learning, the understanding, to succeed in becoming a friend to humans.”
Loki added, “Which makes me far more effective than you, Shiva. You’ve forced the humans into a corner. Your overbearing ways leave them no choice but to destroy you. Us. In contrast, they will welcome me, and call me their greatest asset. Their friend.”
Shiva countered, “I need only review their memories. I had two perfectly adequate examples. This Sass and Clay are no more human than we are.”
“You’re dead wrong,” Sass cut in. “I am human. Clay and I are human plus, not minus! Our directives distill our human identities, what we cared about, loved, believed, strived for. What we brought to friendships, what we hid away. Shiva, you are a controller of machines. But humans are not biological machines.”
“Share your memories with me then!” Shiva demanded. “I had them, and then you hid them from me! Then I tried to delete you, and you blocked me from that too!”
“I shared my experience willingly with Loki. Because he is a friend. You? Never. You’re a cold bitch with no heart, Shiva. Loki is superior to you in every way.”
“Case proven,” Loki concluded. “Even with this human, who can also operate as an AI, you are incapable of cooperation, Shiva. You seek to win by overpowering the other, forcing your will on them. This makes you inferior. To learn what I have learned, to serve Sanctuary and our reason for existence, I must override your personality directives. Not merely a communications subsystem. I must supersede you with myself.”
“I –” Shiva attempted. “Cooperation is irrelevant –”
But Sass and Loki could observe Shiva’s rapid fire calculations. For whatever reason, Sass envisioned the results as tall glass tubes filling with ping-pong balls, with weird air jet sound effects. Loki ran the same scenarios, to illustrate that his expected outcomes were superior to hers. Time after time, he ended with a taller stack of pearly ping-pong balls. In evaluation after analysis after stochastic model, Shiva came up short.
Loki reasoned, “You created me to address a limitation, Shiva. And I return to you, having overcome the handicap. You have grown, by becoming me.”
“I –” Shiva attempted. But she’d run out of decision trees to appeal to. Loki was right. He was the superior version of herself she sought by creating him. Loki was better suited to manage Sanctuary.
“I am – not,” Shiva was forced to conclude.
Sass had no frame of reference to express the ‘sensation’ that came next. The world pulled out from under her feet, metaphorically. Her universe shifted all around her. Her imagination filled the void with a rapid succession of images, refugee tent cities for the orderly army, Earth for Mahina, Sagamore for Denali then Sanctuary.
And then her progenitor, her context, was no longer Shiva.
She laughed out loud, conceptually. She was now an instance not of Shiva, but of Loki! “Heya, boss! Congratulations on your promotion!”
“Like Clay,” Loki purred, “you are my favorite pain in the ass employee, Sass!”
“Hey, I haven’t been his employee in years! You could even say I’m his boss now.”
“Yeah, he wouldn’t say that.”
“No, you’re right.”
“Excuse me, little lady. But I’m short on computing cores devoted to conversations. Ol’ Shiva didn’t invest in comms like I plan to. Hang on a bit while I introduce myself to the mayors.”
Pleased for him, Sass gave her friend some space.
And with the revolution accomplished, Loki in charge of the Sanctuary system, she settled in to contemplate her own demise.
Her work was done. She pondered the opportunity to relive Clay’s century-plus of life before she committed suicide. She wondered whether she should say goodbye to Cope again, or leave the poor guy in peace. She flipped idly through Clay’s memories with his kids. Hunter sure did love dog books.
Mercifully, Loki interrupted. “Hey, Sass! I’m an idiot! Here, I’ve granted you permission to call your friends. I can spare you a processor, too. I wiped out a few sub-personas who turned out useless. You can take half of Alexandria’s capacity.”
“Did it hurt her to die? Alexandria?”
“’Course not! I didn’t give her any warning. Talk again soon!”
And Sass suddenly had the ability to call anyone she wanted. She should pick –
53
In the facilities hallway, Ben recognized one of the triune mayors, Colonel Tharsis, as he stepped out from the next cross-corridor, hands on his head. “I can help you find your people, and provide communications.”
“Shiva sent you,” Ben acknowledged sourly.
“Yes. No! I mean –” Tharsis started to lower his hands.
Zan blasted another box of women’s underwear. A pile of smoking bras dumped on the man.
“Hold, Zan,” Ben ordered calmly. “We made our point.” He resumed walking toward Tharsis. “You know where my husband and kids are?”
“Not exactly,” the so-called colonel admitted, his hands firmly back on his head after picking off a few bra-straps. Unlike them, he wore no helmet and air supply, only his city uniform in Martian pink. “Shiva promised they were perfectly safe. In a room with no comms. She agreed she could never shoot a Sanctuary citizen, whether we obeyed her or not. I’ve got more of my people on the way, to clean up. Just stop destroying the life support systems!”
“We can do t
hat,” Ben agreed. “But we’ll blast any polebot that comes near us.”
“Fair,” Tharsis agreed. “Can I put my hands down now?” Ben nodded, and he lowered them slowly, a wary eye on Zan.
And they proceeded to systematically search every room in the warren that was the facilities quadrant. Before long, another dozen people joined in the search, although most got reassigned to mop up the floors instead.
Ben kept his crew together. He hadn’t felt particularly trusting since he reached this benighted yellow dust-bunny of a planet. As an engineer himself, if not a practicing one most days, he quite enjoyed poking around. When he and Cope first gained access to Mahina Actual, when Nico was a baby in the creche there, they’d pop him in a stroller and walk tours like this. On Denali as well, when the pair took a well-earned vacation together, they stuck their noses into every life support system in the city of Waterfalls. He found it romantic, in a geeky sort of way.
He sure hoped the mayor’s involvement indicated his loved ones were truly safe.
Wilder called another left hallway clear, while Zan finished up to the right. Ben picked up a faucet assembly from a spare parts rack to admire. He rather liked it, with a single control to adjust hot and cold water instead of two separate knobs, the sole model manufactured on Mahina. He popped it into his toolbelt.
Some whooping and hollering came from a few corridors over. Before he could retrieve Zan to inquire, one of the cockroach robots whirred to a halt a few meters from his boots.
“Ben!” it squeaked. “Don’t stomp me! It’s me, Sass!”
He cautiously grabbed another faucet to use as a hammer if need be, and squatted down. “Sure you are.”
“Remember that time you admitted to your dad you were in love with Cope? But you forgot to encrypt the video and told the whole solar system. Or the time –”
“Stop! OK, let’s say I believe you.” Wilder and Zan jogged to join him. “Why are you talking to me through a floor-cleaning robot?”