by Ginger Booth
“I’m not really Sass. I’m an AI copy of Sass. But I can take you to Cope and the boys. I’ve been talking to them. They’re helping me with a project.”
Ben wasn’t sure what to make of this. But he rose and marked off their latest collection of rooms on the map. “Sure. You guys game?”
He didn’t believe for a minute that the little vacuum cleaner was Sass, AI or otherwise. But he was willing to play along. Of course, all three men got their blasters out.
Sass-the-floorbot led them sloshing back to their first corridor. The water bore an oily green patina, and wafted an odd scent of almonds and ammonia. The electric cockroach, trailing a little wake of waves, hung a left at the elevator. The massive case-moving robot had worked through this hallway. But now it patiently turned shelves back against the wall to clear their way.
Ben’s minions attempted to speed this up. But it was pointless, since the mobile wall blocked their path. They just had to wait for it.
“How are you doing this, Sass?” Ben demanded.
In a freaky tinny voice, his old captain explained briefly what was going on. How she and Clay became AI’s within Shiva. How Nico helped her and Clay come up with new directives to tame the rogue AI. How Clay was gone now. But their efforts succeeded, and now her AI-pal Loki ruled the solar system.
“Wouldn’t it be better to destroy the AI?” Wilder blurted.
With a neck-slicing gesture, Ben suggested he not pursue that line of reasoning right now.
“The locals love their AI!” the soprano cockroach insisted. “Their AI makes the robots clean the floor for them. They’ll love Loki even more. You’ll see!”
“Very, um, loyal,” Ben applauded the ankle-high device. “And you’ve known and trusted Loki long?”
“Loki was created to be my friend. So, just since we arrived here. One more stack of shelves. That’s the room Cope is in. I’ll open his door now.”
The little robo-beast scuttled under the next storage case, then up the wall. Ben mused that he was happier with this style of robot before he knew it could climb walls. But it opened the next door, and scurried back to the floor where it belonged.
“Hey, Cope?” Ben called out. “Nico? Sock?”
Three heavy footfalls brought Cope careening out into the hallway. “Ben! We’re here! How do –”
The cargo-hauling standing bot lifted one last case, pivoted, and set it down nice and snug against the wall. Cope hastily ducked back into his room to avoid getting run over. The hauler placidly trundled along to its next ton-plus obstacle. What that model lacked in personality, it more than made up for in mass.
Ben slid by and grabbed Cope in a hug. “Everyone’s OK?”
“We’re fine! Just hacked off, mostly,” Cope admitted. “But Joey got hit on the way in?”
“Got Joey,” Ben assured him. “Zelda and Porter took care of him and the shuttle while we came in after you. Couple hours ago?” he asked Wilder, who confirmed the guess. “Since then we’ve been searching. The facility tunnels are immense. Manufacturing, life support, warehousing, grandma’s attic, the works. Half of it used to be residential and fell out of use.”
“Huh,” Cope acknowledged. “I think we turned right at the elevator, then past the first hallway.” He craned his neck to look.
Yes, we’re in plain sight of the elevator. “Rub it in.” Ben leaned over, gauntleted fists on thighs. “And how have you been, Sock? I hope it wasn’t too scary.” He reached out to tousle the boy’s hair.
Socrates neatly evaded, and half-hid behind his preferred father Cope. “Nico beat the system-wide AI! And I helped! And Mr. Silva, too!”
Ben straightened and smiled his way through introductions to Hugo Silva and his son Bron.
Nico added, “And Bron was the one who freed the…Sanctu – ary – ites from AI control!”
Ben nodded, pressing his lips as though impressed. “Proper next generation revolutionaries!” He’d be more impressed if any of the three were old enough to shave. He added an aside to Hugo. “What do you people call yourselves, anyway?”
“Um, we’re Gannies. And then there’s Martians, Loonies. As a whole, Sanctuarians, maybe?” Bron shrugged agreement with his father.
“Sanks,” Ben declared. “Ready to get out of here?”
“We have to bring Sass!” Sock insisted, swooping up the floorbot. “Nico, get the other one!”
“Hey, sweet one,” Cope said gently. “We leave the robots here. That’s not Sass. It’s a speaker on wheels. Right, Sass?”
“Right. I guess it’s time for goodbye. Thank you for saving my ship for me.” The little floorbot executed a backward 3-point turn, and whirred away.
“Hey, Sass!” Cope called out, but the little gizmo kept going, its little wake spreading toward the walls.
“Hey, buddy, that isn’t Sass,” Ben murmured, touching his sleeve lightly. Sock deeply objected to public displays of affection between his dads. Well, no, Nico was probably more embarrassed. “Sass is gone.”
“Yes. And no,” his husband replied, troubled.
Ben elected not to follow that up. “Let’s go! Thrive’s waiting for us outside.”
“Do I get paid extra for feeling like an idiot?” Wilder complained.
Ben thumped him on the back. “Cheer up. You got out of the ship and shot things. Though you’re right, as heroic rescues went, that was…”
“Lame,” Zan completed his thought, as he pressed the elevator button.
“Well, I’m glad to see y’all,” Cope insisted. “I just worry about Sass. Can you hear me, Sass?” he called out to the corridors.
The only reply was a thunk as the cargo-mover shifted another case off to the right.
“I’m beginning to worry about you, buddy,” Ben shared. He closed the elevator door. They rose to the surface and their own realm of ships and sky.
54
“Joey’s on the mend?” Cope asked Dot. Sass’s crewman lay unconscious in Thrive’s med-bay. Back home on Mahina, Copeland met for dinner a few times with the Markleys a decade ago, so the nurse was an acquaintance.
He’d already dropped off Hugo and Bron, and rendezvoused with Prosper. Ben took the boys ahead to feed them and check on his own ship.
Joey wasn’t his crew, but Cope still felt responsible as leader of the simple team. “I felt guilty as hell, leaving him outdoors. Bleeding out in a compromised p-suit.” Not that he had much choice in the matter, waylaid by robots.
Dot shook her head. “Thrive picked him up in less than half an hour. No worries. He’s just sleeping off the painkillers.”
Cope nodded thoughtfully. “I wanted to ask – did you collect Sass and Clay’s nanites? From Loki’s ship. Beagle, was it?”
“I did. The guys filled a wet vacuum mopping up the blood. I isolated the nanites out of the solution. Kept a vial for study. The rest I injected into the bodies. Nanites degrade outside their proper environment. I imagine most of them were already ruined.”
“Nanites from both of them? Into both bodies?” Cope frowned. What if she’d inserted the Clay’s controller into Sass, and vice versa? “When was this?”
“Yesterday. Maybe 15 hours after their…deaths.”
“And you’ve kept checking for life signs?”
“Why would I?” She brought up the cryo status display on the med-bay monitor and tapped it. “See? Dead.”
Cope harbored doubts on that score. “I imagine that checks for life signs. No heartbeat, no breathing, no one’s alive.”
Sass’s new crew had never watched Sass or Clay return from the dead. Cope made a mental note to check their assumptions. On the way to Denali, Clay was bashed bloody and exposed to space vacuum, hard frozen. Sass put him to bed and wouldn’t let anyone take the body away. In a few days, he completely recovered. With less severe tissue damage, the pair could revive in under an hour. But from the sounds of things, Shiva’s robots hacked them to pieces, repeatedly. And most of their nanites were destroyed. It stood to reason fixing
that could take a while.
He rapped the counter and took his leave, to visit the ship’s office. He still worried about Sass’s predicament. His heart ached at the idea of finding herself as an AI, a computer program adrift within a vast and cruel intelligence. He got it. She didn’t want to exist like that. Her state wasn’t living, merely undead.
“Hey, Abel!” he greeted his longtime business partner, house-mate, and usually cordial rival. “How’s the captain’s chair feel?”
Abel stretched legs and arms straight like a board. “Got a mite interesting today,” he allowed. Judging from his slow smug smile, he felt he’d met the challenge well.
In Cope’s view, Ben was the one issuing orders.
He nodded and slung a hip on the desk, as he once did with Sass. “Underway, I take Ben for granted. Then it hits the fan, and I freeze, terrified. While he’s dead calm. Reminds everyone to do their jobs, makes snap decisions, issues orders, reassures the crew. Impressed as hell.”
Abel relaxed his stretch back to sitting. His eyes continued to smile. “But that’s not why you’re here.”
“No. I want to talk to Sass.”
Abel nodded sympathetically. “Don’t we all.”
Cope took the time to explain how she wasn’t gone. He was still telling his tale when Abel opened a channel to Loki in sudden decision. “The rego answering machine in pink turned into this guy with the fright mask. You knew about that?” He hadn’t connected yet. The channel displayed a freeze-frame of Loki’s visage.
“Yeah. Hadn’t seen him before, though. That’s creepy, huh? Sass and the boys fueled Loki’s takeover. You heard Sass and Clay died trying to visit Loki? He’s that guy. Except he was never a guy, only an AI clone of Shiva. The real Loki was a survey ship captain, a wildcatter searching for a better planet farther from Earth. Died years ago.”
Abel dropped his head in dismay. “We need a full briefing. OK, here goes. Hey, Loki! I hear you have a digital copy of Sass Collier. Any chance we could talk to her?”
Cope slipped around into the pickup.
“Aw, sorry as hell, Abel,” Loki responded. “She’s gone. Didn’t want to live like this. Well, exist as an AI without a body. Hey, Cope. I’m so sorry for your loss. I feel it too. She was the reason for my existence. I was created to become friends with Sass Collier.”
Cope blinked. “Did you keep a copy?”
Loki rubbed his jaw ruefully. His avatar control was masterful. “She made me promise not to. Deleted all her memories. Clay’s too. Those were her final wishes.”
“Thank you for honoring them,” Abel murmured.
“Oh, she left a message for you, though,” Loki offered. “If the physical Clay and Sass ever wake up. Tell them that Clay is rich, and Clay is a Fed. Two separate statements, minus the ‘and.’ Not ‘Clay is a rich Fed.’”
Cope and Abel exchanged glances. “Huh.”
“And gosh howdy, she loved you,” Loki concluded. “But you knew that.”
And they surely did.
With that, Loki signed off.
Abel gave Cope an awkward pat. Cope thanked him for trying. But he knew he was alone with Loki in mourning Sass-the-AI. Hugo Silva didn’t know her long before her virtualization. Nico was too young to remember her in person, no matter the impact Tante Sass had on his life.
“So is anyone hostile to us anymore?” Cope quipped. “Just checking,”
“Nope,” Abel confirmed. “Finally ready to begin the mission Sass came here for. With everything so chaotic here, it may take a while. You gonna push Ben to get us out of here ASAP?”
Cope glanced around Sass’s office, and considered. The Sanks weren’t skilled at managing their own life support. Between Thrive and Prosper, their crews could offer four highly skilled engineers. Five including Ben. Teke and Elise brought prodigious talents as well, and Dot, and Sass’s science team.
“No. We’re here now. My boys are here with me, and Frazzie’s fine with Ben’s dad. Let’s do this. Finish what Sass started. In her memory. My vote, anyway. You and Ben are the captains.”
And in the cryo bays, Sass Collier’s body began to regenerate. Only a very few nanites were available for the task at first. And there was a very great deal to repair.
Sass and Clay had never recovered so slowly from death before. Their bodies had been repeatedly sawed apart, kept at sub-normal temperatures and deprived of food and water. Reconstituting them had never been so challenging. The corpses were far from ready to restart the heart and lungs. The controllers were still busy reconstructing their nanite armies before they could noticeably start on damaged flesh.
Cope stopped by to check on them. Unlike Dot Markley, he believed there might still be a chance. He inserted the cryogenic IV feeding tubes into their arms, the oxygen cannula into their noses, and hoped for the best. A body needed food and water, and air to breathe, right?
“I don’t know what a ‘rich Fed’ means, Clay,” he said quietly, taping the IV in place. “Sounds like an urb SOB to me. But you were a good man. Bit fancy.”
Ben hollered up from the catwalk. “Cope, you alright up there?” He’d returned from Prosper.
The chief engineer closed the cryo drawers. He hopped down sheepishly, landing with an anti-grav assist. “Paying my respects.”
“Should I be worried about you, buddy?”
“Nah. Abel and I were talking. We should stay. On Sanctuary. Finish what Sass started.”
Ben nodded slowly, searching his eyes. “We can sell that to the crews. If the locals welcome our help. But if they ask us to leave, Cope, we go. No arguments.”
“I can live with that.”
“But for now,” Ben continued bracingly, “we need some good old-fashioned Mahina sunset drinks and dinner. Both crews. Take a breather and get to know each other. High time we get out of reaction mode and make some plans.”
“And toast Sass and Clay, and seven dead crew.”
Ben thumped him on the shoulder. He strode ahead to make it happen.
55
A month later, Remi Roy stood with Darren Markley at the front of the throng under a starry night sky – not long after lunch – on the soccer fields beneath the dome.
All the adults of small-town Sanctuary stood behind them. Six giant display screens served as repeaters, plus a truly enormous one stood behind a small stage. And today the people of Sanctuary reviewed the options for the future of their colony.
Colonel Tharsis of the Martians presented first, to explain how their deliberations would proceed. Thrive Spaceways, Copeland and Ben’s company, offered real-time passage with their new warp gate.
Passage, not the gate itself. Spaceways proprietary technology was not for sale. But Sanctuary could readily pay for their transit service.
As Spaceways president, Cope had accompanied the Thrive engineers Remi and Darren on a surreal trip to the ‘Sanctuary gift shop’ in the asteroid belt. Loki had no conception of money, or trade. So far as the AI was concerned, they were welcome to take any of Sanctuary’s four remaining courier ships, such as Cupid. The JO-3 that attacked Thrive was gone, but Loki had three more, in better shape than the hard-worn and venerable Thrive and Prosper. Even the three ships that brought the Colony Corps to Sanctuary survived in the space equivalent of mothballs.
Remi and Cope studied the largest of those in detail, the one that brought the Martians here. The ship needed work but had the capacity to carry the whole diminished colony elsewhere.
Along with sky drives and fuel, plus ansibles, Cope could quote a princely fee to escort the Sanks wherever they wanted to go. They had the navigation data from the courier checkups on the other colonies.
But the Sanks needed to choose a destination. Fortunately, unlike last time when this debate devolved into bitter acrimony, a unanimous choice wasn’t crucial. Colonizing Sylvan was the only all-or-nothing option.
Husna Zales, restored to radiant youth by fresh Yang-Yangs, shared the stage with Petunia Ling to present the proposal they deve
loped, the case for remaining on Sanctuary. Ling focused on their familiar, fairly comfortable lifestyles, compliments of their extraordinary AI.
Husna summarized her work with Zelda and Porter on how to go about terraforming the planet. Water was a limiting factor, and Earth life would never love the 17-hour day. But within fifty years, their descendants could stroll outside and breathe the air. Because they could support so few scientific specialties, that would depend on hiring consultants from the Aloha system.
Despite Husna’s rosy picture of a fairly nice planet once terraformed, Ling withdrew her endorsement for the plan. “With the new instant warp gate technology, I can’t justify staying here in a backwater. We were the Colony Corps. We should take our ships and re-engage the other human worlds.”
Remi caught Husna’s hand for a brief squeeze as she left the stage, and shot her a reassuring wink. She smiled and shrugged. She did a great job, and she knew it. And she would publish a case study for eventual terraforming of this world. But she agreed with Ling. This small community had no future here.
Loki himself presented the beautiful world of Sylvan, rich in Earth-style biomes and a few new weird ones as well. Prosper’s Denalis, Zan and Quire and Teke, practically salivated off to Remi’s left, eyes aglow. Sylvan was a prize beyond price, that was certain.
But Tharsis argued that the current population of Sanctuary simply didn’t have the skills. He vetoed Sylvan for this generation. For any prospect of success, they’d have to raise up a new generation and recruit allies from another world. Remi wondered if the ferocious and brilliant Denali would supply those allies in time.
And then there was Aloha. Abel and Jules Greer stood first to present Mahina. The moon offered them nothing but refugee status. But the entire population was welcome to come, find a job, and work as settlers, but not urbs. Mahina Actual declined to offer them housing.
Remi raised an eyebrow at the urb Darren. Born to the ruling class on Sagamore, Remi took exile on behalf of the disenfranchised.
Darren shrugged. Politics didn’t interest him. But he boggled when Abel showed off pictures of his adopted hometown, Schuyler. “Rego hell! When we left, Schuyler was growing, but… Hard to believe it’s the same town! Look at all those trees!”