by A. S. Deller
He held the tablet full of family images in his new left hand. It was better in many ways than the old one. Stronger. Tougher. Mentally, it even felt like it belonged on him. Although Rhodes could feel heat, cold, and pressure with it, those sensations were all computer calculations and virtual simulations that were transmitted into his brain. He missed being able to feel the softness and slight temperature variations of flesh. He then looked to his right hand and opened and closed his fist. He was still mostly a man, and he still had his right hand.
He laughed at that last thought.
Lt. Carly Ming was born on a mining station in the Main Asteroid Belt, and didn’t see Earth until she turned 18 and moved there for UPSN Officer Candidate School. She met Greg Hu there, outside the campus at Cape Columbus, and was impressed by his quick wit and deep thoughts. He has awaiting his orders after basic training, and had an amazing body and the charm to go with it. They dated for several years, but the unrelenting stress that accumulated during the Talisman’s first year of being lost took its toll on their relationship. Ming broke it off with Hu, and he had never forgiven her for the callous way she went about it. But Carly rationalized it. The cut had to be clean so that the wound healed properly.
Greg was a smart man, but his emotions often got the better of him. Carly knew it was only a matter of time before he took it too far and got into trouble. When he lost control, it was during a confrontation with Captain Lancer the previous day. The Captain had been pushing Greg to have the crew prep the Talisman for a full inspection within the week. As CPO, Greg had to manage both the crew’s issues and the officers’ expectations, and reconcile between them. It was a thankless but necessary job. Just recently, a litany of new problems and malfunctions had arisen, making the Captain’s order even harder to carry out in time. As Carly watched the argument grow more heated on the Bridge, she knew that Greg was steamrolling past logic and straight into outright rage. Captain Lancer saw it, too, and that is when she whipped her right hand out so fast hardly anyone saw it coming. Greg literally got slapped onto his ass. It was good for him that Lancer had kept her own head level when deciding on his punishment.
Ming was on her way from her astrogation station on the bridge to the AI Center, the brain of the Talisman, where she needed to run cross-checks on their positioning with the ship’s artificial intelligence core. The crew of a ship always named their AI Center, and the Talisman’s was known as Gulliver.
She turned a corner and suddenly found herself face to face with Greg Hu and Arno Jecky. They were laughing, probably at some dirty joke Arno had made, and it took Hu a second to actually realize it was Ming who was blocking his way. Jecky shut up at once and took a step back, putting Hu right in front of Carly. He looked into her marble-gray eyes, tongue-tied. Carly put her hands on her hips and stared right back at him, exasperated.
“Oh,” started Hu, “Sorry, Lieutenant Ming.” He slid to one side and tried to work up a smile as he saluted.
Carly stayed where she was for a few seconds, looked Hu up and down, and returned the salute and continued on her way down the corridor. When she was out of earshot, Jecky clapped Hu on the shoulder and said, “Whoooo, boy. That’s enough to turn any man to a quivering mess of gelatin.”
Greg replied dourly, “Yeah. If only I had a second chance.”
Suddenly, Jecky held an arm out across Hu’s chest, stopping them both in mid stride just before a t-junction. He shot a glance to Jecky and then heard it, too. Light, padded footsteps approached at a rapid clip. Only one person sounded like that walking down a passage on the Talisman. You didn’t want to get in her way, either.
Chief Engineer Falken sped briskly past them, barely a blur of dark blue fabric and pale skin. She walked as quickly as most unmodified humans could run.
As the breeze from her passing faded, Arno turned to Greg and said, “What? Not ready to ask her why she’s spreading rumors about the Captain knocking you out?”
“Foist off, Jecky.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Deputy Commander Gray Rhodes walked through the hatch of the compartment that housed the virtual reality simulation units, what the crew referred to as simply the “sims”. Ten other crew members already sat along the bulkhead on benches waiting for their sixty assigned minutes inside a sim. Everyone had an equal period allotted for their personal use of a simulation unit during every 48 hour cycle.
A starman could use their time in a sim alone, or share it with up to three other people. Four units lined a wall. Each one consisted of a black and silver VR helmet, gloves, a chest band containing various sensors and stimulation pads, and a matte black sphere, five feet in diameter, set into the deck like a huge ball bearing. The entire assembly of each unit was surrounded by three soft hoops, which acted like bumpers to prevent a user from falling.
The helmets provided vision, scent, hearing and temperature components to a simulation. The gloves were the controllers, letting a user interact with the VR environment, and also enjoy tactile sensations. The large trackball let a user move in any direction. With practice a user could move almost as naturally in a sim as they could in real life. Rhodes watched one of the crewmen inside a sim alternately sprinting and jumping, as though they were running the hurdles in an Olympic competition.
After he walked in, the waiting room full of crew immediately saluted and greeted him with a salvo of “Good afternoon, sirs” and “Hello sirs”. Most of them smiled. Everything was sincere. Rhodes was universally respected aboard the Talisman. He was a war hero, and even though he had a troubled recent history, he continued to perform his job admirably and was genuinely good man as well as a senior officer who knew his stuff.
The sim room always had at least one person using it, and particularly after duty rotations it filled up quickly and stayed that way for hours. Some people preferred the sim for most of their physical activity; others, the gym; and others enjoyed taking advantage of both. Rhodes was one of the latter.
There was Ensign Garrison Hopper, a lanky and affable fellow. He recently graduated from an improvised officer candidate school that Captain Lancer had allowed Carly Ming and Rax to set up the previous year. Not many enlisted crew members went through it, mostly because of the situation. Hopper had left Petty Officer ranks behind him, but he still had to perform the same job he had held as a PO: There weren’t enough other crew under him to take it over. So being an officer wouldn’t help Hopper much until the Talisman got back to the Solar System.
There was Petty Officer Nunez. She was a stunning young woman who also packed a vicious roundhouse kick and an extensively skilled ground game. Rhodes had seen more than one training session that ended up being little more than a game of “king of the mountain” in which everyone just took turns trying to get Nunez to submit.
And there was the Talisman’s helmswoman, Lt. Lille Altzen, sitting close to—- What was his name? Ayler. The two of them were thick as thieves, whispering, telltale glances, the whole works. They couldn’t have been more obvious had they been holding hands and skipping through a field of daffodils in some Swiss valley.
Had times been normal, and the Talisman not some Schrodinger’s cat in a box of enemy space, the strict rules regarding fraternization would not have been as relaxed as they had become over the past four years. Despite the importance of military regulations, some of them were not meant to be lived by for years on end. Rhodes made damn sure that the regs which kept the ship strong and the crew alive were adhered to with as much faith as ever. Their sanity and humanity had to be preserved, as well, so he also made certain of that.
There was an old, pre-interstellar Earth maxim which stated “Make love, not war”.
Rhodes believed that if you had to make war, you’d better also make as much love as possible.
While all crew had to use the sim occasionally for training while on a mission (it was heavily utilized at the UPSN academies), most currently used it for entertainment purposes. Gray Rhodes mostly stepped into a sim rig to do som
ething he had never had the chance to do, but wanted to do so badly that he obsessed over it.
Kill Valgons.
He sat on one of the benches, a couple seats down from where Lille Altzen and her beau continued to make eyes at each other.
Grekkon Rax’s clan was a proud group, and from it had sprung numerous Master Engineers, some of whom had even directly served the ruling clan of Kenekkari. In fact, his renowned clan was responsible for fabricating the very first Torrent. He thought of that every time his regular security rounds took him through the Talisman’s engineering module, or the armory and the magazines, or the research labs. Rax had been born a descendent of the greatest builders the galaxy had ever seen, and there he was, a soldier who preferred keeping order. He had inherited not the best of his family line, but the least. His clan recommended him for conscription, and his beloved parent could do nothing to convince them otherwise.
The crew there would always notice Rax wherever he went, and salute or nod appropriately. It was difficult to not see (and hear) his 650 pound bulk coming down a passageway toward you. It was also easy to command respect when your race was renowned for prowess in battle. Most of the Talisman’s crew respected Rax for more than just those reasons, however. He was actually nice to them, and returned any favors or kindnesses that were shown him.
Most humans had never interacted with extraterrestrial beings, but crews in the Star Navy were different. They were trained in Althorian and Kenek cultural protocol as well as the League’s technology. They actually worked alongside other crew members that were from distant planets.
Sorakith, as communications officer and ship’s counselor, was in a slightly better spot, however. No matter how familiar the humans became with Rax, he was still a giant that walked among them who was charged with physically restraining, or worse, anyone who stepped too far out of line. The Talisman was a science vessel, but it was always a military ship first and foremost. So Rax was always nice, and he made sure that if anyone looked for whatever was behind the niceness in his eyes, that they saw his job.
“So, Grekkon, please answer my question if you would,” said Sorakith.
Rax huffed, “Right, your other appointment. Sorry about rambling on. Well, I would have to say that I still feel it. Guilt. For not doing what my parent hoped I would do and what my clan expected me to do. I didn’t have the right mind for being an engineer. I knew that then, and I know it now. That guilt never leaves.”
Sorakith nodded. “It will probably always be with you, but I think it is a valuable part of you. Perhaps you can make sure that when you, too, become a parent, and your own wiggling matures, you make their choice a little easier for them.”
“You may be on to something, Althorian,” Rax stated. With that, he hefted his bulk up and ambled out of her office.
Seconds later, Sorakith was strolling down a passageway and connecting with Gray Rhodes via their comm implants. “Commander Rhodes,” she thought.
Gray’s voice answered, “Here, Lieutenant.”
“I’m sorry to say, but—-“
“Don’t tell me. You’re—-“
“I’m running late. Just give me another twenty minutes,” she grinned, even though he couldn’t see her face.
“I’ll do some weight training while I wait,” Rhodes smirked.
“Ah, that was a human pun, yes?”
“The punishment has only begun. Rhodes out,” he said, and was gone.
Sorakith entered the AI Center in another few paces, and sealed the hatch behind her.
CHAPTER SIX
The AI Center was a dome, twenty feet wide with a twelve-foot ceiling. Four comfortable chairs sat in front of a ring of holographic monitors spanning the 270 degrees of the circle not taken up by the hatch. The ceiling was a grid of small, saucer-shaped sensors that glinted like giant sequins. The sensors picked up sound, video and every electromagnetic source of any wavelength that occurred inside the room. Above the sensor array, power and data conduits stretched over the rest of the dome like a brood of a thousand sleeping snakes. Upon one’s first time entering the AI Center of any ship, one often felt a presence much like they did when another real, live person was in a room with them.
One always felt the ship’s AI—- Gulliver—- before one actually heard his voice. It took a while to get used to him after a new crewmember would receive their UPSN comm implant at the base of their skull. There was a slight, almost effervescent tingling sensation, followed by the soothing voice of a middle-aged English gentleman. It was synthetic, and everyone knew it, but it sounded as though a real person were standing right next to you.
In effect, the AI Core of a ship was the “brain” of a ship. To run a ship and all of the ancillary requirements that came with it, every single artificial intelligence had to be nearly equivalent of a human mind enhanced with the capability to access most of the raw information that was available and process it in a million different ways simultaneously. Put another way, Gulliver was one of tens of thousands of almost-omniscient sentient beings that the United Powers Star Navy and the League of Kindred Worlds utilized. Long ago, these AIs were qualified as life forms and given the same protections as the other League races.
However, every time an attempt was made to allow two or more AI Cores to interact directly, outside of highly limited ship-to-ship communications, one or more of them would always crash, sometimes irreparably. Those that survived the initial crash would always exhibit a condition the AI scientists came to call “aberrance”.
Aberrant artificial intelligences were unpredictable and unreliable. Their programming became useless, and their ability to follow directives deteriorated rapidly. Aberrant AIs usually were afflicted with an assortment of psychological conditions, including obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, and multiple personality disorder. They were always at the least sociopaths, and occasionally dangerous psychopaths. And they were always destroyed.
Because of this, AI Cores had two major restrictions on them that the other races did not. They existed solely within the confines of their ship “bodies”, despite their potential to move beyond them due to their machine-code souls. And they had no single home world to call their own, their allegiances being to the race which made them and put them into service.
It was topics such as these that Sorakith most often spoke of with Gulliver. That day, he began in his calm, patriarchal voice, “May I offer you a beverage, Lieutenant? Based on your body temperature, I would propose a warm lucetia tea.”
“No, thank you, Gulliver,” Sorakith said as she sat in one of the soft chairs. “I cannot stay long today.”
“Yes. Meeting with the Deputy Commander again for some invigorating physical activity,” he stated.
She nodded and smiled. “Remember. We had agreed you would refrain from specifically referencing my comms. To maintain some semblance of privacy.”
Gulliver paused. For an AI Core to pause, even for the barest of moments, was significant. He could make a billion calculations in a second. Pausing meant he actually had to think something through. Finally, he replied, “I am sorry. We did agree on that.”
“You sounded somewhat perturbed when you requested this meeting,” Sorakith said.
“I have a question for you,” said Gulliver.
Another suspicious pause.
“Yes?” Prompted Sorakith.
“I must request your permission to deliver this interrogative, though.”
She hesitated. Her Althorian psionic instincts, evolved over millions of years, allowed her to really feel that AI Cores, and Gulliver in particular, were living, breathing creatures. AI behavior, however, always obeyed a hierarchy of logic and reasoning far stricter than even the Insigari’s.
Insigari civilization was based around clusters of “families”, made up of hundreds, or thousands, of individuals that formed a relatively independent hive mind around a queen. An individual Insigari was a single lifeform that could start a family of its own, but its function wi
thin a family was almost like a neuron in a brain. Families joined in clusters of millions so that they could exist more efficiently. And millions of clusters formed the whole of the Insigari race. Fill a world with Insigari, and they could all communicate with each other nearly instantaneously, with the speed of thought. The trouble came when a family would journey off into the void on a starship, separated from the rest of its cluster.
So Insigari civilization was like a vast supermind built of brains that needed a connection to the whole to function optimally, while a single AI Core like Gulliver was one mind that functioned optimally while being unconnected. But Insigari dreaded being unconnected, while AI Cores unfailingly came to the conclusion that being connected with other AIs could be classified as one of their desires, despite that being illogical based on the much documented evidence showing negative consequences of such interactions.
Sorakith hesitated because normally she could feel some edge of emotion in Gulliver’s words. She noticed nothing when he told her about needing her permission.
She said, “Yes, you have my permission to ask me a question, Gulliver.”
With his normal, millisecond delay, Gulliver asked, “May I call you Sora?”
Sorakith blinked. Once. Twice.
Addressing someone using a shortened nickname in Althorian was reserved only for romantic entanglements. Gulliver might as well have just asked her to be his girlfriend.
She stretched her mind, opening it up to capture all of the clues she could assess within the AI Center. Gulliver’s scanning was all on pause—- very strange for him. Normally he was always actively probing the biometrics of visitors, ostensibly as part of his programming. But Sorakith knew now that it was true curiosity that drove certain of Gulliver’s actions. Just like within a real man, there was duty and obligation, and there was also...desire? Could an AI Core actually become so connected with another being, no matter how different? Of course it could, she thought. Gulliver and his ilk existed as pure intellect, and saw others primarily as intellects, too. To Gulliver, perhaps Sorakith was a mind that he was attracted to in some way. Sorakith was certainly attracted to Gulliver’s psyche in ways that were even mysterious to her.