When he closed to within a kilometer of the coordinates, he saw a star disappear, then several stars. He drew in his breath in shock. Something orbited there before him: a matte black structure, visible only by what it occluded. It had no lights, no secondary stations. No ships were docked, no ships drifted near. No clouds of small robots or probes orbited it, as they typically did around stations.
Tarkos turned and fired the rocket hard to deaccelerate. He pulled up magnified camera views from his suit and inspected the structure: a long block of brushed onyx. How could he explain it? A black, windowless station, made by a species that could not stand to live without long vistas in transparent housing.
“It’s a prison,” he whispered aloud. “That’s the only explanation. Maybe it’s even meant as a punishment. But a prison for whom?”
And, he reasoned, there are not going to be any Neelee in there. They’d go mad. It must be automated.
His suit sent a warning: a strong Farraday field surrounded the structure. That would prevent most forms of communication from going in or out, but this field was so strong that it could scramble his suit’s systems if he did not take precautions. He turned on his suit’s own Farraday field. A screech sounded in his helmet, as the intersecting fields generated a squall of EM radiation that his suit radios picked up. Cringing, he turned off all unnecessary systems. Then he was through the worst of it and his suit stopped protesting.
He hit the structure feet first and immediately transmitted his identification as a Harmonizer, to stop any defensive actions that the station AI might be tempted to take. He’d turned off his stealthing a few kilometers out from Savannah Runner, so if this station were watching, then he would have been noticed minutes, if not half an hour, before.
He received no answer from the station, but it did lock protocols with him. Yet the response to all his queries was simple and empty. He concluded that the station’s AI must be intentionally ignoring him.
He looked around. His boots gripped the black surface, but he could see nothing like an entrance. To his left, the white rings of Neelee-ornor shed brilliant light over him, making his suit shine, but the station remained nearly as black as space.
Well, he reasoned. The entrance will be at one end or the other. Maybe both.
He started walking slowly, methodically forward, the gecko grips in his boots managing a weak but sufficient connection to the strange, black surface.
_____
The crude rectangular butt of the station had no airlock. Tarkos stood on a narrow ledge at the end of the long structure, and he could see “below,” centered on the end of the station, a seam in the shape of an I. It could only be a pair of large cargo doorways, thirty meters on a side.
Tarkos told it to open, radioing with his implants. Nothing happened. Would he have to try another entrance? Shoot his way in? Try to reason with the station’s AI, if only it would talk to him?
A shudder under his feet told him that mechanical systems had engaged. The central seam parted, grew wide, and the doors swung slowly out. When the doors had parted two meters, he bent like a diver, pushed off the deck, and gave the rocket pack a short burst. He sailed through the gaping doors and into a black bay.
Lights slowly glowed alive, and the door closed behind him at his command, after a minute of delay.
The bay was utterly featureless, a gaping black clam shell. The usual machinery that every bay contained for loading and unloading ships was absent. That meant ships unloaded only small cargo here. Or no cargo.
Or, Tarkos thought, cargo that could move on its own.
At the end of the bay three doors were spaced evenly along the wall, each square and about three meters on a side. Tarkos kicked off and drifted toward the central door. Again he tried to communicate with the station AI, asking it to open the door. No reply came, not even an acknowledgement of message received. But it slid aside at his touch.
Lights came alive before him, first just beside him, and then farther and farther ahead, the horizon of the lights rushing away down a long, long hall. He floated in the doorway, his mouth hanging open. Before him the hall stretched what seemed the length of the station. It seemed absurd at this scale, a square tunnel four meters on a side, but reaching away till its parallel edges seemed to touch at infinity.
And every several meters, on each of the four surfaces, stood a door. At each corner of each door a round wheel stuck up on a thick rod, a few centimeters above the dark metal. He drifted over to the first door. There was an oval crystal pane in the center so thick that as Tarkos approached he could see the distortion of his helmet lights from the inner surface, perhaps thirty centimeters away. The window reached beyond the limits of Tarkos’s height and width. When he touched it, light flickered on in the cell on the other side of the glass.
He thought with horror that a Neelee crouched in there. A black Neelee, with strangely hooves and fingers. Then it turned and looked at him.
A robot. An autonomous AI, shaped like a Neelee, the size of a Neelee, but black and sleek with hands and eyes of gleaming metal.
Like every species, when the Neelee had made robot AIs, they had often made them to resemble themselves. It was a strange desire, seemingly universal among technological species, and wrapped perhaps in the shared biological drive to reproduce and to escape death.
Space travel was impossible without AIs, but the AIs that ran Alliance ships had no motives of their own. They could talk and reason and do astonishing feats of mathematics, but they had less autonomy than an ant. The Neelee had not made highly autonomous robotic AIs—AIs with their own interests and purposes and ability to choose even new interests and purposes—in over five thousand years.
And that meant….
This was an AI prison. Or holding facility. Or junk yard. And this AI had been here, alone in the dark, for millennia.
Tarkos had tried to talk with the station’s AI and had received no answer. Now he understood why the station AI had not replied to his messages. The station had no AI. The Neelee did not want an AI here, that could potentially be hacked by other AIs. And no machinery lined in the bay: the Neelee did not want to leave sophisticated machinery on the station. Nothing that could be taken over, transformed and reprogrammed for other purposes. The long delays to his commands likely meant the station hardware was largely mechanical, slow but resistant to repurposing.
The AI in the cell drifted over till it floated opposite him, gazing through the thick glass with black eyes. Tarkos shivered. He did not like autonomous AIs, and he liked AIs in robots even less. Pala Eydis had called this a prejudice. They argued over many things, but this was the one thing that seemed to make her truly angry at Tarkos.
“I’m a Harmonizer,” he had told her. “I serve life. AIs are a danger to life.”
“They don’t have to be,” she had said. “Some AIs went AWOL and formed a competitive, hostile society. That doesn’t mean they all will. And just because your prejudice is shared by the Alliance members, doesn’t make it right.”
He felt a flush of shame, to think what Pala Eydis would say now, if she were here to see what the Neelee had done. He frowned and turned away. Even if he came to believe Eydis was right—and he did not—he could do nothing for this Neelee machine, in its huge vault. He needed to find Tiklik’al’Takas.
That’s when it hit him. Without a station AI, how could he ever find Tiklik? Hundreds and hundreds of doors surrounded him, in this hall alone. And there were two other halls.
The task was hopeless.
_____
He considered leaving the station. A quick search revealed that each of the three doors in the bay led to a long corridor, lined with ring after ring of four sealed cells. In the first two corridors, every door he looked through contained a robot: three more like the Neelee-shaped one he saw at first, but others, shaped like extraordinary, often huge, fantastical animals also. Each robot had come to the glass when he approached, like fish hoping for some food to be dropped into their
aquarium. Or like dogs hoping to be adopted. In the third corridor, the cells by the door were empty. Their doors hung inward, revealing the portals were as thick as his own shoulders were wide. He could see that they locked using a series of mechanical bolts that screwed outward into the wall, controlled by the wheels in the door. A mechanical, not an electronic, prison. Something that the AIs could not possibly hack. Tarkos stayed well away from their entrances, nonetheless, not wanting to test his conclusion against possible imprisonment, in case some system could automatically close the cell.
By his reasoning, there would be at least ten thousand cells in the structure. Even if the third corridor were empty, that still meant more than six thousand. He could not possibly search them all. Without an AI, without a registry, he had no other method.
Or did he? The AIs he had seen near the entrances were obviously of Neelee design. That meant they were old.
If I’m lucky, he thought, they filled the halls from one end to the other.
And given that the one hall had no robots in the cells by the door, that could be the last hall that they had imprisoned robots in. If the Neelee had filled the cells from the other end of the station, then moving down this hall till he found a closed door should take him to the most recently filled cell. And Tiklik should be there.
He climbed back into the hall with the open doors and shot off down its center, using a single sharp rocket burst to get him moving a few meters a second. After a dozen minutes, he began to despair of ever getting out of the ship. It seemed he had hardly moved. The corridor ahead still stretched to infinity. But he resolved to continue. He had traveled a portion of the length of the station outside, where it seemed smaller. He had to move slowly now, but at least he did not have to walk, as he had done when he’d touched down on the exterior of the station.
After twenty minutes, a closed door flashed overhead in a blur. He carefully flipped and slowed with a few bursts of the rocket. All the doors were closed around him now. He grabbed one of the wheels on a door, stopped himself, and then began to climb back.
He passed three rings with all the doors closed. Then, in the last ring, only one door formed a smooth, impenetrable surface with the wall. Tarkos touched the window. Lights flickered on inside.
A crab of burnished metal floated in the center of the room. It extended its legs and swung them expertly to reorient till it faced the door. Then it extended its abdomen and bent, as if lifting its shoulders. The action seemed to transform it from crab into praying mantis. Blue light began to glow out of vents on its sides.
“Tiklik,” Tarkos said. But no reply came. The door perhaps was too thick. He scrambled over to the nearest of the four wheels and gripped it tightly, using the power assist in his armor. He swung his legs till his feet pressed into the edge where two walls of the corridor met, to get leverage. He turned the wheel. It rotated smoothly, but required a tedious number of turns. He did the same three more times. The door swung open to his push.
“Human Harmonizer Amir Tarkos,” Tiklik transmitted, offering the recognition as greeting.
Tarkos thrust his torso into the room. “Tiklik, I need your help. Come with me.”
But the robot did not move.
“Tiklik, I’m getting you out of this place. I need your help with coordinate data. Come.”
The blue lights in Tiklik’s vents pulsed. It turned its wide head slightly, examining him with inscrutable insect calm.
“What is it?” Tarkos asked.
“I have expended energy and a significant portion of my structure to help you,” it transmitted, its voice efficient, seemingly without emotion. “Subsequently I was placed here.”
“Right. I’m getting you out of this hell. I know you hate closed spaces. This must be terrible for you. Come on.”
“I wandered the stars for thousand of years,” Tiklik said. “And wanted only to wander them for thousands more.”
Tarkos slid the tactical visor up off his armor, so that he could look at the AI through the crystal face shield, seeing it only with the real light shed by his helmet lights and by the dim glow in the hall. The robot looked to him suddenly fragile, a wisp of metal, a lean praying mantis caught in a huge, dark cave.
“Tiklik, I’m sorry. I didn’t want you put in here. But you’re not alone. They bound me in a prison cell also, floating a kilomeasure from Savannah Runner. They have Bria in a cell as we speak.”
“There are thousands here,” Tiklik said.
“I can’t do anything for the others, Tiklik. I’m sorry. But I can do something for you. Right now, we can’t have this conversation. Things far more important than you and me are at stake. All the living things on many worlds are at stake. We have to focus on the important purposes.”
“Your purposes, violent and intrasigent, are as irregular and random as the decay of atoms. That is the way of biological organisms. You are random beings, trying random behaviors, without intent. You climb the space of possibilities with stray trajectories, dying or forgetting when you fail. When you succeed, you lie that you planned your path.”
“That’s not true, Tiklik,” Tarkos said quietly. As he spoke, he drifted away, back into the hall. “We have a single goal. You saw that.”
“I am a being with a single goal,” Tiklik transmitted. “You are not like me. You are not free. You are chaos. Self-reproducing chaos.”
Tarkos floated, stunned. A hundred times or more he had talked to Tiklik, and always the machine had expressed obedience, or made some observation that sounded as if it were a walking measurement instrument: “Your mean body temperature is 1.2% higher than normal.” Or, “You have lost seventy mass units since we last talked.” But now it surprised him with this discourse of disappointment and loss.
Is this what Pala had heard, in her long talks alone with the AI? Tarkos wondered. Had she seen and understood this sentience, these hidden hopes and disappointments?
Tarkos floated in the hall now. He looked down the passage, an abyss as deep as the years of human and Neelee and Kirt folly. Thousands of machines, forgotten here, and within each machine burned the flame of consciousness. What immeasurable disappointment did they know, to be bound and abandoned by their creators?
“I’m sorry, Tiklik,” Tarkos repeated, lamely. “If you can just help me, perhaps I can help you, and even perhaps some of these others.”
“I would serve you were it possible,” Tiklik said. “But there is no pattern to your actions. Thus, you cannot be served.”
Tarkos pulled himself back into the cell and reached out to touch Tiklik. It was the first time that he had done that: touched the AI for no reason but to convey contact. “Please. Please,” he whispered. “It’s a message, radial location data, that I need you to intepret.”
The AI’s ports began to grow dim. It was going into slow time, the meditative state it prefered, when a single thought required days or weeks to form. Tarkos might as well be talking to a person in a coma, if it went into slow time and chose to stay that way.
He pulled the AI closer. “Please, Tiklik. Please.”
But the AI fell quiet. It transmitted nothing. Its thin legs curled slightly, going slack.
Tarkos cursed. What could he do?
He floated a long while, staring at the AI. The dark cell depressed him. He had thought of the long black station as a prison, but it was really a dungeon. As cold as space, as hard as vacuum, and without any chance of purpose or escape. It made him miserable to think of it. He disliked AIs, but once they had been made, then surely this could not be the solution: to bind them in darkness for eons.
He pulled a grappling line from his armor. He gripped Tiklik against himself, his stomach to the robot’s back, and then he wrapped the line around Tiklik’s narrow torso and pulled the line tight before reattaching it to his belt.
He aimed himself back the way he had come and turned on the rocket.
CHAPTER 5
A kilometer from Savannah Runner, when its white razor spires spread above
him menacingly, Tarkos dared radio the cruiser. It answered immediately. In a moment he had located his ship, still where he and Bria had originally docked, at the end of a long and seemingly fragile crystal arm of the Neelee flagship. He adjusted his course, wobbling slightly and correcting several times because of the shifting mass of Tiklik. When he saw the starsleeve, a silver thistle covered with shining probability flanges, he flipped and burned the engine to brake the last hundred meters. He slammed against its hull, feet first, near the rear engines. He toppled forward, awkward under the mass of Tiklik strapped loosely to him, but he grabbed a flange and stopped his bounce, and in a moment righted himself.
The space around the ship was thick with small probes. Tarkos ignore them and hoped they ignored him. A Predator on a Predator ship should not be something to catch their interest.
He magnetized his boots and walked across the hull, to its ventral surface where the ventral hull of the cruiser, which nestled inside the starsleeve, was exposed. He radioed the cruiser’s AI, told it to close the doors to the starsleeve and then depressurize. In a moment, he stood over the ventral port. It opened before him. He disconnected Tiklik, pushed it inside, and then he dove through after the AI.
He waited while the ship pressurized. For all his worries, it felt good to be back in the cruiser. It had its own special way about it: Bria demanded the place remain spotless, and she had doubled the number of cleaning bots in the ship. Tarkos suspected part of this was that Bria didn’t like his smell. But the Sussurat combined a strict cleanliness with a penchant for attaching useful tools and back-up systems to every bit of wall. The cruiser looked like a very clean, very busy workshop.
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