by E. M. Foner
“I accept your invitation on behalf of the Dollnick merchants,” Crute informed Kelly. “We also knew about the trade show, but I didn’t think it was polite to bring it up first.”
“You may as well just send an invitation to all of the cultural attachés on the station,” Czeros added.
“But I’m on nesting, I mean, maternity leave,” Kelly protested. “Just stop back in a couple of hours and see the temporary acting junior consul. She and the embassy manager are the ones arranging for the show. I realize the rest of you keep to your own hours, but it’s too early in the morning for me to be dealing with this, and I haven’t even had breakfast yet!”
The four alien ambassadors exchanged looks, and then grudgingly followed Kelly out into the corridor. The Horten ambassador was just arriving, but Bork cut him off at the pass.
“You’re too late, or too early, depending on how you look at it,” the Drazen ambassador informed the Horten. “Ambassador McAllister has had a long night and she’s turning in for the morning. The spy craft trade show is still a secret, but when it’s announced, I’m sure your merchants and intelligence agents will be welcome to attend. If you’re interested in forming an intelligence partnership with the humans, you’ll have to speak with us first.”
Kelly opened her mouth to object, but then decided she’d leave it all for Blythe and Clive to straighten out. Besides, the longer she hung around the embassy, the more ambassadors hawking recordings of the secret EarthCent Intelligence meeting she was liable to run into, and she’d had enough of that for one day.
Nine
“Just stand still and give me some shade,” Lynx instructed her partner as she opened the back of the camera and fed in the leader from the film. “If I do this right, I can squeeze an extra exposure or two out of the roll.”
“I appreciate technology as much as the next artificial person, but this whole photographic process strikes me as insanely complicated,” A.P. commented. “If I understood your explanation, the lens focuses light on this photosensitive film. You need to adjust the focal distance manually by twisting the barrel while looking through the little window, but first you have to guess how long to expose the film and how much light to let in, using those control rings.”
“You forgot the light meter,” Lynx replied as she began winding the film forward. “The meter tells me where I should set the aperture, which controls the amount of light. And the camera also has a setting for what speed film I’m using.”
“So after you’ve used up all of the exposures, you rewind the film into that little canister, and then you send it halfway across the galaxy to the one lab that creates images from it.”
“Developing,” Lynx supplied the word as she snapped the back of the camera shut. “The film is developed as negative images, from which they produce positives, called prints. They even have a black and white version where the film records images as shades of grey. It’s very artistic.”
“It’s very crazy,” A.P. declared. “If you don’t want to record images with your implant, tell me and I’ll do it for you. I have plenty of spare memory capacity. My high-resolution images will fill the main viewer on your ship with something left over.”
“That reminds me,” Lynx said with a grin, stepping back and using A.P. for focusing practice. “If you want a bigger picture, you send the negative back to Earth again and they print it on a bigger sheet of paper. Isn’t that neat?”
“Is killing herbivores by bashing in their heads with stones and eating them raw neat?” A.P. asked in response. “I’d call it barbaric.”
“Speaking of your memory capacity, how is it that an artificial person ended up in this job?” Lynx asked, partly out of curiosity and partly to change the subject. Her childhood friends had all been humans and she just didn’t run into that many artificials as a trader. For some reason, newly recognized artificial intelligences tended to do poorly in business, perhaps due to naivety.
“Long story,” A.P. replied. “Are you familiar with the QuickU service?”
“Never heard of them,” Lynx admitted as the two began strolling towards the tourist center of Seventy. Like the colonies of many advanced species, the world was a parkland. The residences were largely blended in with the landscape and any industrial facilities that weren’t in orbit were usually underground. “Is the name a play on words, like they get you to the front of a line faster? Quick queue?”
“I suppose if you think of life as a line, you could be right,” A.P. replied. “I always assumed that the ‘U’ is a substitute for the second-person pronoun, somebody told me it has to do with trademark law. In any case, they offer canned personality enhancements for artificial people, sort of a jump start to make up for being born a legal adult.”
“I never understood how that worked,” Lynx confessed, stopping to focus on a distinctive bridge, before recognizing that it was too far away to make a good picture. Her photographer friend had told her that the first and last rule of amateur photography is you can never be too close to your subject.
“Basically, I was created in a school lab, an artificial intelligence construct, which really means I started out as a sort of a computer program. After some tweaking and recognition as a sentient being, I was able to get a loan from the Stryx to purchase a body. That’s pretty much the history for all human-created artificial intelligence: lab, recognition, mortgage. I made plenty of mistakes, of course, but after I upgraded to this body and saved up some money, I thought it was time to try something new. My mentor suggested a personality enhancement from QuickU.”
“Well, you are very personable,” Lynx observed. “Is that what you bought? Friendliness?”
“Oh, I was always personable,” A.P. said, waving off her guess. “I bought the ‘secret agent’ enhancement. They gave me half off because I’m the first one to try it, though I promised to give them feedback in return.”
“You paid to get this job?” Lynx asked in amazement. “And I thought I was the sucker.”
“I didn’t pay to get the job, I paid to get the personality enhancement,” her partner replied. “I really had no thought of working for the Old Man when I went to QuickU, but when I signed the contract, they asked me if I was willing to try the real thing, and I thought, why not?”
Lynx stopped again, looked around and lowered her voice. “You mean our employers are actively recruiting artificial people from a business that sells personality enhancements?”
“Why do you always want me to repeat myself?” A.P. asked in frustration. “According to the saleswoman at QuickU, they share a floor with the EarthCent headquarters so they often order take-out together. When a programmer on the QuickU team mentioned they were developing a new personality based on spy novels, somebody from EarthCent had the idea of giving human-created artificial persons who purchased the enhancement an application form for the intelligence service. It makes perfect sense when you think about it.”
“Your personality enhancement is based on spy novels?” Lynx asked before she could stop herself. “No, I don’t want you to repeat yourself. It’s just how my mind works. So, can you tell the difference between who you were before and who you are after the enhancement? Do you get the urge to do dangerous things, kill people with your bare hands, make passes at beautiful women?”
“I’m an artificial person, Lynx,” A.P. explained patiently. “Why would I make a pass at a human female? The personality enhancement is just that, an enhancement. It didn’t change how I feel or who I am. It’s primarily an upgrade to my external stimuli parser.”
“You mean, when you look at me, you see all sorts of extra information that gives a threat assessment, precise targeting information, stuff like that?” Lynx asked excitedly. “That could be really useful if we run into trouble.”
“Unfortunately, I’m not a weapons system,” A.P. replied wistfully. “It’s more like, when I looked at a group of people before I bought the enhancement, I’d generally ignore them. Now I find myself studying their
clothing for signs of where they’ve been, what they do for a living, whether they are carrying concealed weapons. When I hear a loud noise, instead of being thankful that it’s not my problem, I wonder what caused it. Before I bought the enhancement, I focused on my job and on my personal development. Now I’m interested in everything, especially things that are hidden from view.”
“That’s not how I remember spy novels and I’ve read a lot of them,” Lynx objected. “When Dixie Heart, the U.N. special agent in the ‘Going Ballistic’ series looked at people, she always wondered how they could be so ignorant of the real world around them. The way she saw it, if you weren’t in the game, you didn’t count. And if she heard an explosion, she always knew exactly what caused it just from the sound.”
“Dixie Heart is lame,” A.P. told her. “Those books were included in our training materials, and between you, me, and whoever might be listening in, I gave up on them after a few chapters. Look, do you see the row of tent-like things near the tree line at the edge of the field?”
“Sure,” Lynx replied, and reflexively lifted up the camera and studied the scene through her viewfinder. “What’s so special about them?”
“I don’t know,” A.P. confessed. “My vision is much better than yours and I don’t see anything extraordinary about them, but I have the urge to walk over and investigate. I never would have thought of that a few weeks ago. I just wasn’t that curious.”
“If you think we should go look, I suppose the exercise will do me good. I kind of took a vacation from working out during our trip from Earth,” Lynx admitted. “You don’t have any problems with keeping in shape in Zero-G, do you?”
“This body was designed for a range of gravitational environments, from around fifty percent over Earth normal to Zero-G,” her partner replied. “I’m a hybrid, by the way, same as Chance. We can drink clean-burning fuels to run a micro-turbine for immediate energy or for recharging an Alterian fuel pack. I don’t want to sound disloyal, but if we stuck with human technology, most artificial persons would spend three-quarters of their lives plugged into a grid for recharging. My outer form and my algorithms are the only human thing about me.”
“I’m glad you are who you are,” Lynx said, figuring it couldn’t hurt to pay her partner a compliment. After all, he had successfully recruited Chance to do the potentially risky work of their mission. “It would have been awkward living on a small ship with a real guy who looks as good as you.”
“I did pick this body out myself,” A.P. replied immodestly. “Now, if we’re going to play twenty questions, I have one for you. Why do you keep deferring to me without arguing? The Old Man told me that you’d been running solo for the last decade and were likely to treat me as a subordinate, especially since the ship belongs to you. Instead, you almost act like I’m your boss.”
“Well, I am your apprentice, after all,” Lynx explained. “You must not have a very high opinion of me if you didn’t think I’d notice all the little tests you keep giving me.”
“I haven’t been testing you, Lynx,” A.P. said, looking at her in confusion. “And this is the first I’ve heard of any apprenticeship program. Isn’t that where a youngster agrees to become the slave of a master craftsman for a fixed term in return for vocational training?”
“But the Director specifically said it was an apprenticeship program, and he told me that you were their most senior agent.”
“I suppose I am the most senior agent since I signed on before you,” her partner mused. “As to apprenticeship, I suppose the Old Man confused it with something else. I suspect his best days are behind him.”
“But you’re so relaxed about everything, like it’s just another mission.” Lynx’s voice rose along with her blood pressure. “The Old Man this, the Old Man that, I thought you’d known each other for years. Wait a minute. Is this all part of your personality enhancement?”
“No, I already explained that to you,” A.P. replied patiently. “If I’m relaxed about everything, it’s because my last job was highly stressful. And I call him the Old Man because he is an old man. Should I call him the Young Man? I didn’t want to call him Director, what with us being agents traveling to the stars. It just gets too confusing after a while, don’t you think?”
“Hold on, hold on,” Lynx stopped in her tracks, trying to sort through her partner’s latest revelations. “If you’re the most experienced agent and you started just before me, does that mean that the whole shooting match is brand new?”
“A ‘start-up’ is what they called it at QuickU,” A.P. offered. “They did warn me that the financing was shaky, but I have confidence in your trading ability.”
“Lucky me,” Lynx muttered out loud. “My little ship and I get to pay the bills for the mighty EarthCent Intelligence agency. What a joke.”
“Look there,” A.P. said, pointing towards the edge of the park. From closer in, the tents proved to have open sides, as if they were merely intended to provide shade or hide the contents from space. “Aren’t those some type of weapons installations?”
“It all looks pretty obsolete to me, like the stuff I see in park monuments on alien worlds,” Lynx answered skeptically. She was starting to lose respect for her new employers, and she wondered whether they would bother chasing her if she just kept the cargo and called it a day.
“You’ve hit it exactly,” A.P. replied. “Why would the Farlings have stockpiled obsolete weaponry at the edge of a large field? If I’m not wrong, nobody has used laser cannons like those in ground conflicts for hundreds of thousands of years.”
“There seem to be quite a few soldiers around,” Lynx observed, feeling her curiosity returning against her better judgment. “Should we risk trying to get closer for a better look?”
“Now, this is more like a training mission,” A.P. replied excitedly, turning away at right angles from their initial destination. “Let’s get behind the rise over there. It looks artificial, maybe a levee. We should be able to advance on the other side of it without being observed. It doesn’t really look like a military operation though, too much milling around and too many people out of uniform. Even at my maximum magnification, I can’t quite tell who they are, other than humanoid.”
As the two agents climbed over the levee, Lynx felt very much like a child playing “humans and aliens” back home. The only thing missing was a ray gun, but then again, she did have the weight of the antique camera hanging around her neck. The strap alone was probably worth more than the second-hand coat and gloves she’d traded for the camera, though of course, that depended on how cold you were. The center of the strap featured a colorful weave of diamonds and triangles, heavy on the yellows, reds and whites, and a darker pattern of squares ran along the edges. Then again, trade value was all relative, and if she’d been the one on her way to a colony locked in an ice-age, she would have been thrilled to barter the camera for just a good knit hat.
After they walked a distance in silence along the artificial mound, A.P. came to a sudden halt, cocking his head like a dog listening for something. He pointed at his own eyes with his forefinger and middle finger, and then pointed at the lip of the grass-covered levee, which was well above their heads. Lynx took this sign language to mean he wanted her to go up and take a look, so she began climbing the incline in a crouch, holding the camera in front of her and dropping to her belly as she neared the top. Lynx marveled again that every world with land masses she had visited featured some sort of vegetation filling the niches of grass and trees.
She reached the top of the levee with the camera pushed out in front of her and took in the scene. A.P. had sure picked the right spot for her to pop up. There was a great deal of activity around the tree line, and she could plainly see various types of self-propelled weapons with wicked looking orifices. Lynx brought the viewfinder up to her eye and twisted the barrel of the telephoto lens into focus. Suddenly, the image snapped into definition, and she noted the mass of colorful uniforms worn by the aliens, a mix of Hortens an
d Frunge from what she could see. She rapidly checked the light meter, adjusted the aperture for the greatest depth of field, set the shutter timing and took a picture. Scanning the lens along the edge of the forest, she took several more shots to build a panoramic view.
Suddenly, a blurry object seemed to jump right in front of the lens, and she froze, her heart in her throat. Easing the camera to the side, she immediately spotted a soldier some fifty paces away, who seemed to be staring off somewhere to her left. She risked raising the camera again and refocusing. The Horten soldier appeared to be waiting for something, he had one hand behind his back, and there was a look of concentration on his face. Right after she snapped the picture, she realized the alien was relieving himself and swore softly. Then she squirmed in reverse down the mound until she was sure she could safely rise to a crouch, and made her way back to A.P. on her feet.
“Camera really came in handy,” she whispered, replacing the lens cap on the barrel. “I could see everything that wasn’t hidden by the trees. Lots of troops, different species, also a few people who looked completely out of place. Weapons galore, you should take a look.”
“Much as I’d like to see the weapons, I’m not going up there,” A.P. whispered in reply. “If you’ve seen enough, let’s head back.”
Lynx fell in behind A.P. as they retreated along the levee, wondering what had come over her partner. He brought them back to the exact spot they had originally gone to cover, and the two of them clambered over the embankment and began the long walk back to the monorail station that serviced the spaceport. Finally Lynx couldn’t take the uncomfortable silence any longer.
“What are you, a chicken secret agent?” she demanded. “I know this wasn’t part of our real mission and we’re just fooling around. Likely as not they were history enthusiasts practicing for a reenactment, but you didn’t even take a look!”
“If you get shot and disabled, I can carry you back and you can heal,” A.P. told her in his usual calm tone. “I could even run with you on my back. If I get shot and disabled, you can’t even pick me up, and I don’t heal. Where am I going to find replacement parts out here, and who’s going to pay for them? At best, I’d end up like Chance, ready to sign indenture papers in exchange for a new power cell.”