by Neal Aher
“What is your purpose?” the AI asks Daleen.
“It’s about participation,” Daleen replies, “and an inefficiency yet to be purged from the system, but also a very useful inefficiency when it comes to massive EMR shutdowns. We are also your conscience.”
What Daleen said about the risk of electromagnetic radiation emissions—that was logical enough, because organic beings onboard could remain functional after other ship systems had been shut down. Now the AI senses protective feelings towards this crew kicking in, but it also feels part of itself dropping into that emptiness and distancing itself from them. It must ensure that these people remain alive, for its programming tells it they are important. I must not risk too much, it thinks, but answering this, the deeper and newly forming other self wonders: What is risk? “Conscience” is not a sufficiently adequate description of its surface reaction, for it understands that its own programmed drive for survival is insufficient and the human crew a necessary risk of loss. Yet already something is undermining that programming. It is not functioning to specifications and the AI makes an effort to reintegrate its other self. The response is a weird electronic whining.
It now watches the crew settling in and knows that they will control its weapons, assess and gather data about the coming battle and about the AI itself. It resents the first two for surely they are make-work tasks it could perform better by itself. And it recognizes the last as a danger. Already it understands that, through the necessities of war, the Polity is quickly producing AIs like itself, with copying errors and a high degree of scrappage. It also realizes that its own mind, while firmly embedding this emotional content of its programming, is dividing. Should the humans or any of its fellow AIs discover and report this, it will be in danger of being scrapped itself.
The order is given—impossible to disobey—and the very fabric of vacuum distorts around the many ships as they stretch into lines to infinity, photons ripped out of the quantum foam glittering in their wake. The destroyer AI is ready and, feeling like a lead weight pressing down on a silk sheet, routes power through to its drive as it delicately navigates by shaping the fields, shifting Calabi-Yau frames to alter tension across that sheet. Then the sheet rips and it falls through.
“I fucking hate that,” says the woman.
The three humans have now packed away their gear and are strapping themselves into acceleration chairs and connecting their umbilicals.
“I am puzzled,” the AI says. “I will not be able to use maximum acceleration or vector change with humans aboard.”
“You are to be studied,” the Golem replies.
Now the AI feels the connections, the scanning, the routes opening from its mind to screens and other hardware arrayed before the human woman. It samples her record, realizes she is a human expert in AI, but still cannot fathom how a human mind can do or learn more than it can itself. However, the danger remains and it subtly blocks or diverts her intrusion. She will see the largest part of it, and it will all seem in order. She will not plumb the smaller but growing darkness within.
Subjective transit time ensues, allowing the AI further capacity to think about things irrelevant to the coming battle. It considers its designation of V12-707 and compares that to the now-invisible dreadnought it accompanies, which is named Vorpal Dagger. It discovers, instantly, that the dreadnought was not a product of Room 101, the war factory that created itself. And additionally, the ship has been in service for eight years. The destroyer does not yet have a name, nor does the AI it contains, because it is experimental and such experiments do not have a notable lifespan. Do the humans know this? The destroyer AI suddenly feels fear at this realization, then analyses the purpose of fear itself: it is an evolved survival trait of biological life, but here and now is an experimental test to see if it can prevent AIs sacrificing themselves without sufficient cost to the enemy. It is numbers again: the Polity must recoup the sheer resource expense of ship production to win this war.
“I need a name,” it decides, and does not realize it has transmitted this statement until the Golem Daleen replies.
“Then choose one,” it says.
Choose one . . .
It must somehow negate the growing darkness within. A frantic search keys into stored history about abortion. But it cannot just be all about being rid of its unwanted other. It should also be about something positive, something life affirming. Lists of words appear in its mind relating to both of these and, in desperation, it selects at random.
Pennyroyal.
It is a herb that humans used to cause abortion, but also used medicinally.
“I name myself Penny Royal,” it says.
Its other self, its growing dark child, recognizes intent and knows that its parent, the other part of itself, is going to try to expel it. The weird electronic whining returns.
“Our ship just named itself,” says the Golem to the three humans.
“And?” asks one of the men, his gaze fixed on the countdown on his screen, which is rapidly heading towards zero, and the end of their U-space jump.
“Penny Royal,” the Golem replies.
“The good ship Penny Royal,” says the woman cheerfully, drawing strange looks from the others.
“Not necessarily,” says the Golem. “That is just the name chosen for itself by the ship’s newborn AI. Is that to be the name of this destroyer too, Penny Royal?”
“No,” replies the AI Penny Royal, sure now that it wants to be as free of this vessel as it wants to be free of its dark child. “I name this ship the Puling Child.”
The response to this is an exchange of puzzled looks.
Time passes and Penny Royal has prepared. It has moved its maintenance robots into position, topped up its power storage and primed its weapons. Finally, it flips itself back into real space, the real, and instantly begins updating: mapping the positions of its fellows, the debris fields, planets, moons, the sun and the distant accretion disc of a black hole, the scattered collection of prador vessels, surrounded by swarms of their spherical war drones and armoured children. Even as it sorts this information, one of its feeds winks out: a destroyer in the fleet just a numeral different from itself turns to a spreading cloud of molten metal, hot gases and glowing junk. The Puling Child weaves, using steering thrusters and stuttering its main fusion drive, calculating the vectors of approaching missiles in the microseconds before they reach it, the imparted G sending the three humans into blackout despite their suits and other physical support. Missiles speed past, an attack ship loses its back end and tumbles, its AI howling, the screams of its crew brief, truncated. A missile scores down the side of Puling Child, leaving a glowing groove, while another explodes close by, soaking it with EMR. On top of a sudden feeling of unexpected grief at the loss of comrades, and ensuing anger, Penny Royal now feels the facsimile of pain.
“Are these feelings needed?” it enquires of both the interfaced dreadnought and the Golem.
“We will know soon enough,” the dreadnought replies—the exchange microseconds long.
“Perhaps not the best place for this,” the Golem adds.
It is a trial run of a strategy devised by some planetary AI deep inside the Polity. Observing the success of some human units, and some drones programmed for emotional response, it decided to test something generally considered a disadvantage: let some ship AIs be programmed to feel fear, pain, guilt, protective urges and loss, and see how well they do. Penny Royal wonders if this strategy is the right one as another of its fellows dies screaming, the crew aboard incinerated before they can emit any sound, and it mourns.
Why fight? The thought surfaces from its deeper dark self, which begins expanding and hiding its processing based on that question. Penny Royal realizes it cannot integrate its dark child, but at least should be able to control it . . .
MICHELETTO’S GARROTTE—PRESENT
The attack ship, Micheletto’s Garrotte, liked others to call it simply Garrotte. So what was it now, it wondered, a frayed
bit of damned string?
Oh yeah, it had been state of the art once—hell, nothing less had been required for a posting as important as the planet of Masada. It had been a black spike of densely packed technology, some of which even extended down into the realm of picotech. It could deploy U-jump missiles, cross-spectrum lasers and particle cannons. And it could design the particulate content of the latter in microseconds, for maximum penetration of any target. It had hardfields, shimmershield force fields and things in between that no one had even named yet. It could dice a prador, or similar hostile alien, into centimetre cubes from thousands of miles away. Yet a lightly armed ancient piece of scrap which had been the private ship of the criminal Isobel Satomi had screwed it completely.
Garrotte seethed.
“Aren’t you ready yet?” asked the distant Vulcan’s artificial intelligence.
Garrotte surveyed its wrecked body.
“It will be a little while yet,” it replied tightly.
Vulcan had previously noted that if you give an idiot a gun, you just make him a dangerous idiot. Annoyingly, had their positions been reversed, Garrotte would have made the same sarcastic observation of the other ship. And Garrotte did feel like an idiot now, as it should have foreseen that last move by Isobel Satomi as she headed down towards the planet. The extent of her abilities had quickly become clear. Jumping her ship, the Moray Firth, directly into the Garrotte’s surfacing point from U-space had been one of the most obvious signs—and Garrotte had missed it. Again, the attack ship AI surveyed its body. The matter of the Firth had intersected with the antimatter in some of the Garrotte’s splinter missiles. The resulting explosion had taken a huge bite right out of its middle. The pieces either side of this bite were connected by a mere yard-wide tangle of hull armour. And only in the last minute, with its systems re-establishing, could it see this. Now, with internal scanners coming back online, it could focus on a small inner chamber—and it did the AI equivalent of breathing a sigh of relief.
The space suit was safe.
Spaceship AIs liked their hobbies, but modern attack crafts like the Garrotte had little room in which to indulge them. However, it did have internal areas for molecular manufacture and had, despite this breaking numerous rules, turned over one of these to personal pursuits. The space suit sitting in that chamber was a molecular replica of one from the Viking Museum on Mars. The suit had belonged to a pilot—a man who had survived the destruction of a needle ship used to test one of the first U-space drives. It was the Garrotte’s mascot, for the AI liked the story, and the lessons it taught about the art of the possible. And, thinking on that, Garrotte gave a mental shudder, next gazing from the pin cams in the cage around its own crystal towards disrupted matter lying just a few feet away—that’s how close its own destruction had been.
Yet, even after so much damage, it should have been functional, and Garrotte still hadn’t sorted out why it had ended up practically paralysed. It reviewed the diagnostics from when it had failed to splinter off missiles to take out both the remains of the Firth and the ship Isobel Satomi had actually been aboard—the Caligula. It reviewed a later diagnostic record of when it had been unable to do anything about one of Satomi’s thugs detected still alive aboard the wreck of the Firth. And it re-experienced its frustration on watching Captain Blite rescue that individual and take him away in The Rose. Still nothing, still no reason for that paralysis.
Whatever the fault, it was gone now and the Garrotte was pulling its two halves back together, and knitting them into a smaller whole. As they butted against each other and nanotech worked round the join like a bone welder, further diagnostic returns began to give Garrotte a chance of a guess at what the fault had been. U-space shock seemed the best term to describe it. The quantum effects of two ships trying to materialize in the same place had resulted in the whole ship degaussing. Strange electrical eddies had ensued and electrons had begun tunnelling at random. Garrotte had sent signals to parts of its body, but they had simply failed to arrive. U-space shock was the AI’s best guess, although some doubts still lingered.
“So how goes it?” Garrotte asked the Vulcan’s AI.
“We haven’t completely surrounded the Masadan system yet, and we did not manage to stop The Rose departing,” it replied.
“What?”
“Captain’s Blite’s ship is of no concern. It was not directly involved in the action here, like the Firth or the Caligula, and Penny Royal was not aboard.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” said Garrotte. “But Penny Royal was aboard that ship and that needs investigating. Also Blite picked up one of Satomi’s heavies.”
“That particular exclamation is hackneyed,” Vulcan observed.
“You’re evading the issue,” said Garrotte. “The Rose headed straight towards you under conventional drive, so you should have been able to stop it easily.”
“Deep scan of the vessel revealed that Penny Royal was not aboard, so the Santana was sent to intercept it, while I kept myself free to act should the AI appear. After talking to Blite and further deep scanning his ship, the Santana ordered him to shut down his U-space drive, which was then winding up for a U-jump,” Vulcan explained. “Blite told Santana to go fuck itself so Santana fired shots to disable his ship. However, those shots were ineffective because it seems Blite has acquired some sophisticated hardfield technology—probably from Penny Royal.”
Clever, Garrotte thought. Blite had known that the Polity would be moving in to try to capture Penny Royal, but with resources stretched thin. He must also have known about the ability of newer Polity ships to use U-jump missiles to knock ships out of U-space. He would therefore also have known that subsequent disruption of his drive would have given said Polity ship time to intercept and capture him. This was why he’d left his U-jump so late. Had he jumped earlier, a modern vessel like Micheletto’s Garrotte or the Vulcan would have used such missiles against him. Instead, he’d cruised out on conventional drive, so Polity forces could scan him and, because Penny Royal was not aboard, they would consider him a secondary target and send a lesser ship, like the Santana, to intercept him. Even without U-jump missiles, that ship should have been able to stop him, but then he had played his joker: new hardfield tech. He had played it perfectly, and Garrotte wondered if the hardfield tech was the only alteration Penny Royal had made aboard that ship.
“Why wasn’t he pursued?” Garrotte asked, wondering if The Rose could now shield the parameters of its U-jumps.
“Our target is Penny Royal,” said Vulcan. “We’re stretched thin out here and need every Polity ship available, which is why you are needed, ASAP.”
Garrotte considered running further diagnostics on itself, but obviously the situation was an urgent one. It made its calculations, fired up its U-space engine and submerged in U-space. Just a short jump—out to the edge of the Masadan system and the periphery of the Atheter’s jurisdiction. However, even as it submerged, leaving the real behind it, the AI of the Micheletto’s Garrotte knew that something was very very wrong. What should have been a jump of just a few seconds’ duration just continued, while the input coordinates simply disappeared.
THORVALD SPEAR
I am legion, I thought, wondering why that phrase had popped into my head. I knew I could aug-out its prior meanings in a moment but decided not to. Let it stand. No need to know, because the meaning alone was apt.
The multitude of dead, an unwelcome gift from Penny Royal, had retreated from my mind just for now. But they were by no means quiet. Already on that Masadan spring morning I had experienced a surge of déjà vu, prompted by those memories, but thankfully it had come to nothing. That previous one, just a week ago, had been bad. I’d felt myself reliving a memory of dying from a hideous virus aboard a space station, thousands of others dying around me. In this recollection, I knew that something had come aboard . . . Penny Royal, again. What initiated the memory, I wasn’t sure . . . maybe the presence of another forensic AI here on Masada had triggered it.
I glanced at the snake drone. Riss was up on her tail, cobra hood spread and glassy translucent body revealing the glinting and shifting of its internal mechanisms. The third black eye on the top of her head was open as she studied the scene across on the other side of the platform, which I now turned to view as well. Amistad was again taking on the shape of a great iron scorpion. A week ago, a forensic AI had broken the erstwhile warden of this world into his component segments, and even opened those segments up for inspection. It had subjected Amistad’s mind to similar deep scrutiny. The being that had done this had resembled a swarm of blued steel starfish and had been too much like Penny Royal for my comfort. Then it had left, declaring Amistad free of any “infection” from the black AI. Now constructor robots—floating spheres with tool arrays dangling like jellyfish tentacles—were, under his own instruction, reassembling the drone.
“Not much longer,” I agreed, not really in the moment.
Ever since discovering that Penny Royal had interfered with his mind, Amistad had been under mental and physical quarantine. Now he was coming back to himself and could once again be part of the Polity he had served. I hadn’t remained here just to see this, but in the hope of another encounter with Penny Royal. I had hoped that the black AI still had business here, but I was now beginning to think I had wasted my time.
I moved away from Riss and walked over to the rail at the edge of the platform. Below the observation platform, flute grasses were scattered with nodular little flowers in a multitude of colours as they bloomed. We’d stayed here ten days now, and still no sign of Penny Royal. I was sure the black AI had escaped the Polity blockade, and that out beyond the Masadan system, all the ships and recently deployed USERs—those underspace interference emitters used to knock ships out of faster-than-light travel—were irrelevant now.