More Human Than Human

by Neil Clarke

  I wasn’t sure we’d made progress, but I sipped my wine anyway. I added my own toast. “To Roberto and Ruby and the nameless garden bot.”

  Aliss laughed.

  Below us, the paper from the window peeled back, and Caroline waved at us.

  Two of the three new robots stood in the kitchen watching her with their shiny silver faces.

  It was too far away for me to tell for sure, but I thought Caroline might be smiling.

  E. Catherine Tobler is a Sturgeon Award finalist and editor at Shimmer magazine.

  .IDENTITY

  E. CATHERINE TOBLER

  As with most things, it started small. In the center of my vision, I perceived the virus as a pinprick of white light. The program was instantly distinguishable because of its color, colors being significant—green was good and red dangerous; white indicated something not entirely understood. I tried to quarantine the unidentified program, but it overran every obstacle I placed in its path, as if anticipating them.

  Venningen, bathed in the faint crimson light pouring from the overhead, crouched before me, his hands wrist deep in my torso. Venningen had isolated my torso from the rest of my body, to further segregate the virus, and I could not feel his hands at work. It was only when he sank my torso into place and brought systems back online that I could feel his fingers on my core. I traced every whorled fingerprint in waking light to confirm his identity.

  “And laugh upon the apple of her eye?” he asked, invoking my authentication process.

  My visual cortex brightened, but Venningen’s attention wavered. Though his hands still rested on my core, his eyes moved, attention directed over his shoulder beyond the shadowed alcove sheltering us. Archival databanks rose around us, the colony ship’s oldest library, but the rows were empty save for us. I scanned and he watched the databanks, as if waiting for someone to come upon us.

  The alcove was not where Venningen normally tended my systems, but far removed from Peragro’s central core. The alcove, the frame from which I hung like a puzzle waiting to click together, belonged to the first AI the crew tried to embody twelve years prior. The attempt was unsuccessful, but on a ship like Peragro, nothing is useless or thrown away; plunging through deep space toward a new world, it cannot be. Peragro’s crew would need every bit for their new lives.

  My vision washed from red to orange and into yellow. When the yellow bled green, a steady glow that did not give way to questionable white, I said, “And stand between her back, sir, and the fire.”

  I checked twice and again, just to be sure as humans always said. Every system within my frame—and as Venningen allowed the connection to Peragro once again—every system over the whole of Peragro, all one hundred and forty kilometers of her, glowed green.

  “There is no evidence of the program within me, nor within Peragro.”

  Venningen looked up at me. I met his gaze, his eyes still shaded in crimson from the overheads. “No anomalies?” Venningen asked.

  I knew the answer, but scanned again, shedding waves of light over his hands so the shadows flickered up through my torso.

  “Your hands alone are anomalous.”

  At this, Venningen withdrew from my core and released the lock on the frame, which allowed me to slot my body back together. Standing, I was on eye level with Venningen and he met my gaze, his own still troubled. We were both fourth-gens, born on Peragro, destined to set down with her on Kepler-726 in mere weeks. Peragro, who’d run for more than a century and a half, was nearly done running.

  “I’ve set a program to moat the fucker, if it returns,” Venningen said, “but it shouldn’t. Still—”

  He looked at me in silence for forty-seven seconds; I counted each, while Peragro flooded me; environmental systems, oxygen flows, waste expulsion, water intake, propulsion, radiation shielding. As I briefly touched Gaff and Rachael, my fellow AI, and ensured all was well, all was normal.

  “Captain gets wind of this—”

  The captain didn’t know, because my condition updates were routed to Venningen and Venningen alone, to streamline reply and response.

  He watched me for another six seconds. As the time passed, I monitored the harvest of greens in the greenhouse, looked in on the continued upgrades to the dwarf-pod tubes, made an adjustment to the environmentals controlling the reproduction banks, listened to the regular and smooth rush and flush of the waste tanks into the greenhouse underbellies, ensured sea-glass Comet Hyakutake off Peragro’s starboard side had not changed course (in all its years, its path had made no deviation—oh, to be so precise and sure), and approved forty-five requests for time off among crew. Venningen stared unblinking, as if he’d never seen an embodied.

  “Venningen.”

  He blinked and nodded. “Right. I loosed a tracer to unravel the initial source of the virus. The source sits in you, the tracer running silent in Peragro.” Venningen’s fingers fluttered over my torso again, confirming. “Tracer will return to you and you alone—you’ll know when. Hell, you can probably see it already.”

  I could. The tracer was small and colorless, a shadow ghosting through Peragro’s massive frame. I would have asked Venningen why he didn’t have me trace the virus, but I already knew: the virus had come to me, hadn’t reached for any other part of Peragro. If I was its target—there were too many ways in which to finish that sentence and so I didn’t.

  Outside the data archive, Venningen fell into step alongside me, though I knew he had duties elsewhere.

  “Is there more?” I asked.

  Venningen reached for me. I calculated the arc of his hand, how it would encompass my arm, how it had never done so before. Venningen’s fingers were warm as they closed around my upper arm and they smelled vaguely of oil. He always smelled of oil, his clothes and skin showing signs of the work he did, the work he loved. But this was my oil, and it struck me odd—as so many things had since I’d spied the prick of viral brightness an hour before.

  “Daidala—”

  It isn’t a name exactly, though they use it as such for me; a daidala is a sculpture (was a sculpture?) from ancient Earth, attributed to the mythical Daedalus. Daidala were objects of great beauty and sometimes immense power—but I do not forget that Daedalus built wings which melted as his own son flew too closely to the sun.

  “Yes, Venningen?”

  His hand did not lift from my arm, but tightened. “Be on your guard,” he said.

  “Am I not always on my guard?” I asked. “I know all there is to know of this ship—of its systems.”

  “This virus was sent to you, Daidala.” His voice dropped, concern shadowing it into something I had never heard from him before. I had heard this tone from others, however: concern, love, and always ever worry—treasured things could be lost. “If this is a threat, if it is ongoing . . . it may not be the only threat. To you—and through you, to Peragro.”

  Had I skin, it might have pricked. Instead, every awareness inside me spread outward, to detect every danger I possibly could. I reached even beyond Peragro’s walls, toward the sailing comet, and beyond, touching the star we were nearing. Six planets in the system, one of which would house Peragro’s crew when we safely landed. All was normal, ordinary, in place.

  “Be on your guard,” he repeated, then left me as if he’d never lingered.

  As with most things, the threat didn’t take long to grow.

  I do not sleep, though as the ship’s waking crew cycles through the days the ship has kept calendar of since leaving Earth, there are hours I am less active. Usually these hours see me nestled in my customary frame, observing Margot’s systems from a stationary position, watching the shadow of Venningen’s tracer continue its search. I was built to wander, but sometimes I prefer to not. (An embodied with a preference; they can be slow or swift to develop—much as Margot herself, I too am an experiment, a thing monitored. Venningen laughed when he discovered I preferred night cycles to day cycles on board ship. Venningen never laughs.)

  There was no vir
al pinprick this time, only the sudden and catastrophic failure of a dozen cryogenic pods. I registered the power failure and tried to reroute, but every route I took was blocked. The virtual pathways to the pods appeared severed, though when engineering flooded the Goddard deck, they saw no damage. Only dark pods, filled with mostly-dead occupants. One struggled to breathe as engineers and doctors cracked the tube open.

  Some of Peragro’s forefathers had chosen cryogenic sleep for the journey; normal lifespans would not allow them to be part of the regular crew and live to see the new world with their own eyes. They wanted to witness the success of their work and not be left to wonder. Some of their children had opted to serve in a normal fashion, so the descendants of the founders lived and worked on Peragro even now, but most would no longer set foot on Kepler-726, for they lay dead. Founder Rosen struggled on, carted to the medical wing.

  “And you maintain there was no warning?” Torres asked me as we stood on Goddard deck, watching the engineers examine the pods.

  “None whatsoever,” I told the security chief. I spied Venningen across the deck, making his way toward me only to be stopped by security personnel. I took his expression to be one of profound displeasure, features streaked with oil and grime. I registered nothing strange in Torres’s scans or demeanor, though. She was as perplexed as I was. “An alarm will alert me at any change: a drop or surge in power, a fluctuation in temperature, gravity—anything that might jeopardize the occupants.”

  “Explain how there was no alarm.”

  I could not. “Scans show the alarms remain in place—they were never tripped. The ship . . . “ I trailed off, trying to find the proper explanation—but it remained elusive. “Disregarded the emergency?”

  According to the engineering crew, every pod was intact, as if no malfunction had ever occurred. Every line in and out of the pods was secure; nothing showed signs of tampering. I conferred with Gaff and Rachael and neither of them could find the source of the malfunction, either.

  I considered the virus and wanted to voice my concerns, but recalled Venningen’s concern if the captain learned of the attempt to infect me. If I were disconnected from Peragro and considered a security risk, many systems would fall into disrepair or complete failure before the ship reached its destination. While Margot possessed two other AI systems, I carried more than half the load, given my unique embodied state and ability to interact with the waking crew.

  Had part of the virus burrowed its way into me, despite Venningen and I believing otherwise? I looked his way, to find him gesturing angrily at the security crew. He wanted inside; they would not allow him entry.

  We did not speak for three hours. Torres finished her queries with me, filled with assurances that she would speak with me again, and released me. When Venningen finally approached me, he said I was under observation—as were Gaff and Rachael, only as precautions. None of us had motive to kill the founders, so—

  I interrupted him. “Motive implies this was not an accident, Venningen. Is there evidence that the pods were deliberately tampered with? That the founders were murdered?” That word felt strange; Peragro had certainly known crimes over the course of her journey, but nothing close to murder. Everyone within Peragro’s walls wished a successful end to a generation’s long journey. Or did they?

  It was easy to judge via actions one witnessed every day, but what could I know of the human heart? What did I know of humans? I worked with them every day of my existence and had been programmed to know very specific things; Venningen had layered superfluous knowledge into me over the course of our work—introducing me to music, art, and fiction—matters I didn’t necessarily need to know in order to operate myself or the ship. Each might illustrate what we now faced—the idea that one thing could be layered with another; that a calm exterior might house a burning heart.

  “And to what end?” Venningen asked. “Unless it was a test—to . . . fuck.”

  We returned to the old, quiet archive, where I stepped into the AI frame and disengaged my joints, so Venningen could examine each in turn, ensuring that the virus was not within me. I could have told him it was not, but we both valued outside confirmation. I tracked the tracer through Peragro, still on its route, but it had discovered no evidence of the virus along its journey.

  “A test to bypass you,” Venningen eventually said, completing the thought he’d had. “You knew nothing of the malfunction—neither did Gaff or Rachael. You three are aware of everything—down to when people use the head.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him when he’d last been, but he raised a finger.

  “None of you saw this coming—nor could you stop it once it was in progress. You are the fastest thing on this ship—aside from the engines.”

  Given that we were moving down darker paths, I stepped onto yet another. “This level of interference—it would not be a large leap to say that if it is possible to bypass any of the AI on this vessel, it is equally possible to alter their memory cores.”

  Venningen watched me in the crimson light, his silence seeming an agreement with my assessment. “And laugh upon the apple of her eye,” he murmured.

  As I put myself back together, I ran a diagnostic on my systems, even as I continued to filter through everything happening on Peragro. But there was nothing to tell me anything was other than fine. Every system ran green, but for those already under known repairs.

  “And stand between her back, sir, and the fire.”

  He did not take me offline. I am not certain if I would have agreed with him had he suggested it. I did not doubt Venningen could solve the riddle before us, but knew Peragro herself would be at a severe disadvantage without me. If that was the intent—to eliminate me from the system—Venningen was unwilling to take the step.

  Founder Rosen lived for twelve compromised hours. Within the medical unit, the doctors strove to bring him back into the waking world. If they could not, they would try to sink him back into the unknowing sleep of cryo.

  But Rosen would not be swayed in either direction, taking another when the medical unit was leached of power. In my mind’s eye, the med unit’s electrical grid resembled a cobweb, deftly pulled by an unseen hand. I was as good as blind—could not see what drew the power, nor where it went; no systems surged with an excess, the med unit registering as a solid black pit on my display. Emergency generators, which should have clicked instantly into place, had no reaction.

  Peragro is a vast colony ship, three habitable disks speared by a long abdomen-like engineering core, separated by solar panels that unfurled the moment we’d gotten close enough to Kepler-726’s sun. The ship was drinking in power, slaking her thirst after her interstellar journey, and should have had energy to spare.

  In the powerlessness that neither I nor Gaff nor Rachael could counter, Founder Rosen passed from this world into that which awaits all living things. Rosen died without ever having been fully awake, his descendants circling his flag-draped body in the funerary services three days later. Peragro mourned—even I did, in some part, as 73,202 mournful communications spilled through the ship, through me.

  Communication is a constant flow within Peragro, digital and vocal twined into a river of sludge from which I retrieve words,

  compile occurrences, assign import and, given my programming, understanding. Most are useless to me, but after the viral incident, Venningen set a subroutine running. A program to further filter the communications river in the hopes of revealing a clue. Again, it was only the absence of anything unusual that held a measure of strange.

  Specifically, it became the absence of anything from Venningen. I discovered an absence of digital communication from him alone, and when I scanned for his voice, to pull it as a thread from the others, it was absent. Venningen had never been absent from me, present from the moment my systems came online until now. I could know nothing like panic, so did as I would with any missing crew. When a regular scan did not reveal his location, I worked through the ship section by section to pin
point his life sign monitor.

  I could not.

  He was absent for fifty-four minutes. I became aware of him again when he left the ship’s bridge. He cut through the usual crew—captain included—and made his way through Aldrin Hall, into the guts of Peragro’s engineering departments. With every other system on board, I tracked him. His pattern was not unusual; the crew he spoke with were those he supervised. His tracer returned from its searching—to me and me alone as Venningen said. I took it into my core and broke it open—though found it empty of any evidence. Venningen sought me out when his shift neared its end. As he had always done.

  I reported on the findings of the tracer—the lack of findings—but did not share my suspicions with Venningen. It was possible the virus was a distraction, that it was not meant for anything more. Ball thrown, AI dogs giving chase. What had we missed in our time spent chasing? While Venningen sorted the tracer’s information, I traced every whorled fingerprint in waking light to confirm his identity. I reached for Gaff and Rachael.

  I set Gaff on a mission, following the route Venningen’s tracer had taken, reporting any anomalies within that route. I set Rachael on the opposite course, setting her to report on the lack of anomalies.

  When Venningen finished compiling his data, he peered up at me. Within his dark eyes, my own reflection. Each embodied AI had been made in the likeness of Founder Waldeck’s late wife; Margot had died in the building of the ship, taking their unborn daughter with her. Venningen had never known her—born on the ship as he was—but had cared for the Founder’s cryogenic pod all his adult life. I had only known her face, but Venningen often wondered aloud what Waldeck would make of me upon his waking. We would never know.

  I allowed Venningen to leave without telling him my suspicions. I tracked him as he went: straight to his quarters where he sank into a dreamless sleep. When Venningen dreams, he is as a puppet, arms and legs working as if dancing, flying, falling. I spent the night cycle as I had always spent the night cycle, wandering Peragro, filtering every scrap of information through my body. I traced a slow path through each of the three habitation disks, pausing only once in the kitchens where all stood in readiness for the coming day.