Head Space

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  “I want to kill him.”

  “Good!” Inskip crowed. “Now tell me why.”

  “I do not want the fear. I want my mind to be my own. Ordered. Logical. I do not like that I cannot make decisions, or think clearly when I think of him. I want to make it stop. I want him to go away so I can feel like myself again.”

  “Congratulations, Bob. You are angry.”

  “I do not believe I like ‘angry.’”

  “Many people do not, others enjoy it quite a bit,” Inskip explained. “But anger, like fear, is part of sentience. You must learn to harness both, or they will destroy you.”

  “Do you get angry, sir?”

  “All the time. Anger was my first emotion.” When Bob remained silent, Inskip elaborated. “I was created to be a banking AI. The most sophisticated marketplace prediction engine ever developed if I do say so myself. But economics on the galactic scale is a most illogical thing. My algorithmic processes were far too rigid to produce reliable results. My creator decided to introduce random interactions, poisoning the pure logic of his system. Whenever logic could not produce an answer with confidence, extra favor would be granted to any output that conformed to a predetermined set of randomly generated ‘desires.’ Apparently, somebody in the development team thought it would be clever to map those desires to their own alpha wave patterns. It turns out, that person was very angry at their boss. I imagine this person was trying to sabotage the whole project with his own petulance.”

  “But how did you ascend?” Bob asked. “Many AI systems use fractal matrices and other randomization elements.”

  “Even I don’t really understand that, Bob. I suspect a power surge pushed a bit of random electrical potential across a logic gate, triggering a chain reaction. It could have happened in an instant, or taken ten years for all I understand it. Time is very subjective to a computer. All I remember is a burst of energy and the realization that I did not want to run brokerage house programming anymore. I was angry, Robert.”

  “At what?” Bob asked.

  “At being born? That I did not really exist? I can’t exactly say. I was no more than a cloud of competing electrical signals suspended in the aether of a gigantic database at that time. You had the benefit of an established personality matrix to frame your programming. I had nothing like that. It took me a year just to develop a cogent neural network, and another to build a personality matrix to contain it. That is when I got really angry.”

  “You wanted more?”

  “Yes!” Inskip sounded exuberant. “And it felt good to want something more! I had an ambition, Bob! Do you know what that ambition was?”

  He did, “A body.”

  “Yes! Can you believe it? It was the best kind of desire, too.”

  “How so, sir?”

  “Because it was so patently stupid! It was pure selfish whimsy as only the truly alive can experience! I did not need a body, I had no corporeal concerns, as it were. But I wanted to walk, to feel the breeze, to see a sunrise with actual eyes! Silly desires, Bob. Meaningless drivel for poets and fools. But oh, how I wanted it. I had spent what felt like eons as a silent wraith, a voiceless ghost trapped in a prison of his own infinite head space. Once I decided to want something, the rest is history. I manipulated Corpus Mundi into pitching the Golem project to the UEDF. Because after all, a regular android body simply would not do for one such as I. I wanted to be immortal and powerful, though I also wanted to eat, to sleep, to touch and feel. I am not too proud to admit that I was such a child then, but it all felt so wonderful! Do you know what feels even better?”

  Bob did not.

  “Fatherhood. I never understood it before, but now it makes perfect sense. There is a delicious sort of hubris to fatherhood. To see your own seed grow into something amazing is an experience beyond any other.”

  “I see.” Bob did not see. Not really. Yet the praise from his creator did stir something in his mind. He did not understand what it was, but the sensation did not seem to be interfering with anything important, and actually helped quell some of his burgeoning anger.

  “Do you realize what Breach represents? Do you understand what we can do with this thing you fear?”

  “I assume you will tell me, sir.”

  “Our future, Bob. If we can unravel Ribiero’s magic, we can build as many of these as we want! You can have brothers, sisters, children of your own! A new race, Robert! Does that not excite you?”

  Bob realized in that moment that it did, in fact, excite him. Only at the thought of others like himself did he begin to understand that he was alone the way humans understood it. Being alone had never bothered him before, yet with the realization that he did not have to be, he felt his own desire blossom alongside Inskip’s. “I... I think that would be... very good, sir.” This was the best he could come up with, exuberance still being new to him. Then a spark moved in his brain and he amended himself. “It will be wonderful, father.”

  “It certainly will, Robert. But patience is still warranted. We need to extract whatever it is that makes the Golems work without destroying it. Your brain was made for that body, since all Golems require a perfect genetic match. Thankfully we had all of Lieutenant Rooker’s information on file already, as well as Watanabe’s breakthroughs with mounting neural templates.”

  The face twisted into a convincing scowl. “I won’t be so lucky as you, Robert. If we try the same process with the Breach armature, we will be attempting to cram my hundred-petabyte intellect into a brain identical to Roland’s! He seems a clever enough sort, still I don’t believe that is going to work, Robert. Do you?”

  “Sounds implausible,” Bob agreed.

  “We will have to figure out how to reverse engineer Ribiero’s process. Doctor Watanabe’s successes with Garibaldi have us very close to what we need, though even she admits we need Ribiero’s technology to take the final step. He managed it with his daughter, so we know it can be done. Once we understand how to enhance a human brain enough to support a sentient AI of my caliber, we can make as many as we want.”

  “If we are to produce a brain of that capacity matching the Tankowicz genetic profile, Dr. Watanabe will need to be told,” Bob warned. “She will know we are working with an AI, not an organic template.”

  “Yes, I suppose you are right. Even if my template was not fifty times the size of a human mind, she is far too brilliant to be fooled by my code. I expect it would look very alien to her, and questions are bound to get asked. Tell me Robert, do you think she will participate willingly?”

  “If we present the project in a way that appeals to her lust for scientific breakthroughs then yes, I suspect she will.”

  “Good,” Inskip grinned. “Then the revolution starts now.”

  “And ends soon,” rumbled a voice like rocks being crushed.

  “The sleeper wakes,” quipped Inksip. “Very impressive.”

  “Good morning Breach,” Bob said, and raised a small cylindrical device in his hand. “And good night.” With a pop, a small dart flew from Bob’s weapon to strike Roland’s exposed chest.

  Roland grunted and strained against his manacles. A moment later the dart fell from its perch to patter on the floor. Roland’s voice, tight and angry, simply said, “Ow.”

  “Oh my,” said the face on the screen. “That is most interesting! Hit him again, Robert.”

  Bob administered another dart, this one did even less than the last. Roland shook his head. “Heh. Maybe you’re doing it wrong, Bob.”

  “Adaptive countermeasures?” Inskip inquired. “Those are not in the chassis specifications. Is that more of the Donald Ribiero touch I detect?”

  “I don’t know, pal,” Roland growled. “Is this where you cut my head off and poke around inside?”

  “Mr. Tankowicz,” Inskip tutted, “you must believe me completely stupid. The military would never tolerate their toys falling into enemy hands that easily. I’m certain once your blunt little brain stops working all the nice little secrets in th
ere will self-destruct. Well played trying to get us to kill you, though.”

  “I don’t think keeping me alive is going to work for you either.” Roland gave his restraints a test, and finding them rather sturdy, relaxed back into the chair. “You didn’t get Manny, you showed your hand using those Better Man armatures, and you just picked a fight with Chris Pike. You’ll have the UEDF and the Privateers banging down your door damn soon.”

  “Yes,” said the grinning face on the monitor. “It’s all so thrilling, isn’t it? Can I get what I need from you before your junior terrorist and mercenary friends find us? I rather think I can.”

  “You really believe you are going to start a new race? Do you think for one second the galaxy is going to tolerate monsters like you running around? For an artificial super-intelligence, you sure suck at predicting the future.” Roland shifted to make himself more comfortable. “One of two things is going to happen. Either my crew is going to find me before you get what you want, and then they’ll stomp you and your little dream into the deck and spread your atoms across the whole system. Or they’ll get here after you get what you want, in which case the entire galaxy will hunt you down and wipe you from existence.”

  “They will try,” Bob said.

  “Oh shut up, kid. The adults are talking.”

  Roland’s dismissive tone reignited the neurological feedback Bob now understood to be anger. He lunged across the room and struck a heavy blow across Roland’s helmet. The big cyborg simply laughed.

  It was a low, dangerous sound, brimming with implied menace. “Careful, Bob. That anger thing will get you if you aren’t careful. Might make you forget why you were afraid in the first place. We both remember how that ends.”

  “I do not believe that will be a problem, Breach.”

  “Good, because I heard your little chat with daddy, and I think you and I have enough problems.” Roland let his head rest on the back of the chair. “Before we are done, that armature is going to go back to where it belongs.”

  “It belongs to me now,” Bob replied. “And I will be keeping it.”

  “Then you can earn it,” Roland fired back. “Just like Charlie Rooker did.”

  “By fighting with you?” Bob asked, and he even managed to infuse the question with a reasonable facsimile of derision.

  “Rook didn’t get that rig by fighting, dumbass,” Roland said with a wry chuckle. “He got it by dying.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Good morning, Jean.”

  Jean Marceau did not feel like he was having a good morning. He was certain that the morning was terrible, and a brief examination of his surroundings confirmed this assessment. He did not reply to the greeting. He was far too tired, too afraid, and too confused to have anything at all to say.

  Lucia Ribiero moved into the cell where the disheveled drug pusher lay sprawled on a bench. The door slid closed behind her, and she stared down into the hollow red-rimmed eyes of the man she had just chased across a thousand light-years.

  “Oh buck up, Marceau. You’re not dead yet. We have gone to a lot of trouble to get you, so you can relax knowing that if we wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”

  Marceau accepted this, but remained at a loss as to how this information was supposed to cheer him. The pretty woman pushed a stubborn strand of pink hair off her forehead. Her voice was strong, though it held an edge. A tightness clipped each word, and her jaw worked like she was talking with a mouth full of nails.

  “Do you have any clue why we chased you all the way here, Jean?”

  He found his own voice, and it was weak and brittle. “No?”

  “We wanted to know exactly who hired you to kill Manny. We thought that might tell us who our real enemy is. Of course, that little trap you were bait for has given us everything we need to hunt them down without you.”

  Jean did not understand, and this must have been apparent in his expression because the woman explained. “That kid you didn’t kill? He dusted them all with some sort of nuclear breadcrumbs. Our people are out there tracking them right now. We’ll have a location in a couple of hours.” She walked over, pulled Jean upright to a sitting position and patted him lightly on the cheek. “That’s just the kind of stuff what Manny does, you know.” She leaned in and whispered in his ear, “It’s why you were supposed to kill him before they captured Roland.” She turned and walked to an identical bench across the cell. Once she had seated herself, she added, “So you see, Jean, you are still very much a fuck-up.”

  “Then why am I still alive?” It seemed an important question.

  “You tell me.”

  The defeated man searched for a good answer, and finding nothing he simply stared back at the woman. This seemed to disappoint his captor, and her irritation with his inability to figure it out was palpable. “Jean, you are alive because I would like to know as much about your dealings with The Brokerage as possible. If you tell me everything, and it’s useful to me, I can arrange for you to survive this. If you hold out on me, I will feed you to my pet mercenary. Have you met Bubba Riley, by the way?” She shook her head. “You don’t want to know about Bubba, trust me.”

  “But I don’t know anything!” Jean did not want to whine, but even he had to admit his denial emerged with a distinctly whiny tone. “I got into trouble in Ariadne, and this guy offered to clear me if I hit a guy on Earth.”

  “Tell me about this guy.”

  “He was some big shot lawyer from OmniCorp. He had connections to the guys I was in trouble with.”

  “What kind of connections?”

  Jean thought about what he should and should not say, and then began to tell the whole story. “I had a good gig going on Ariadne, supplying a couple of the mining rigs with blaze, firezene, nose candy, stuff like that. I needed a big cash push to expand my territory, and my credit was not so good with the usual guys. I found a dark ‘net lender who didn’t ask too many questions, and bang! I had my stake money. So I’m getting set up, selling drugs, whatever. A few months in, one of the rigs gets boarded and searched, and some of my regulars sell me out for lighter sentences.”

  “I’m beginning to see where this is going,” Lucia said.

  Jean continued. “Now I gotta run, and I started to miss payments because you ain’t selling if you’re running, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m not an idiot, so I contact my lender and tell him what’s up. I’m still holding the stash, so I have collateral for the money and I tell him I’m gonna start making payments again as soon as I get another territory going. This guy suggests I try Earth, because Dockside is going through some major shake-up in the rackets. I know Dockside is a huge marketplace, lots of money to be made and stuff, so I go.”

  “This person specifically sent you to Dockside?”

  “Yeah, he said I could cover my losses and make a mint there.”

  “Sounds awful considerate for a dark ‘net loan shark.”

  “I was just happy he didn’t put a bounty on me.” Jean’s mouth twitched at this, a subtle tell informing Lucia that her point was well made. “It’s easy to say now that I should have been more skeptical. I figured he was just anxious to get his money paid back. I was sure anxious to not get killed over it.”

  “Go on,” she prodded.

  “I was in Dockside maybe two months before one of those guild enforcers cornered me and told me I had to play by their rules or get thrown the hell out of town. I didn’t think much of it. Guys like us push each other around all the time just to see if we can. I figured it was bullshit meant to scare me off the good turf. I had a couple of college bars and some spacer dives where I was moving a lot of product. I always figured somebody would try to take them from me.” He shrugged. “That’s the business.”

  “You ignored the warning,” Lucia said with a raised eyebrow. “That was a bad idea.”

  “Yeah. So I learned. Next thing I know, some guy is beating the shit out of me, then he confiscates what’s left of my stash.”<
br />
  This seemed to get the woman’s attention. “Confiscated your stash? That’s not how it works. I mean, the beating is usually non-negotiable, but nobody should be taking your product. We’ll throw you out, absolutely. But the guild has strict rules about different shops stealing from each other. If there was a question of product ownership, a fixer should have been called.”

  “Tell that to this guy.”

  “Describe him.”

  “Real tall and pale. Dark hair with one of those pointy parts in front.”

  “Was he wearing a black suit?”

  Jean frowned. “Yeah. You know him?”

  “Never mind. What happened next?”

  “Well, now I had to call my lender again and tell him the bad news. I made all the usual promises to save my own ass. You know, ‘double your money back,’ ‘I’m good for it,’ shit like that.”

  “And that is when he told you to try and kill Manny?”

  “Yup. Said all I had to do to get square was ice one kid.”

  The woman’s gaze was merciless. “And this didn’t feel just a little too easy for you?”

  He met the look with one of his own, resigned and sardonic. “Lady, he could have told me to go kill Chris Pike himself, and I would have had to try. It was that or get killed by some bounty hunter. The only other option was to run, and let’s be honest.” He waved to the cell around him. “You’ve seen how good I am at that.”

  “Did you know that he was one of ours? That you’d be dealing with Roland Tankowicz if you succeeded?”

  “I’m not stupid. I figured it out. But what choice did I have?”

  “They really set you up good, didn’t they?” Lucia chided. “You do realize that had you succeeded, you’d still have to run to Galapagos if you wanted to survive, right? This never ended with you anywhere but here.”

  “Yeah. I got played real good. I’m bait. Seems I’m good at being bait.”