Deja Vu

by Guerin Zand

  Back to Keith and Sabrina.

  “Listen, Keith.” As I said, he was a Brit and I found his demeanor annoying to say the least. “She is in charge of deploying the sensor net on your ship and you will do as she tells you. Understood?”

  “Aye, sir.” At least having been a member of the SAS meant Keith didn’t argue with orders. You should see some of the shit their instructors put them through to teach them to obey orders without question.

  “And you need to apologize to Sabrina for the language you used.”

  “But, sir. She’s just a machine. That would be like apologizing to the forklift.”

  “Does she look like a forklift to you?” I think I had him on that point. If not, the Brits were a lot more fucked up than even I thought. It was also possible that he had some sick fetish for his forklift, but I didn’t even want to go there.

  “No, sir, but she’s not a real woman. You do know that, right?”

  “And just what, in your opinion, makes something real, Keith?” In a way, I was hoping he could clarify that one for me. I’d pretty much given up trying to tell what was real and what wasn’t.

  “Don’t know that I can actually say, sir.” What was I expecting, he was British after all.

  Sabrina wasn’t actually helping me out much. She was just staring off with the typical blank expression common to the fembots. The whole personality training was still pretty much a work in progress.

  “Neither can I, Keith. Since there is a question as to what these ladies are, don’t you think it might be wise not to antagonize them? I do know that she could pull you apart like a rag doll if she wanted. That at least should make you think twice about pissing her off. Would you speak to my daughter the way you just spoke to Sabrina here?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because if she didn’t tear me to pieces, you would, sir.” I think I got my point across to Keith and he apologized. “I apologize, ma’am.”

  Of course, Sabrina didn’t respond. I really didn’t have time for this shit. “And Sabrina.”

  Sabrina turned to face me with the same expressionless look. “Yes, Guerin.”

  “Try not to be such a bitch, ok?”

  Keith and I started to laugh. Sabrina just started rocking her head slightly up and down, to the right and to the left, as she tried to compute what I had just said. Luckily her creator had foreseen these dead-end logic loops when it came to personal interactions. He had installed a sort of failsafe for them to escape these traps. Basically, after a few seconds, she just tossed it all into her bit bucket and gave the standard response. “Yes, Guerin.”

  As I walked away, I heard Keith say, “Well, get on with it sweet cheeks.”

  See, it was this sort of shit that made me hate management. It was obvious I was going to have to put together a course on AI manners and require all the teams to attend. You know, like those sexual harassment courses all the companies used to make us attend. Of course, when I attended those courses, I always brought a date with me. I always wondered why I was the only one who ever thought of that.

  It was true that my crew, family, hell, just about everybody, gave me shit about how I would befriend all the different AIs, from the food replicators to the navigation systems. I had been accused on several occasions for being a bit too friendly with the food replicators, but I always got a half-way decent meal out of them, which was the best they could do, while others seemed to not be so lucky. The navigation systems could have some fun with you as well if they were so inclined. On more than a few occasions, as we were training our crews, the nav system would plot a course with multiple portal transitions, instead of just one simple portal transit, just to make a point to an abusive operator. You know how confusing traveling through a transit portal could be on a human consciousness. It never got any better, you just got used to it, sort of. Imagine the effect of going through a hundred or so portal transits in rapid succession. Everyone would try to insist that these were just glitches, or operator error, but I was as stupid as the next guy, and I never had one of those navigation glitches.

  Men have known since we first started building machines, that they had personalities and they could be quite sensitive. That’s why we refer to our machines using feminine pronouns, well that, and just like women, we want something from them. This is also the reason that women and machines typically don’t work well together. I don’t think there’s a man alive who’s woman hasn’t insulted one or more of his machines. Then, after the offensive woman leaves, we very nicely apologize to said machine so it won’t hold it against us. Of course, when our women catch us sweet-talking our machines, they think there’s something wrong with us. Now, add a little AI to the mix of man and machine, and I contend that there’s even more reason to be nice to them. The only real exception to all of this that I’d ever seen, were those old GPS units we used to have in our cars. Those were obviously designed by women. Their sole purpose was to annoy men while they were enjoying their machines. That’s why they had annoying female voices, and just like your woman, would always give you bad directions. It was totally acceptable to use foul language in response to your GPS unit’s instructions.

  ◆◆◆

  The ships were finally loaded, and the crews were ready to go. We lifted off from the spaceport and started heading out of the system using only our gravity drives. Steve and the Discovery opened a portal and went ahead to check out the latest activity on Desterio. We had left a sensor net behind, but we wanted to double check before we committed the more vulnerable cargo ships. Steve reported back all clear. Then he opened a portal and took one of the cargo ships with him to one of the LaGrange points around Desterio. I opened two portals to the other LaGrange points we were going to deploy the platforms at for the remaining two cargo ships. I followed them through and the operation was underway.

  We took one last look at our long-range sensors before we gave the crews of the cargo ships the ok to begin their deployment of the platforms. At that point, we turned the flight controls of the Discovery and Ryvius over to the preprogrammed flight paths for the deployment of the sensor modules. The deployment of the sensors would actually take longer than it would to deploy the platforms. The problem was, the cargo ships were not capable of stealth operations when not using their star drives. That meant it was possible they would be detected from stations on Desterio, and if that happened, the Ryvius and Discovery would have to suspend their operations to deal with any ships they might send up. Based on what we knew about Trogan technology, the cargo crews should be able to complete their part of the mission before any ships from Desterio could reach them, but we weren’t going to take any chances.

  During the entire operation, we did not see any response from the surface of Desterio. Some speculated that they had noticed the appearance of the cargo ships, but they’d also detected the use of Collective portals, and were not willing to risk a conflict with anyone with that technology. Whatever the reason was, the cargo crews deployed the platforms without any issues. As the crews began running the systems through the startup and diagnostic procedures, a craft appeared out of nowhere. This automatically triggered the autopilot functions that were controlling the Ryvius and Discovery to abort their operations and jump to intercept the intruder.

  “What’s up, Dad?” Maria contacted me over the comm network.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Maria? You just caused our ships to stop the sensor deployment to deal with your sudden and unexpected appearance.”

  “Sorry, but you should have updated the computers to include the Deviant as a friendly ship design.” She was right of course. It turns out that we forgot to update our systems to include the new lightning class in their database of known ships.

  “Whatever. That still doesn’t explain what you’re doing here.”

  “I just thought we’d pop in on our way back to Hell to see how things were going.”

  “So, you brought the whole family into hos
tile space just for a fucking look-see? What part of stay safe don’t you understand?”

  “We’re perfectly safe on the Deviant, Dad. Quit worrying.”

  “You just disrupted our operations, which were timed to reduce the risk to all the crews. It’s bad enough you don’t consider your own safety, but did you even consider the safety of the crews involved in this operation? What the fuck is wrong with you? You should know better.”

  “Fine, we’ll leave. Nice talking to you, Dad.”

  The Deviant was gone before I had a chance to respond. She just hung up on me in a very rude manner, if you ask me. We put the two ships back on autopilot and continued with the sensor deployment. The cargo ship crews had completed the checkout and initialization of the platforms. They were waiting for us to complete the sensor net before enabling the system. We were deploying the sensor net at the border of what would be cloaked space. If we enabled the platforms, our own ship systems would have a hard time navigating the warped space that was generated around this border. The sensors worked with the platforms, constantly exchanging data, so even though they were within the cloaking field, they had the ability to see outside that field into normal space as well. That was one improvement we made over the system deployed in the Vaj system.

  As I had been trying to explain to Maria, while the two ships were busy deploying sensors, they couldn’t protect the cargo ships. We had them move inside of the cloaking field, so when it was enabled, they’d have that for protection until we had time to open portals for them to return to base. We didn’t think the Trogans had anything that could get close to our ships without us detecting them first, but we all know what happens when you start to make assumptions. From what we could tell from our scans of Desterio, there were no weapon installations protecting the planet, only a few Trogan troop carriers seemed to be based at the local spaceport. It appeared that there was only a small garrison on the surface, consisting of fewer than two hundred Trogans, to maintain law and order on the planet. How many of the humans were working with the Trogan occupation forces was unknown.

  Ok, I’ll admit it. I was paranoid. That’s probably the reason I blew up at Maria the way I did. The whole idea of stealing this planet from the Trogans had to be one of my dumbest ideas ever. The whole time we were planning it, I had hoped someone else would have said so. Even as we were about to activate the system, I was expecting something to go terribly wrong. It didn’t. When the system went active, we could tell it was working by the invalid readings we were getting from the navigation systems. According to those systems, we were no longer where we were. Either the cloaking field was working, or we’d really screwed the pooch.

  One of the compromises we had to make in order to only cloak a single planet, in comparison to the entire solar system that was cloaked around Hell, was to find a way not to affect the amount of solar radiation that reached the planet from its star. If we didn’t include the star somehow within the cloaking field, no light, heat, or any other form of solar energy needed for life would reach the surface, and we’d pretty much kill everything on the planet.

  To accomplish this, the cloaking field extended to a little over five million miles from the stars surface. This was just outside of the star’s corona. The radiation levels there were high enough that the standard Trogan ship capable of carrying passengers was not designed to withstand that sort of exposure, so we weren’t worried about any Trogan ships being able to take advantage of that vulnerability. Since Desterio was the closest planet to the star, we didn’t have to worry about another planet’s orbit being affected by the warped space. This allowed a 120-degree section of the star’s surface on the side facing the planet to be unaffected by the cloaking. It also meant that if someone knew what to look for, they would be able to see a few anomalies that would give a clue to what was really happening.

  The planet would cast a partial shadow on any body, or vessel, whose line of sight to the star was eclipsed by the cloaked planet’s true location. The star would also appear a bit dimmer in areas if viewed along similar lines. We decided that this wasn’t that much of a risk. Even if they knew the planet was still there, navigating warped space would prevent them from getting there in most cases. For those other cases, the platforms would simply open portals to remove those that made it that far.

  When we were satisfied everything appeared to be working as planned, we sent the cargo ships back to Hell. Then we took the Ryvius and Discovery just outside the cloaking field to make sure everything from outside the cloaking field appeared as we wanted. We intentionally looked for the anomalies we knew would be visible. We were surprised to see that they were only detectable when we made detailed scans of the star’s surface. At that point, we signaled the system to begin broadcasting our message to the planet’s inhabitants.

  We informed them that the Collective Space Force had now taken possession of the planet Desterio. All Trogans would be allowed to leave using the vessels available to them, but only Trogans. No vessels with human passengers would be allowed to return to Trogan space. The sensors would be able to scan the ships and determine if humans were aboard, but just in case they tried to shield themselves from the scans, they were warned that such attempts would result in the ships being disabled. It was made clear that we wanted the Trogans to leave. If they did not do so by their own choice, or if they were considering causing any issues on Desterio, a force large enough to take care of the problem would be dispatched. They were given two weeks to abandon Desterio. The platforms were programmed to use portals to transport the Trogan vessels out of the cloaked region and back to the Trogan home system.

  Roger had already assembled a quick reaction force of one hundred and fifty Rangers on Hell that we could have onsite at a moment’s notice. He was also working with Steve to supplement that force with two hundred of the ex-marines that had joined our private security forces. With our two cruisers and three cargo ships, and the help of the Collective technology we possessed, we should be able to remove the Trogan presence from Desterio by force if needed. We were hoping that wouldn’t be necessary, but based on our previous visit to the surface, we didn’t think it was going to be that easy.

  Roger and Steve were going to handle all of that. I had done my part coming up with the cloaking system and would only get involved if they decided they needed the Ryvius to assist in their efforts. Steve returned to Hell to escort a cargo ship that would carry the Ranger quick reaction force and all their gear back to Desterio within an hour or so. The plan was to set up a small base well outside of the colony where the force would be stationed. Steve and the Discovery would protect the base. In case they encountered a force that the Rangers could not handle, the Discovery would provide cover for them while the cargo ship retrieved them.

  I was going to stick around until Steve and the Rangers returned. I portaled back into the cloaked region of space to keep an eye on things. Actually, the sensor net and platforms didn’t really need my help to keep an eye on things, but it made Roger feel better. We still had Heesa onboard. I was more than ready to get rid of our guest. I went back and explained that we had taken Desterio, and that I wanted him to order his troops to follow our instructions.

  “Why would I help you?” Heesa asked.

  “Because, Heesa. If you don’t help, then people are going to be killed when it really isn’t necessary. Guess who’s at the top of my list of candidates to be the first to die?” I raised an eyebrow and smirked at the arrogant little fuck. I think he got my meaning and he contacted his troops on Desterio as I had requested. I left Heesa in his quarters. I was going to wait to see how his troops responded before sending him on his way.

  As I entered the bridge, Kelly gave me an update on what was happening. “Sir. The Trogans appear to be packing up, but there is a lot of activity down there. The human population appears to be in a bit of a panic, and there have been some skirmishes between a few groups and the Trogans. What are your orders, sir?”

  “Order the hum
ans to return to their homes. Inform them that the colony is under martial law until we can restore order. Let them know that a human security force will be arriving soon. Any actions taken against that force will be met with deadly force. Until Steve and the troops arrive, use the immobilization fields to disable any large gatherings of humans in the area that ignore the warning.”

  “Aye, sir. And if the Trogans attack the humans?”

  “If our squad of Rangers onboard can handle it, send them down. A few dead Trogans might just be enough of a message to get across to them we’re not messing around. If it’s too much for our squad to handle, knock them all out and we’ll let Steve and his troops take care of it when they get here. If everything is going according to plan, they should be back here within the hour.”

  Kelly sent the message down to the colony. The two of us stayed on the bridge together to monitor the situation. The squad of Rangers on the Ryvius suited up and were assembled in the transport room waiting further orders. Most of the humans heeded the warning and returned to their homes. We observed a few small groups of troublemakers. Kelly decided to break up the squad into three groups of four, and deploy them as needed. The Rangers were sent down to the surface, and they weren’t fucking around. Any human or Trogan that even looked at them funny ended up dead. Most ran when the killing started. Kelly would then open a site-to-site portal to move the groups around to wherever they were needed next. It was a brilliant plan by Kelly actually. It made it appear that we had at least ten times the number of troops we actually had. By the time Steve and the troops did arrive, Kelly had the situation on the ground mostly under control.