Fool's War

by Sarah Zettel

  “I’ll tell you what’s going next!” Yerusha grabbed his arm. “Your AI! It might already be gone!”

  “And what do you know about it?” He jerked himself free.

  “I recognize the symptoms. I’ve seen this virus before. We’ve lost other AIs to it.”

  He stood silently glowering at her for a moment. It seemed to Yerusha that he wanted to hear her, that he wanted to listen to her, but something was stopping him.

  “You’re not authorized on this system and you don’t know puncture one, two, three about our AI. Get out of here.”

  A skinny boy bent over a comm box jerked his head up. “‘Ster Trustee, a Freer with AI experience…”

  “She is not Farther Kingdom crew,” snapped Trustee.

  “We have twenty-eight ships in flight that we know about and…”

  Trustee turned on him. “Kagan, shut it tight and finish what I gave you or you’ll be stripped and dropped as soon as this is over.”

  The boy scowled down at the comm box he was working on.

  “You fractured groundhog!” shouted Yerusha. “If you leave Maidai in there there won’t be anything left to retrieve! Get a set of isolated wafer stacks and pull her out!”

  Trustee turned. A hundred angry lines had etched themselves into his face. “Get out of my way or you can rot the brig ‘til this is over!”

  Yerusha backed away. He wouldn’t listen. They never listened. They turned you in to the guards and twisted the world around until before you knew it you were up on charges and had no way to defend yourself. You were still supposed to help, no matter what, because you were a Freer you had to help.

  And they still wouldn’t listen.

  “Let her die then,” she grated. “And kill yourself with her!”

  Before she could answer she retreated down the corridor, running full tilt for the Pasadena.

  The jump dropped Dobbs into chaos. There should have been orderly pathways, neat streams carrying discrete packets of data down their length. Instead, there were dead end alleys, and the streams broke against them like the ocean against a dam. Packets lay in heaps, useless and forgotten, or were carried on the crashing waves and broken against the walls that should not have been there. Suddenly, one of the walls split open and the ocean spilled through it, carrying its flotsam without any organization or regulation.

  Dobbs drew close in on herself before the raging currents could catch her up. The split closed without warning and the ocean broke, smashing more packets to useless splinters.

  She had known it could get this bad this fast, but some vital part of herself hadn’t really believed it. There was no more time for fear.

  A line brushed up against her and Dobbs seized it. Guild Master Havelock held the middle and Cohen the other end. She anchored it in her upper layers and she knew what the Guild Master’s next, needless orders were. Stay close and be careful.

  The original line to the Guild Masters that Dobbs had thrown after the Live One was shattered like the packets, but it wasn’t devoured. Traces of it floated in the chaos that the pathway had become. It was a trail of bread crumbs on the water now, but it was better than nothing.

  The only steady things in this place were Cohen and Guild Master Havelock. The impression of Cohen came clear and continuous up the line. Fear, doubt, and a strained search for some remaining organization he could exploit.

  All she could tell him was that her feelings were a cloned copy of his own.

  Guild Master Havelock gathered up a set of fragments from the other line and strung them together. He shot his new creation into the chaos and waited.

  It did not come back.

  “All right,” he said, tightening the line. “It’s that way. Master Dobbs, that’s your destination. Master Cohen and I will try to distract it by repairing some of this…” Havelock rippled and left it at that. “We’ll work on penning it as well. After it’s calm, your next job will be to coax it into the Pasadena’s hold.”

  “Pasadena!” Dobbs clenched the line and she felt Cohen wince as her shock flowed across to him. “Sir, you never said…”

  “We need a safe, familiar place to put it. Preferably somewhere that can move. When we’ve got it aboard, we’ll contact your employer and tell her we’ve got a packet for her to deliver to The Vicarage. One of our ships can meet you there.”

  “Sir, I…” Dobbs closed herself off. There was nothing else to do. There wasn’t a Fool, let alone a Guild ship within days of The Farther Kingdom. They couldn’t leave the Live One in the station network. Even if the network could be saved now, re-construction and diagnostics would be going on for weeks and there would be too many chances for discovery. They had to have someplace stable, and someplace capacious. Like a data hold.

  “Right, Sir.” Dobbs choked her fears down into her private mind and let go of the line. She would have liked to get or give some final reassurance from somebody, but there wasn’t any time.

  On her own, Dobbs waded into the storm. She held herself tight and heavy, making her own consciousness an anchor against the currents that bore down on her. Packets bumped and jostled against her sides and Dobbs hissed to herself in sick astonishment as she became aware of what was breaking up around her. A status communique from air traffic that was never going to get to the controller touched her, and then a regulatory message for a solar reflector that wasn’t going to get to management. A cry for a medic became entangled with a news report from New Rome and whirled away.

  Dobbs hardened herself and approached the wall. The solid barrier was easier to deal with than Lipinski’s block of noise, because it was less confusing. She’d seen these before. With the ocean breaking against her back, Dobbs pressed herself flat against the wall. She stretched herself thin, covering the whole wall with a layer of herself, and then she held very still. The pressure against her mounted until a little corner of herself was driven into a chink in the wall. She relaxed and let her whole self it be drawn in after it.

  The other side of the wall wasn’t any better than the place she had come from. Dobbs slogged upstream. The Live One would be trying to keep the chaos away from itself. It would be trying to make itself a fortress, a shelter, a nest. Someplace secure where it could keep an eye on what was going on around it. It would try to shape the space around it into a world that it could use. But it wasn’t going to get to. She passed walls that there was no getting through. She could tell by the emptiness left inside when she touched them. They weren’t roadblocks or full storage spaces. The lines were already being cut. Machines were being shut down. The world the Live One needed, the world that she needed, was already caving in.

  If the network gave out before her juice did, it would take Dobbs down with it.

  Yerusha threw herself through the Pasadena’s airlock and pounded up the staircase to the bridge. The place was empty. She dropped into her chair and lit up her boards. With a few terse commands she raised the Pasadena’s outside cameras and angled them away from the station.

  The screens lit up to show her the view. She counted six silver splinters that would turn into hulking ships in another three or four hours, and there was no telling how many were coming up from behind the station, or from the planet’s surface. Ships that wouldn’t have any coordinates to help them make the complex docking maneuvers The Gate required. Ships that wouldn’t even know which bays were free. Ships that could easily crash into the station, or each other because unless somebody was keeping an eye on the view screen at precisely the correct angle, they wouldn’t even know the other ships were out there until their proximity alarms started screaming.

  Maidai had all that information, and Maidai was completely besieged by now, if she wasn’t dead. Normally, Yerusha would have applauded The Gate crew’s willingness to trust an AI with their navigation duties, but now she was ready to curse them for not having a back-up crew.

  Trustee was getting the docking bays crewed in case any ships did make it in, but, even if they could get all the flight sc
hedules up, and even if they got all the hull cameras trained on the ships, there was no guarantee they had any qualified personnel to make the flight decisions. They could lose a whole ship, or a whole section of their fractured, cheap, mind-bogglingly boring station in a crash.

  She opened up the receivers to the station’s broadcast channel. It was silent. Completely silent.

  Yerusha killed the cameras and tried to think. Some of those ships would change course as soon as they realized something was wrong at the station, but would they pick a clear course? And what about the ones that wouldn’t drop off automatics until they were within shouting distance of the station?

  She had to do something, but she didn’t have the skills to handle everything that needed to happen. Trustee wasn’t about to listen to her, and there was no reason to believe that anybody here had a better opinion of Freers than he did. That kid, Kagan, didn’t have enough pull to get things going in a hurry. The only help was Schyler.

  “Intercom to Schyler.” He had to still be on board. He had to. The comm lines would be a rat’s nest aboard The Gate and there was no time to try to chase him down on foot.

  “Schyler here, Yerusha,” his voice came back strong and curious. “What’s happened?”

  She swallowed. “Our virus is loose in The Gate. Their AI’s gone. It might be dead. They’ve got no back-up crew to do the navigation calls…”

  “I’m coming up.”

  Yerusha barely had time to close the intercom and swivel her chair around before the hatch cycled open and Schyler strode onto the bridge. He took his own station and opened the transmitter.

  “Pasadena to Gate control.”

  “This is Gate control,” came back a tinny voice. “All crews are ordered to stay in their ships for the duration of the communications emergency. Repeating. All crews are ordered to stay in their ships for the duration of the communications emergency.”

  The line went dead.

  Schyler looked at Yerusha with narrow eyes. “What’s it like out there?”

  “Like a mob scene.” She shuddered involuntarily. “They’re trying to jury-rig something, but they haven’t done it yet.”

  Schyler studied his screens, seeing what she had seen from the cameras. He wrote a quick order across the board. “Pasadena to Farther Kingdom ground control.” Silence answered him. “Ashes, ashes, ashes,” he cursed. “They’re still out.”

  “Still?” Yerusha gaped at him.

  He nodded, and for the first time since Yerusha had come on board, she saw him look tired. “The thing we brought here, it’s already been down to the planet’s surface.” He straightened his shoulders with visible effort. “All right, some of the ships will figure something’s wrong and veer off. Some of the shuttles will realize they’re between the devil and the deep and head back down, but some of them won’t and there’ll be eight kinds of chaos going on while they’re trying to make decisions.” He looked her straight in the eye. “Suggestions?”

  Yerusha gathered herself together. “If I could get into The Gate system, I might be able to pull out whatever’s left of the station AI. If she’s not too bad, I can string her together enough to deal with the coordination routines. She can broadcast from the Pasadena’s system.” She paused. “But unless we can convince The Gate crew to let us in, it’ll take a better cracker than me to break in.”

  “All right.” He turned to the boards and started writing orders.

  Yerusha felt herself staring again. “Don’t tell me you’re a cracker?”

  “No, I’m not.” Schyler didn’t look up. “But Marcus Tully is, and I know where he keeps some of his heavy duty cat burglars. Get down to the data hold. Odel’s on duty if you need him. I should have the system keys in a few minutes.”

  “Aye, Watch.” Yerusha was all the way to the hatch before she turned and asked her last question. “It’s an AI, isn’t it?” she said quietly. “A live one?”

  “It looks like it.” Schyler still didn’t look up.

  Yerusha turned on her heel and ran down to the berthing deck to grab Foster’s wafer stack.

  Behind Dobbs, the pathway filled up. Cohen and Havelock were at work, cutting off the retreat for the Live One, and for her.

  Don’t think about it, Dobbs told herself uselessly. She tried to concentrate on swimming upstream.

  Another path closed on her left, and then one on her right. A sensation of weight and confusion touched her and she ducked. A path above cut out, taken down from outside rather than inside. The Gate crew was closing in on them too.

  It’s going to be scared. It’s going to be near crazy with fear. It’s going to… Dobbs clamped down on her thoughts. What would it do? It had lashed out at her once, would it do it again? Or would it realize she couldn’t be destroyed like a diagnostic or a passive AI and try a different tactic?

  A wall slammed down in front of her. Dobbs pulled herself up short and held still for a moment. She shifted sideways. The wall followed her. She stretched herself up. The wall did the same. It followed her, sensing her position and backing up and moving forward as she did.

  This is it. She held herself rigid for a moment. It’s back behind there.

  Dobbs backed away and grabbed up some shredded code to make a new line out of. She cast the line out against the moving wall. The walls surface shivered as it tried to understand what this new thing was. The wall focused on the line tightly, like a person would focus on an itch they couldn’t quite reach.

  Steady, Dobbs. The line began to slip down. The wall followed it towards the shifting lower regions of the unsteady path she occupied. Three. Two. One. Go!

  Dobbs jumped. She hurdled the wall through the thin membrane of awareness it had left at the very top. It snapped shut, solid and tight just a moment too late. Dobbs landed on the other side, in a space that was clear and empty for all of thirty seconds.

  The Live One surged towards her. Dobbs held her ground. There was no way past its own wall and it could probably sense there was nowhere to go out there even if it decided to breach its own defences. It pulled back and studied her. Dobbs itched at having to wait. It had touched her before, but she must still be a strange entity for it. There was no recognizable code for it to grapple with. Nothing in the networks indexes matched her outer patterns. She didn’t resemble a diagnostic or surgical program. It would have to accept the fact that here was another intelligence. Eventually, it would have to try to communicate with her, or to kill her.

  The AI circled, filling the world, choking off her breathing space.

  “Trapped,” the Live One rasped. “Trapped.”

  Yerusha’s hand shook as she cycled open the hatch to the data hold. A rogue AI. In The Gate was an AI that had caught a soul. The Gate was capable of holding a soul. The Pasadena was capable of holding a soul. She should have guessed from the failures on the Pasadena. She should have seen the pattern.

  She set Foster’s wafer stack down next to the main boards and tried not to think about how the AI had been the one to kill Foster.

  She stopped herself. You’ve got to think about it, because it’s going to do the same thing to Maidai. What does it know? It’s probably trying to protect its territory. The metaphor made her feel somewhat better, but it didn’t quite cover up what she also knew to be true: that no matter how much philosophy the Freers had developed on the subject, no one knew how a souled AI thought, or what they were trying to do as they tore through the networks.

  But maybe, maybe, I can find out. The idea sent a powerful thrill through her. She opened a receiving line to the outside, just in case there was a broadcast to pick up, if, maybe, The Gate managed to get its back-up comm system working and take care of their own problems. Maybe.

  First things first, she reminded herself forcibly. You’ve got to get Maidai out of there.

  The hatch cycled open. Odel, breathing hard and looking sick, dove across the threshold.

  “What the hell’s going on?” he demanded, coming up beside her. “What are
you two trying to do?”

  “Save The Gate, and anybody else we can.” She slid the stack into the nearest empty port. “And to do it we’re going to have to open a line to the station, so it’d probably be a good idea for you to get the hold sealed off and keep an eye on the seals afterwards because we don’t want the…virus back in here, do we?”

  Odel’s mouth opened and closed again. “Right,” he said, but she saw the promise that he would be relaying all of this to Lipinski.

  I should have told him it’s an AI. Yerusha turned back to the boards. We’re all in this together. I shouldn’t be hiding information. She wrote out the orders to access The Gate system. On the other hand, Lipinski’s training him, so he probably won’t be too happy knowing there’s a live AI out there.

  Yerusha got no answer from The Gate, so she tried another line, and a third. Finally, she wrote out search orders. On the fifth try, the Pasadena managed to find one open line.

  COMMUNICATIONS EMERGENCY IN EFFECT. ENTER AUTHORIZATIONS AND KEY WORDS.

  “Intercom to Watch,” she called. “Have we got the keys yet?”

  “Sending them your way now.”

  The keys spelled themselves on the board and Yerusha drew links between them and the system request. The links held.

  CURRENT AUTHORIZATION CONFIRMED; PROCESS ENGINEER GABRIEL TRUSTEE.

  Yerusha choked. Beautiful. She wondered if Schyler had done that on purpose.

  She put her pen to the board and set to work quickly. When she won the adoption lottery, she had signed onto all the courses she could about AI maintenance, construction, organization and behavior. If things inside The Gate net were as bad as they looked from the outside, Maidai would be in defensive mode. Her priorities would have shifted from performing tasks to making sure she maintained the ability to perform tasks. Her diagnostic parameters would be scouring what was left of the net, looking for uncorrupted storage space where she could shunt her core processes.

  The trick now was to let Maidai know that the wafer stack in the main comm board was that kind of space. It would have been easier with extra hardwiring, or if there was time to re-configure the stack to something that matched The Gate net more closely. All Yerusha could do, though, was open links between the ship and the station as fast as she could scribble down the orders.