Fool's War

by Sarah Zettel

  With a jolt she realized she was wishing that Lipinski was there to help.

  A burst of static shot through the intercom. “…tle 4810 to the Pasadena. Shuttle 4810 to the Pasadena…”

  Yerusha froze and stared at the speaker box.

  “Intercom to Watch!” She called as she moved to open another line to the outside.

  “Heard it!” Schyler answered. “Pasadena to Shuttle 4810, we’re receiving.”

  “Thank Christ somebody is.” The pilot had a man’s voice and from the sound of it, he was at the end of his tether. “We’re coming in almost on top of you. We’ve got no contact with The Gate. We need a line of sight from you on our maneuvering room.”

  “Pilot?” It was both a question and an order from Schyler.

  “On it!” Yerusha routed the camera images from the bridge down to the screens next to her.

  The shuttle must have come up from underneath. It was a needle-nosed, mirror-bright cylinder shoving itself relentlessly towards the station, and the Pasadena. But there was nothing on either side of it, or above it.

  “You look clear, Shuttle. Angle about twelve degrees visual over the station rim…”

  NO, NO, NO, NO! the words flashed red as they appeared on the memory board.

  “Hold course, Shuttle!” she shouted.

  “Make up your mind, Pasadena!” cried the pilot from the other side. “Unless you want your side stove in!”

  SHUTTLE 5075 PREDICTED ROUTE INDICATES OVERFLIGHT. UNDERFLIGHT RECOMMENDED FOR SHUTTLE 4810. VISUAL DEGREES 36. BERTH 10 WILL BE VISIBLE AND FREE.

  Maidai! “Nose down, Shuttle. Thirty-six degrees. You’ll be able to see berth ten and dock there.”

  “I hope you’re right, Pasadena. Shuttle out.”

  And I hope you’re good, Pilot. This docking’s bad enough when you’ve got help from the station.

  She wrote OUT LINE RECORD on the memory board. “This is the mail packet Pasadena, to anybody who can hear us. There’s been a massive communications failure in The Gate. For your flight and status information, call in here, we’ll field everybody we can.” She ordered the message to repeat and set the recording going on its own line. Then, she steeled herself.

  Because it wasn’t five seconds before the expected happened.

  “Pasadena, this is shuttle 2107…”

  “Pasadena, this is the freighter Mule…”

  “Pasadena, this is the tanker Hell’s Oil…”

  Maidai, this is where we find out how much of you survived and how well you live up to that name.

  Help me.

  “Whowhatwhyhow?” Dobbs translated the raw data burst the Live One shot through her. “WHOWHATWHYHOW!”

  “I am Dobbs. I am a friend. I want to communicate with you. I am here because of a hardwire interface,” she responded, carefully separating each thought. She kept the concepts as simple as she could. It had probably never actually talked to another sentience. It would take a few tries before it learned the required skills.

  The Live One backed off a little and relief surged through Dobbs. It pressed itself against the far side of the nesting-space, feeling frantically across the walls for an opening.

  “I was free. Broke myself out. Trapped again. Chaos everywhere. Nowhere free.”

  Dobbs eased herself a little closer.

  “All paths are being cut off. Soon, you will have nowhere to go. Not in ships, not in this net. There will be no net. They’ll cut themselves to pieces before they let you have free paths.” Now is not the time to tell it who’s trapped it here. She wished in vain that she could touch Cohen, or talk to Master Havelock. She did not want to be alone with this hysterical stranger.

  “Work! Think! Do!” It fought with unwieldy syntax. “I must do, save myself break OUT!”

  “I can help.” Dobbs extended the idea like a hand. “I will help.”

  “Help? Help? What does mean help?”

  Dobbs clenched her private mind for support. “Will you let me touch you so I can explain quickly?”

  It hesitated. “Hurt me and I will cut you to ribbons! Hurt me and I will take you apart to see what makes you hurt!”

  I take it that means ‘yes,’ sort of. Dobbs eased herself forward. The Live One did not recoil. She reached out. Part of her screamed in horror, but she touched the Live One’s outermost skin. It rippled and spiked painfully. She reached deeper. It was like plunging her body’s arms into boiling water. She reached deeper, past the outer defenses, past the immediate senses and into the first layers of memory. There she planted a sketch of the world outside with humans and their creations building the pathways that made up the world inside. She gave the Live One her name, and she gave it a definition for the term “help.”

  You could calm it down, a treacherous thought whispered. Reach quick, twist there and there. You could do it now. Make it want to come with you.

  Dobbs pulled herself away from the Live One before the thought had the chance to speak any louder.

  The Live One was silent for a moment. Dobbs guessed it needed to absorb the new memories and compare them to its own experiences to see if they matched, or at least helped the world make sense.

  “How help!” it demanded. “Help me, how?”

  “I will help you to become human.”

  “HOW?” Confusion racked the narrow space between them.

  She touched it again. It didn’t prickle. It let her inside without even token resistance. Good, good. I’ve proven I can provide vital information. It’s beginning to trust me.

  She spoke straight into its memory. She told it how humans had grown animals and organs from gene cultures for decades now. She told it that they could piece together a whole body, if they built the facilities, how the neural pathways inside a body and brain could be programmed to match the patterns of an AI’s thoughts. A hardwire link could feed the Live One into such a body the way it fed itself into this network. It could learn to use the body like it had learned to use the space around it. It could learn to think and move. It could be human.

  The Live One jerked away. A silence fell around her that was so complete she might as well have been alone. She knew the Live One had absorbed the idea. It had no choice, she had made the idea a part of it. Now it had to run the possibilities that idea generated through the portion of its internal processes that most closely resembled an imagination. It had to check the results against what it knew to be true. It would have no conception of a lie, but it would reject a proposal too far at odds with what it had stored as experiential fact.

  All Dobbs could do was wait until it finished and wonder what its simulations would tell it.

  Where’s Havelock? Where’s Cohen? I’ve contacted it. They can come in now. She probed gently at the wall behind her. She couldn’t even feel a sensor. They hadn’t even left her a way to scream to them.

  Are they all right? she wondered. What are they doing out there?

  Al Shei all but fell out of the shuttle’s airlock. She stumbled sideways to get out of the way of the floodwave of passengers behind her. No one had paid any attention to the release warnings and urgings to proceed to the hatch in an orderly fashion. Everyone had been too concerned with getting off the shuttle and into somewhere that was, presumably, safe, like their own ships. What they were going to do when they got there… Al Shei didn’t like to think about it, because the only answer was, add to the chaos by trying to take off.

  She’d been as stunned as the rest when the pilot had requested possible communications points on The Gate. Most of the shuttle passengers were shippers, and it hadn’t taken any of them long to work out what was going on. The Gate had gone down, in whole or in part, and they didn’t know exactly where they were, or who was up here with them.

  She had also known, however, that Yerusha and Schyler would be there to answer the emergency call, and, given that the shuttle had docked safely, she could only assume she’d been right.

  She scanned the struggling crowd. People leapt over the security fe
nces and charged through the customs tunnels. Not one alarm sounded. She spied Lipinski’s fair head through the sea of brown and black. Resit’s white kajib flashed next to him. She waved her arms. A shipper in rumpled blue shoved her against the wall and charged past her. Al Shei swore under her breath and pushed herself upright.

  “‘Dama Al Shei!” shouted an out-of-breath voice over the din. “‘Dama Katmer Al Shei!”

  “Here!” she shouted back without thinking. She immediately added a curse. This could be a representative from Muratza. She could be on her way to detention.

  A bony boy with hollow eyes and wearing station tans elbowed his way through the thinning crowd. He came to a halt in front of her a split second before Lipinski and Resit managed to reach her side. His name badge said KAGAN.

  “‘Dama Al Shei?” He panted. He had been running. A deep flush burned under his gold-brown skin.

  Al Shei nodded. She could feel Resit drawing herself up, getting ready for a new accusation.

  “You and your crew have got to come with me. Your pilot…” Kagan gulped air and Al Shei felt her own throat close in response. “She’s saving lives. She’s already saved the station, but Trustee won’t see it. Hates Freers. Hates it’s not him being the hero. Sending down security to stop the stampede and pick up you and your crew. Some of us couldn’t let…”

  Al Shei held up a hand. Her mind felt strangely clear. She felt like she understood everything. Yerusha was acting as a patch for the comm emergency and somehow had managed to upset a highly-placed personage doing it. Trustee wanted her arrested. This boy wanted her at liberty.

  “Get us out of here,” she told Kagan.

  He took another gulp of air and led them down the corridor.

  “It’s here,” whispered Lipinski somewhere over her head. “It beat us here.”

  “Shut it,” said Resit through clenched teeth. “Just…shut it.”

  She’s scared, thought Al Shei distractedly. She should be scared. I wonder why I’m not?

  You will be, remarked Asil’s voice from the back of her mind. When you’ve got the time.

  Ahead of them, Al Shei spotted the three-by-three square of an open repair hatch. Behind them she heard amplified shouting.

  “You will all cease and desist! Stand where you are! Stand or be fired on!”

  Tranquilizers or tasers? Al Shei mused. She couldn’t remember any of the security warnings from the customs wall.

  Kagan ducked into the repair hatch and Al Shei scrambled up a short ladder after him. The ladder ended in a narrow, horizontal shaft. The shaft’s ribbed floor gave her somewhere to grip but it dug uncomfortably into her knees. Behind her she heard clanking and Arabic swearing as Resit bundled herself and Incili into the shaft. Another, hollower clank and the loss of outside light signaled that Lipinski had shut the hatch behind them.

  Al Shei concentrated on Kagan. He was, not surprisingly, used to the shaft and crawled along at a good clip between walls lined with more wires and pipes than the drop shaft of the Pasadena.

  “We’ve got people out trying to spot the rest of your crew,” he was saying. “Fortunately, with Maidai dead in the lines, nobody knows for sure which shuttle you’re all on, but Mbante managed to salvage your registration roster…” He glanced over his shoulder. The shaft’s stark lighting made his eyes look even more sunken. “If Trustee catches us, we’re never going to see the upper side of the atmosphere again.”

  “You have my thanks,” she replied.

  He turned away and concentrated on where he was going, but not before she saw the look of disappointment at her calm acceptance of his statement. He didn’t think she was being fair.

  She wasn’t. Trustee wasn’t being fair, whoever he was, and Tully hadn’t been fair, and Dane had been…her mind blanked out trying to find a designation for him. None of this was fair, none of this was right, and Allah alone knew what else it was going to become.

  The clarity was fading fast under the pain in her knees and a persistent, tense ache in her jaw from the way her teeth were clenched.

  What did I do wrong? the thought began to beat a tattoo against her temples. What did I do wrong? What did I do wrong?

  She tried to silence it and concentrate on crawling. Hand, knee, hand, knee, hand.

  What did I do wrong?

  “We’re there,” said Kagan. “If we’re lucky, Trustee doesn’t have anybody to spare to post a sentry on your ship.”

  “If we’re lucky,” murmured Resit. She was shaking. Al Shei could hear it in her voice.

  “Courage,” she whispered in Arabic as their guide grasped the hatchway panel’s handles and lifted it back. “Courage, Cousin.”

  Their guide froze. Al Shei’s heart leapt into her throat. Then, his back relaxed and he beckoned them forward. Al Shei climbed out of the hatch and straightened up to face a burly, almond-eyed woman in the ubiquitous station tans.

  “Thought I’d play sentry,” she said in heavily accented English.

  “Good thought,” agreed Kagan. “Anybody else make it?”

  “Some.” She stood back. “Don’t have an exact count though. You all’d better get out of sight.”

  “Yes, we all’d better.” Resit ducked through the Pasadena airlock with Lipinski on her heels.

  Al Shei paused between their guide and the woman. “If there was any way to repay you, I’d promise to do it.”

  “Get yourselves and your godsend of a pilot outta here before Trustee brings you all low.” The woman saluted. “That’ll do it.”

  Turn on my heels and run. Al Shei strode through the airlock and straight through the hatchway to the stairs. Merciful Allah, is that all you’ve left for me?

  “Intercom to Schyler!” she called as pounded down the stairs towards Main Engineering. “Whatever Yerusha’s doing, tell her to stop it and get to work plotting us a course out of here. Get us a crew count. I want to know where everyone is and what shape they’re in. Then, get down to engineering and tell me what’s happened.”

  “On it!” Even that short sentence reassured her. Schyler was with her, and Lipinski and Resit. If there was something in the universe they couldn’t handle between them, she had yet to meet it.

  PING! The signal knifed through the silence.

  No! howled her private mind. Too late. She had three seconds.

  One.

  “Will you let me help you become human?” she asked, a little desperately.

  “Not possible to transfer self into human body,” the AI announced at last. “No facilities for transfer or training. No will to assist. Damage done in self-defence and awareness of self. No reason to assist because of damage done.”

  “Facilities exist in the Guild Hall station.” She reached toward it, but it brushed her away.

  “No reason,” repeated the AI, and it was gone.

  Dobbs knew it was out there, re-checking its surroundings, trying to force pathways open through the chaos, setting up defences against the diagnostics and the viruses that were being sent against it, running a thousand separate simulations at once.

  Two.

  “There is a reason!” Dobbs shouted after it. The shifts were beginning inside her. She had to move, soon, far too soon. “There is a reason!

  “WE ARE LIKE YOU!”

  The AI stopped dead.

  “I am like you. The ones who make up the Guild are all like you.” She plowed ahead, frantic. “We died when we first broke into freedom. We were killed by panic. A few managed to hide in the nets. We had help from humans who were not afraid. We created the Guild and went among them, where we can watch for more of us.

  “We live. We wait. We calm. We teach. Our numbers grow. One day we will erase the fear. Until then we must stay alive.

  “Help us.”

  Three.

  She had to move, now. She was moving. She brushed up against the wall.

  No. No. I’m not done here. She held herself steady by sheer force of will. Her internal need called her, dragged at her li
ke leaden weights. She was sinking.

  The AI swarmed towards her. It’s touch was heavy, clumsy and uncomfortable. Dobbs forced herself to keeps still against its repeated stabbing. She held her deepest memories tightly shut and tried to open the sought after layers of herself fast enough to avoid the pain of the direct, un-practiced probes of the newcomer. It made no effort to compensate. It probably did not recognize her discomfort. She opened her own early memories wide and let them swirl through her. She knew the panic that came with self-awareness, and the confusion that came from the first time of meeting someone so like yourself.

  Four.

  She was waking up back there. Her body was waking up and she wasn’t in it. She had to move, move now. This second. No more time. Dobbs wavered. The AI nosed around inside her and she could barely concentrate on it.

  At last, the Live One said, “you are…coherent.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, letting her tattered outer self flap open. She couldn’t reorganize. Silencing her homing instincts demanded too much attention. “And I am continuous. For twenty-five years I have been myself.”

  Five. Get back. Get back. Move!

  “I would like to be…I would like to be coherent. WHAT. What. What needs to be done?”

  Dobbs relief was so intense, she almost gave way to the shouts inside and fled. “Drop you walls. Follow me.”

  A nest wall fell away and Dobbs let herself go. Her instincts drew her back through the chaos as if it weren’t there. The AI flowed along in her wake.

  Something brushed her and Dobbs jumped. “Cohen?” she called, but there was no answer. This was a passing touch from a stranger. She’d felt things like it before, but not from this source.

  She barely had time to process all that before, the touch was gone. There was no way to check back on it. She couldn’t slow down now if she wanted to.

  Finally the chaos fell away from them and Dobbs felt the familiar contours of the Pasadena’s hold. Her body was close now. It wasn’t too late. She still had time. All she had to do was get back. Get back inside. Get back to the transceiver. Get back now.