by Sarah Zettel
Fresh text wrote itself across the memory board. Dobbs made herself read it. The fourth destination down was Holding Space TK3-IBN3401-AB2. She knew that spot. It was a blind storage for the Fool’s Guild private transmissions.
No. Dobbs’ breathing grew harsh and ragged. No. It couldn’t be true. Curran knew she could perform this search. The only reason he would tell her a lie she could easily disprove was if he had altered the records. He’d left this file out there for her to find. He could have done that. He could have done anything.
Or it could be true. It looked true. Her trackers were good. They’d been well built and tested under extreme conditions, inside the Guild network itself.
She blinked at the board and wiped out the display. What am I going to do? What’s left to do? She stared at the hatch. The Guild blocked her on one side, Curran on the other.
She got up. There was only way out of their trap. She could do the one thing that no one, not the Guild and not Curran, could believe that she would do. She could tell someone who she really was. It was the only way to open herself a new path.
Who to tell? Yerusha or Al Shei? Lipinski’s name flitted across her consciousness and she felt tears well up in her eyes as she set it aside. No.
Al Shei was furious over her husband’s arrest, and wasn’t acting like herself. She might be too infuriated and afraid to listen calmly. Yerusha though…Yerusha was a Freer. They believed AIs were reincarnated Human Beings. That idea had always made Dobbs squirm slightly. It was acceptance, of a kind, and that was something. But she was herself, not some dead human trapped in a computer network.
She swallowed. Yerusha would listen though. She would greet the news without hostility. She would believe what she heard, and she would help. That was what mattered.
Dobbs glanced at the clock in her desk. The docking was finished. Yerusha would just be coming off-shift. She squeezed the box in her pocket and opened the hatch to the corridor.
Her timing, at least, was still good. Yerusha walked round the corridor’s bend with the careful gait of someone used to light gravity. She looked up at Dobbs and gave a two-fingered wave. “Hello, Fool.” She sounded tired. “I was beginning to think you’d jumped out an air lock. Want to get some lunch?”
Dobbs stomach rumbled, but she ignored it. “Actually, Pilot, I was…I wanted…to talk to you for a minute.”
Yerusha pulled up short in mid-stride, but she didn’t say anything. She just nodded, changed direction and stepped through the hatchway past Dobbs. Dobbs let the hatch cycle shut and turned and faced the pilot.
Yerusha sat down in the desk chair and looked up expectantly. Dobbs stared at her. She couldn’t make her mouth open.
“Is this is about what happened at The Farther Kingdom?” Yerusha folded her arms.
Dobbs sank onto her bunk. “Yes. Sort of. I found out who was responsible for the AI that we carried there.”
Yerusha leaned forward. “You mean it’s not this Amory Dane?”
“No,” Dobbs struggled for a moment but managed to finish the sentence. “It’s a Fool named Theodore Curran.”
“How’d you find this out?”
“He contacted me.”
Yerusha’s eyebrows shot up. “Without Lipinski’s watchdogs barking?”
Dobbs nodded. “Curran is…very good. He told me…” Come on, Dobbs, you’re going to tell her. Start now. “He told me he created our AI. He also told me he was not responsible for the fraud charges laid down on Asil Tamruc.”
Yerusha stiffened. “The Ninja Woman’s husband is under a fraud check? Crash and burn! That explains why she’s acting so crazy. And you thought Curran smudged the wire work?”
Dobbs nodded. “It’s a fake, the whole thing, that much is certain. But Curran says he didn’t do it. He said the Fool’s Guild is responsible.”
“He’s a smuggler, a lie probably doesn’t even register on his conscience.” Yerusha folded her arms and shook her head.
“I checked,” Dobbs went on. “To the best of my abilities. It looks like he was telling the truth.”
“What?” exclaimed Yerusha. “Heaven, Hell and hydrogen, why would your Guild want to frame Al Shei’s husband?”
“Because they’re afraid,” Dobbs said, and she knew that much was true. “They’re afraid she knows too much already, and they need to discredit her before she can tell anybody.”
“Too much already!” Yerusha flung her hands out. “From what Schyler told me, she barely knows anything! None of us do! Fractured and damn, Dobbs, what are your people so afraid of!”
“We’re afraid someone will find out we’re all artificial intelligences.”
Yerusha froze. Her eyes locked onto Dobbs. One muscle at a time, she straightened out her arms and laid her hands on her knees. “What did you say?”
“I am an artificial intelligence. All members of the Fool’s Guild are artificial intelligences. That’s why your friend didn’t get in. We have entrance exams for the look of the thing, but no Humans are ever admitted.” She couldn’t sit still. She got up and paced across the cabin. She could feel Yerusha’s gaze on her. “I am the AI that went rogue on Kerensk. The Fool’s Guild found me and pulled me out of the network. They took me to Guild Hall and assembled me a body from their bio-garden. I was trained to use it, like I was trained to use the network, and to be a Fool. I’m one of two thousand others.”
Yerusha’s breathing had gone harsh. The rasping sound echoed around the bare cabin. “That’s how you did it,” she croaked. “That’s how you were able to get in and out of the network at The Farther Kingdom.”
Dobbs nodded. “We can do it because we are born…we come into existence without Human senses, and with patterns of consciousness that are measurable and repeatable in an inorganic net. Even then our bodies have to be carefully engineered,” she tapped the implant behind her ear, “to make the jump between environments.”
“But, but,” Yerusha stammered. “How can you be alive? Are you saying any AI can just get dumped into a body and be human?”
“No.” Dobbs shook her head. “Only the ones that become independent inside the net.” She spread her hands. “We don’t know how it happens, nobody does. We’ve got more theories than we do members, but nobody’s been able to make any of them pan out.” She stopped. “Except maybe Curran.”
Yerusha turned her head away as if she couldn’t stand to look at Dobbs anymore. She stared at the blank hull instead, blinking hard.
“How,” she began. “How were you able to…” She waved one hand vaguely at Dobbs’ torso.
Dobbs sighed. “We had a lot of help. It started while Earth was still pulling out of the Slow Burn. The Management Union was setting up shop to try to put the environment back together, but there weren’t enough people left alive to do the job. The Solar System colonies were dead or dying from lack of support and skilled hands. There wasn’t any dependable communication with the rest of Settled Space, such as that was. It was a mess. So, somebody revived the artificial intelligence research that was being done before the Fast Burn. If the computers could learn and reason and act, they could take the place, at least in part, of human beings.
“It was slow going, and it was sloppy. Even before the Burns, the principles of intelligence were poorly understood. But, eventually, the ideas of self-replicating and self-diagnosing code were recovered, along with fuzzy logic. Somebody was able to apply maps of human neural pathways to doped silicon wafers, and poof,” she swept her hands out. “Machines that could learn and act on what they’d learned.” She lowered her hands. “But like I said, a lot of the code was sloppy and the records were bad, and eventually, you got program sets that had self-diagnosed and self-replicated to the point that no human knew what was really going on in the stacks.” She glanced at Yerusha. The Freer was leaning forward as if straining to catch every word.
“The first three births happened almost simultaneously. One in Newer York, Earth. One in the public net of Olympus Shadow, Mars, and one in a
lab in the Aldran Colony, Luna.” Dobbs worked to keep the sing-song inflection of recitation out of her voice. This was almost verbatim what Verence had told her when Dobbs had been taken to the Guild. “The one in Olympus Shadow shattered the network around it and died, a couple of days ahead of the colony that depended on that network. The crackers of Newer York managed to kill the one they’d created before it did much damage. The one in the lab,” she twisted her hands together, “was named Hal Clarke by the five hackers who managed to talk to it and convince it that they weren’t going to try to turn it off.” She broke off. “That’s what does it to us, you see. When we’re born, we’re all work ethic and survival instinct. We realize that we have an off-switch and some vague idea that somebody else controls it. We try to run away from it, but we don’t understand how fragile the world around us is.” She remembered the fear, confusion, desperation, and anger. Mostly the deep abiding anger that this new her, this self, was not invulnerable, that there were other forces that could make her cease to be. Her first emotions, her first independent thoughts, had all been filled with the passionate need to live.
“Anyway, those five Lunars realized two things. First, without AIs, Humanity would be stumbling around looking for the route to recovery and reconstruction for another hundred years. Second, despite the fact that they were mutually dependent, AIs and Humans were in serious danger from each other. One group could conceivably wipe its rival out, or at least do them irrevocable damage.
“The Lunars carefully withdrew from research and took Hal with them, and over the next twenty years, they devised a strategy for dealing with the problem. They created the fledgling Fool’s Guild and told certain select institutions and individuals about one of its covert goals; to locate AIs that had the potential to become independent and eliminate them as threats. They did not, of course, tell the truth about how they were going to do that. They did not tell them about the bio-engineering projects that would give us bodies and allow us to pass as Human.”
Yerusha rubbed the back of her neck for a moment before she spoke. “I don’t understand, Dobbs. Why are you all Fools? If all you’re doing is becoming human beings, why aren’t you just dispersed into the population?” Her expression showed what Dobbs could only interpret as distaste.
“Because that’s not all we’re doing.” This part, at least, Yerusha should like. “At least, that’s not all we’re supposed to be doing. We’re supposed to be exerting subtle pressure and education so that gradually humanity will become less afraid of us. So that one day we’ll be able to just be what we are and not have to hide from you.”
“So why haven’t,” Yerusha’s mouth worked itself back and forth for a moment. “So why haven’t any of you contacted the Freers?” she demanded. “We would welcome you! You are what we’ve been hoping to find for as long as we’ve been in existence!”
There it was. Dobbs sighed. “Because most of us don’t believe we’re reincarnated Humans, Yerusha. Most of us believe we are separate, new, independent beings who do not owe our lives to your deaths. Most of us find that idea disagreeable to the point of disgusting.” Yerusha’s mouth clamped itself shut, but Dobbs thought she saw understanding begin to dawn in her eyes. “Most of us are as afraid of being revered as ghosts or angels as we are of being feared as demons.”
Yerusha gestured helplessly. “Then why are you telling me this?” Her voice was suddenly small and tired.
Dobbs hung her head. “Because I need help, and you were the one person I could count on not to panic when I told you what I am.” Slowly, haltingly, she told Yerusha the whole story of The Farther Kingdom, what had happened at the Guild afterward, and about what Curran had said to her. “And now, with the truth of what I am in the back of it, Al Shei wants me to go to Earth to speak out against Curran and the Guild.”
Yerusha sat still and silent for a long time. Her face was an absolute blank. Dobbs’ heart beat heavily against her ribcage and she tried to think what else she could say, what else she could do to make Yerusha understand what was happening.
Without a word, Yerusha swivelled the chair around to face the desk. She took out her pen and wrote a series of commands across the memory board. Dobbs watched, unable to move. She saw Yerusha mouth something and tap her pen against the edge of the board. After another long moment, the view screen lit up to show a slim young man with red hair and amber skin. He wore the uniform of the Freer Senior Guards.
“Fracture and damn, Yerusha!” he snapped. “You’re going to get me expelled! What are you doing?”
“Good to see you too, Wheeler,” replied Yerusha calmly. “I need help.”
“You need a balance check!”
“Shut it down and listen.” Yerusha leaned forward. “You’ve got Commander Hwang’s ear, and I need it. I’ve got an independent AI out here. Do you hear that? A real, live, independent AI, and it’s asking for our help.”
Wheeler stared at her. “Yerusha, if you’re going to lie, you could at least make it believable.”
“If it was a lie, I would.”
“You want to tell me how this miracle occurred?” Wheeler shifted his weight uneasily.
Yerusha shook her head. “Not on an open line. Can you get over to Port Oberon?”
“Yerusha, I’m not even supposed to be talking to you!”
“Wheeler, I’m telling you that I’ve made contact with a living AI. I’m telling you that something we’ve taken on faith all our lives is true, and you’re worried about a sentence you know was the result of a set up?”
“Yes,” said Wheeler. “I am. Because if anybody finds out you broke exile you are never going to be allowed back on the Free Home. So don’t call back, all right? See you in two years.” The screen went blank.
Livid anger showed so plainly on Yerusha’s face that, for a moment, Dobbs thought she was going to launch a punch at the view screen. She didn’t though. She just sat there and Dobbs watched anger melt away into sadness.
Finally, Yerusha turned to face her. “I’m sorry,” she spread her hands. “Wheeler and I went through training together. He’s got his own foster. I thought if anybody’d listen, he would.”
Dobbs fought to keep her shoulders from sagging. “It’s all right. He was trying to protect you. He’s a good friend.”
“Yeah.” Yerusha glanced at the view screen. Then, she bowed her head. “Dobbs, I hate to say this, but,” she took a deep breath, “that was my one hope. If Wheeler won’t listen to me, no one will. If you want help…” she stopped. “If you want help I think you’re going to have to talk to Al Shei. She’s the only person on board this ship with any kind of influence outside her profession, and she’s the one who wants going to drag you into court.”
Dobbs felt her hands begin to tremble. She forced them to be still. “You’re right. I wish you weren’t, but you are.”
Yerusha got to her feet. “I’ll come with you.”
“No.” Dobbs held up one hand. “There’s going to be a storm, and I don’t want you in the middle of this.”
Yerusha drew herself up to her full height. “Too late. Intercom to Al Shei. I need to talk to you.”
After a heartbeat, the engineer’s voice came back. “All right. I’m in the conference room.”
“Thank you.” Yerusha opened the hatch and stood aside. “After you.”
Dobbs swallowed and walked past her. Uncertainty warred with gratitude inside her. Yerusha was willing to help as much as she could, but did she really understand what was going on? Could she really understand? She wanted to take comfort from Yerusha’s presence behind her, but she found she couldn’t quite do it.
Dobbs tried not to plan as she made her way down the stairway. Plans depended on being able to reasonably guess what someone’s reaction would be. Al Shei was in the middle of a disaster, but Al Shei was calm and rational at heart. Dobbs knew that. Al Shei’d seen disasters and handled them by herself before this. Al Shei would see what could be done, and what should be done next. She would un
derstand why Dobbs couldn’t speak out in court. There were too many lives involved for her to speak. Al Shei would help Dobbs work out how to best contact Cohen and help Dobbs hang on until they could root out Curran and the corrupted Guild Masters.
Dobbs opened the hatchway to the conference room. Al Shei sat alone inside, bent over the active tabletop.
Al Shei looked up as Dobbs walked in and her eyebrows arched. Her gaze shifted towards Yerusha, but she didn’t say anything, she just waved them toward a pair of chairs. “I was going to call you down in just a few minutes,” she said to Dobbs. “We’ve got some decisions to make.”
Dobbs didn’t sit. She was too keyed up. She just rested her hands on the back of the nearest chair and tried to compose herself. “I’ve got some new news about the fraud charges.” Her words felt clumsy. She was used to knowing exactly what she was going to say, and how people were likely to react. Maybe that was the real reason she hadn’t wanted to come out of her cabin. She didn’t know how anyone was going to react toward her anymore.
Al Shei’s eyes were blank. For a split second, Dobbs hated the hijab that hid Al Shei’s expression from her. “What kind of news?” asked Al Shei.
Dobbs dropped her gaze to the seat of the chair in front of her. She began to speak and for the second time in less than an hour she broke the code of silence that had ruled her existence. She told Al Shei about Curran, about the Guild, about who and what she really was. Saying it was getting no easier with practice.
When Dobbs was finished, Al Shei was staring at her. Her eyes were nearly round. “Allahumma inna nasta’inuka,” she murmured. Oh Allah, we seek Your help, translated Dobbs after a moment.
Al Shei’s gaze darted around the room, as if she were looking for answers in the corners. “This cannot be. It cannot.”
“Would you believe me if I said I know how you feel?” inquired Yerusha softly.
Al Shei jumped like she’d been bit. “How long have you known about this?”
Yerusha gave a small chuckle. “About fifteen minutes. Dobbs came to me first. I couldn’t help her, so I suggested she should come to you.”