by H. A. Swain
“Then I’ll make it quick!” I mute her again before she can respond.
Fornax throws her hands up in the air and irately shakes her head, but I stand my ground.
“If you want your station back, you need to listen to me.”
Fornax bites her tongue and narrows her eyes as she stops shouting at me all the way from Earth.
“Before I’ll launch the Res Extensa, I want three promises from you.”
She crosses her arms tightly against her chest and scowls.
“First, you will grant asylum to Talitha and Castor and make them honorary MUSC citizens if they want to stay here.”
Castor and Talitha look at each other, then at me, then at Fornax.
“They are good enough and smart enough to join us, and without them, we wouldn’t have succeeded here,” I say.
Dr. Fornax looks to the ceiling, but she nods in agreement. Castor and Talitha gasp, then hug with Quasar barking at their feet.
“Second, I want my LWA to include regular visits to the Earth.”
Dr. Fornax wrinkles her nose and shakes her head as if I’ve asked for something disgusting.
“You need to find me a job that involves the Earth, or I won’t be happy here.”
“Do it,” Mom tells Fornax.
Dr. Fornax grits her teeth, but she nods for the second time.
“And third”—I take a deep breath, because I know this one’s a doozy—“you must end the ExploroBot program.”
This one catches Fornax off guard. She stares at me for a moment, then her face softens. She’s not angry like I thought she’d be, just confused. She points to her mouth, then clasps her hands together as if to say please.
“Unmute,” I command.
“Uma,” Dr. Fornax says calmly, “you don’t understand. What we do with the ExploroBots is for the good of all humankind. Someday the Earth will not be livable and the rest of the universe will be our home, and without ExploroBots—”
“No matter what you try to convince yourself of, Dr. Fornax, the ExploroBots are people,” I say. “For all the nonsense spouted by D’Cart or Zaniah or whatever her name is, she’s right about one thing. Just because you replace their body parts doesn’t mean you make them less of who they were.”
“And,” Castor joins in, “if you’re going to use human beings as your technoslaves, you’re no better than Zaniah is, because she planned to do the same thing to your people when she took over up here.”
“Who are you?” a voice asks, then we see Micra creep into the holo frame from behind Fornax. This time it’s a genuine question, not a condemnation.
Castor does a double take when he sees Micra. He stands up tall. “My name is Castor Neva.” I see Micra studying him closely as he says, “I am an Earthling. You may think of me as just some guttersnipe from the Wastelands, but my father helped build this place.”
“Oh,” says Dr. Fornax. “Your father was an ExploroBot?”
“Our father,” he says, and puts an arm around Talitha’s shoulders. They are mirror images.
“My husband, too,” says Randazza, with her chin held high. “I came here to be near him.” My mother lays a hand on her back.
“Well, er, um … thank you all for your family members’ services,” Dr. Fornax mutters. “I hope the payment—”
“No,” says Talitha. “It wasn’t enough. It was never enough.”
Dr. Fornax shuts her mouth for a moment, then she takes a deep breath and says, “I’m sorry for your losses. I truly am. But your loved ones would not have lived on the Earth. Their injuries were too great. And the work they did here has helped us create a world for the greater good. We’re expanding. New colonies are being built to accommodate all of our people—”
“But what we have here benefits such a small group,” I argue. “And the price is too high from a few individuals. You’ve built this place on the backs of people like their father and Randazza’s husband, but you haven’t truly compensated them by bettering their lives.”
“It’s not that easy to stop,” Fornax insists. “I have more stations half built!”
“Look,” I say. “I know that without the ExploroBots, we’ll need to develop newer, better technology that will allow us to accomplish the things we want to accomplish. But isn’t that what you educate the cohorts to do? We are ingenious, creative, and excellent problem solvers.”
“I can’t do it,” Fornax says. “Your friends can stay, we can find you an LWA that involves a relationship to Earth on behalf of MUSC, but I won’t compromise our future.”
“Well then, I won’t launch the Res Extensa,” I say, stepping back. “And all of us, Castor, Talitha, my mother, Randazza, Aurelia, and the dog will board that MUSC Shuttle in the next loading bay and go back to Earth to take our chances down there. When D’Cart wakes up, she’ll waltz back onto this station to take over MUSC and all its citizens, and you can come back up here to clean up your own mess.”
I hold my breath and don’t make a sound. I wait for my mother to protest. For Randazza Marmesh to say no way is she going back to Earth. But they don’t. They stand firmly by my side.
“Your choice,” I tell Fornax, who stands mute on her own. “But you’re going to have to decide soon, because D’Cart and Mundie will be awake any minute.”
“Okay, fine,” Dr. Fornax says, completely exasperated. “But it’ll take time, Uma. We’re going to finish those other stations, then phase out the program properly.”
“I’m okay with that,” I say, and smile with relief. “We’ll begin deportation now. Darshan, initiate robotic loading arm,” I command.
“Initiating arm,” Darshan concurs.
Slowly and gracefully, the loading arm pushes the Res Extensa away from the MUSC station. On board, through the front windows, we see D’Cart stir. Her eyes flutter open.
“She’s awake!” I say.
“What’ll happen to her?” Talitha moves closer to my side. I take her hand and hold it tight.
D’Cart sits up, startled and afraid. She looks out and sees all of us staring back at her. She bangs her fists on the window and screams, but we can’t hear her. I watch her lips move as she punches something on the screen in front of her. Out of the corner of my eye, on the other side of the room, Aurelia’s blue-lit eyes flash.
Castor sees it, too. “No!” he shouts.
Aurelia whips toward us, arms out, but Castor’s quick. He scoops Quasar off the floor and jumps in front of us with the dog held out like a shield. “Aurelia, keep Quasar safe!” he shouts.
Aurelia stops in the center of the room, her eyes trained on the dog writhing in Castor’s arms.
“What are you doing?” Talitha yells at her brother.
Out the window, I see the loading arm has fully extended and cocked back like an elbow.
“I programmed Aurelia to always keep Quasar safe,” Castor explains, his voice shaking. “I think my command is overriding whatever D’Cart is asking her to do.”
We all cast our eyes from the bot, still stalled in the center of the floor, to the window where the loading arm pauses, waiting for the station to reach its apogee for maximum orbital trajectory. Then the arm releases, flinging the Res Extensa with Zaniah Nashira, aka RayNay DeShoppingCart, headlong into space.
“Transmission lost,” Aurelia says, and rolls backward away from us to reposition herself by the wall. “Awaiting reconnection,” she announces.
Slowly, carefully, Talitha walks toward the bot. “Aurelia?” she says cautiously. “Are you going to hurt us?”
Aurelia turns her face plate up to look at Talitha. “I have no orders to do so now,” she says, and we all sigh with relief.
Castor kisses the white star on Quasar’s head, then sets him on the floor, but he keeps a wary eye on Aurelia.
“What will happen to the Yoobies and AlphaZonia once D’Cart is gone?” Mom asks from where she gazes out the window into the blackness.
“Most likely AlphaZonia will collapse beneath the weight of
its own hubris, then something or someone will come along and take its place. It always does,” Dr. Fornax says.
“Humans are as wily as bacteria,” I say. “We continually reinvent ourselves to exist even in the most desperate circumstances.”
“How right you are,” says Dr. Fornax, turning to me. “And now it’s time for you to wake our colony.”
CASTOR NEVA
MOON UTILITARIAN SURVIVAL COLONY
WHILE UMA AND Talitha head to Curie’s immunology lab to check on the pathogen and find a way to wake the others, Persis takes me to an Intelligence lab so we can dismantle Aurelia. The episode in the landing dock spooked me, and I don’t want to take any chances that D’Cart could connect to her again.
“Amazing,” says Persis as we dismantle Aurelia’s head and attach it to a diagnostic podium while her body stands useless beside the wall. “This is exciting for me. I’ve never gotten to work on a robot as intelligent as this one.”
“Thank you, Persis,” says Aurelia’s head. “That is a nice compliment. I hope my complexity lives up to your expectations.”
Persis laughs, delighted. “My DrillBots are smart, but they don’t engage with me like this! I don’t know how you do it.”
Persis’s comment is clearly rhetorical, but Aurelia is far too literal to get the nuance, so she answers honestly. “I’m designed to use observations from my experiences as feedback to update my behavior algorithms. I have noticed that speaking directly to humans by using their names and thanking them makes them feel more attached to me.”
“Uh … yeah,” says Persis as she finishes hooking up Aurelia to the processor. “I wish a few more MUSCies had the same social skills as you.”
“I’m going to access your CPU now,” I tell Aurelia gently.
“I understand,” she says brightly. “You’ll find my neural web is quite intricate and ever changing.”
“Yeah, I know,” I mutter as Aurelia’s deep learning code is revealed to us on the holo screen. “D’Cart created this beautifully complex neural network in you, but she left out a moral code. Instead, you’re programmed to follow her instructions without regard to how they affect others.”
“Sounds like a few people I know,” Persis jokes.
I take a deep breath, then dive in to unravel the impossibly long and tangled algorithms that make up the general intelligence central to Aurelia’s mind.
After hours and hours, I’ve gotten no closer to successfully overriding D’Cart’s ultimate control of Aurelia.
“I can’t do this!” I throw my hands up in disgust, then collapse onto the work space facefirst.
“Are you frustrated, Castor?” Aurelia’s head asks me from the podium.
“Yes,” I grumble. “When I was younger, somehow I created a blanket override in you, but now I don’t see how to do it. Maybe you’re much more complex than you were back then, or maybe I got lucky before.”
“Perhaps,” says Aurelia. “But it is also true that you did not install a blanket override in me previously.”
“Yes, I did!” I sit dumbfounded for a moment, then begin to question myself out loud. “Didn’t I? After we’d been with you for a year? I hacked your code and installed an override so you would do what I wanted.”
“Because Zaniah Nashira allowed it,” Aurelia says.
“Of course!” I smack my forehead. “I feel so stupid.”
“You are not stupid, Castor,” says Aurelia. “You successfully wrote and installed the override algorithm in me, but I needed Zaniah’s permission to run it.”
“Wait,” says Persis. “What about Quasar? Didn’t you program Aurelia to always keep him safe?”
“I guess Zaniah allowed that, too, right?” I say, annoyed.
“No,” says Aurelia. “She did not see it, or more accurately, she did not know to look for it. You hid it well, Castor, deep in the heart of my processor.”
Persis smiles. “That’s something at least!”
“Not really,” I say. “Even if we could install code for keeping individuals or groups of people safe, it’s exactly the kind of thing D’Cart will be looking for and undoing.”
“If she survives and still has access,” Persis says. Then she turns to Aurelia. “Do you believe Zaniah could have access to your CPU in the future?”
“Yes,” Aurelia says simply.
Persis and I exchange looks.
“Well,” says Persis after a few moments of pondering the implications. “As long as we keep her head and her body separated, she can’t physically hurt anyone or damage the station if D’Cart tells her to.”
“That’s fine for now,” I say. “But Aurelia’s not whole until we put her back together.”
“Then, the only thing I can think to do is to wipe her central processing unit and start again,” Persis says. “Otherwise, if Zaniah survives, she could reestablish control from afar.”
“I can’t do that!” Tears sting my eyes, which catches me off guard.
Aurelia blinks at me. “Are you crying, Castor?”
“I don’t know why,” I mutter, swatting away the tears. “It’s stupid. With everything that’s happened—getting caught by D’Cart, thinking Talitha could be dead, watching the Observatory blow up while I abandoned my mother on Earth—this is what makes me cry?” My nose runs as my eyes continue to leak. “It’s just that, if I replace your CPU, you’ll no longer be you, Aurelia! And I already feel like I’m losing everything and everybody familiar to me. I don’t want to lose you, too!”
“I don’t know about that,” Persis says, studying the code on the holo screen in front of us. “People’s brains get rebooted in different ways. Strokes. Trauma. Amnesia. Dementia. Does that mean they’re no longer who they were?”
“If you lose memory of who you are and all of your experiences, aren’t you then a different person?” I ask.
“Maybe not,” says Persis. “Maybe you regain yourself or at least make a new version of who you were when you are surrounded by the people who love you.”
“I don’t think it’s like losing a limb,” I say. “You can’t just train a replacement brain. Isn’t your mind fundamental to who you are?”
Persis shrugs. “It’s a very old question that gets asked again and again in new ways each time we make a technological leap. What’s the brain? What’s the body? How are they different, and how are they connected? What makes us each uniquely ourselves? But maybe those are the wrong questions to ask in this situation.”
“Then what should we be asking?” I say, exasperated.
Persis thinks this over, then she says, “Maybe the question is, what’s best for Aurelia?”
“I know what best serves me,” Aurelia’s head says.
“What is it, Aurelia?” I ask. My heart speeds up, and my palms sweat. I hold my breath, waiting for the answer, hoping D’Cart isn’t speaking through her.
“I was created to learn from my mistakes,” Aurelia tells us. “That is fundamentally who I am and who I would like to continue to be.”
“Even if that means we replace your brain and take away all your memories?” I ask.
“Humans worked so hard to overcome catastrophic forgetting when they created artificial intelligence,” Aurelia explains. “But maybe forgetting what Zaniah taught me is the best way to save me.”
“For someone with no moral code, you are the least selfish being I’ve ever encountered,” Persis says.
“But there’s so much important stuff in here!” I motion to the endless lines of code running across the screen. “We can’t get rid of it all!”
“Maybe we can mine out the good stuff and save it,” says Persis. “Just like I do down on the surface of the Moon.”
“Really?” I ask, blinking back my disbelief.
“It’s worth a try!” Persis says.
The lab door opens. Uma comes inside with Talitha and Quasar at her heels. A pang of jealousy ripples through my gut. Talitha and Quasar have always followed me.
“The pathogen
s are ready,” Uma says, clearly excited. “Want to take a look with us? I’m going to scan and sequence them.”
I perk up at the offer and jump to my feet, but then I hesitate and look back at Aurelia, watching me. “I should probably…”
“No, no, you go with Uma,” Persis says. “I’ll stay here with Aurelia. I’d love to look through her code some more. This is all so fascinating to me. The MUSCies never let me close to these labs. They think I’m just a lowly repair person with no capacity to understand how AI works, but they underestimate me.”
“They underestimate all Earthlings,” Uma says.
* * *
In the immunology lab, Uma removes the glass tubes from the centrifuge and loads them into a device no bigger than a tabletop convection cooker.
“What’s that thing do?” Talitha asks.
“This is called the GenExtSeq, which is short for genetic extractor and sequencer,” Uma says. Her eyes light up, and she talks quickly as she explains. “First, these tiny automated pipettes will draw off the DNA that was released into the solution when we broke up the specimens in the centrifuge. Then it’ll sequence the DNA and look for potential matches in our database.”
“This is why I love immunology.” Uma beams as she opens the radio frequency oven where the petri dishes have been cultivating. “You get to handle specimens, grow things, watch life unfold and collapse in front of you. It’s the closest thing we have to gardening.”
“Yeah,” I say, ogling the centrifuges and vortex machines and thermocyclers and other things I can’t name but would like to get my hands on. “I could stay in here for a week and never sleep.”
“You’ll fit right in up here,” Uma says with a delighted laugh.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” I say quietly.
“Isn’t it interesting, Castor?” Talitha says from where she snuggles Quasar on the floor. “Since we’ve been here, you haven’t tried to steal anything.”
“Of course, I haven’t,” I say. “What would I do with this stuff?”
Talitha stares at up me. “Sell it on Earth, duh?”
“Dang, Talitha, you’re a bigger thief than I am!” I say, but I know she’s right. This is the first time in my life that I’ve walked into a place and haven’t immediately thought about what I could dismantle, hack, or swipe for my own benefit. And I’m not sure why. Maybe it just hasn’t occurred to me yet.