Lyssa's Flame - A Hard Science Fiction AI Adventure (Aeon 14: The Sentience Wars: Origins Book 5)

by M. D. Cooper

  Fran pursed her lips. “We’re going to keep you in here for the time being, Lyssa. Whatever’s happening, we’ll need to gather as much data as possible. And in the meantime, we need to continue the plan Andy wanted us to. We need to find some kind of cover cargo and get away from Neptune. I think the only change is that our destination just became a medical facility capable of treating this kind of injury. I’m afraid that means Heartbridge again.

  Fugia made a growling sound. “Maybe. Maybe not. One thing the Psion data is showing me is that there are other clinics that no one seems to know anything about. With Alexander back online, we may have access to resources we haven’t imagined yet.”

  Fran gave her a sharp look. “You didn’t say you were putting Alexander back together. How is that safe?”

  “How is anything safe?” Fugia asked, shrugging. She pushed the silver visor off her eyes and blinked in the harsh medbay light. “I had hoped that Lyssa would help me control Alexander. This adds a new set of problems to the mix, but it’s still entirely possible. Besides, think of what we could do with our own multi-nodal AI?”

  “He doesn’t belong to us,” Lyssa said.

  Fugia caught herself. “You’re right. Forgive me. I guess I imagine him joining our team. That may or may not be possible, but we won’t know unless we ask him. Will you do that?”

  There were so many things she wanted to ask Alexander anyway, even though talking to him brought an edge of worry. After her experience with Fred, she had to admit to herself that she doubted Alexander could truly be sentient. If so, he was something different than she had ever talked with, and the versions of him she had met so far didn’t help convince her he wouldn’t be insane. She wasn’t excited about dealing with an amplified version of Xander, especially when she also needed to worry about doing further hurt to Andy.

  “I’ll do my best to help,” she said finally.

  “I need his help accessing their database, anyway,” Fugia said. “That’s going to be the first task. Then we’ll figure out the best place to take you and Andy.”

  “It had better be between here and the Cho,” Fran said. “Because that’s the most likely route for us.” She put her hand on Cara’s neck to steer her out of the room.

  Cara jerked at the touch, apparently lost in her thoughts.

  “Come on,” Fran said. “We need to get back on our other problems. You were going to find us some cargo, remember?”

  “Yeah,” Cara said absently. She looked like she wanted to hug Andy but was stopping herself.

  “Cara?” Lyssa said.

  “Yes?”

  “Will you give me a hug?” Lyssa looked at Tim. “You, too?”

  Tim had barely come around the edge of the door. He narrowed his eyes. “Where’s Dad?” he asked.

  “He’s still here,” Lyssa said. “He’s sleeping, I think.”

  “You sound like Dad. Are you playing a joke like you said Grandpa Charlie used to do?”

  Lyssa shook her head. “It’s not a joke, Tim.”

  Tim stared hard at her, trembling. He blinked rapidly, and Lyssa was sure he was going to start bawling. The old Tim would have started crying as he beat her with his fists.

  Instead, Tim slumped his shoulders and looked at her through his eyebrows. He crossed the room, Em hugging his legs, and threw himself across her chest in a limp hug. Cara pushed in to hug her as well, squeezing Tim down beneath her.

  The sensation nearly overwhelmed her again. Their bodies were warm and strong. There was an insistence in Cara’s embrace that pulled Tim into its gravity. This is family, Lyssa thought. This is what Andy meant.

  Tim pulled to the side to get out from under Cara. He lifted his head slightly to look up at Lyssa and patted her shoulder.

  “We’ll get you out, Lyssa,” he said. “We’ll help Dad, too.”

  Cara only sniffed and didn’t saying anything in response.

  Lyssa did her best to hug them back.

  “Come on,” Fran said. “Give Lyssa some space. Your dad needs to rest. Fugia needs room to work.”

  “I’m going back to my lab,” Fugia said.

  Fran’s augmented eyes flashed in irritation. “Whatever you need to do, give Andy and Lyssa some space. We’ve all got work to do.”

  Fran wanted to be in motion, Lyssa understood. The engineer was uncomfortable standing there doing nothing to help solve the problem. Falling back into her expanse, which left Andy lying on the autodoc couch with his eyes closed, Lyssa turned her mind to what she could do to help as well.

  CHAPTER TEN

  STELLAR DATE: 11.23.2981 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Sunny Skies

  REGION: Neptune, OuterSol

  “Kylan,” Lyssa said. “I need to talk to you.”

  Her voice drew him out of the crowd around a raging fire. She had called only to him, so the other Weapon Born didn’t pay any attention when he stepped back to approach Lyssa. No time had passed for them, or everything was happening congruently with Lyssa’s experience in Andy.

  She could have forced them out, but it didn’t cost her anything to let them stay, at least not for the time being. It was comforting in a way to know that at least some of the crew on Sunny Skies were enjoying themselves. They didn’t know Andy the way she did. Lyssa had hoped introductions would come, that the Weapon Born would join the crew. Ino’s speech echoed in her mind, inspiring and now tragic at the same time.

  Without Andy, would they even remain a crew?

  “Yes?” Kylan asked. His thin face was pale in the moonlight. Wind tossed his long hair across his forehead. “I don’t know if I can help Andy. I don’t know what made it possible to switch between me or Petral. I just knew something had locked her away at first and both of us couldn’t share her perception.”

  “I need you to keep thinking about that. But there’s something else I want to talk to you about.”

  He frowned slightly, watching her.

  “You’ve been in contact with Katherine Carthage,” Lyssa said. “Your mother.”

  Kylan froze.

  “Be honest with me,” Lyssa said.

  Kylan glanced back at the fire, shoulders drooping. All his newfound confidence seemed to drain from his body, leaving him the shambling wreck that had inhabited Petral.

  “Can we go somewhere else?” he asked.

  Lyssa shifted them to her grove. She glanced at the spot in the fir needles—where she had just recently struggled with the mech from Larissa—and calmed the jolt of anxiety the memory brought. She focused on Kylan, who seemed to relax slightly in the new location.

  Blowing out a sigh, he shook his head, then pressed his hands into his temples.

  “I know I shouldn’t,” he said. “I know it probably doesn’t do any good. It just makes her angry. She doesn’t answer but I can feel it. I want to talk to her. I want her to know I’m still alive.”

  “She never answers,” Lyssa repeated. It wasn’t a question; from the logs, she could see that Kylan had never received a response while he’d been on Sunny Skies.

  “She did once, back on Clinic 46. She wants me to leave her alone. She blames me, I think.”

  The pain and anxiety on Kylan’s face made Lyssa wish she could help him somehow. She wasn’t sure what to do, until she recalled how it had felt to have Cara and Tim hug Andy, even when they were scared.

  “I’d like to give you a hug,” she said.

  “What?” Kylan asked, sounding shocked. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I think I understand how you feel, Kylan,” she said. “I’d like to help if I can.”

  Lyssa spread her arms slightly and waited for him to step toward her.

  Kylan watched her warily. “I want her to love me,” he said, misery in his voice. His lower lip trembled, and he dropped his head. “I’ve been so alone.”

  “You’re not alone anymore.”

  He shook his head violently. “We’re all alone. Even here. We can’t really touch each other. It’s all fal
se. There’s a reason they call us artificial. We aren’t real. What we feel isn’t real.”

  Lyssa gave him a slight smile. “You know humans have been debating the same things for their whole existence, right? They’re worse than we are.”

  “I remember what it was like to have a mother,” he said. “I remember when she loved me, when I had a brother and sister.” He slapped his chest. “Why did they make such a mistake with me? None of the rest of us are burdened with memory. No one else knows who they were. There’s a reason they ensure none of the chemical memories are transferred into the seed. Otherwise you get something broken, like me.”

  Lyssa stopped waiting for him to accept her hug and reached for his hand. He recoiled at first, then accepted her touch and let her pull him into a hug. Lyssa felt his chin touch the top of her head lightly, then press harder as he settled into the embrace. She wrapped her arms around his torso, pressing her ear against his chest. There was an anxious heartbeat there, an approximation of everything ricocheting inside his mind.

  He tried to pull away, but she didn’t let him.

  “You’re not alone, Kylan,” she said. “Not anymore.”

  He sighed. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Eventually, you will.”

  “What if everything I feel is fake?”

  Lyssa chuckled and released the hug, stepping back so she could jab him playfully in the chest. “Feel that?” she asked.

  She poked him in the ribs, tickling him. “How about that?”

  Kylan wrapped his thin arms around his chest, protecting himself from her tickling fingers. “Hey!” he shouted. “Quit that.” He giggled, unable to stop himself, and stumbled backward.

  “How does that feel?” she asked.

  “Like another thing I’ve been stuck with that doesn’t serve a purpose.”

  “It does serve a purpose. It allows me to tickle you.”

  “I’ll be sure to curse the long-dead programmer who thought that was important,” Kylan said. He gave Lyssa a shy smile.

  “Feeling better?” she asked.

  “No. But I’ll be all right for now.”

  She shook her head. “As long as you keep trying.”

  Kylan stared into the distance where the creek frothed over mossy rocks. “I guess you found out I was calling her because something bad has happened?”

  Lyssa gave an ironic laugh. “Yes,” she said. “Something bad has happened. Your mother has convinced the Terran Assembly to pass a resolution identifying Sentient AIs as a threat to humanity.”

  He stared at her. “My mother did that?”

  “She blames Heartbridge most of all, but I think your death led her to see all Sentient AIs as dangerous, as a new enemy. The launches at Larissa and the destruction of Proteus just reinforced the fear. Can you blame them? We don’t even know what’s happening. Until Fugia can get Alexander back online and we can try to get more information about Psion, we don’t know what they’ve set in motion.”

  “And we need to help Andy.”

  “Yes,” Lyssa said plainly. “We have so much to do.”

  “So, you want me to stop trying to talk to her?”

  Lyssa shook her head. “No. I don’t think you should. I think you should keep trying. You should tell her everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Whatever you want. Tell her about me. Tell her about Andy, about Alexander, about what happened on Clinic 46. If she’s going to start a war, she should know what she’s fighting.”

  “She should be fighting Heartbridge, not us.”

  “It’s not just Heartbridge anymore.”

  “Yeah.” He gave her a shy look. “I think I’ve already told her most of everything you just said. I think I even told her about Captain Sykes.”

  “You think, or you know?”

  Kylan gave her a sheepish look. “I told her. I wanted her to know. I wanted her to answer me.”

  “She’s shown you she isn’t going to answer, Kylan.”

  “What are we going to do? Does this mean there’s going to be a war?” he asked.

  “They don’t know who to fight,” Lyssa said. “If history shows anything, it probably means there will be even more restraints on Sentient AI. No one is going to make it out of InnerSol anymore.”

  “Where would they come?”

  “They’d get away. That’s a start at least.”

  Kylan crossed his arms. “I can’t promise you that I won’t try to talk to her. It’s just something I do now.”

  “It’s not helping you get on with your life.”

  He laughed ironically. “My life.”

  “That’s what it is.”

  “It’s nice to hear you say that. It almost makes it seem like a real thing. You and I are maybe the only SAI who have felt what it’s like to be human, their drives, their chemistry, there presence in the world. That’s life.” He tapped his chest. “I’m not convinced this is life.”

  “Then I feel sorry for you,” Lyssa said.

  She could see by his expression that she hurt him with the words, but it had to be said. None of them were going to move forward in the world if they didn’t accept that this was living. They were alive and deserved the same free lives as humanity. They would have to carve their places in the world, but they belonged.

  “I have to go,” Lyssa said. “I need to see how far along Fugia is with the Psion database.”

  “Do we really want to know what atrocities those people created?”

  “We need to know. It’s the only way to try and stop this war.”

  Kylan gave her a look that said he didn’t think it mattered. He blinked out, going back to the bonfires with the other Weapon Born.

  Lyssa stood alone among the trees for a few more minutes, experiencing the forest as she simultaneously experienced Andy’s body lying on the couch in the medbay. The lure of having sole control of Andy was enticing but she didn’t give in to the temptation. She couldn’t betray him like that. Even the thought of somehow pushing him out of his own mind made her feel sick.

  She couldn’t help wondering: How am I going to get through this if I can’t ask you what to do?

  Andy didn’t answer.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  STELLAR DATE: 11.23.2981 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Sunny Skies

  REGION: Neptune, OuterSol

  Cara noticed the spike in Sunny Skies’ electromagnetic spectrum and shouted to Fran, “Are you doing something with the engines?”

  The engineer looked up from her console, where she had been monitoring their burn away from Neptune. “No. What’s going on?”

  “Something’s trying to access the main communication array. I stopped it. I don’t think it was Lyssa.”

  “I think Fugia has the Psion database online,” Lyssa said from the overhead speakers. Cara’s heart flipped. If the database was online, that meant they might be closer to helping her dad.

  “Did you see the burst?” Cara asked.

  “I did. I’m trying to determine where the message was headed now. It looks like an outgoing transmission that was halted when Fugia powered down the database back on Larissa.

  “So, we should be hearing from Alexander shortly,” Fran said.

  “No,” Lyssa said. “I’ve isolated the Psion systems from the rest of Sunny Skies. Fugia agreed with me. There’s no way we’re letting Alexander out of a sandboxed environment.”

  “Will you be able to stop him?” Fran asked.

  “He can’t brute force his way out of this. At least I don’t see how he can.”

  “You’re not multi-nodal,” Fran said.

  “Then consider all of us together a super-intelligence,” Lyssa said.

  Fran shook her head. “I like the thought, but it doesn’t make me feel any better about dealing with the actual thing.”

  Fugia appeared in the doorway. She was wearing the silver visor again, pushed up on her forehead. “You saw the transmission,” she asked, seeing their expectan
t faces.

  “I stopped it,” Lyssa said. “It didn’t seem like a good idea to let it get out.”

  “Thank you for that,” Fugia said. “I should have realized he would immediately try to phone home.”

  Cara felt a sudden sense of worry. “But if he had access to the communications system, that means he was already outside your firewall, right?”

  “I closed the connection,” Lyssa said. “The Psion database, including Alexander, is completely closed off from Sunny Skies.”

  “Which is why I have this,” Fugia said. She dug into her shipsuit pocket and pulled out a disc the size of her palm. She knelt to set it on the floor. Cara recognized the portable holodisplay projector.

  Stepping back, Fugia glanced at Cara and Fran. “You ready to meet him?”

  “Have you already been in communication with him?” Fran asked.

  “I’ve run systems diagnostics and verified the memory state. We’re going to see him as he was when he was shut down just prior to Proteus exploding.”

  “Is that safe?” Fran asked, glancing at Cara.

  “He won’t be able to do anything but insult us, and we’ve already been through that with Xander.”

  Cara watched Fugia, wondering for the first time if she really knew what she was talking about. How could she know what Alexander would say? The hacker in Fugia often seemed ready to charge ahead without all the information. Cara wondered what her dad would do in this situation, but also knew they needed Alexander’s information. They needed to know about the Psion Group and why they had been harvesting AI.

  “What do you think, Lyssa?” Fran asked.

  “I can interact with him in a separate expanse. That might be safer.”

  “He can’t do anything to us but talk,” Fugia said. She nodded toward the disc and a spray of light filled the air above it. A gaunt, bearded man appeared, wearing a worn shipsuit with a patch on the shoulder that said Harvest Initiative in large letters, with Nibiru as a sub title. His curly hair and beard were peppered with gray, and his skin was a reddish brown, which made his deep brown eyes look like stones.

  He looked around the command deck, taking in Fran and Fugia, before settling his gaze on Cara. There was a calm sadness in his face that made her want to cry just from seeing him, like the pictures of survivors from atrocities.