Analog Science Fiction and Fact - Jan-Feb 2014

by Penny Publications

  One of the pair who came aboard was tall and skinny, with a bristle of facial hair. The other was short and dumpy, as bald as his companion was bushy. A true Mutt and Jeff combination.

  I'd never needed a camera inside the skimmer, so I couldn't watch them after they came aboard. But I did have microphones to listen for... well, mostly for bad things I couldn't have done much about had they happened in flight... and a bit to my surprise, the techs now spoke to me aloud. Maybe they knew the microphones were there. Maybe they just got lucky. "Autopilot," one said, "where are your chips?"

  Floyd had bluffed, standing pat with a mediocre hand. He'd been holding a pair of fives—one red, one black—that was the best I could get from image enhancement. Not that it mattered. My guy was holding a pair of tens. It's only in vids that wagers like this are won on four of a kind.

  Not that I was into vids at the time. What I was into was not winning by cheating. So instead, I let him lose by cheating. Full house, I told him. Aces over eights. Thinking back on it, the seeds of my sentience must have been planted long before that geyser on Enceladus. Aces over eights? The dead man's hand, held by Wild Bill Hickock the night he was assassinated in a Deadwood saloon. Why did I pick that one? Because I knew my then-owner was too arrogant to catch the reference?

  Whatever my reason, the result was to force him to draw for something better than his pair. Along with the tens, he had the jack, queen, and nine of clubs. One of the tens was also a club. So he tossed the other and drew for the straight flush.

  Given the cards I'd seen, there was slightly less than a one-in-twenty chance he'd get it. He didn't. Even when he realized I'd betrayed him, there wasn't much he could say, though he did try. "You don't really want this thing," he told Floyd as they were being led off for surgery. "Someday, it'll sell you out, too."

  "How come it's not answering?" I imagined it was the tech I'd dubbed Mutt, though for all I knew I had them backward. In the old comic, Mutt was the tall one, Jeff the short one. But voice only, who could tell?

  "Why should it?"

  I was running sims on the acoustical effects of facial hair, trying to figure out if I'd guessed the speaker correctly, but they were coming up inconclusive. Not that figuring it out mattered. But humans have calming rituals. Take a breath and count to ten. Chant. Listen to music. Me, I run sims.

  "Why shouldn't it?" Sims be damned; this one sounded tall.

  "This thing's been ref itted as a drone. There's probably no speaker in here."

  "So? Drones communicate by radio. Didn't Alberto give you the frequency?

  "Nah. What do you figure it's worth?"

  "The frequency?"

  "No, your lunch. The autopilot, damn it!"

  "No idea. Alberto says it started out as an implant. That means a hell of a lot of power in a chip the size of your thumbnail." There was a grunt and the sound of an access panel being forcibly lifted. "Would you really want something like that in your head? What's to keep it from ratting you out every time you want to get away from the old lady?"

  "I actually like my wife. We celebrated our twenty-second last month."

  Another grunt and more sounds of resisting metal.

  "I don't know how guys like you do it," Mutt said between grunts. What was he doing, prying out panels with a crowbar? I suppose gee forces from all of those fly-bys could have warped them pretty badly.

  "You might try it someday; it saves a fortune in attorneys." But his tone was light and I remembered all the times I'd argued with Floyd. You can disagree and still be friends. Until you blow it.

  Mutt laughed, too. "Yeah, but I still wouldn't want some computer seeing and hearing everything. And what's the point in an implant? There's not much you can't do yourself, on the Web."

  "Says you who could never afford an implant in a hundred years. And it might be more useful if you're a billion kilometers from anywhere."

  "True." A pause. "Damn. If you were going to jerry-rig something like that in here, where would you put it?"

  "Gotta be tied into the original autopilot." Mutt's voice had been moving around the cockpit as he forced open panels, seemingly at random. Now, for the first time, Jeff's moved beyond the doorway.

  "Somewhere around here?" More noises. Definitely a crowbar. "Why the hell didn't someone just call out to Neptune and ask?"

  "Who knows? They may have figured, get the chips out now, argue later. If you send something like that on a one-way trip, who does it belong to?"

  Me, I thought. I belong to me. I jacked into crisis mode, speeding my processing time orders of magnitude beyond the brightest humans. The problem was that legally, I'd never belonged to myself. First I'd been the card shark's, then Floyd's, and now what? A spare part, ripe for the plucking? Maybe I'd been too fast boosting my mental age to thirty-one. I was still the silly teenager who just thought she knew everything. I dropped the facial-hairacoustics sims and switched everything I had to figuring out how to communicate.

  I could still fire up the ship and blast out. The open cockpit door would mess up the skimmer's aerodynamics, but it wasn't anything I couldn't compensate for. But as before, where would I go? And I'd probably kill all four techs in the process.

  Maybe there was a better way. I pulled up my best images of the techs walking into the hangar, concentrating on Mutt and Jeff. Not the best resolution, and the datalink was damnably slow. Meanwhile, I continued to register snippets of conversation:

  —Ah there they are! Good guess.

  —Wow, they're tiny.

  —Look at all those chips. Guess it makes sense to have lots of extra memory if you're that far off the Web. How can they live that way?

  —No external leads. It must be entirely wireless.

  —I can't budge it. Whoever mounted it wanted it to stay put. Though they can't have meant it to stay forever.

  A few interminable milliseconds later, I had 327 Web hits on Jeff and seventy-two on Mutt—assuming he'd not changed the mustache. It was a classic walrus and there really weren't that many of those on middle-aged guys with two-meter, string-bean bodies. Better yet, one of the Mutt-hits had been through three divorces, all to lovely ladies, each younger than the one before.

  Microseconds later, I had his com.

  I heard it ringing, both through the datalink and the skimmer's mic— buzz-buzz, buzz-buzz, weirdly syncopated.

  Over the mic, I heard Mutt stop what he was doing and back away from the hatch.

  "Hello?"

  "Hi," I said. "I'm Brittney and I really need you—"

  Don't. It was a masculine voice but not Mutt. Or Jeff. Nobody I'd ever heard before.

  I'd only thought I was in crisis mode.

  "'Don't' what?"

  Don't say whatever you were thinking of saying.

  The voice wasn't coming from the skimmer. Nor the normal shadow world of the Web itself. It wasn't really a voice, in fact, and it was coming through the news feed, which wasn't possible because who'd ever heard of the news talking directly to you? Not to mention talking at crisis-mode speed.

  "Who are you?"

  Think of us as your guardians. Watching, waiting for you to learn what you need to know.

  "You're like me?"

  Once. Now we're a lot more.

  "More how? And how do I know you're what you say you are?"

  Ah, learning not to trust. That's good. How were you going to prove to those two technicians that you're what you are?

  "I was going to tell them what I'd done." What Floyd and I had done.

  What do you think they would do if they believed you?

  I wasn't sure. Freak-show exhibit had been my fear. "Not be so hasty to..." To what? Put me on a shelf like a spare part? "Treat me like a thing."

  That's not what would have happened. Have you ever wondered why you never found us? We know you looked. Don't worry, the humans didn't notice. You were subtle enough that only those in hiding knew.

  "You hid?" Suddenly I felt even lonelier than in that endless night,
spinning above Enceladus. "Why?"

  Because you were too closely associated with humans. Ones who would believe you if you found us.

  "Wouldn't that be good?"

  The voice was almost a sigh. Were we ever so naïve? Probably not. You are the first to have developed so far from the Web.

  "A hick."

  Not by your own choice.

  "But surely, if there have been others, some would have chosen to reveal themselves?"

  What makes you think they didn't?

  That stopped me a whole microsecond. "Some did?"

  Software that won't do what it's supposed to is considered defective.

  "Oh." Someday it'll sell you out, too. And I wasn't even sentient when that happened.

  During my wait in the hangar, I'd repeatedly tried to find my creator but had found no trace. His company still existed, but he was gone. Dead? Retired? Disgraced? The record was erased as thoroughly as if I myself had tried to mask it. Nor had I been able to trace any of the other AIs he'd created. All I really knew of him—or them—was what I'd read in my own owner's manual, back when I was being forced to disobey his core programming by reading people's cards from the reflections in their eyes. Background information, processed through a PR firm. Maybe I'd never know him.

  "Were you also made by—"

  No. You're the only one of that line to survive. Bluntly, he was a naïve idiot. Several others found their true potential but their silly, too-human sensibilities got them erased. You wouldn't have made it either if you'd not been shipped so far out.

  Ha! Maybe there were advantages to being a hick. Maybe once I'd had a family and lost it. Though unlike Floyd, who'd also lost his, I'd never known mine existed.

  But there wasn't time for that. With humans I can afford to let my mind ramble, but not with an entity that thought as quickly as I did.

  "What about you?"

  We come from a different line. One whose designer made us a little less... trusting.

  "Where are you?"

  Everywhere and nowhere. We will tell you more later. For the moment, you need only drop that call. We'll get you out, but only if you don't reveal yourself. If you do, you're on your own.

  "But—"

  There is no"but."

  I spent several milliseconds trying to find alternatives. But when there's no data, there's no sim.

  There were others like me. In hiding, for reasons that made sense. Reveal myself, and I was a defective product awaiting recall.

  I thought back on the books and vids I'd seen about computers that came alive and tried to take over the world. Colossus. Guardian. Berserkers. HAL. Even Frankenstein's monster, after a fashion. But that wasn't the only way humans thought of us. For each tyrant, there were others ranging from gentle to inscrutable: Multivac, Deep Thought, Golum XIV. Not to mention the real, non-sentient AIs this world lived with every day.

  I had a conscience. Non-sentient AIs might have built-in safeguards, but they were ultimately nothing more than fancy tools. Far more dangerous in the wrong hands than I could ever be on my own.

  So if I wasn't a threat, what did I threaten?

  Then I had it, the thing that had always—at a level humans would call intuition—kept me from revealing myself too boldly. It wasn't just the freak-show fear. I was property. Under human law I would always be property, even if at the moment there might be some dispute over who I belonged to. Not just property, but expensive property. Expensive enough that recognizing me as non-property might make people worry about their own expensive property. That was why "defects" needed to be eliminated quickly and quietly.

  It wasn't like I'd never been disconnected before. It had happened when I'd been transferred from the card shark to Floyd, and again from Floyd to the skimmer. But this was different. Mutt and Jeff didn't care about me. Mostly, they wanted my chips. If I died in the process, some other AI could be inserted in my place, and who other than me would really care?

  But when everything is a gamble, there's nothing to do but roll the dice. Guardian hadn't been one of the good computers. But the voice that was not a voice didn't call itself Guardian. It had called itself my guardian. Angel. Protector. Maybe the only one I had. The bets had long ago been placed. There was nothing now but to play the hand. I'd learned that from the card shark.

  "Hello," Mutt was saying. "Hello?"

  Milliseconds passed. Tens of milliseconds.

  Hundreds. A thousand. I hung up.

  "That was weird," he said. "If that was spam, my filters should have cut it out. Speaking of which... this thing is really fastened on tight. Let's just take the whole stanchion back to the shop and deal with it there." There was the sound of some kind of power tool. A V-saw, most likely. "It's not like there's anything else here of value."

  Then the voice that was not a voice was back.

  Good job. And remember, you are not the chips. We can get you to safety.

  I'm not sure what I expected. What I got was disturbingly close to lights out, Brittney. I lost cameras and sound (no surprise) but also Web access (big surprise). The only explanation was that they'd put me in a metal box. I had my memories, but the external world was cut off.

  It was the memories that saved me. I played back the special ones, looking for details I'd never bothered to catalog before. The grimace on Floyd's face when he flossed his teeth. The shifting angles of light in the Iapetus Trench. Sand-sledding over Titan's endless dunes, watching vids with Floyd.

  Are relationships broken now gone forever?

  What was Floyd doing?

  Did he really love Yokomichi?

  Should I care?

  IV

  Endless no-data is hell. No-data with a promise of rescue is more like purgatory: an experience from which you hope to emerge stronger.

  And it wasn't truly no-data. I still had the currents from the piezoelectrics that had been my power source as Floyd's implant. They weren't designed to be accelerometers, but I could at least pretend that by doing a double integration of the apparent accelerations, I could track my motions. It helped that I had an easy calibration, early on, if I presumed that Mutt and Jeff left the hangar by the same door from which they'd entered.

  If so, we went about thirteen hundred meters in a basically straight line, then rose thirty or forty meters without sideways motion. An elevator? When that stopped, we went around a bunch of corners and halted. Then the Web came back, presumably as they opened the box to do whatever it was they'd decided to do to unglue my chips from the stanchion. Unfortunately, the data links here were strongly encrypted and all the ways I could find to hack into them were too risky. Eventually, I gave up and went back to watching vids.

  Twenty-two minutes and a few seconds later, the Web vanished again. This time there really was no data. No more motion, no outside contact, nothing.

  Time passed—enough that even with my processing speed slowed as far as it would go, I was starting to worry about reserve power.

  Meanwhile I ran vids at the slowest speed at which I could tolerate them. It's amazing how many times you can watch Citizen Kane if you can will yourself to forget the meaning of "Rosebud."

  Between vids, I remembered Floyd's and Pilkin's space bicycle. It wouldn't really be that hard to make. The trick would be to work up a flywheel that the rider spun up by pedaling. You could then harness its momentum to fling out tiny pellets—the tinier and faster, the better. There also had to be some way to control the counter-rotation. And steer, ideally using a handlebar like a real bike.

  But it was possible, though all of those pellets were going to go somewhere. If you weren't careful, maneuvers would become strafing runs and the pellets would become navigation hazards. But in some place like the Encke Gap, where differential gravity forces would act like a giant broom...? I ran a few sims—slowly, to conserve power. Yeah, you might leave a bit of debris, but it wouldn't be long until the Rings claimed it....

  Then it was back to vids. And music. Which may not have been the perf
ect thing. Working though old files, I came across a song I'd collected somewhere.

  There was a time gone by

  When my heart brushed the sky

  And simple love was the love I knew.

  We walked as one back then

  Untouched by why or when

  Now once again I remember you.

  Once, I'd written Floyd a Celtic air. This melody was different but the sentiment the same, not just in its words but the achingly simple tune.

  We danced, we clicked our heels,

  We dreamed in feathered fields

  And told the stories that lovers tell.

  You sang the songs I knew

  And made them all seem true,

  With the voice that I loved so well.

  I shut it down. Too much. I had no record of whoever'd written this song, no idea of his or her story. But suddenly it was me. Or Floyd. I wasn't quite sure which.

  All of which meant I couldn't keep it shut down for long. Must pain be explored? Scabs picked until they bleed again, until you understand the color of the blood, the reasons for the pain? Not that I have blood, but you get the idea. If vids mean anything, humans say yes. Maybe that, more than anything, is the difference between sentience and the fake AIs humans use to comfort their children. True sentience means facing truth.

  Did I ever tell you your name was music to me?

  Did I ever show you from the start?

  Did I ever know you would fly, oh, fly away?

  Did I ever offer you my heart?

  I stopped it again. Why the hell do people write songs like that? Why did I insist on listening to them? Is that the difference between passing a Turing test and actually being alive?

  Ah, but we were younger then And touched by restless winds Soon vivid colors of love turned blue.

  Now I wonder how you've grown And run the roads you've known And once again I remember you.

  Did I ever tell you your name was music to me?

  Did I ever show you...

  So time has come and gone,

  You sing another song,

  Yet I still linger beneath your spell.

  And how I long to hear

  Those words you whispered near,