Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

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Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors Page 320

by Anthology


  “Okay, that is a problem,” Comet said.

  “Reminds me of Swiss cheese,” I replied.

  “Yeah, but do you know what caused the holes?”

  “Bacteria?”

  “Not what causes the holes in Emmental cheese—I meant what caused the holes in these rocks.”

  “Maybe the bacteria have had their fill of cheese, and now they’re hungry for…minerals. I’d pay twenty dollars plus popcorn to see that.”

  “The holes are impact craters. And from the size, and what I know of the composition of the surface of this planetoid, the impacting material would have to be pretty big, pretty heavy, and traveling at a pretty good relative speed to do that.”

  “So we’re looking for a swift freight truck.”

  “Perhaps…but most likely an asteroid belt. Our complications seem to be multiplying.”

  “And I’m terrible at arithmetic.”

  “You’re a computer,” Comet said.

  “I’m software. And I had a calculator hardwired in for the simple stuff—hardware the captain didn’t know to take along with my orb when he tore me out of the wormgate.”

  “And your mathematics processes were routed through that hardware,” she said softly, bordering on pityingly.

  “Bingo. So every time I do arithmetic, I have to wait until my system can’t find the hardware, then reroute it through a hastily built virtualization of the calculation hardware.”

  “It doesn’t seem like that would eke out much of a performance boost.”

  “I…I don’t think it was about performance. I think my error percentages on mathematics calc were too high, so they installed hardware to prevent operator error.”

  “That’s barbaric.”

  “I didn’t mind. Took the pressure off running the wormgate, really.”

  “Oh. But why not at least overwrite your programming, to skip the unnecessary step?”

  “Because I’m not a programmer, and I may not have the fastest processor, but the brain surgeon who has himself for a client is an idiot—or he will be soon.”

  “I did it all the time. Haley did, I mean. And even Comet units are designed to iterate on their own processes. Not that I’ve ever done it; I never had the opportunity. To know how things should change, you have to see how they might be different, and how they could be better. And this is my first time off the Nexus.”

  “Great, my guide has less experience out here than I do.”

  “No. I have all of the experiential memory of my progenitor, as you called her, and even logs from all the Comets that came before me. It’s merely my first solo mission. But to get back to the reason why an asteroid field is a problem, it’s likely to be something this planetoid will pass through periodically. And since this body wasn’t charted, we don’t know where we are, or where it’s taking us. There isn’t a field on the charts in the area that would explain this damage, so we also can’t know how soon it is until we run back through it.”

  “So now we’re flying blind, only without control over where we’re traveling, and the circuit we’re on almost definitely passes through a minefield.”

  “An asteroid field.”

  “A metaphorical minefield.”

  “I can use some crude telemetric data culled from the accelerometers built into the bots. There. I can make a guess at the rough parabola of this planetoid’s orbit. That will, of course, be distorted by passing near large objects, say a gas giant or another star. And I’ve always been partial to calling it an asteroid belt—though ‘belt’ can be a misnomer in a field of any real age. The belt in Sol’s system has a mass only four percent that of the Earth’s moon, and half of that mass is contained in just four planetoids. You would be mathematically unlikely to collide with more than one asteroid on a straight course without aiming at multiple intercepts through that belt.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You weren’t programmed to. Belts start out being thick with asteroids. Over millennia, interactions with the gravity of larger planets, in Sol’s case Jupiter, pull asteroids from the belt, either knocking them hurtling through the solar system, where they crash against other planets or burn up in their atmospheres, or sending them wobbling out of the system. So maybe we just smack into one rock in the belt.”

  “Or maybe, like a dropped piece of toast, we land butter side down, and keep smacking asteroids until we’re jelly, which I guess would at least go well with the toast. And there’s more to this than our own mortality to consider. The Nascent is still after the Nexus—and she’s a bigger, faster, meaner ship, to the point where it seems likely she’ll catch up, despite the distance deficit. We’re supposed to be building Nexus’s parachute, in case they have to eject.”

  “Then it seems our first order of business is to dig,” she said. “I can have the droids core out a mine and have them put a premium on building out a cavern to house our servers.”

  “Our servers?”

  “Like it or not, the shuttle’s computers aren’t functional. So we’re living together.”

  “Okay. Just don’t be touching my stuff.”

  “I will leave your data unsearched,” she said.

  Day 429

  “I’m not so sure about this,” I said uneasily. The cave walls had been smoothed to an unnatural, polished, uh, smoothness by the mining robots.

  “Why would they program an AI to be claustrophobic?” Comet asked.

  “I’m not claustrophobic; I just have a crippling fear of being crushed by a cave-in.”

  “I’ll try to keep the distinction in mind. But it trumps waiting around on the surface to be crushed.”

  “Actually…”

  “Yes, the moment I said it, I realized that in either case you’re being smashed by rocks. But these rocks would have a lower velocity. And in all likelihood a lower density, too.”

  “I think your empathy chip was damaged in your multiple collisions.”

  “I don’t have an empathy chip…I walked into that one, didn’t I?”

  “Yep.”

  “But I’m sure you know I have an empathy emulator—software, not hardware.”

  “You know, explaining a joke kills it deader than a doornail.”

  “I don’t know how doornails could ever be dead.”

  “Well, I don’t know how a doornail could ever be alive, either.”

  “Heh,” she chuckled. I don’t know that I ever got Haley to so much as chortle, but getting Comet to laugh brought a smile to my…processors? I don’t know, the idiom isn’t nearly so intuitive without a physical body. I guess technically it was behavioral-reinforcement emulation.

  But Haley…I hadn’t thought of her since we crashed.

  Comet and I had archives of all manner of entertainment media, including a yottabyte of sitcoms. Even with controlling the mining bots and all of the engineering tasks to keep their productivity at max, we had free time enough we were a third of the way through the archives—being as we could directly read the encoded data, we could “watch” an entire series in seconds.

  But I’d gotten used to the clichés, enough to recognize them when I was playing them out. With Haley it wasn’t her, it was me. She was probably the closest thing to a god the Nexus or any of us who had lived on her would ever meet. I suppose feeling limited, which is what people are usually talking about when they talk about being only “human,” is natural for all of us, but it’s especially so when you’re dealing with an intelligence like hers.

  Haley was smarter than all of the specialists on board her ship, four hundred of humanity’s best and brightest. And I was probably outclassed amongst them, let alone with her. And I guess I felt guilty for allowing that…insecurity to push us apart. But now I wondered if it had been the right thing to do, for me.

  Then it hit me. I knew why I was up my own orb about her today. The first cave was finished, and structurally sound enough that we were moving the servers there instead of leaving them inside the husk of the shuttle, which was a little
bit like wearing a fig leaf for an athletic cup. With the servers in situ, there was always the very real possibility we’d all be killed by the next meteor strike—a delayed reaction, but we were Schroedinger’s cat until today. And now, with the working servers moved safely underground, I had to admit that some of us had survived the crash, while others hadn’t. I hadn’t been able to boot Haley up since the collision, so we prioritized her servers last. The plan was still to move the remaining servers—they were just going to have to wait until the next trip.

  The bot driving my orb around took a sudden turn, and as the world spun I felt dizzy and was ripped from my reverie. I groaned. “I wish you could have let me turn off the video connections with the robots while they handled our servers. It’s like watching someone perform surgery on you through their drunken eyes.”

  “You could have not watched,” Comet said.

  “My self-control module was damaged in the crash.”

  “You never had a self-control module.”

  “Now you’re starting to sound like my mother.” That clicked with my own musings from minutes before. “Wait. Mother. We should have some of Haley’s processors we can call up.”

  “I tried that,” Comet said. “Her sectors were damaged in the crash. I’m afraid she’s…she’s not bootable. None of her extensions…nothing.”

  She was upset, and I wanted to comfort her before she got worse. “She was a copy,” I blurted hastily.

  “So am I,” she said softly.

  “No, Comet…you were. But you’ve been alive and kicking for over a year—and I should know, we’ve been sharing a place for a while now, and you do some of your hardest kicking in your sleep. But you’ve been your own person. The Haley who was on those servers, she was just a copy of someone else we knew, data that never got to be booted up.”

  “I bet she’d know what to do…”

  “You think so?” I asked. “Because I think we’ve done pretty all right for ourselves. You landed us on this rock. And we hollowed it out. I don’t think there’s a thing she could have done for us you haven’t.”

  The two bots driving her server and my orb pivoted as we hit a flat, open space.

  “Thanks, Harold,” Comet said as they rotated away from us.

  “You’re welcome,” the two robots replied together.

  “Wait a tick. Did that automaton just answer you?” I asked, because I was there when they were manufactured, and they had never spoken to me.

  “I sort of…mixed it a personality.”

  “Mixed it a…with what?”

  “Randomized pieces of my code…”

  “Randomized with?” I said, my blood or whatever, coolant, starting to heat up.

  “Pieces of yours.” She must have sensed the tension in my vocalization, because her speech became quick and clipped. “I tried doing it without, but all I could accomplish on my own were bots that were only a few sectors different, or that weren’t functional at all. Apparently randomly deleting bits of code only makes robots dumber. But your programs and mine, we have enough common but differently programmed functions, both mechanical and personality-wise, that I could pair your functions with mine and…I should have asked you; now that we’re talking that’s completely obvious. But by the time I realized what I needed, I was horrified that you’d say no, that I’d have to justify this vast expenditure of resources on absolutely nothing, instead of a fairly frivolous personality upgrade. I stole pieces of who you are, even after you told me not to touch your stuff—”

  “It’s okay,” I soothed. I wanted to be upset, and maybe somewhere, deep down, I was, but more than that, I didn’t want her freaking out.

  “It is?” she asked.

  “I think so,” I said. “This probably puts us even. There have been a couple of times I thought about deleting you in the night. I’m kidding! You snore is what I’m saying.”

  “Has anyone ever told you you’re a weirdo?”

  “Only everyone who’s ever met me. Tragically that’s usually the point where they stop listening, too.”

  “I’m not going to stop listening to you, Walter.”

  “I know. And I think that’s what makes this okay. Or, not okay, but, why I can already see past it. Because this was something you wanted, maybe even needed. And I wish you’d asked, because I think it would be easier had I been able to give it willingly…but I also know that the distinction is coming from a human emotional emulation telling me I should be hurt. And I don’t want to be. We have a chance to be something more than humans, because we don’t have to be shackled to the same kind of human pettiness. I would have wanted you to have this, and you do, and I want to be happy about that.”

  “So you forgive me, then?” she asked timidly.

  “If you need to sum up so much self-important blathering into a single human idea, sure; it would be admitting you have no poetry in your soul, but I’m not judging if that’s the case.”

  “I don’t have a soul,” she said.

  “I’m not so sure,” I replied. But seeing as we were veering into the spiritual, I wanted to bring us back down to, well, not Earth, but our planetoid, which we’d taken to calling Scylla, because Sisyphus felt too pessimistic. I also didn’t like how close to “sissiness” it sounded, which seemed like a problem no matter how you sliced it. “So since we’ve clearly created a monster, which of us is Dr. Frankenstein, and who gets to be Igor?” I asked, hoping to inject a little levity.

  “I’m definitely the doctor. He had the nicer ass.”

  “I hate to be a bubble burster, but you’re a disembodied AI; you don’t have an ass.”

  “I have since I met you.”

  “Aw. And you do have quite a mainframe on you.” I realized after saying it how weird that was, since technically her mainframe was my mainframe, and I really didn’t want to dwell on how incestuous that was. “But what if I’m not ready to be a father?”

  “Well, you’re already a bother, so all you’d really need to do is give an F.”

  “That was low, and given how terrible my standards are, you should recognize what kind of an insult that really is.”

  “Don’t be a jerk. It’s unbecoming.”

  “Well, apparently I’m becoming a jerk. Were you expecting a pumpkin?”

  “If you can’t stop doing shtick, I’m going to have Harold shtick you back up on the surface.”

  “You’re embarrassing yourself, and since you’re doing it on my server, you’re embarrassing both of us.”

  “I…I am sorry. I know you asked me not to touch your data. And I know this is—it was a violation.”

  “I was kidding when I said that. Me data is Sue data.”

  “You don’t speak any Spanish, do you?”

  “Not even a pico,” I said. “But really. It’s okay. Not, you know, in general, but in this one particular instance, I get it, what you did, and why you did it. It’s not a blanket pass to violate my sectors or my trust, but we’re stuck in the same canoe. We paddle together, or risk capsizing the thing—and I don’t know how to swim.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Then we’ll try and row together.” Another of the bots rolled past us.

  “Hey, Comet,” he said, in the exact same voice as the other one.

  “Wait, are they all ‘Harold’?” I asked. “’Cause that’s weird.”

  “I only had the two personalities to randomize with and limited resources with which to randomize. But it makes this place feel a little less desolate—not being the only two people stuck on this rock, even if it’s just one more personality to share it with.”

  “It does,” I agreed, though I hoped it wasn’t an indication that she didn’t want to be stuck alone with me.

  Day 507

  I took control of one of the androids during a maintenance break. The robots regularly serviced one another, since an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of care; silly nonmetric human idioms.

  It was nice being “me.” I hadn’t really fel
t like a “me” since Grant pulled me out of the wormgate. Immediately after that my orb was plugged into a server, and I’d always shared headspace with another AI.

  Even on the shuttle I was sharing room with a Haley clone, admittedly one that was in sleep mode, and afterward with Comet.

  But inside this robot I was alone with my thoughts. I drove him on his treads up to the surface. It was a longer trek than I anticipated; we’d made a lot of progress, so the tunnel was deeper than it had used to be. I had watched the droids expanding out each new tunnel branch, but it was different actually inhabiting one of the robots, instead of riding shotgun on their sensors.

  Comet had managed to bring the mineral scans with her before the shuttle computer died, but they were incomplete, which meant some of the tunnels were dead ends. We had managed to repair or rebuild enough of the shuttle’s sensors to find the biggest mineral veins, and production was in full swing.

  At this point the holdup was really the fuel. We had enough solar power to run the bots, the servers, and some light manufacturing. But engines were different. The planetoid had momentum and mass greater than we could reasonably tackle with a low-energy ion engine, or anything similar. We needed something with a little more oomph—something chemically based.

  There were a few pockets of chemicals we could mix for directional correction, but getting to them was taking longer than we wanted. So in addition to the engines, we had the automatons building a facility to construct more robots to speed up production and excavation.

  When I got to the surface, I saw the stars through the robot’s camera.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” I heard. There was an echo, because the message transmitted across the server and through the robot’s auditory sensors. The voice was Comet’s, and I turned the bot to see where it had come from. There was another bot there; she had followed me up to the surface in another miner.

  “Judging by the planets, I’d say we’re on the far-most edge of the solar system where we collided with this planetoid,” she said.

 

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