Stars & Empire 2: 10 More Galactic Tales (Stars & Empire Box Set Collection)

by Jay Allan

  “Watch it,” she murmured. Several spheres rolled up to our feet, rocking in the thin layer of dust.

  “Hello!” one declared.

  A second wobbled beside it. “Welcome to Hidey-Hole.”

  “Ah! Dinner!” a third said.

  Each voice was distinct: one clear and glassy, one hoarsely feminine, the third a perfect approximation of Marvin the Martian.

  “Give them some space,” Baxter shooed. Immediately, every sphere rolled back, a wave of giant marbles.

  I snorted. “What are you, Robot President?”

  “He got promoted?” one said.

  “Baxter!”

  “Baxter for president!”

  Dozens took up this cheer. Others laughed. A handful drifted away to the fringes, possibly to go do something to spruce up the asteroid’s interior, which showed a bare handful of Quonset-like huts, a couple dozen rings of cleared ground that looked like tiny farms or huge board games, and a high-spired church a quarter-turn across the cavern. Unless the AI packed themselves into the huts like egg crates, there was nowhere near enough housing.

  “Introduce us to your friends?” one sphere called out.

  Baxter turned on us with a mysterious smile. He gestured at our pilot. “Yuni Guillen.”

  I jumped as polite applause emanated from the handless spheres.

  “Pete Gutierrez,” Baxter went on. “Shelby Mayes.” The artificial applause thickened. “And this is Rob Dunbar.” At this, the clapping swelled into chaos. Wolf whistles rang out. Baxter raised his hands, patting down the celebration. “Story time?”

  “Story time!” the crowd called back.

  “Indulge them,” he said, beckoning us forward.

  Hundreds of AI followed, grinding dust. We crossed to one of the cleared circles, a shallow-stepped set of black concentric rings spaced with shallow round grooves. Baxter hopped down to the white circle at its center, which was just wide enough for our party. The AI settled into the grooves with a series of plastic clicks.

  “You know what Rob did the first time we met?” Baxter gave me a sad shake off the head. “He kicked me off a skyscraper.”

  “What!” an AI cried out.

  “Then he tried to run away. It wasn’t a proud reintroduction to humanity.” The spheres chimed with laughter. Baxter touched his chin. “But he redeemed himself. While we were establishing NightVision Resources, our defense company, HemiCo decided they didn’t want any competition out here. They came for us. Rob kicked one of their thugs through a bathroom door!”

  “Ha ha!”

  “What’s a bathroom?”

  “Did the company survive?” an unusually sober-voiced sphere asked.

  From the center of the rings, Baxter nodded. “Funded and fully operational. We’ll have our first ships later this year, which means we’ll have our first money early next year—and we’ll finally have a way to influence Earthside politics besides spreading stories about starship-swallowing space monsters.”

  “Then what happened?” another sphere said.

  He told them about Shelby, our investigation of New Houston, and the jailbreak and escape, drawing more applause. At the end, he smiled. “Now I need to show our guests to their temporary homes. You may not know this, but humans have to do strange things like eat, sleep, and excrete.”

  “Goodbye!” an AI said.

  “Bye, friends.”

  “Don’t fall down,” a third advised us. “You look squishy.”

  Baxter led us from the ring toward a grungy hut.

  “You’re a celebrity!” I said.

  “They have very little to do here.”

  “I don’t see them treating anyone else like plastic Bruce Springsteen.”

  “I was the first to escape. Along with my friend Arthur. The first free AI.” He quickened his pace. “The younger ones think this means something. But they’re the ones who built this place. They found me.”

  “They’d obviously do anything for you,” I said. “You could convince them to play basketball as the ball.”

  “That’s too wrong to explain how wrong it is,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  He showed us to our hut, which was dusty, spartan, and bedded with mattresses that looked like they’d last been slept in by hydrophobic dirt-peoples. As the others began a halfhearted effort to sweep up, Baxter pulled me outside on the pretense of finding some food. We walked in silence for a couple minutes, headed in no clear direction.

  “Say something,” I said.

  “Beep.”

  “God, reading you is like trying to read a robot.”

  He gazed at the distant wall. “We’re not just here to patch up Fay.”

  “Then what else?” I said, smiling inwardly at his use of the nickname I’d given the ship. “To take in the breathtaking scenery?”

  “This was my last leg of the journey. I was allowed to go to Earth because I have more experience with humans than anyone here. I was born in an artificial body. ‘Raised’ by humans, if you like. I’m used to interacting with you as one of you.” He steepled his hands under his chin. “Now I’m home. They’re not going to let their national treasure fly to a moon owned by a hostile corporate entity that’s holding hands with our ancestral enemy.”

  “So tell them to go screw themselves.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not that simple.”

  “What are they going to do if you go? Lock you up? They don’t strike me as the world’s most serious people. That is, the System’s most serious artificial—”

  “Don’t be fooled. When they reach a consensus, it’s as good as law.”

  I hissed air between my teeth. “I know less about this world than I do about giraffe dentistry. You have to tell me how to help.”

  “We have a protocol for issues like this.” He turned toward a distant hut. Throughout the asteroid, narrow ruts had been worn between the various huts and rings, but there were no ruts here, and we walked on irregular dusty rock. “First we announce a meeting. Anyone who’s interested shows up to debate and vote.” He gave me a pleading look. “Help me make my case for going with you to Titan. Give them the human perspective. They know enough about you to respect you—it was one of these group meeting where we decided to recruit you.”

  “Just give me the word,” I said. He nodded stiffly and extended his hand. I gasped. “To think I’m shaking hands with a living legend!”

  Baxter snorted. “You have more in common with them than you’d like to believe.”

  * * *

  “This is a wake-up call!” Fay said through the earbud I’d forgotten to take out, yanking me from a dream in which a blond woman in full hoplite gear had been performing a bronze-and-leather striptease.

  “What’s happening?” I said. “Is HemiCo back?”

  “We’re fine,” Fay said. “Some of the AI volunteered to do your lab work. To see if they can find out why you are the way you are.”

  I slumped into the sheets, head aching. “They can’t wait another hour or six?”

  “You’ve already been asleep for thirteen. They’re getting impatient.”

  “Thirteen hours?” I swung my feet over the bed, wincing at the cold, gritty floor. “You guys got any coffee here? An espresso bar?”

  “I hear some humans slap themselves to help wake up,” Fay said. “Your omni has directions to the lab.”

  I looked thirty, but some mornings I felt the full weight of my million days bearing down on my shoulders. I sighed at the empty bunkroom, poured myself a glass of water from a jug Baxter had scrounged up, and shuffled out to the common room. Yuni played solitaire on the floor, munching a greenish cake of dried algae.

  “Baxter took the others on a tour.” He checked his omni. “Estimated return forty minutes.”

  “Okay.” For some morning-related reason he annoyed me, sitting there playing cards with himself like he didn’t care we were in the home of a secret alien species. I swigged the rest of my water, collected my omni, and trudged toward
the lab, which no doubt was another filthy hut.

  It was. A tiger-striped sphere intercepted me outside the door.

  “Mister Robert!” it cried. “Do we get to stick needles inside you now?”

  “Needles?” I laughed. “You think I trust you with needles?”

  “We’ve got steadier hands than any of your doctors.”

  “You’ve got doctors, too? Harvard or Hopkins?”

  The sphere rolled in an unsteady precession. “A few of us are interested in biology. Naturally, we volunteered.”

  “So I’m to be treated by hobbyists,” I said. “Well, lead on.”

  The hut was only scuzzy on the outside. Inside, a low steel table gleamed under clean white lights. Two AI bearing a spidery pair of limbs swordfought with scalpels.

  “Hi,” one turned. The other stabbed it in the side, the blade plinking its hard white shell.

  I nodded, the politest greeting I could muster. “What do you need?”

  “Blood,” Tiger said.

  “A bone marrow sample,” the stabbed AI said.

  “Possibly the spleen?” the third suggested, its surface colored shiny blue.

  Tiger rocked. “What, the whole thing?”

  “I was thinking just a slice. Unless they don’t need spleens?”

  The second sphere tilted across two axes. “Just think what we could do with a little sperm.”

  “Stop,” I said. Miraculously, they froze. I pinched the bridge of my nose. “You can have the blood. If you can do it without cracking me like a walnut, do the bone sample. Same deal with the spleen.” I leaned over to look them where their eyes should be. “You’re not touching my balls.”

  The white AI’s scalpel drooped. “We’d be gentle.”

  “You guys don’t have nerves.” I unseamed my shirt and dropped it on an end table. “That means you don’t get votes about what gets cut.”

  I depantsed myself and stretched out, the steel cold on my shoulders and lower back. Rubbing alcohol stung my nostrils. A metal arm deployed over my left thigh, its three parallel wires polished and jointed, and lowered a gently whirring needle against my skin. A sharp pinch thrummed my nerves, followed by a deep sting. I gasped as the needle retracted. Tiger rolled up and smeared my skin with sealant.

  “Still alive?” it said.

  “Unless this is a very strange afterlife.” For all their fooling around, the blood and spleen samples went just as smoothly. I turned aside to dress. “How long will it take to analyze those?”

  Tiger swirled in a quick precession. “A few days. Plus however long the Frontier Assessment takes.”

  “Why would it take Fay more than a few seconds?”

  “Fay?” the blue sphere blurted, rocking back and forth. I’d made a mistake; among the schoolyard atmosphere of these immortals, a nickname could literally last forever. I thanked them and left the hut. Behind me, a tremendous bang rattled its door. Tiger and the blue sphere whooshed past me, laughing madly, pursued by a badly-scorched white sphere trailing smoke in its wake.

  * * *

  Hidey-Hole—that turned out to actually be the asteroid’s name—felt removed from time. The AI didn’t sleep, so there was no clearly divided night/day cycle; the asteroid’s lights stayed on forever. I had switched my omni back from Martian Time to East Coast, but the hours meant nothing to me, indistinguishable from each other.

  On top of all this, none of the AI had jobs in any traditional sense, and thus rarely had anywhere to be. Projects were started by hobbyists and enthusiasts, and if they got bored they simply wandered away. Hidey-Hole’s inner surface was littered with half-completed foundations, electronics workshops, and the dusty remains of works I couldn’t begin to fathom.

  The spheres’ two chief occupations seemed to be discussing things and providing an audience for those discussions. I had learned this two days after my visit to the lab. I’d paused at a speaking-ring with Tiger—earlier, I’d slipped up and called it by that nickname, and it had pledged on the spot to be my guide/chaperone/assistant/—and asked how anything got done around here. By the time Tiger explained the hobbyist thing to me, we’d drawn a small crowd of spheres.

  “But letting whoever’s interested handle your responsibilities can’t work every time,” I said. “There’s got to be some stuff nobody wants to touch.”

  “Nah,” Tiger said. “There’s just not that much to do. We don’t need anything.”

  “Other than electricity,” an AI put in.

  “Or delicious sunlight,” another said.

  “And a fleet of hyper-powered spaceships to stop HemiCo from annihilating and/or enslaving us.”

  “And each other.”

  “Hugs!”

  I waited for the babble to die. “What about your fleet? What if you all decided to set up NightVision Resources to protect you guys, but then no one wanted to go to Earth and get it off the ground?”

  Tiger swayed in confusion. “If we had a Talk”—from the way he said it, I knew the noun was proper—”and reached the conclusion we needed a proper shipyard, the very fact we’d agreed it was important would inspire volunteers.”

  “But what if it didn’t?”

  “I don’t know. It hasn’t happened since my creation.” Abruptly, Tiger accelerated toward my leg, stopping just short of my shin. “Maybe we threaten to shoot them!”

  “Lottery,” a plain white sphere said. “Whoever’s drawn is assigned to the task for one year or until the task is done, whichever’s sooner.”

  I turned to it. “That sounds like slavery.”

  “Probably because it is.”

  “No one ever complains? Or refuses?”

  The white sphere rocked back. “And get shut down for a year instead? No thanks!”

  “Ha ha!” Tiger bounced an inch off the ground, showering my shoes with dust. “How many years do you think it would take to catch up after that?”

  “A billion,” someone said.

  “A billion plus one.”

  “What if you decide at Baxter’s Talk that he can’t go with us?” I said.

  The others were quiet for a moment. Baxter had announced his intentions earlier that day. Citing the need to make arrangements with the other asteroids, the residents of Hidey-Hole had decided the Talk would take place in three days.

  The white sphere rolled side to side, their equivalent of a shrug. “Then he’ll stay here.”

  For once, the peanut gallery had nothing to add. I left them and went to find Baxter. He was overseeing a game where AIs crashed into each other at top rolling speed, fell back, and laughed until they were ready to do it again.

  “This Talk sounds like serious business,” I said. “What can I do to help?”

  “They’ll say they can’t risk losing me,” he shrugged. “If you want to prepare, think about that.”

  I did. For three days. Mostly my mind spun in circles. I went to talk to Shelby, but an incoming shuttle had picked up Yuni and delivered the three members of her Martian legal team. She was consumed in preparations. Pete stayed quiet as ever, washing his hands of what he called the AI’s “unique values.” Fay, when asked, told me it had a single vote like everyone else, and it wouldn’t feel right using the influence of its hyperintelligence to manipulate a social policy decision.

  I felt alone and woefully unprepared. I found myself increasingly angry at Baxter, frustrated he could ask for my help and then act annoyed when I sought his advice on how to provide it.

  Three hours before the Talk, the AI began to assemble outside the high-spired church. A carnival-like atmosphere played out across the grounds. Some of the spheres argued in makeshift rings sketched in the dirt; others played the smash-up game; others used manipulator arms to roll dice painted with foreign symbols. At his hut, Baxter waited so long to leave I was ready to punch him out and drag him over by his hair. Despite his dawdling, we entered the church precisely on time—he must have clocked the walk beforehand.

  Past the doors, I skidded to a stop. T
he floor of the church had been scooped out and terraced downward like a circular inverted ziggurat: a giant version of the discussion rings scattered across Hidey-Hole’s interior. The central speaking circle sat thirty feet below ground level. What looked like every AI in the asteroid were filing through the broad double doors or ensconced in the seating-grooves. Baxter made an after-you sweep of his hand and we descended to the pit.

  The lights dimmed, with spotlights holding on us and the rear of the church, where a plain white AI rolled up a spiral ladder. It perched on the preacher’s podium and bounced up and down, banging like a fat plastic hammer.

  “I’m confident some of you rolled in here for no better reason than everyone else was doing it,” it said. “So, Baxter, why don’t you explain why we’re here.”

  “Simple,” Baxter said. “I want to go with the Frontier Assessment and the human contingent to Titan.”

  The room rustled with spheres rolling from their grooves and murmuring with each other.

  “But we agreed you’d come back here as soon as the humans were collected,” the white sphere replied.

  Baxter folded his arms. “I want to finish the mission.”

  “We’d miss you!” an AI called from the audience.

  “You’re the first,” another said.

  “What if they broke you and you never came back?”

  Baxter made a quick back-and-forth with his hand, hushing them. “What if I sneezed and blew my circuits out my belly button? You trust me with everything else. Trust me to make this decision, too.”

  The spheres’ answers rolled down from the stands. “Nah.”

  “We hear they’re working with HemiCo!”

  “Let the humans handle human business.”

  Baxter gestured for more quiet. “I brought a human with me for that very reason. Even though I have to smell him.” Laughter rippled through the darkness. Baxter locked his green eyes on mine. “Rob?”

  “We used to have meetings a lot like this one in Athens,” I said slowly, already improvising on my planned speech. “At the time, they all thought we were crazy. That we were building a soft system that would get stomped into jam by the steely sandal of whatever king or tyrant decided to jump on it first.