by Joe Zieja
“Thanks,” he said, wiping his mouth. “I don’t talk in your stupid accent. Why don’t you go somewhere and sound like an idiot to someone else?”
The whole table became silent for a moment. Mailn found something very interesting to stare at on the table, and even the Viking looked like she didn’t know who to hit in this situation, which must have confused her terribly.
“Take it easy, McSchmidt,” Rogers said. “He’s just trying to be friendly. I mean, sure, he annoys the living piss out of me and I want to open the room to vacuum every time he opens his mouth, but . . . at least I’m not a jerk about it.”
“Actually, sir,” Tunger said, “you were kind of a jerk about it.”
Rogers shrugged. “Whatever. I outrank both of you. McSchmidt, chill out. Tunger, get the marshmallows out of your cheeks.”
The two of them looked at each other with icy disdain, but there was no further hair-pulling.
“Fine,” Tunger said finally, breaking his absurd staring contest with McSchmidt. “I’m going to go feed the children. You all have a great time talking normally.”
Tunger sauntered off, and Rogers saw that there were claw marks on the back of his trousers.
“Anyway,” Rogers said. He slid McSchmidt’s datapad across the table so he could look at it. He’d never seen a raw intelligence report before—he’d only ever gotten the distilled information through briefings—and now he realized that he was perfectly happy with that. The report was written in a style so old, it was almost comical, all capital letters with hash marks and slashes in all these strange places. It was almost impossible to read.
“What is this crap?” Rogers asked, gesturing at the report. He could see some of the stuff that McSchmidt had talked about in the middle of the document, but it was bracketed on both the top and the bottom by such an incredible amount of textual gibberish that it looked like someone had disemboweled a keyboard.
“Oh, that?” McSchmidt said. “It’s a bunch of routing information. It says where the report came from and where it’s supposed to go.” He squinted and leaned forward again. “At least, I think so.”
Deet beeped in that sort of way that told Rogers he wanted to say something.
“What is it?”
Deet’s neck craned over the top of the datapad, and he gave another few beeps.
“This isn’t all routing information,” he said.
“How would you know?” the Viking said. “You’re just a droid zombie.”
“Hey,” Rogers said. “I made this droid zombie.”
“EXPLETIVE EXPLETIVE yourself,” Deet said.
The Viking snorted. “He can’t even swear? What use is he?”
Deet hung his head. “It’s not my fault.”
“Can we please focus?” Rogers said. “What is it on the top of this report that makes you curious?”
Deet looked back at the report and pointed at the top of it with one of his three-fingered hands. Rogers hadn’t done the best job of putting him together, he supposed; one of the fingers was attached at a very strange angle.
“This is all a primitive droid code,” he said. “I can’t read all of it, though. I’m too new for it and this programming language was on its way out before I was commissioned.”
“Oh,” McSchmidt said. “That makes sense. The droids do most of the routing in the systems.”
Rogers looked at him sideways. “They do?”
“Sure,” McSchmidt said. “Some of the other intel guys tell me that it was part of an initiative to make things more efficient a couple of months ago. Klein signed off on it. The droids do some of the number crunching for the statistical analysis, and they make sure it’s all routed properly.” He rubbed the back of his head. “I think they do a final proofread before it’s disseminated, too.”
Rogers frowned. That was a lot of artificial intelligence working on intelligence. Did that mean that the intelligence was artificial? Now he was just confused.
Nearby, a pair of starmen second class were chuckling by one of the new propaganda posters that had shown up, this one an unintelligible depiction of a hulking, dual-headed mythical creature sitting atop what appeared to be a mountain of chocolate bars. The caption read, IT’S SO GOOD. SO GOOD.
Rogers saw his work, and saw that it was, indeed, good.
“It doesn’t just look like routing information, though,” Deet said. “It looks like access information, too. Like it’s pointing me in several different places at once. I can’t make it out, and I can’t access the network to test it out.”
“That must be lonely,” Rogers said. “Not being on the network for so long.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” the Viking said, taking a bite into a SEWR rat without even taking the packaging off first. She chewed up a wad of plastic and spit it out. “Droids can’t be lonely.”
“These are Froids,” Rogers said.
“Yeah,” Deet said. “We’re Froids. But, no, Rogers, that was the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Even the Viking chuckled.
“Fine,” Rogers said. “Screw me for trying to be compassionate to a nonhuman. What if we were to plug you into the network? Would you be able to figure it out then?”
“Maybe,” Deet said.
“Why?” McSchmidt asked. “What’s bugging you about it?”
“I don’t know,” Rogers said. “Call it my distrust of droids. What do you need to plug into the network?”
“Just a regular power cable would be fine, I think,” Deet said. He beeped. “That’s the way it’s been everywhere else I’ve been connected, anyway.”
Rogers turned around to where the squadron of droids had been plugged into the mess hall’s power outlets for “lunch.”
“What about there?” He pointed.
“That’ll work,” Deet said. He looked around as though suspicious. “I’m not sure how the other droids will react.”
“EXPLETIVE the other droids,” Rogers said. “Besides, they’re already done eating. It’s not like you’re going to go steal someone’s food. McSchmidt, why don’t you let Deet here borrow your datapad so that he can look into that code? Maybe it’ll help us figure out exactly where the intelligence is coming from. If there’s some sort of sensor error, this would be a good way to find out about it.”
McSchmidt, still looking doubtful, slowly handed the datapad over to Deet, whose Frankenbot body ambled all the way across the dining hall to stand next to the elongated table. Rogers watched him, thinking. If there was something wrong with the sensors, or something wrong with the intelligence, then the whole Thelicosan invasion was a mistake—or a lie—and all the changes they’d been making to “prepare for war” would just become inconveniences.
Deet stood by the table for a long time, not doing anything. Through the echo of the cavernous mess hall, Rogers heard a frustrated beeping noise.
“What’s the matter?” Rogers called across the dining hall.
“I can’t get it up,” Deet called back.
At least two of the people at the table nearly choked on their food. For some really absurd reason, Rogers felt himself blushing. He hurriedly got up from the table and walked over to where Deet was standing.
“What do you mean?” Rogers asked.
“It’s my data cable,” Deet said. “It’s been damaged. I didn’t realize until now since I haven’t had to use it, but this piece of FECAL MATTER won’t come out to connect to the ports.”
“Oh,” Rogers said. He knelt down, feeling around on the ground where the connection ports were, and opened the little hinged panel. Adjacent to the actual plugs was a backup wire that extended from a small coil in the ground. Hoping his many years of playing with electronics and not dying would prevent him from getting a shock, Rogers uncurled the cable and handed it to Deet.
“Here,” Rogers said. “Stick this in you.”
More snickers came from his table.
“Oh, grow up!” Rogers shouted.
> “What’s their problem?” Deet asked as he plugged into the cable and put the datapad down on the table.
“Nothing,” Rogers said. “Sometimes, I forget how little you droids understand about, um, human reproductive habits.”
“We have a Freudian Chip,” Deet explained. “To us, it’s all cable envy.”
“Right.” Rogers stood up. “How is it going? Were you able to access the network?”
Deet was quiet for a moment. Someone came out of the exit door to the kitchen, holding a single piece of bread that wasn’t in any way, shape, or form marred by mold or mechanical lubricants, and fell to his knees sobbing. Rogers understood how he felt. If someone had handed him a bottle of Jasker 120 or turned on the beer light, that’s about how he’d react right about now.
“It looks like a network,” Deet said, “but it’s definitely not the ship’s main network.”
Rogers frowned. “What do you mean by that? Is it a backup system, maybe? Were the droids coming in here to store backup data and charge their battery reserves?”
“I don’t really know,” Deet said. “It’s hard to describe. I can tell that I’m in a network, but I can’t really tell what network I’m in.”
“I think I understand what you mean,” Rogers said.
Deet looked at him and beeped confusedly. “How could you possibly understand what it’s like to be in a network but not know what network you’re in?”
Rogers chuckled. “There’s a street on Merida Prime that has almost a full mile of bars stacked right next to each other like townhouses. By the time you get a quarter of the way down, you start to understand what you’re talking about.”
“Have you ever considered the possibility that you may have a drinking problem?”
“I drink just fine, thank you.”
Rogers looked back wistfully at the Viking, who was laughing heartily with Mailn, a piece of protein cardboard stuck to the bottom of her lip. Even though it was a piece of a SEWR rat, Rogers wished he could reach his own lips out and help her brush it off.
Shaking his head, he turned back to Deet. “Are you telling me the network is encrypted?”
“It’s like encryption,” Deet said, “but different. It’s more like a confusing transportation system. If I had the right map, I could . . .”
He trailed off for a moment. In fact, Rogers’ droid companion became so quiet that Rogers thought he’d lost power. But since the ship’s gravity generator was obviously still working, that wasn’t possible. Deet’s eyes went from their normal bright blue to a sort of dim cerulean, then came back again.
“Deet? Are you still there?”
“I found the road map,” Deet said, his digitized voice breaking up as though he was at the far end of a bad radio transmission.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Rogers asked. “Are you actually using metaphors?”
“I’m learning,” Deet said. “Actually, I’m learning quite a lot. Right now.”
“About what?”
“For one thing,” Deet said, “this isn’t part of the ship’s network. It’s not part of the backup system, either. It appears to be completely separate. And it’s not controlled by humans.”
Rogers felt his stomach start to sink, like the feeling he got when he realized someone knew he was cheating them. He asked a question, but somehow, he felt like he already knew the answer.
“Who built it?”
“Artificial intelligence,” Deet said. “Droids. The top part of the intelligence documents that Lieutenant Lieutenant McSchmidt has been reading is the access codes to get into the network and point to specific updates that are priority downloads for any droid connected to the closed system.”
“That doesn’t sound like something Klein would authorize,” Rogers said.
“Actually,” Deet said, “Klein did authorize it. It was part of a sweeping set of changes to help the 331st prepare for the imminent conflict with the Thelicosans. Which, by the way, isn’t actually going to happen. The intel has been faked. By the droids.”
“What’s going on over here?” McSchmidt called as he walked over. “Is your little droid friend finding out anything interesting?”
Rogers slowly turned to face McSchmidt. His fear must have shown on his face, because the intel officer stopped as soon as Rogers turned around.
“Yes,” Rogers said. “I’m learning that we are, all of us, completely screwed.”
* * *
“What do you mean, you can’t talk about it?” McSchmidt asked.
All five of them were walking briskly down the hallway of the commissary deck, Rogers trying to keep his head down and his mouth shut. He’d asked Deet to download every scrap of data he could from the closed network and had asked him no fewer than sixteen times if it was possible any of the other droids would know of his intrusion. Deet had explained, every single time, that his login information would be stored in the database. Of course they’d know.
“I mean they’re listening,” Rogers whispered. “They have ears all around us. Don’t you understand?”
McSchmidt, the Viking, and Mailn all exchanged uneasy glances.
“Have you been spending too much time in your room?” Mailn asked. “I hear a lot of time in freefall can start to make you, um, see things.”
“No,” Rogers said testily. He’d grown quite used to living part of his day in zero gravity, as a matter of fact, and now he hardly ever ran into walls. He had even taught Cadet to pee outside of the room, which helped him avoid wayward globules of cat urine. “I’m not losing my mind, Cynthia. We just can’t talk about it here.”
In fact, he wasn’t sure they could talk about it anywhere. Deet had revealed that most of the areas on the ship were bugged, which explained all kinds of things about the propaganda posters and the devices that Deet had found previously. The droids had been listening to every word he’d said since he’d gotten back aboard the Flagship. But what did they do with all that useless chatter?
“Well, where can we talk about it?” the Viking asked, her gruff voice cutting through Rogers’ rapid and frantic train of thought. “You left the mess hall looking like you were about to shit your pants.”
Rogers wasn’t entirely sure he wasn’t about to do just that. In reality, he didn’t know what droids were trying to do with all of this false information and this spying, but he didn’t feel comfortable about it at all. From what Deet had told him so far, it was clear that the droids weren’t acting under the orders of anyone on this ship.
“Hey, are you listening to me?” the Viking said. She grabbed him roughly by the arm, creating the same result as if Rogers had run directly into a brick wall. He stopped—well, he sort of flailed around and would have fallen over if not for the iron grip on his arm. “What’s your problem, metalhead?”
Rogers looked at the Viking, his lips trembling. Aside from being excited at getting a little roughed up, his thoughts were already completely addled. How was he going to explain to all of them what he’d learned without tipping the droids off ? He still didn’t even really know everything that Deet had learned.
“It’s just . . .” he began. “I can’t . . . Look, this isn’t easy, alright? Give me a second. And let go of me or I am never going to be able to think straight!”
The Viking released him reluctantly, and Rogers shook out his uniform. He could feel the impression of her bearlike grip on his arm pulsating on his skin, tingling like someone had just applied a love tincture to his flesh. Taking a deep breath, he tried to push thoughts of being rescued from burning rooms from his mind and focus on the very serious task at hand.
“Deet . . . had a bad meal.”
“Your robot has indigestion?” Mailn said.
“No,” Rogers said. He looked at her intently, opening his eyes wide. “Deet had a bad meal in the mess hall.” He winked. “As in he perhaps ate something that doesn’t agree with him.” Rogers winked again.
“I think he’s having a seizure,” McSchmidt said.
“I’m not having a seizure!” Rogers cried. “Can’t you read between the lines at all?”
“What lines are we talking about?” Deet said. “I don’t see any lines.”
Rogers hopped up and down, pointing at Deet. “You see what I mean? He can’t see any lines! He can’t see any lines! ”
The droids don’t understand metaphor and figures of speech! Rogers wanted to shout. Even if they were listening to every word he said, even if the entire AIGCS reassembled right in front of him—they would have no idea what he was talking about.
The problem was, apparently, neither did anyone else.
“What kind of crazy did you wake up with this morning?” the Viking said. “Droids don’t eat things, Rogers.”
“Except data,” Mailn said, laughing.
Rogers pointed at her, then tapped his nose.
“Are we playing charades?” McSchmidt said.
Rogers rolled his eyes. “No, we’re not playing charades. We’re playing open your god-damn ears and try to figure out what I’m trying to tell you because maybe something important is preventing me from saying it straight at this very moment.”
The three other humans stared at him blankly. Rogers was ready to throw up his hands and listen to Klein orate him to death, abandoning the Flagship to whatever fate the droids had in store for it, but after a moment, Mailn’s eyebrows shot up.
“So, you’re saying that Deet plugged in and ate a meal that he didn’t like,” she said.
“Yes!” Rogers said, wanting to fall to his knees and cry after hugging that brilliant, brilliant woman. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m saying that Deet ate something that could potentially, I don’t know, kill us all.”
McSchmidt’s eyes widened. “He ate a bomb?”
Rogers slapped his forehead. “Are you seriously an intelligence officer?”
“You put me there,” McSchmidt mumbled.
The Viking shrugged. “Well, I still have no idea what either of you are talking about.”
“I’m starting to wonder if I understand human communication protocol at all,” Deet said.