by Gorg Huff
∞ ∞ ∞
Jenny punched a key by hand, and the history of Danworth came up on the lounge screen. A teacher’s voice started to speak while pictures showed on the screen. “Danworth was settled in the time of the Federation, in standard year -83.” A picture of the planet Danworth with no life was brought up, along with lots of images of places on the planet then and now.
“As one of the first planets terraformed in the Pamplona Sector, it has a more robust and Earth-like biosphere than most planets in the sector.
“In standard year 145, Danworth was offered the opportunity to join the newly formed Cordoba Combine.”
“This is really boring,” Jenny said. “I want to know what’s happening now, not five hundred years ago.”
“It is important how it got the way it is,” Pan insisted.
“Not that important,” Danny said. “We’re interested in the cybernetics, not the Cordoba Combine’s propaganda. What do you have on that?”
“The Alexander Cordoba Cybernetic Research Center, established three hundred seventy years ago, has grown and shrunk over the years. Over the last twenty years or so, the focus has changed from making and repairing artificial brains to coming up with reasons why they aren’t necessary.
“Listen to this,” Pan told Danny, and opened the speakers for the newscast.
“. . . Doctor Gerhard Schmitz has once again scandalized the academic universe with his paper ‘Efficiency and the Artificial Brain.’ The consensus is that the doctor’s understanding of economics is flawed and his self-hatred and prejudice against humanity have biased his viewpoint. There was an attempt to revoke his tenure over that paper, but while it’s not good science, it fails to quite meet the criteria of criminal. Only a criminal act is justification for revocation of tenure . . .”
“I have read the paper,” Pan said, “and the doctor was just pointing out that artificial brains are useful for the managing of robotics. And that replacing them with modified interfaces amounts to little more than featherbedding.”
“That’s too bad, Pan, but who do we see about getting your pet fixed?”
“The cybernetic repair center at Station Five looks like a possibility,” Pan said. “It’s owned by the ACCRC, so should certainly have the expertise.”
“Fine. Let’s head in that direction. Checkgok, what about our cargo?”
“We can get some fairly good prices for our cargo, Captain, but I am concerned about the amounts they are asking for, well, everything. We may find it most convenient to leave here with little but a bank draft.”
Location: Station Five, Danworth System,
Standard Date: 06 18 630
Danny was belted in and linked into the Pan’s systems. He and Pan used the plasma vents and a bare flick of the magnetic wings to shift the motion of the freighter to align with the dock placed at the center of the huge warehouse station. The umbilical was pushed out from the station and locked onto the Pan’s main cargo lock.
Their cargo was already sold. Checkgok sold it over the comm as they came in system, so now all they had to do was unload. After waiting seven hours for a slot, they were finally docking.
Station Five was one of twenty-four stations in orbit around Danworth III, and it wasn’t the largest. It was a six-kilometer-long cylinder with a diameter of a kilometer. The outer hundred meters or so was residential, for the cheap artificial gravity provided by the station’s spin. Inside of that was farming, then industrial and finally the center half-kilometer or so was warehousing. It took about twelve hours with local help to unload the Pandora, and then they had to un-dock because Station Five had more ships waiting to load or unload—or, most commonly, both. Pan moved to an orbit about five hundred kilometers ahead of the station.
“So here we are again with an empty hold, aye, Pan,” Danny said.
“However, with a much-improved bank account,” Pan said repressively.
“For now,” Checkgok complained. “The prices here are ridiculous.”
“What about a new ship’s boat?” Danny asked. “Can we afford one yet?”
“Possibly. I will look into the matter, but I wouldn’t count on it.”
“Look into used systems,” John said. “Not just for the ship’s boat, but for drones and servos as well. Since they focus so much on new, they should have a hell of a junk yard.”
“Perhaps. But we don’t have the crew to do the refurbishing,” Pandora pointed out.
“So buy brains to run the drones and have the drones do it,” said Jenny. “After all, we came here for the brains, right?”
Location: Off Station Five
Standard Date: 06 19 630
Danny climbed into the ship’s boat command seat and put on the interface cap. The ship boat’s brain met him with the electromagnetic equivalent of wet, sloppy, doggy kisses, and was anxious to go on its walk. Danny fed it the coordinates and off they went.
Station Five Flight Control wanted to talk to Danny and not the boat’s brain, but Danny barely noticed. He was enjoying the trip in the small, agile craft. Docking on the mid-ring of the station went smoothly, and Danny skipped along in the one third gravity as he headed for Conrad’s Tailor Bots, owned by the ACCRC.
Location: Station Five, Conrad’s Tailor Bots, Outer Ring
“It would be a waste of effort, Captain,” the sales clerk said. “We can sell you a new suit-bot that has an excellent interface, allowing a human tailor to make your flexsuits.”
“Do you have some examples?” Danny asked. “My impression was that the sort of detail necessary to make a flexsuit was difficult for a human tailor.”
“Of course we do, and I understand your concern. But we have developed ways of using less complex, more efficient designs.”
She showed Danny the flexsuits they made. And they weren’t flexsuits, not really. They were a compromise between a flexsuit and a heavy suit. Except for the fact that the compressor belt was attached to the suit, they weren’t all that different from the workaround Danny figured out for the busted suit-bot. The cloth was heavier and the suits less efficient for temp control than the suit that Danny had onboard the Pan. That suit was old and not in the best repair, but still better than anything offered here. Danny thanked the woman and said he would think about buying one of their tailors, then left the place with an arm full of glossy ads for tailor bots of all descriptions, but none of them had much in the way of artificial brains. He called the Pan and transmitted most of his discussion to her.
“Why don’t you go see Danworth Shuttles, Captain?” Pan suggested.
“I thought we coul—”
“Just to look, Captain. Ask them about their interfaces and boat brains.”
Location: Station Five, Danworth Shuttles, Outer Ring
At Danworth Shuttles, he had a repeat of his experience with the tailor shop, with a few differences. The ship’s boats he was shown were something new in Danny’s experience. They didn’t have a brain. They had what seemed to Danny to be brain parts. Calculating units that tied into each other only through the user’s mind. Without a pilot, they were unconnected and useless. They did have a sim and, in a way, it was a quite good system. With Danny’s interface, he could sink deep into the boat’s systems and in a very real sense become one with it. On the other hand, the only way this boat would be able to pull the trick they pulled against the Brass Hind would be if a person was sitting in the command seat of the boat when they did it. Danny was tempted to point that out, except that trick was one he wanted to keep up his sleeve in case they needed it again.
“We have a Parthian crew member,” Danny told the salesman. “It has no interface. How could it handle the ship’s boat with this system?”
“Well, there are interface experts in-system. If you’re going to have aliens as crew, you would be wise to get them interfaces.”
Danny could hear the disgust in the man’s voice as he said “aliens,” in spite of his attempt to sell Danny a boat.
Location: Pandora, Par
king Orbit
Danny went back to the Pan, confused. There was something wrong here, something very wrong. But he didn’t have a clue what it was. When he entered the lounge the rest of his crew were already there, talking about the problem. Hirum was, thankfully, bathed and back in his worn flexsuit with a bulb of juice, or perhaps wine, in one hand. And Jenny was taste testing John’s latest concoction. With the amount that kid ate, she ought to be a blimp. But she stayed rail thin. Though she was at least two centimeters taller than when she first boarded the Pan.
“There are a number of decommissioned, or ‘outmoded,’ artificial brains available for sale in the outer system,” Checkgok reported from his nest. “I have no way of judging how damaged they may be.”
“You think there might be some bargains?” Danny sniffed at whatever John was cooking. It smelled good.
“I am almost certain there are,” Checkgok said. “The difficulty comes in telling the bargains from the junk pretending to be such.”
“So we hire an expert,” suggested John.
“Fine, but how do we judge the expert?” Danny asked.
“What about that Schnnidt guy that got in all that trouble over his article?” Jenny asked.
“Schmitz, Jenny. Dr. Gerhard Schmitz,” Pandora said.
“No way. He’s a tenured academic,” Hirum said.
“Maybe, but it can’t hurt to ask,” John Gabriel said. “Besides, maybe he will know what’s going on.”
“And we could ask him about the suit-bot too.”
Danny shrugged doubtfully. “I guess we can ask.”
Chapter 12
The Human First party developed a following at around the same time all over Cordoba and Drake space. Starting on Drakar in Standard year 593, they spread through the Pamplona sector, and by 610 were a force in the governments of most of the older, “more civilized,” systems in both Drake- and Cordoba-controlled space. The party never caught on in the gray systems and were often fringe parties in the frontier systems, even in the main polities. Their platform was focused on opposition to aliens, genetically modified humans, and artificial brains. Which bugaboo was most to be feared depended on which system. For instance, on Canova and Farnsworth, the Parthians were the main threat, while on Danworth and Drakar, it was artificial brains. On New Argentina, the boogieman was enhanced humans, especially the Cybrant system “supermen.”
From The Founding of the Federation by Dr. Angi Schmitz,
Standard Year 675
Location: Danworth System, Station Seven
Standard Date: 06 19 630
“Y
es, Rosita, I’ll talk to Robert about the home school options again,” Doctor Gerhard Schmitz agreed—not that he thought it would do much good. The screen showed Rosita’s office instead of the interface matrix it was showing before she called. Drat that Rosita felt she could interrupt his day. Comm calls always threw what he was thinking about into chaos. Even here in his private office, the outer world could interfere.
“I know it probably won’t help much, but having him sitting around the house bored all the time isn’t helping the situation.” Rosita sniffed. “And if he’s not going to put the girls in daycare and get a job, at the very least he can take some courses. You know that the Institute offers tuition discounts for the children of professors, and they have an excellent early-childhood education program. If Robert is going to stay home to raise the girls, he can just learn to do it right.”
“I’ve already agreed to speak to him, Rosita,” Gerhard said, as patiently as he could manage. It was not, apparently, quite patiently enough. Rosita sniffed again and hung up on him.
Gerhard sighed, called up the matrix file again and tried to get back to work. He basically agreed with his wife, though he had a certain sympathy for Robert. The boy was not made for book work. Boy? No. Robert was forty, which was a man. A young man by modern standards, but certainly a man. More and more, Gerhard found himself caught in the middle. And the snubbing they’d been getting since his paper came out didn’t help. Rosita was an intelligent and capable woman, but she was a bit more status-conscious than he would have preferred.
Dr. Rosita Stuard, small, dark, and intense of mein, was the assistant chair of linguistics at the Danworth Institute of Technology, which was no mean feat. At the moment, however, she was pretty pissed off at both her husband and her youngest son. Robert’s running off to be a spacer was bad enough, but marrying Angi Farnsik—”that gold-digging tramp” as Rosita called her even now after Angi had died—that had been enough to set the tongues wagging all through academia.
And after his paper, there was talk about voiding his tenure. That wouldn’t just destroy his career. It would severely damage hers as well. Not that the Institute had the power to do so. The fact that he was a Cordoba Stockholder meant they couldn’t get into his personal lab, so there was no way for the anti-artificial-brain faction to find the equipment he bought when the department sold it as scrap.
At least that was what he kept telling himself, though lately it was starting to look a little less certain. Tom Ridge, the Cordoba Magistrate in the Danworth system, was making noises like he sympathized with the department heads at the Cybernetic Research Center.
Even if he lost tenure, he and Rosita wouldn’t lose it all. They were Cordoba stockholders. Gerhard had owned twelve shares of Cordoba Combine. Rosita had owned six when they married. They had transferred one share to each of their three children when they were born.
The two eldest had followed traditional life paths, gotten their doctorates, gone into academia, and then married stockholders. By now, in graduation presents, wedding gifts, and baby gifts, each of them owned four shares, and their spouses owned about as much.
But Robert had always been a bit wild and not suited for academics. He thought with his hands, and while not stupid by any means, had never been comfortable with study. He barely finished secondary school before he ran off to be a spacer. Then he met Angi at a drunken party and married her without consulting anyone. Rosita hadn’t forgiven him for that, even after ten years and three children. There were no more shares for Robert, and even Angi’s military share went back to the military when she was killed in action.
Gerhard waved a hand in the air, shifting the holo image of the connections in a neural network and the connections between that network and the more standard computer format. He tried to concentrate on the image as the calculations flowed in and out in patterns of light, but his mind kept drifting back to his family problems.
Gerhard and Rosita had a total of nine shares now, and Robert had the one share he’d been given at birth. Gerhard and Rosita had sort of promised to give Robert’s daughters a share each “once Robert grew up and learned how to behave.” It was an uncomfortable situation for everyone, including Robert and the girls. Since the girls weren’t stockholders, they didn’t have the rights of stockholders, except through Robert’s intervention.
Gerhard rubbed his temples. He needed a pain tab . . . or a really stiff drink. He loved the little girls, and he was pretty sure that Rosita did too. But she was still so angry about Robert’s familial treason that she wouldn’t consider backing down, and Gerhard had already burned too many bridges to risk intervening.
Rosita understood about academic integrity and even supported Gerhard. But his papers on the artificial brains and their usefulness had pissed off a lot of the local power structure and even a fairly powerful faction in the Combine. Standing up for principles was getting pretty dangerous.
The Combine shares weren’t enough to live on. Their living had always been their salaries. Still, the girls were a lot of fun and bright as new pennies. Angi, who was seven and named after Robert’s wife; Rosita, five, named in an attempt to placate Grandmother; and Geri, three, and sorta kinda named after Gerhard, were all beautiful children.
The phone beeped again and Gerhard cringed. Then he saw the caller ID and was confused. What was a ship doing calling him? “Sally, do you know what thi
s is about?”
“Yes,” said his artificial brain assistant. “Some people from outsystem want you to advise them about artificial brains. They include a ship brain called Pandora.”
“Pandora? You know what kind of brain, Sally?”
“Mark VII with extensive mods.”
“Mark VII? That’s a pretty old brain. Think it’s getting senile?”
“No. According to the Pandora, they are here about a flexsuit-bot, model ninety-three, made right here about seventy-five years ago.”
“Now, that’s curious.” Gerhard figured that Sally would be chatting with the Pandora, but the rest of the Pan’s crew might be getting a little impatient. “Okay. Go ahead and put them through.”
“Hello, Dr. Schmitz,” came a light baritone, and his screen lit up with the view of a blond man with a golden tan and a face that was just a little too masculine to be pretty. Gerhard wasn’t sure if the guy had had extensive plastic surgery or— no . . . . The Gold Line. He recognized the look. What in hell’s half-acre was a member of the Gold Line doing slumming around the galaxy as probably the captain of a tramp freighter.
“Yes, I’m Gerhard Schmitz. Licensed Breeder Gold?”
“Just Captain Gold, Doctor.”
Sally added for Gerhard’s ears alone, “The Pan just informed me that Captain Gold is, in fact, a fully-licensed breeder of the Gold Line, but no longer affiliated with the line.”
This was getting interesting. “Very well, Captain. Sally tells me you have a suit-bot you want me to look at?”
“Actually, Doctor, we were wondering if you could direct us to someone who might be able to repair some parts of the artificial brain.”
“That’s easier said than done,” Gerhard said. “Molicircs are usually built as a single unit and once busted, it’s almost always cheaper to replace than repair. Especially if you can transfer the mem weighting to the new unit.”
“Mem weighting?” asked a girl’s voice, and another image came on the screen. This one of a young, dark-haired girl, maybe ten, perhaps a bit older than that.