“Well, they were derived from one of the religious cults anyway, and very into the evolutionary perfection of humanity toward some angelic ideal.”
“Right,” I said. I’d heard of this. The Jacob’s Ladder. A famous ship from history. Like the Flying Dutchman or the Enola Gay. There was always some attraction, of course, to leaving your meat-mind behind and creating a version of yourself that lived entirely in the machine. But that creation wasn’t you; it was a legacy. A recording. A simulation.
Not because of any bullshit about the soul, but because the mind was the meat, and the meat was the mind. You might get something sort of like yourself, a similar AI person. It might even think it was you. But it wouldn’t be you.
Still, I guessed, it was better than nothing.
I wondered whether those swarms were still around, and what they were doing out there if they were. “You think the parasite is a nanoswarm?”
Singer snorted with mechanical laughter, which I took to mean agreement, or at least not seeing any reason to disagree.
He said, “I think there’s insufficient evidence to speculate.”
“That’s Singer for, ‘That’s as good an explanation as any.’ ”
He said, “Funny how, after all those ans of trying and failing to create artificial intelligence, the trick that worked was building artificial personalities. It turns out that emotion, perception, and reason aren’t different things—or if they are, we haven’t figured out how to model that yet. Instead, they’re an interconnected web of thought and process. You can’t build an emotionless, rational, decision-making machine, because emotionality and rationality aren’t actually separate—and all those people who spent literally millennians arguing that they were, were relying on their emotions to tell them that emotions weren’t doing them any good.”
He paused for slightly too great a duration, in that way AIs will when they’re unsure of how long it might take a meatform to process what they’re saying.
I sighed. “Come on, Singer,” I urged. “Bring it home. I know you’ve got it in you.”
He issued a flatulent noise without missing a beat. “You were in a hurry to get somewhere?”
“No, just wondering when we were going to find out where we were going.”
“Tough crowd,” he answered. “But I guess in that case you aren’t in need of softening up. Okay, what I was wondering is this: Is your Koregoi not-a-parasite a sentient? And if so, what is it feeling right now? And what does it want?”
I thought about that. With my emotions and with my logic. For . . . a few minutes, I guess; my face must have been blank with shock as I worked through the implications.
“I wish you hadn’t said that,” I said.
“It might not be an accurate assessment of the situation.”
That was Singer for comforting. For the first time in a decan what I really wanted was a hug. I took what I could get, instead.
“Well, it is what it is. If it tries to send me smoke signals, I’ll worry about it then. Whatever is going to happen is already happening.” I put my head in my forehands. “Right this second, I’m sort of wishing I could order everyone to shut up.”
“It’s okay,” Connla said kindly. “We’re glad you can’t.”
“But we can program people to be responsible adults!” Singer said.
“And you don’t see a problem with that?”
“Programming an intelligence? It would be hypocritical of me, don’t you think?” Singer had a way of speaking when he was making a point that always made me think of slow, wide-eyed, gently sarcastic blinking.
“Not everybody agrees with their own programming,” I said. “Not everybody likes it. Some of us have gone to lengths to change it.”
“Some of you were raised in emotionally abusive cults,” Singer replied brightly.
“. . . Fair.” I massaged my temples and didn’t say, Some of you were programmed to have a specific personality core by developers of a different species, too.
Connla said, “But where’s the line between rightminding and brainwashing? Or, in the case of an AI, programming for adequate social controls versus creating slave intelligences?”
“It’s not late enough at night and I’m not drunk enough for this conversation,” I said.
“We can print you some intoxicants,” Connla said.
“Night is a null concept under these conditions,” Singer said.
I considered throwing a cat at him. If he had had a locus persona, I might have.
He continued, “It’s true. I was created by my team of parent AIs and human programmers from a menu of adaptations. They wanted me to be curious and outgoing and not take things at face value. To investigate and theorize.” I could almost hear the face he would have been pulling if he had a face to pull faces with. “They also had a remit from the sponsors, of course.”
Given the debt payments we were still making to keep Singer out of hock, I was pretty aware of that. But Singer figured out early that meat-minds require a fair amount of repetition, and he’s scrupulous about providing it. He’s still better than a lot of AIs, really, being more socially aware. Some of them exist on the tell-you-three-times rule, and let me tell you three times, the reminder algorithms they use on us poor meatheads aren’t that varied or subtle.
“They got their money’s worth,” I said, and through the shared ship sensorium, I felt Singer beaming.
“That reminds me,” he said. “Something doesn’t make sense to me about the not-a-parasite.”
“Only one thing?”
“What the hell was the booby trap doing there? And what was it for? It doesn’t make any sense.”
I had something clever on the tip of my tongue, but it never got said. Bantering with Singer and Connla was recreation on these long trips. But I faltered, and considered, and after a little while I said, “I hadn’t thought about that.”
The sparkles outlined my nailbeds as I studied the back of my hand, gleaming with kaleidoscopic light. Singer waited me out, so eventually I prompted, “You have a theory, though?”
Of course he did. To his credit, he managed not to sound smug as he said, “It makes sense to theorize that it wasn’t intended as a booby trap. But to protect the person who triggered the blow.”
“Right,” I said. “Of course. The pirates had an inside being. Somebody in the crew of the factory ship who made those modifications, triggered the blow, and hopefully survived to be picked up by the pirate ship. The parasite heals, and gives you a sense of direction in space, and that needle was designed to go through a standard-issue space suit and seal up the hole it left behind itself. So the inside alien installs and flips the switch their pirate contacts have given them, gets jabbed and blown into space with everybody else—but they’re wearing a suit. And they trigger their beacon and get picked up, parasite and all?”
“I’d need a little extra protection to be willing to risk that,” Connla said. “That’s the kind of crazy motherfucker you don’t mess with, somebody who would do something like that. Never mind that the ship was in a bubble when it happened.”
“Safer than a fight against a whole ship’s complement, probably,” I said. “And the crew of a ship doing something as illegal as rendering down Ativahikas would be armed, wouldn’t it?”
“Why not inject yourself with the parasite first, and then push the button?” Singer asked.
I gazed in the direction of his central core. “You’ve met engineers.”
Singer sighed.
“Still,” Connla said softly.
“Yeah,” I answered. “Still.”
I didn’t mention my ongoing curiosity about where they’d obtained the Koregoi senso in the first place, let alone learned to use it. Or my realization that it meant the pirates had at least one person who could do the same space-time surfing tricks I apparently could.
Was that the presence I had sensed?
Probably, they had more than one such person. Because if you had some ancient ali
en nanotech symbiote that would let you feel your way around the dark-matter lattices of the universe, you’d probably want to share it with all the people you trusted. As long as there weren’t unknown terrible side effects to being infected with alien space plague, I mean. I was sorry Connla hadn’t wound up with it; as pilot, he would have been able to react faster if he weren’t surfing my senso to read the gravity map.
I wondered if it had come off the factory ship, and was somehow related to the artificial gravity. I hoped the pirates didn’t have the means, or didn’t care enough, to try to track us with it. The mythical Admiral might have been able to do it, but the Admiral had the advantage of being a tall tale, which gave her the power to do whatever was narratively interesting. Folding space with an Alcubierre-White drive leaves enough eddies in the space-time continuum that I could feel them pretty clearly, and I was really new at this stuff.
Go the other way, I thought, and comforted myself that they’d want to hang on to their prize, not chase some random space tug across the galaxy.
♦ ♦ ♦
The thing about Ativahikas is not that they’re giant, or sapient, or weirdly gorgeous, though they are all of those things. When they haven’t been horribly butchered, they look a bit like a Terran leafy sea dragon, or those motile sentient sea-trees from Desireninex. They’re seaweedy and ragged and layered in fringe like the dress of a medieval queen, and their symbiotic algae turns them into a shifting, iridescent play of brilliant shades of indigo, cobalt, teal, and jade and emerald greens. And the reason people kill them is not for any intrinsic quality of their own—it’s for those algae. Or the metabolic byproducts thereof.
Certain more complex and nuanced combinations of organics are, as I mentioned before, hard to synthesize and print in exactly the right harmonies. You can make a burger that tastes like umami and salt, sure—that’s not terribly difficult. Coffee that tastes like coffee is, at the current state of the art, impossible, and chocolate or vanilla that actually taste like chocolate or vanilla . . . Well, Terra has a healthy luxury export market in those.
Likewise, devashare.
Easy enough to synthesize, get you high as hell. If your existence is unbearable, it helps relieve the misery. Most people don’t even know, I suppose, that the drug was originally isolated from compounds derived from Ativahika symbiotes. But—from what the connoisseurs tell me, I wouldn’t know myself—the synthetic stuff bears the same relationship to the harvested as pot-still white lightning does to a good aged whiskey. Which is to say, it gets the job done, as long as getting your head blasted open is the only job you care about doing.
I spent a little bit of time using the synthetic stuff pretty heavily after I left my clade. A lot of people who go through that kind of transition do. You manage to disentangle yourself, but then you’re out in the hard, cold universe and suddenly everybody is disagreeing with you—and you have no idea how to manage disagreement and how awful it makes you feel, having never experienced it at all.
And I had a traumatic relationship to recover from, which I was still blaming myself for. But of course that’s what people leaving one kind of damaging situation do—they find another one, slightly different in some aspects, and they try to exert control over it. Even more disagreement to manage, and a lot of blame. From a lot of directions.
Devashare is great for that. Better than THC, or alcohol.
Eventually, I realized that I was wasting my time, and if I wanted to hide from humanity in a bottle, I was better off making it a titanium one with a warp drive and a couple of carefully selected companions. I got over my clade-reaction issues with neurochemical control enough to seek professional chemical stabilization, and I used my clade-trained engineering background and aptitude to get into a tech program and Made Something of Myself.
These diar, I get a lot more reading done.
Synthetic devashare isn’t expensive. You can print it from readily available components, if you are someplace with a permissive substance policy. But the good stuff—the nightmare stuff—that’s not the sort of thing that you can get just anywhere. It’s virulently illegal everywhere with a government, as you’d hope any intoxicant rendered from the murdered flesh of presumed sentients would be. So it’s the sort of thing you hear rumors about the wealthy and dissolute obtaining, or trying to obtain—the same way you hear rumors about certain debauched privileged types throwing noncon kink parties and similar nasty things.
There are people, even now, who manage to elude rightminding to the point where they enjoy their pleasures more if somebody else suffers to provide them.
♦ ♦ ♦
Two decians later, we didn’t have any answers, but we’d all kind of gotten used to having the not-a-parasite around. And we were still calling it the not-a-parasite, even though it had proven pretty useful.
We’d moved on, in most of our intramural discussions about The One That Got Away, to mourning our loss of the gravity tech and theorizing extensively about its origins and whether or not the pirates were more interested in that or in the results of the factory ship’s abominable business. We hadn’t come to any conclusions on that front, either—but at least the conversation, as a sport, had served to see us home. (Home, in this case, being a relative term meaning “At least technically close enough to an inhabited system to beg for help and hope we might be heard.”)
A faint shudder ran through the ship as we dropped out of white space and into reality. My sensorium flickered and resolved, matching what appeared in the forward port—stars, a glaring sun, the frame of a gate marker placed in a Lagrangian point so ships already maneuvering through the system could avoid collisions with ships dropping out of white space. We’d come in neat, but hot. Really hot, despite everything.
Hot, and nearly out of fuel.
“Singer,” I said, “can you compute a docking trajectory, please?”
“I can,” the AI answered in his usual mellifluous tones. (“When you can sound like anything you like, why not sound like something pleasant?”) “But are you sure you really want to go over there?”
He was teasing, of course. See above, nearly out of fuel—though I think none of us was really sanguine about the trade opportunities available in this slightly dodgy backend of nowhere.
“We could use an air exchange,” Connla said reasonably. “I know it’s not a concern for you. But we apes do like our oxygen.”
We were moving fast, but at least we were within lightspeed communication range that wasn’t longer than a human lifetime. So I got on the horn and sent out a personally voiced feeler and a request for help. Sometimes it helps to remind them you’re not a drone.
“This is a salvage tug, Terran space ship registry number 657-2929-04, inbound with Pilot Connla Kuruscz, Engineer Haimey Dz, a shipmind, and two nonsentient pets aboard. We request braking assistance, and—”
“No docking assistance,” Singer said.
“Over,” I said, and dropped the transmit. “No dock?”
“I don’t want to owe them any more than we have to,” Connla said, suddenly serious. “Singer and I can handle it.”
As we decelerated, he and I both drifted into contact with the couches we had previously been belted to, but had to all intents and purposes just been floating beside. The cats were already snug in their cushioned accel pods, despite Mephistopheles’s protests. Bushyasta might have woken up when we netted her in? I’m not sure.
I sweated. Weight began to press on my legs and arms.
“Salvage tug registry number 657-2929-04, Kuruscz and Dz, braking assistance, confirmed, over,” a voice came back.
I lifted my hands against the uncomfortable pull of acceleration to indicate to Connla that I released negotiations—and the ship—into his and Singer’s command.
Funny story, but the coincidence of our last names ending in the same letter is what led two such disparate types as Connla and myself to meet and team up in the first place. It’s a long story involving being sorted onto the same team fo
r a pub quiz.
We used to call ourselves Team Zed. It sort of fell out of use after we had built up a decan of better reasons to feel like a family, but it still gets a wink and a grin every once in a while.
This was not going to be one of those times. The tense line of his shoulders, with no reason I knew of for it, made me wonder if he’d been arguing more than recreationally with Singer.
Well, one of the things you learn about sharing a small space with strong personalities you can’t escape from is to practice your boundaries even if you’ll never be really good at them. If it was any of my business, somebody would tell me about it eventually.
I sensoed the system tugs coming up alongside.
Alcubierre-White ships coming in hot is a not-uncommon occurrence, and I wasn’t worried. Nothing in space is ever really standing still, so all vectors and accelerations are, not to put too fine a point on it, relative. Our goal wasn’t so much to slow down, exactly, because a station in orbit around a primary is whipping along at a pretty good pace, depending on the season, the ellipticality of the orbit, and the size of the star and the station’s distance from it. Also on whether it’s parked in a Lagrangian point, or in a secondary orbit around a world or satellite—in some smaller and older systems, there’s only one station, and the spaceport is actually attached to the platform at the top of the El. It’s convenient for trucking, because stuff can go up and down the line out of the local well and straight onto transport without having to be bussed around locally first.
But having all your eggs in one basket like that would make me nervous, if I were a groundhugger. What happens if the El comes down, and takes the spaceport with it, and there’s no way for disaster relief, even, to get insystem except for pod drops or some such primitive travesty? I mean, okay, if a skyhook fell on your head you would have real problems anyway—climate change, punctuated equilibrium, global-catastrophe existential-level problems.
But not being able to get water and toilet paper wouldn’t help with those.
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