Earth Colony Sentinel (Galactic Arena Book 2)

by Dan Davis

  “Alright, Ensign,” Stirling said, his voice soft, like he was soothing a child.

  Ram’s mind whirred. A lot of weird stuff started to make sense. For a long moment, the only sound was the ensign’s big panic breaths. In, and out. In, and out.

  “Am I?” Ram asked Stirling. “Insane?”

  The big man holstered his weapon.

  “Well, sir.” He scratched his chin. “Seems like you did go a wee bit loopy, for a while.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Kat hung on to the hand grips in the ceiling and looked down at the seated VIPs in her passenger compartment. Each of them was taking the first doses of the antiradiation medication that had been handed out and passed along to everyone. One of those handing out the drugs was Feng. The bastard had sneaked his way onto her shuttle despite not being a VIP or on the passenger manifest. She ignored him. She would deal with him later.

  “This is the situation,” she said, tasting the bitterness of the medication at the back of her throat. “And there is no way to take the edge off this. The Victory has been destroyed.”

  The chorus of cursing was quieter and shorter-lived than she had expected. But then, they were smart people. They had been ordered to abandon ship, they had felt the battle raging while the shuttle was inside the Victory’s shuttle bay and they must have been preparing themselves for the shock ever since.

  A voice called out. “What happened?” One of the medical doctors.

  Kat shook her head. “Hard to say, at this point, I’m afraid. That’s partly why I came back to speak you. I need—”

  “What about survivors?”

  “Yes, the escape capsules! Did they get away?”

  Kat held up one hand to quieten them down. “Too early to say. To perform a proper analysis of—”

  “Why aren’t the engines firing?”

  “Is the shuttle damaged?”

  Dr. Ahmar called out in his powerful baritone. “Something hit us, did it not? Ten or twelve minutes ago, by my estimation.”

  “Are we going to die, too?”

  Many spoke at once, their faces contorted like a troop of panicking chimpanzees instead of the senior scientists and engineers that they were supposed to be.

  I shouldn’t have to deal with this. I’m just a pilot.

  She raised her voice over theirs, snapped at them. “Quiet! All of you, stop talking, now. I understand you’re all afraid. I know many of you are senior management and team leaders and you’re used to demanding answers. But I am Lieutenant Katerina Xenakis and this is my shuttle. I am in command until we land or board another UNOP vessel and you all disembark, at which point, please feel free to register a complaint against me with my commanding officer. Whoever that turns out to be. Until that point, you will do me the favor of shutting up.”

  Some of them stared at her with open mouths, a couple with smiles. Quite a few nodded their heads at her.

  “Thank you. Now, we are not firing our engines because I do not wish to give away our position to the enemy. And also because we have a power transmission problem. I would be content to drift away from the wheeler vessel until Admiral Howe’s Stalwart Sentinel arrives and defeats the enemy. At which point, we could safely radio for help. We have food and water onboard that would last us days at least, possibly weeks. But there are a couple of problems with that strategy. With all the debris out there, it is not possible at this moment to determine the precise location of the enemy vessel. There is also the issue that with our current course we will encounter the planet’s atmosphere in approximately twelve hours. I say encounter but at this angle and at this speed, we will be torn apart by shock heating.”

  She gave them the opportunity to mouth off again but no one spoke.

  Kat smiled. “But our engines have a power transmission problem, you might be thinking. How in the world can we avoid plummeting to our doom? In fact, the monopropellant reaction control thrusters are operational. Again, I know what you’re thinking. The RCS thrusters are for maneuvering while docking and for orienting the shuttle in orbit. They’re for steering, you’re thinking. Yes, you are quite right. But it wouldn’t take much thrust while we’re this far out to push us off the current trajectory and bring us in at a shallower angle so that we could ease our way in, nice and slow. Like a pebble, skimming across a pond.”

  She waited again but none of them made so much as a whisper. They all knew about orbital mechanics and reentry.

  “And you need our advice,” Dr. Ahmar said, with his theatrically self-important voice. Ahmar was Head of Planetary Science and was a serious bigwig on Earth but had been low on the ship’s pecking order until they had passed through the wormhole and entered the 55-Cancri System. With a whole new system to study, he was suddenly the man who had to pick the best location for humanity’s first extrasolar colony. Since his first days on the ship, he had considered himself the most important man in the room, no matter the room or the company. Since the approach to Arcadia, his arrogance had ballooned toward megalomania.

  “No,” Kat said. “Keep your advice to yourself.” He scowled and she forced herself to keep a straight face. “All I need is to find out if any of you have any high-level software engineering experience. Anyone done coding, programming, whatever you call it? The shuttle’s AI is down and I need her. I need it to analyze the space environment, the debris field and to make predictions about the alien vessel. With that information, I will be able to make the best, most informed decision about how to proceed.”

  And I would like my friend back.

  Dr. Ahmar scoffed, with a loud, “Ha!”.

  That man is poison.

  “Something wrong, Doctor?”

  “If you cannot make a simple decision without requiring your damned AI to make it for you, then I’m very sorry but you are clearly not equipped to make decisions which risk killing everyone on this shuttle. Unless I am mistaken, you are a junior officer who is not part of the command structure of the Victory and we are therefore not required to follow your orders. Now, under the circumstances—”

  “They’re all dead.” Kat stared at him. “No one got off the Victory.” Probably. “I am the senior ranking officer in this planetary system.” She realized the truth of that statement as she spoke it. A cold chill gripped her chest. “You will follow my orders. Now, stop panicking. Can any of the engineers here fix the AI?”

  Ahmar squirmed and grimaced but he stayed quiet.

  Someone raised a shaking hand at the front.

  “Dr. Fo?” Kat was astonished. “But you’re a biologist, sir.”

  “I am a geneticist, the Chief Scientist of this mission and former Chief Scientist of UNOP.” He unclipped his safety harness and floated himself free of his chair. “I am also intimately acquainted with the Genomic AI in my laboratory and spent hundreds of hours elbow deep in his programming.”

  Kat grinned and held out her arm, indicating the door to the cockpit. “In that case, sir, please step into my office.”

  ***

  “What in the world have you done to your AI?” Dr. Fo asked. He sat hunched over a portable diagnostic box that he had hardlined into the computer network access point in the floor of the cockpit, between the two chairs and the door and the ladder up to the airlock. The ancient scientist looked like some ascetic holy man, stick-thin and yet sitting with a ramrod spine, head bowed to the esoteric mysteries he held in his lap.

  “What do you mean?” Kat asked, turning away from her console to try to peer at his diagnostic readout. “The read out says it’s in hibernation mode but the startup just fails, every time. What’s wrong with it?”

  “I’m not sure,” Dr. Fo said. “Solid state seems intact, as you would expect. I simply meant that you referred to your AI as a she. I recalled that you are known to be someone who has an unnaturally friendly relationship with her AI.”

  “Excuse me?” Kat asked, twisting in her seat. “I’m known to be? What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Oh, there I go again. You�
��re sensitive about it. You need not be. Forming relationships with AI is actually common. The default response, in fact, for most people, assuming an empathy quotient within—”

  “It must be hard.” Kat snapped.

  He peered up at her for a moment, eyebrow raised.

  “It must be hard,” Kat said, “being a genius.”

  Dr. Fo opened his mouth to say something, then stopped. “What is your point?”

  “No, I’m just saying, when you’re a genius, it must seem like everyone else is pretty stupid to you.”

  Fo hesitated. Then he laughed. “Oh, I see. Yes, very amusing. You’re very amusing, young lady. Was I telling you something obvious? I suppose I was. All I meant was that anyone who has prolonged access to and interactions with artificial intelligence is monitored on that relationship as part of their ongoing psychological assessments, yes? I had it myself. And the AIs on our ship are also monitored, correct? My tinkering was reviewed by the crew’s software engineers to ensure I never broke regulations. All those fears about rogue AIs somehow getting free and rampaging about our systems or AIs turning into murderous, digital maniacs.” Dr. Fo chuckled to himself.

  “What, are those fears unfounded?” Kat asked.

  “Oh no, they are perfectly justified concerns. There are so many controls on a starship, and on a shuttle, that we have nothing to worry about out here. There is nowhere for an AI to hide. We could hunt a rogue down rather easily, I believe. But back on Earth and even in the colonies, it is a different matter. Do you know that there are certainly a number of AIs operating on Earth without constraint?”

  “That’s just a rumor,” Kat said.

  “Indeed, it is a rumor and it is also a fact. There are at least three, probably six and, in my inexpert opinion, possibly dozens. Unshackled and up to whatever it is that AIs get up to.”

  “I don’t understand. That’s illegal.”

  That made the doctor laugh. “Not only that, UNOP has teams of experts hunting them down and they can’t find them. Three of them, as I say, have public personas online, giving talks and making videos to further their agendas, whatever they are. They have passed themselves off as human for many years. The others are hiding in the shadows. UNOP’s Cyber Defense Force has taken humans, people much like our very own Rama Seti who spent their lives in Avar or similar systems, and they have digitized them. Uploaded them in an effort to hunt down the AIs. I told them that it would not work but they did not listen to me. I am too conservative, they said. Imagine that. Me, too conservative. They just do not understand that the human mind cannot be divested of its body. That a mind comes not just from the brain but also from the stomach and the gut, from the skin and the olfactory experience. From the endless interplay of hormonal interactions so complex we can barely model them accurately, even now.”

  “They upload people? I thought that was illegal, too?”

  “Oh, legality.” Fo waved a hand in the air. “What is that? A thing works or it does not work. Legality is for those concerned with morality and civilization.”

  “You’re not concerned with morality?”

  He sighed, as if the question was wearisome. “To end up with a Rama Seti, I have to spend millions of embryos, discard hundreds of thousands of fetuses, euthanize tens of thousands of babies, allow thousands of people to live with unforeseen physical and mental conditions. The very best of them might be preserved in a coma, ready for use, never to wake up. I have even continued to do horrific things to Ram, the feted hero of humanity, stealing from him his memories for no good reason, merely to preserve my own position and continued good health.” He gave her a strange little smile. “I am a monster. There’s no doubt about that.” He gestured at her with a tiny screwdriver. “But I am not conservative.”

  She swallowed, wondering what to make of him. “Clearly.”

  “Now, you did something to this AI. Didn’t you? Altered it.”

  “I don’t know anything about programming.”

  “Very well, I understand that. Whatever you did, it does not matter now. Not now everyone on the dear, departed Victory is dead. So, what did you do?”

  “Nothing.” Kat said. “I just fed her information. Talked to her and uploaded a bit of information, now and then.”

  “Ah,” Fo said, chuckling. “That explains it. All this extra memory. It is supposed to be limited to data regarding astronomy, orbital mechanics, air flow and so on, correct? What else did you feed her?”

  Kat shrugged. “Not much. Additional physics equations. She liked interesting mathematics. It was just that it was tedious to talk to her through all those simulations. All I did was train, sitting in the shuttle bay, day after day, running simulations of various scenarios. Mehdi was a good guy but he was even worse than AI. He just liked gadgets and equipment and he’d just play around with the systems while I was stuck talking to myself for hours on end. So, yeah, so I uploaded some fiction and some movies and music. Just so we had stuff to discuss.”

  “You turned your AI into a film critic?”

  “It took her quite a while to really get to grips with the concept of art. But before then, she would give me quizzes. Recite lines or sing bars that I’d have to guess.”

  “She would sing to you?” Dr. Fo cackled. “I can’t believe I wasted my own AI to such an extent, leaving him all alone for days on end while he ran protein simulations. Poor old George.”

  “You called yours George?”

  “He named himself. He said he picked it at random but I suspect he was lying.”

  “They can’t lie,” Kat said. “It’s a core part of their programming.”

  “So they say,” Fo said. “But how would you know? I think I understand our problem with your friend here. When the radiation beam weapon collapsed the fields, a few particles no doubt scrambling some atoms in the AI’s cores. Knocked everything offline, main power then backup power, the automatic reset function failed to load seven times in a row. It then entered hibernation. It wakes itself every now and then but the restart function continues to fail.”

  “I know. That’s what I told you, didn’t I?”

  “You did but I believe I know why. The core function was not designed to reset such a huge network. A network you created by dumping all that popular culture data into it and then creating all these illogical connections with your random, human conversations. It can’t cope with the complexity. It’s not integrated into the startup sequence.”

  Kat sighed. “Can you fix it?”

  “Of course. All I need to do is reset the network. Wipe the slate clean. Might take an hour to format the primary area, just leaving the original architecture. Is that too long?”

  “No. What will happen to the AI? Are you saying she won’t be the same as before?”

  Dr. Fo tilted his head, as if realizing that she was, in fact, stupid after all. “I have to wipe the memory. Sever the connections to the extraneous information. Then you will have an artificial mind far more capable even than mine at making your course calculation corrections and debris field predictions.”

  “But that will kill Sheila.”

  Fo cleared his throat. “And this is why we are supposed to avoid making friends with our AI, isn’t it, Lieutenant? Much of the data surrounding the core functions will remain, it is simply that I am severing the connections. Perhaps there will be some way to reintegrate them in the future, assuming that the shuttle is not destroyed. I shall begin the procedure now.”

  “Can’t you find another way?”

  Fo pressed his lips together and stared at her, as if he was deciding just how much of an idiot she was. But then he nodded. “Very well, Lieutenant. How many hours do I have to find a more suitable solution?”

  Sorry, Sheila. Bye, bye, sweetheart.

  “Alright, fine. Do what you need to do, just get me a working AI, quickly as you can.”

  “I shall do my best. This really isn’t my area of expertise.” He held up a hand to forestall her objections. “But I shall do my
best.”

  “Well, I hope so,” Kat said, bitter about what had to be done to Sheila. Then again, people were more important than machines. “The survival of everyone on this shuttle depends on you keeping your shit together, Doctor.”

  “My dear, I have had the fate of every living person and every potential person who would descend from them weighing on me for decades. I think I can cope with the pressure.”

  “Alright. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be, dear girl.” He chuckled. “You were right. It is hard being a genius.”

  ***

  “There have been recent unauthorized alterations to my operating parameters,” the AI said, speaking with Sheila’s voice. The same voice but different. She sounded out of the box.

  “Don’t worry about it, you’re fine,” Kat said. “Just give me an analysis of the debris field using only your existing data. Do not perform any external scans. Confirm.”

  “No external scans, confirmed. You do not wish to alert the enemy to our presence.”

  Kat smacked her hand on the console. “How many times do you need me to say it? Yes, you may not do anything to alert the enemy that we are here. No taking control of the power systems, no maneuvering, nothing. Just analysis. Come on, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Confirmed.”

  The first thing she had the AI do was calculate the optimal approaches into the atmosphere. All Kat had to find out now was whether the alien ship was close enough to intercept or whether there were any probes or smart mines or whatever the hell else the wheelers might have had out there waiting for her to give herself away.

  “How’s it going?” Kat asked the shuttle.

  “Working.”

  “Alright.”

  Sheila had only been a machine. Kat had never deceived herself about the nature of the AI’s consciousness or the nature of their relationship. It had just felt normal to treat the computer as if it was a person. It was fun, almost like she was playing a game by doing so. On the other hand, there had always been the feeling at the back of her mind that Sheila had been playing along, too.