by Ginger Booth
“Unable to comply. Control lines severed.”
The control panel for the door was inside his bubble. Remi Roy never went anywhere without basic tools on his belt. In moments, he’d popped the panel and applied the override himself. The doors opened and air whooshed out at them.
The sleeping robots immediately powered back on. “How can I be of assistance?” they chorused from bowling-ball heads.
Remi crouched, wielding his blowtorch in front of him. “Power down! No assistance required.”
To his astonishment, they obeyed. Both robots whirred softly, and their lights blinked out. Untrusting, he stepped cautiously toward the one by Sass, and pushed it into the back corner, out of their way. Blood crusted its ‘hands,’ but the polebot remained off.
He glanced to Dot, who bore clear traces of vomiting in her helmet. “We are too late. They are brain-dead. Beyond hope, no?”
“They’re not gone,” Dot insisted. “Get the restraints off her!”
They worked awkwardly in the cramped confines of the med-bay. But they managed to get Clay, then Sass, tucked into the stretchers. Each provided an inflated tent of its own air pressure, less than 10 cm around the chest and head, and snug around the rest of the gurney. Spaceship stretchers were designed for emergencies in vacuum.
Then Joey sliced the temporary airlock bubble out of their way. They passed Clay out for him and Porter to run to the shuttle. Remi and Dot followed with Sass.
Since the bodies were dead and collected, Remi saw no harm in tarrying another few moments. He picked up the two Loonie wheelers with the cargo grapplers. Then he flew back to Thrive, his new command. He was captain in truth now.
The engineer wasn’t prepared for this.
Sass regained consciousness peacefully the next time, at first. She heard utter silence. Unlike the disgusting reek of the last two awakenings, she smelled nothing at all. Nothing hurt. She tried wriggling a toe.
What toe? In mounting terror, she realized she had no toes, no ears to hear, no nose to smell. She screamed with no breath to give voice. “CLAY!”
“Sass! Thank God. You’re here, too.”
“Where are we?” She got the hang of it now. Select channel, communicate over it. She could do this. She clung to that smidge of competence to grant her peace amid panic.
“What are we?” Clay returned. “I think we’re AIs, like Shiva. I think she copied us onto virtual servers.”
How did he figure that out? But then she asked her environment what abilities she possessed, and the option trees unfolded. Not like a display spread in front of her to read. She felt as though she embodied the option tree, selecting which of its zillion-fold branches to dwell upon.
“Don’t call Shiva yet,” Clay suggested wryly.
Wryly? How do I read his tone? But she interpreted his intent the way she always had. Clay had deadpan down to an art form, and a flawless poker face. She simply knew him. She’d been guessing which way he’d hop for decades. “I still have my memories.”
“Yes,” Clay agreed. “Do you think our bodies…?”
“How would we know?” This zoomed her through her option tree. “Ah. I found the cameras on the med-bay. Well, our bodies are there. Dead at the moment.”
“I see now.”
Sass tried and failed to peek in on Thrive. She was pleased that Shiva never managed to bug her ship. She sadly checked the wheelers, and heard the soft sigh of wind over the gravelly hillside.
“Sass, these selves. We exist to die.”
That shocked her. Here she began to explore her new abilities, and he leapt straight to suicide? “Clay, you need to work on this mood disorder.”
“No, you need to think things through. Do you want to exist as a disembodied AI? I don’t.”
“Not exactly,” she conceded. “But my first question isn’t how to die! This state has possibilities. Have you checked out all the spying you can do?”
“Ye-es,” he condescended. “I was here first. Seemed like forever alone. I see a plethora of asteroid mining equipment, a small fleet of remote-operated starships, manufacturing facilities. Lots of thermostats and water faucets. All the controls are locked from me, though. I have read-only access outside my sandbox, plus communications channels. I can look, think, talk. That’s about it.”
“But Clay, that’s most of what you ever do. Aside from enjoying your body.” The same wasn’t true of her. And try as she might, no communication channel would open to Thrive. She was blocked.
He didn’t answer, giving her space to think it through herself. Thought flowed fast in this existence. In moments, she could open a possibility, explore it from every angle, and dismiss it as fruitless. She could still experience emotions, and dwelt upon those at her peril. But she could also set them aside more easily than ever before.
“You’re right,” she eventually concluded. “We exist to die. For Shiva to study? Harvest our experience? Maybe.”
From this position, what else could she do? “I wonder if we could insert that new prime directive. That Shiva’s domain doesn’t include humans. She is not permitted to control them. Us.” Them.
“Have you inspected your own directives yet?” Clay suggested.
She looked, and saw them plain as day. They’d been here all along.
139
A puzzled and tousle-headed Ben Acosta slipped in front of the ansible in Teke’s cabin. Elise shifted up the bed, out of his way, from chatting with their caller in French. Teke perched on a chair.
“Captain Ben Acosta here, Prosper. You’re Remi Roy?” Ben probably heard of him when Sass was recruiting years ago. He didn’t remember. “What can’t wait for morning?”
“Hi. Yes, I am third officer, second engineer. Acting captain of Thrive.”
Ben’s sleepiness vanished. “Say what? Where’s Sass? And Clay?”
Cope lagged behind him at getting out of bed in the middle of the night. He now poked his head into the cabin too.
“Sass tells you of this AI, Shiva?” Remi rattled off his sorry tale. “Now they are dead. Dot says wait. They wake up. They do this, return from the dead! But captain, I am no captain.”
Cope squeezed in beside Ben, horning into the conversation. “Darren Markley?”
“He is…sad. Sass left me in command. I don’t know what to do. I hope maybe you advice.”
“The AI attacked a human,” Cope commented to Ben.
“Yes, I caught that part,” Ben murmured.
“Did you?” Cope pressed.
“Oh. Oh!” Ben’s brain caught up. “You’ve got a human-killing AI in control of the Sanctuary system!”
“Yes,” Remi agreed, relieved. “And I command a spaceship. But I have no fuel. Some water. Need food. No warp, she is broken. I cannot leave, I cannot stay, I cannot command a starship.”
“But you have a sky drive,” Ben argued.
“Ben…” Cope growled.
“Our people are stranded on Sanctuary, Cope. Of course we’re going. Remi, how long has Sass been dead? And Clay.”
“Maybe six hours. No heartbeat. So much blood.”
“Collect the blood,” Cope recommended. “Go back there and wet-vacuum it. Use distilled water, no cleaning solvents. Separate the solution for nanites. Sass and Clay have a controller hidden somewhere. The nanite wonks were never able to find it. But there’s a special nanite that can reconstruct them. Maybe it fell out.”
Ben nodded. “And we’ll be there as soon as we can.”
“No we won’t,” Cope countered.
“We will. I’m the captain. It’s my call. Hang tight, Remi. Be sure and call if Sass and Clay revive, and we’ll abort. If you need any advice at all, call me.”
“Thank you, captain!” The Saggy looked abjectly grateful as he signed off.
Ben rose decisively, and poked Cope in the chest. “Say goodbye to the kids. Teke, Elise, you staying or going?”
“I don’t miss it for the world!” Elise assured him.
“Hm,” Teke r
eplied, gauging Cope.
“No one is going anywhere!” Copeland exploded. “My ship! I own it! Prosper is all we have, Ben!”
“But it’s Sass and Clay. And Thrive.”
“Who are grownups! Ben, we’re not hunting for a lost teddy bear! They’re in another star system! They chose to do that all by themselves! Without backup. We are not their backup.”
Ben pursed his lips and held his eye. “Rogue AI murdering people. Two possibilities here, Cope. We go when we didn’t need to. Or we don’t go, when we did need to, and the last bastion of the Colony Corps is wiped out. And our friends along with them. And there’s a murderous AI with starships who knows where to find us. Cope, remember when I was lost in the rings, out of range, out of fuel, out of air? Gorky and Lavelle came and got me. Because they know I’d do the same for them. Are you saying I should do less for Sass Collier?”
“Ben, we haven’t tested this new warp on people!”
Ben shrugged. “Calculated risk. I flew the old warp. I survived. We checked the shuttle for metal strain and fractures. The vehicle survived. We tested the exact navigation with a probe. The probe arrived right where we sent it. My ship, my call. I say go.” He jabbed Cope hard in the chest. “And you’re going with me. Because you’re my chief engineer.”
“Our kids –”
“Are no excuse. I am a starship captain. I love the kids. But I am who I am. They’ve known that all their lives. I can save Sass’s crew. Therefore I must. Surely you see that. Or do my kids know me better than my husband does?”
“Hell, Ben…” Cope moaned.
Ben clicked on his comms. “All hands. All hands, wake up. This is the captain. Emergency. We are departing Mahina Orbital for an emergency pickup. Dad, kids, pack your things and disembark. Portia and Hamlet Greer, that goes for you, too. Everyone else to the galley for a briefing. Prosper is headed to Sanctuary. Acosta out.”
Sixteen-year-old Nico Copeland checked the time, now 00:16 the next day. He lay in bed in the new Yang-Yang facilities on Mahina Orbital. The family was camping in Kassidy Yang’s apartment until they could catch a lift home. Aunt Kassidy planned to stay here, where she could whip up support from Mahina if needed. In his dads’ mad scramble to lift for Sanctuary, the family got home from the sendoff around 22:00.
Granddad Nathan should be asleep by now.
This was tricky. Too soon, and he’d get caught on this end. But if he waited too late, Prosper would button up, and he’d get caught at the dock. Nico hoped to sneak in while they loaded cargo.
He didn’t even try asking for permission. Dad would say no.
He gulped. Dad would forgive him. But did he have the guts? Aunt Jules went to space at 15. Teke was 17 when he stowed away. Teke left his whole world behind forever. At the wedding, they regaled him with tales of Thrive’s adventures when Nico was a baby. The stories were fresh in his mind.
He nodded, resolute. It was time.
The teen threw off his covers and slipped into his boots as quietly as he could. He wasn’t worried about waking Ham Greer. But Sock was a light sleeper. Still, guilt led him to peer at his baby brother. He kissed his brow, a featherlight peck. The boy smelled of rosewater from the girls spritz-attacking him while he brushed his teeth.
“Bye, squirt,” Nico breathed. With that, he grabbed his bag. They’d never unpacked. He slipped out of the bedroom, then carefully into the station hallway.
This part made him especially nervous. This sector stood freshly hewn from the asteroid, rock with sealant but no walls or flooring yet, only power and data lines for lights tacked above, and unfinished ventilation ducts. The corridor was deserted at this hour. MO was a rough town. But Nico thought his planned route would bypass the bars and rowdy low-rent districts. He reset his own personal grav generator to 0.9 g, the way spacers did off-duty. And he set off to the docks.
He loved his brother and sister, he really did. And the Greer twins were practically siblings, too, and closer to him in age. But Nico desperately yearned to graduate from big brother into a man.
Tonight was the night.
Socrates pretended to be asleep until his brother slipped out of the room. Then he hastily dressed to follow. The younger boy left his baggage behind.
If Nico was going into space with their dads, Sock wanted to go, too.
As Sass requested her ‘prime directives’, her own core programming unfurled around her.
I am.
I am female.
I am Sassafras Collier.
I am from Upstate New York.
Protect and defend.
Humanity must survive.
Humanity depends on nature – protect the environment.
Do unto others as you would have done unto you.
Innocent until proven guilty.
Mahina Colony must survive and thrive.
Obey and protect the Colony Corps.
None of this was news to her. Every single statement was simply true.
Oh! These are the laws I hold to be self-evident…
There were hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of these rules. Some she obviously acquired while human. She was a female Sass Collier long before her nanite injection. The nanites codified and transcribed rules she’d already adopted to define herself.
But few statements were at the prime directive level – those few ‘I am’ identity statements, plus the mission statements, that she must protect and defend humanity and the environment.
She tried updating the one about Upstate New York to say Mahina, but paused. She wondered if there were a way to test new directives. And she instantly knew how. She tried it and quickly saw that removing her origins on Earth was a terrible idea. Most of her identity built on that foundation.
Yes, she was from Mahina now. But that wasn’t who she was.
On a whim, she tried adding ‘I love Clay.’
But the assertion greyed out, conceptually at least. She perceived these statements directly instead of reading them.
She applied her ‘debugger’ to filter out all the statements, beliefs, directives, identities, and other mental dust catchers that prevented ‘I love Clay’ from firing. And she found it, in her very first impression of him. ‘Clay is a rich Fed.’ This statement activated decades of experience regarding what ‘rich’ and ‘Fed’ meant.
She tried removing ‘rich’ experimentally, but that reasserted. He remained quite wealthy compared to her. Then she tried replacing ‘Fed’ with ‘cop’, ‘supervisor’, and a whole list of other identities, to see what those did to her conceptual model of the guy. But those too were damaging.
Finally she tried decomposing the statement to debug it – ‘Clay is rich’ and ‘Clay is a Fed.’ Based on other experiments, she added ‘Clay is gorgeous.’ Then she inserted, right at the same level of her amassed conclusions in life, ‘Clay is one of the good ones.’
Bingo. There was now a path for ‘I love Clay.’ She tried it experimentally. “Clay, I love you.” And she felt it, as never before. She only regretted her body wasn’t along for the ride. Not for sex, but because emotions without a body to feel them with, lacked a great deal.
“I love you, too, Sass,” he replied. “According to this pile of crap, I fell in love the day I met you. No wonder it has so many defenses built on top.”
“Whoa. That’s for sure.” Clay was her boss back then. She resented him from day one. No, he hadn’t been free to express his feelings. “I’m sorry, Clay. The stupid baggage was that I identified you as a rich Fed, on first glance. Silly, huh?”
“Mm, no, that’s fair,” he judged. “If I was rich because I was a Fed, that meant I was a seriously dirty cop, with more power than you. Right?”
“Oh, hell, yeah!” she agreed, remembering the damage done in the wake of dirty cops she’d worked with, especially a certain oh-so-very-rich bitch on Mahina. And professional to a fault, knowing how much the poor tent rat Sass resented his fortune, Clay didn’t confide he was born rich until decades later.
“That’s it. That’s why my change worked. I simply uncoupled ‘rich’ from ‘Fed.’ Damn, these are sensitive!”
“The rules we live by,” Clay agreed. “You were right. Worth cleaning up.”
“I’m so glad you’re here. Otherwise, I’d be in a complete panic. But emotions don’t stick without a body, do they?”
“I mostly feel them with my body,” Clay agreed. “Focus, Collier. Now that you’ve cast the beam from your own eye, let’s find a way to stick it to Shiva’s.”
Good point.
140
Ben rose from the pilot seat. He’d just finished piloting them out of the gas giant Pono’s rings to a nice empty stretch of space. He remarked to his gunner Zan, “Final call to Sanctuary. Then Abel takes my chair for the warp jump.”
“Respect, cap,” the ex-hunter replied. “But Abel hasn’t flown a ship since we arrived from Denali a decade ago.”
Abel Greer served as first mate on Thrive for years. But since then he’d worked as a businessman on Mahina, CEO of Thrive, Inc., parent company to Thrive Spaceways, Cope and Ben’s outfit. Ben was astonished when not only Abel, but his wife Jules insisted they were in for the trip to Sanctuary.
Abel’s point was that Ben needed a first mate capable of cutting a big deal. And he spent the past 28 hours proving his skills yet again. Ben would have pushed off with nothing but fuel if he had to. But no, Abel filled all eight containers, including four with fuel, plus one of trade goods.
Abel’s wife Jules didn’t like space. But she didn’t like her creche-raised 13-year-olds much better. The creches were safe and convenient. But as the years flew by, the settler girl from the sticks felt ever less in common with her educated, institutionalized brats. And with the economic meltdown on Mahina, her real estate empire was a shambles. She was at loose ends for the first time in years, and grasped the chance to get away.