by Ginger Booth
He looked up to demand why his kids hadn’t reached him yet. And saw both boys running away from polebots, Sock’s legs pumping fast and low, Nico’s stretched in low-g bounds. And another polebot was aiming for him.
Cope ran and lunged to tackle the gunner bot flat, and yanked its blaster away. He paused to shoot it, holding fire until its bowling ball head exploded. He pivoted to aim at any other bots threatening his children.
But all three boys were captured. Robot arms seized them around their midsections. They rolled full-tilt into the garage.
Cope didn’t have a safe shot. He ran for the open garage lock. Hugo beat him there, and started wrestling the polebot that kept Bron pinned. Cope gave Nico a bracing grimace. He set to work freeing Sock first. Like Darren before him, he spotted right off how to dislocate the shoulder joint for the articulated arm. “I’ll work you free, Sock, don’t worry.”
Of course, he pocketed the blaster to work on the robot. He pulled the master pin and the arm drooped helpless, releasing Sock.
But the lock finished cycling. Three more polebots apiece grabbed Cope and Hugo. The scholar hadn’t gotten far at freeing Bron, constrained to rig him an air supply first.
Cope tried to fight the polebots off. The net result was that his elbows got clamped around his ears, with another mechanical arm hugging his hips, and a third pinning his knees. His back was twisted into a strong spinal stretch.
The squad of polebots sped toward the elevator at the back of the garage. Free but alone on an alien planet, Sock ran after his dad and brother. Within seconds, he was recaptured.
Cope finally thought to call home at the last second. “Ben, help! Captured by robots –” Steel elevator doors shut behind them, and the chamber descended. A tone chimed to inform him that his comms were out of range.
“You didn’t tell him where we are,” Hugo noted sadly, suspended sideways in mid-air between two robots. His pair of captors clutched him at chest and thighs, more dignified than Cope’s contortion.
Cope sighed. “The shuttle tells them that. And Joey.”
A spare polebot reached into his pocket and relieved him of his blaster, then his toolbelt.
143
The polebots released Cope, Hugo, and the three boys into a control room, deep in the bowels of the facilities quadrant of Sanctuary Colony. The robots retreated, sealing the door behind them, with no explanation.
The engineer found the loss of his toolbelt especially galling.
“Where are we?” Sock asked plaintively.
Cope set his helmet aside and shrugged out of the top half of his p-suit. He started pacing the room, heavy sleeves slapping his thighs.
Hugo replied instead. “The facilities wing of my town. This is where we keep mechanicals, like water pumps and –”
“I know what mechanicals are,” Sock interrupted, fairly politely. “Why did the robots put us here?”
Bron theorized, “Shiva’s gone nuts, the AI who runs everything here. She’s taken us hostage. She’s going to force the spaceships to leave or she’ll kill us –”
Hugo seized Bron’s upper arm and dragged the boy to him sideways. “That’s not helpful, Bron. We don’t know any of that for sure, Sock.”
“Water quality monitoring station,” Cope reported to the room in general. “No cutoff valve. No staff.”
“The robots still manage the facilities,” Bron supplied uneasily. “Major Ling – the Loonie mayor – she’s trying to get all this staffed. But the top priority is the creches. And Shiva doesn’t want to hurt –” He stopped. “Until Joey, she’s never harmed a person.”
“She murdered seven in their sleep on Thrive,” Cope corrected him. “Plus Sass and Clay. Now Joey. All it takes is to redefine personhood.” Cope resumed prowling another lap of the cramped quarters. Nico and Sock flattened themselves against the cabinets when he passed. “Define harm, Hugo. Shiva is dangerous.”
These enameled steel boxes twinkled with status lights over rocker switches. Probably because they always had, Cope mused sourly. Status indicators in an unmanned position offended his engineer’s sense of decency. On the next pass, he used the karate-chop side of a hand to rock switches to their opposite settings.
“I hadn’t considered that,” Hugo conceded. “Redefine personhood. Shiva did that to Sass, of course.”
Nico shared, “On our world, the terraformers redefined settlers as a different class with less rights. Same on Sagamore, where Remi is from.” He paused as his dad pulled a side panel off a cabinet with an ear-splitting screech. “On Denali, they have three classes. But none of them are subhuman.”
“Four,” Cope murmured. “Teke is an academic. Quire is a farmer. Zan’s a hunter, and Aurora and Reza are cosmopolitans – cosmos. But most of the academics lived in the capital. And died.”
“Oh, right, Denali Prime, the one the volcanoes destroyed.” Nico said. “Dad will get us out. He’s been in prison on every world he’s ever been to. This is his fourth.”
Bron grinned. “Fourth prison? Or world?” Now that his breathing gear was off, he proved an attractive lad, on the brink of manhood-with-acne, with black hair like Nico’s, though his skin was a lighter brown.
“World,” Cope growled. He’d survived more than one prison on Mahina, and Nico reminding him didn’t help.
He tossed away the sheet steel with a clang, not having figured out anything useful to do with it yet. “Hugo. You were in a tearing hurry to visit us. Before, I thought we’d wait so you didn’t have to tell the story twice. Now,” he ripped a bank of handspan-wide ribbon wires out of the cabinet he was dissecting, “I’m curious.”
Hugo made a show of looking around. “Walls have ears.”
“Get creative,” Cope advised. “My kids look forward to seeing their Tante again. My second is named for her. She’s not here.”
“He means –” Sock began. Nico shushed him before Cope could reach. Cope gave him a quick hug anyway.
Hugo nodded, easily catching on to Cope’s example. “About that. I had an interesting call. And brought some notes.” He pulled out a data stick.
Despite the generations that separated their two societies, most technology hadn’t advanced worth a damn in the interim. Cope pulled out his tablet and stuck in the stick. Two files, one a video, the other text. He opened neither, because at that moment, the door hissed open, and a polebot entered, unarmed. The door closed behind it.
Cope and Bron instantly tackled it to the floor and disarmed it – literally. The bot bore no weapon except its single claw. The machine took up too much space on the floor, so Nico flipped it back to standing. He devised a sling from a couple of its springs to keep the broken arm out of the way.
“Where was I,” Cope muttered, and retrieved his tablet.
“Cope, it’s me,” said the bowling ball head of the polebot. “Sort of. I’m a copy of Sass.”
Cope folded his arms over his chest. “You’re Shiva.”
The ball chuckled. “I don’t blame you. Shiva is the one who took you hostage. But I’m Sass.”
“Prove it.”
The blank-featured polebot audibly sighed. “I found you crying because the baby almost ate your solvent rag. That’s when we took Nico to the creche. When I invited you to come to Sanctuary with me, you said no, because of Nico. You said Ben would be a fool to go, because you were going to marry him, and you’d make him captain instead of third mate. And you were good as your word. You bought him Prosper. I can hardly believe you came, Cope.”
Each sentence brought him closer to certainty. “OK, you’re Sass. Or you can access her memories, at least.”
Hugo nodded agreement, though why the local scholar believed her, Cope wasn’t sure. Oh! She already contacted him. Hence the data stick.
“I need your help,” Sass-as-polebot continued. “The file explains.”
Hugo interjected, “But surely you have no way to affect…things?”
“Clay has a plan.” Despite the tinny quality of the pol
ebot speaker mouths, she sounded sad. “It’s alright. You can speak freely. Shiva has no ears in here.”
“Does Clay’s plan get you killed?” Cope inquired. “Deleted.”
“Him. I’m the backup.”
“Sass… We could find some way to copy you,” the engineer suggested. “I don’t know how to weld you back to your bodies. But Thrive kept them in cryo. It might take a while, but I don’t give up easy. Trust me on that.”
“I trust you with my life, Cope,” Sass agreed gently. “Always. But Clay and I don’t want to continue as AIs. It’s been a couple days real time? It feels like an eternity. No bodies. No freedom. Nothing but memories and each other. And Clay won’t stay.”
Cope’s eyes fell on a sorely puzzled Sock. He ordered himself to grieve later. He hated to let go of a friend, but in truth, he let Sass go a decade ago. His responsibility lay in protecting his family, Prosper, Thrive, Mahina. “I understand. So this file Hugo gave me?”
“You have Nico with you. Show it to him,” Sass the bowling ball advised.
Cope opened the file on his pocket comm and read the first few lines, which explained the goal – to devise directives that convinced Shiva that she must not manipulate humans. To protect people, she must not alter or control them in any way. The detailed case-by-case legalese struck him as more Clay than Sass in spirit. The mechanics of figuring out how to alter the code was beyond him. He scrolled through half a page of the existing directives, but the code was impenetrable.
He showed it to Nico. “Can you work with this? Or do we need to send it to your buddy on Mahina? That’ll take days. Once we get out of here. Say, Sass. You opened the door. Do that again.”
“I used the door open button on the outside.”
“Awesome. So suborn another robot and do it again.”
“Too many robots in the halls, Cope,” her tinny speakers replied. “This is their lair. You wouldn’t get far. And each time I do it, Shiva might catch on and cut me off.”
Meanwhile Nico bent to study the file, and Hugo borrowed Nico’s comm tablet to look the code over as well. “I could use a bigger screen,” Nico complained. “And one for Sock to work.” The younger boy hung on his shoulder.
Cope chided, “Sock, leave your brother alone.”
“No, Dad,” Nico countered. “I want Sock’s help.”
“That’s a first. Use mine. Don’t screw it up.” Cope handed over his deluxe engineering tablet. To his surprise, Nico added some software to it, then Sock took custody of his powerful large-screen tablet instead of his big brother.
“Did you find any screens I might use?” Hugo requested. His son Bron slid down a cabinet onto his butt, bored.
“There’s a dumb monitor.” The two men, soon helped by Bron, managed to scavenge wiring to give Hugo a display slaved to Nico’s pocket comm. Cope found it a very strange sensation to watch his firstborn solemnly collaborating with another grown man. They seemed to confer as equals. Sock interrupted a couple times. Nico calmly unstuck his issue so Sock could get back to playing.
Sock explained to his dad what he was doing, and demonstrated. Cope praised him as the child desired. But his older son jerked his head to suggest his dad get out of the kid’s way.
Cope gave up trying to scavenge equipment. If his goal wasn’t to break out of the room, there wasn’t much point. Nothing in here would let him reach Ben. Relying on his kids to save the world was a concept he didn’t care to dwell on.
So he slid to the floor beside the teen Bron and the polebot. “Tell us about your world, Bron. What do you learn in school?”
144
“Souls,” Ben echoed. After Cope left with the shuttle, he finally deigned to call Sanctuary Control. They’d put this off for hours now since he arrived in-system. He and Abel claimed it was the locals’ problem to curb their pet AI. They tried insisting they would speak only to the mayors.
But the mayors quit accepting their calls. Shiva wouldn’t obey them, and they were helpless to persuade her.
“In what sense, exactly, do you hold Sass and Clay hostage, Shiva?” Ben demanded. “I’ve seen their dead bodies. You murdered my friends.”
Flanking him, Remi and Abel nodded to back him up, arms crossed belligerently across their chests.
“They are not gone,” Rosie the Shiva avatar replied calmly. “And they are not human. Therefore it is not murder. They are artificial intelligences. I copied them to alternate media.”
“After you tortured them to death! Transfer their copies back to us, immediately!”
“As I said, I will do so in exchange for you leaving Sanctuary. I will retain a backup copy as insurance.”
Abel noted, “Which offers us nothing.”
“She murders my captain,” Remi opined. “A rogue AI this powerful, we must destroy her computing cores.”
Rosie’s expression remained mildly pleasant as always, her tone even. “Destroying me would compromise life support for every person on Sanctuary. Mass murder.”
Ben nodded. “I see our hostage count expands. Tell me, ‘Sanctuary Control.’ By what right do you control Sanctuary? This is a human colony. Yet you suppress their free will. You refuse to obey their wishes.”
“I protect them. I am currently renegotiating my relationship with the colony. This is an internal affair of no concern to visitors.”
“Hang on,” Ben said, as he started receiving frantic messages from Hugo and Joey. He shared his channel with Remi and Abel, desperately trying to figure out what was going on. Then communications ended with that cut-off message from Cope.
“Shiva controls the robots,” Remi growled.
“Where are my children? My crewmen?” Ben demanded of Shiva. My husband!
“They are safe. They will also be returned to you when you leave the planet.”
Ben immediately cut the Shiva channel. “Remi, where’s your shuttle?” While Remi figured that out, Ben hailed his ship. “Wilder, Zan. Load up on weapons. We’re hunting robots.”
“Darren has a sample robot in the hold,” Remi supplied. “It is a rolling pole, with one claw arm. We should take Thrive. We cannot risk your shuttle.” Prosper’s shuttle housed their micro-warp gate out of here.
Wilder acknowledged the task. Abel set off to disconnect the umbilical between the ships.
“Found the shuttle,” Remi reported. “And my crewman. In cryo.” He thumbed his comms. “Dot, prepare for cryo revival, Joey in stasis.”
Within minutes, Abel and the fighters were in the hold. The umbilical stood sealed and detached for their return. Ben jumped down from the catwalk and donned the closest size in pressure suit. As soon as the cargo ramp was buttoned up, Remi took off.
Abel tried to talk Ben into letting him lead the expedition off-ship.
“Need two captains,” Ben replied. “You keep Remi in case I don’t come back. Abel, it’s Cope and my kids. I’m going.” He accepted a blaster from Wilder.
“You’ve been on desk patrol for a decade,” Wilder reminded Abel. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded of Porter and Zelda. The two young grad students suited up.
Porter explained, “Remi ordered us to get Joey into the shuttle and dock it.”
Zelda added, “So you can concentrate on the captives.”
Ben and Wilder reluctantly nodded. The Denali hunter Zan approved of the unmet grad students’ courage.
Once suited, all five of the ground team squeezed into the door airlock, ready to jump out.
In minutes, Thrive set down, and they were off. Ben hesitated a moment to make sure the grad students were alright. But no robots were visible, let alone shooting. And Thrive sat here for backup. Porter made for Joey, and Zelda straight for the shuttle. They’d be OK.
“Move your ass, cap!” Wilder barked at him.
Ben jogged to catch up in the garage lock, outer door still trundling open. Wilder reversed it to close the second Ben ducked inside.
He’d lose comms in a moment, and could be under fire i
nside the bay. “Abel, inform Shiva we’ll destroy any robots we cross paths with. And likely crucial life support equipment, too. So get her robots out of our way! Captain out.”
They weren’t aware that there were no people inside. So they waited slow minutes for the vehicle-scale chamber to repressurize. Wilder hugged the wall to the right, Zan in front of Ben on the left, all with blasters trained low to start shooting the moment the inner doors opened.
Sure enough, a dozen polebots waited to greet them. But Shiva’s waldo shooting prowess was nothing to write home about. Whereas Zan and Wilder’s skills were top-notch. Zan rolled and shot out polebots which lay prone to shoot under the rising door. Wilder ran across blasting out the bases of the standing bots. Ben, huddled in a protected corner of the lock, took out a couple from the side with slower aimed shots.
“Clear!” Zan reported. All the bots were on the ground. He took the time to detach their blasters and kick them toward Wilder. A couple bots still whirred. Those he blew the heads off. Wilder gathered the blasters and kept a couple for backup. The rest he dumped in a recycling bin.
Meanwhile Ben studied their surroundings. The facilities garage offered no fun electric horses or three-wheelers. Instead it offered rolling utility platforms for conveying heavy loads. These awoke and started to shift, but they didn’t have much speed, and no space for a turning radius. He hopped onto one, walked across it while it backed and filled, then hopped off at the other end. A lane on the inner side was kept vehicle-free by a waist-high colonnade of stone-core bollards, painted the usual hazard yellow.
Stairs and an elevator appeared to be his only options forward. The dusty floor advertised that all recent traffic used the elevator. “This way.” Ben pushed a button and held the door for the two fighters to complete their mop-up. “Abel? The garage was heavily defended. We’re fine. Heading in.”