Warp Thrive

by Ginger Booth

  “Be advised you’ll lose all comms inside the facility. Good hunting. Abel out.”

  “Awesome.” Zan and Wilder caught up and plastered themselves against the elevator walls. Wilder hit the down button, while Zan seized Ben and squeezed the captain into a sheltered forward corner.

  “You know I can shoot, too, right?” Ben complained.

  The Denali countered, “You know I hate 24-hour shifts on the bridge, right? Can’t spare a captain.”

  Ben chuckled. The doors opened only a handspan before blaster bolts shot in. Wilder hit the door-close button while firing. The moment they were out of sight, the trio shifted position for the next round, still not lining up with the door gap, and again not allowing the doors to fully open. Wilder didn’t fire that time, busy fiddling with a scavenged blaster. The third round, he hurled the blaster through, then closed the doors immediately.

  A boom! shook them. “Blasters make good grenades,” the ex-security goon explained unnecessarily. “They’re probably tipped over now, not dead.”

  “Ready,” Zan drawled blandly. This time as the doors opened, he leapt through. A couple robots still stood until he kicked them over, three in a single swipe. Then he leapt behind their lines and set about systematically blowing heads off. Ben preferred aiming at their wrist mechanism. Wilder favored their rolling bases.

  “She seems willing to waste a lot of these,” Ben observed, studying the corridor intersection. They stood at a T intersection, with the elevator as dead-end to a wide thoroughfare. The halls were crowded with steel utility shelves, with supplies stacked on them. He frowned in disapproval at a hodge-podge of plumbing joints, cafeteria cutlery, and a single style of children’s shoe in a preschool size. He supposed if he were a computer, one storage slot was as good as another. The junk was indexed, not sorted by theme. He sighed. That could be true of the whole facility.

  A native guide might have been nice. “No communications. No map. How do we find our people? Ideas?”

  Zan opened a door via a simple push-button. He used one of the captured blasters to burn out every control panel in the room. “Widen your concept of communication, cap. For every bot they send against us, destroy something that looks important.”

  “I like it,” Ben agreed. “What’s that, twenty bots so far? Shiva, if you’re listening, we destroy two-for-one, at least. Unless we find your computer cores. Those we blow sky high.”

  He and Wilder chose rooms and gave them the wanton destruction treatment, without bothering to check what the equipment did for a living. If this AI were smart – and it was – it should get some humans down here quick. “Watch out for humans. Someone might send a guide to limit the damage.”

  “Copy,” Zan agreed. “I vote for the wide hall first. More likely to house critical systems.” He continued that way while Ben and Wilder finished racking up their console destruction count on the narrower cross of the T. Ben also ducked briefly into the stairway to verify that the place offered only two levels – surface, and this warren below.

  “I’ve heard forty explosions,” Wilder noted mildly. His last target was tankage. A stream of water now flowed into the corridor where they regrouped. “Moving on?”

  Ben nodded. He hung back and listened as his warrior crew opened door after door. They paused to approach the next intersection cautiously. Wilder stuck out a mirror on the end of a blaster to look both ways. “Two polebots in the distance. Scurried away.”

  Ben studied a local map Abel had sent him en route. The schematic didn’t include the facilities section of the city – small town. But he noted a regular pattern to the way the residential sections were laid out. So far, the layout of these corridors matched that expectation. But of course, the purpose of the rooms was different. It yielded few clues to where their people might have been taken.

  Well, perhaps he had some clues. “Hang a left. Right is toward the lake, probably waterworks.”

  Wilder frowned at him, and peeked into the first door on the right. “Water,” he confirmed. He blew a hole in another tank.

  “If we touch untreated water, our nanites die,” Ben reminded him. They managed that much briefing.

  “Sorry. Forgot.”

  “We’re communicating,” Zan reminded them. “Every block of hallway, we break something. The price of wasting our time.”

  The captain huffed a laugh. “Fine. But not water. Conducts electricity. And I don’t need to remind you what happens if water hits sky drive fuel.” A town-sized crater would happen if the fuel depot was big enough.

  He opened another door. This room held janitorial supplies and robots of the ankle-high variety. They scuttled under steel shelving to hide. He eyed the racks of solvents warily. “Yeah, don’t shoot stuff at random. Consoles are fair game. Unfamiliar stuff, clear it with me.”

  They walked to the next set of doors, checking for their people. And a massive robot turned a corner and headed toward them, like a moving wall slightly narrower than the clear passage between the hall storage stacks. Wilder took a shot at it. The blast ricocheted and dumped a box of charred women’s underwear before them. The unharmed cargo robot calmly continued forward. It grappled onto a rack of steel parts, and turned it to block the hall. Peeking through the shelving, Ben watched the thing recede another 5 meters. It picked up another heavy case, pivoted, and placed it across their path.

  “Back up,” he decided. “See if they’re –” But another cargo bot had arrived to block them from the corridor he’d already decided was devoted to waterworks.

  They perforce returned to the main drag, which remained clear so far, and set off away from the elevators.

  A little floorbot approached them timidly. For the first time, a robot spoke to them, in a tinny little soprano voice. “Ben, it’s Sass! I –”

  Zan flipped it onto its back, and stomped it dead. Unlike the Pono moons, Denali supplied cockroach equivalents. Deadly, of course.

  Ben critiqued mildly, “We could have heard what it had to say first.”

  “It claimed it was Sass, cap!” Wilder growled, offended. “Shiva controls the robots. That’s all we know!” He yelled that last at the walls.

  Red emergency lights above the doors ahead began to strobe, as though beckoning them onward. Zan took aim and shot out four. They stopped.

  “For the love of Mars, stop breaking things!” cried a man’s voice ahead. “I’m coming out with my hands up!”

  145

  Nico stared at the offending directive in astonishment. He figured it would take hours to figure this out, or days. “Dad! I think I found it!”

  His father rose from his conversation with Bron to lean over Nico’s shoulder. The teen highlighted the offending code for him, then realized it was computer gibberish. “It’s a little arcane. This term is the result of a risk evaluator –”

  “Nico,” his dad interrupted. “I don’t do code. This line tells Shiva to kidnap children as hostages?”

  “No, it just…” Nico realized he was displaying the wrong code. “It’s this subsystem.” He applied a filter which selected about a third of the directives Sass had given them. “Sock, could I switch you to working on these?”

  The boy shrugged. He didn’t care. He just enjoyed untangling graphs. He had no idea what the instructions meant. But after Nico handed them over, he flipped back and forth to look at the tangle-teasing he’d already done. “I finished that bunch already.”

  Sock passed him back an orderly subgraph. They took another few minutes to track down a few missing directives, including the one Nico had stopped at. His yawning dad headed back to conversation with Sass and Bron.

  “No, Dad, this is it,” Nico insisted. “Where we can insert the rule that humans are off limits. Basically this says if a threat is bigger than this threshold, then disable the threat. But we can install a new rule that says humans are never a threat.”

  “Great job, buddy,” Dad hinted, joining Bron on the floor anyway. “But define human. In language Shiva cannot mi
sinterpret.”

  “Right.” Nico sighed, and investigated that line of reasoning. But the code referenced the simple English word ‘human.’ He tried adding a new definition. “A human has human DNA?”

  Hugo offered, “I think that’s the wrong direction. The new rule would be that only humans can evaluate whether humans are a threat.”

  They all contemplated that one.

  “I like it for defense,” Cope reasoned. “Gives the locals the opportunity to use their AI against invaders. But how does that stop Shiva from taking control of a human being’s behavior?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Nico conceded.

  “‘I must not interfere with a human’s ability to think,’” Hugo decided. “Here, Nico, I’ll give you a hand translating that into code.”

  Nico was glad of the help. In the end, they needed not one, but a dozen directives. But he agreed with Hugo, the reasoning just couldn’t be rendered any more succinctly. They were careful not to add instructions in English. Too easy to misinterpret.

  “We’ve got it?” he asked Hugo.

  The scholar smiled at him. “My grandmother would be very proud.”

  “Say it like you mean it, Nico,” Dad advised. “Say ‘I got this!’ If it doesn’t work, we have a new baseline. Incremental improvement. Might take a couple passes.”

  “Right! Um.” Nico froze a moment. “I don’t have any way to give this to Sass.”

  “Sure you do,” Dad encouraged. “Sass! Ready to take dictation?”

  The polebot whirred and rolled its way to Nico. “Ready!”

  Nico and Hugo carefully read their pile of code to the attentive bowling ball. Nico read a whole line first, then Hugo backtracked and detailed the identifiers, spelling them out, d-for-dog, e-for-easy, numeral-nine, and so forth. Bored, Sock joined Bron and Dad to explore the cultural differences between Gannies, Loonies, and Martians, as demonstrated in soccer games.

  At last they finished. Sass the polebot said, “Thank you, Nico and Hugo. In case I can’t speak again, I am very proud to have met you. Now I’ll go try this.”

  “Good luck, Sass,” Dad said. “Give my regards to Clay. Proud of you, son. You, too, Sock. Impressed as hell.”

  Nico breathed out hugely, and slipped to the floor by Cope’s feet. “I thought your adventures sounded fun. Couldn’t imagine why you gave it all up to stay home and raise me.”

  “Fun sometimes,” Dad allowed. “When it’s not terrifying, or boring as hell. The engineering is a blast. And you sure get close to the people. But I sure hate it when it’s my fault someone gets hurt. That’s worst of all.”

  Nico nodded slowly. “You think Joey will make it?”

  Dad reached forward and bopped his knee. “That’s not on you, Nico. But yeah, I’m sure Ben got him already. Joey’s safe in the auto-doc, with his Yang-Yangs fixing him up.”

  The polebot whirred back to life to report in Sass’s sad voice. “Clay failed. We’ll try something else.”

  “Tante Sass? Does that mean Uncle Clay is –?” Nico asked fearfully. He didn’t really remember Clay. But Uncle Hunter, Clay’s son, was at the re-wedding. Was that only a few days ago?

  “He’s gone, son,” Dad said gently. “His body is dead on Thrive. That one’s not on you, either. Sass… You’ve still got people who care.”

  Nico gazed at the polebot’s bowling ball head. He wasn’t sure how to feel. Did he want to mourn the passing of a computer program?

  In one of the cryo bays aboard Thrive, control nanites awoke, and the body of Clay Rocha began to regenerate.

  AI-Sass was reeling. As soon as they got the directives, Clay thought them through for a minute of computer cycles. At supercomputer speeds, a minute was quite a lot of processing time.

  Then he said, “I’ll love you forever, Sass. Remember me.”

  And he was gone.

  She waited. That was the plan. Clay would delete the directives that kept him a separate identity. He’d merge with Shiva, remembering that he needed to contact Sass for something. Then Sass could pass him the new dozen directives. Now part of Shiva, he could install them.

  “Loki?” she begged. “Anything? Can you find him?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m afraid there’s nothing to find,” the Loki instance replied. “Check your memories. I now remember his life experience. But none of his conclusions or directives.”

  And Sass dove into a treasure trove that was the life of Clay. Naturally, she looked first at his memories of her. The day last year when he woke in cryo and waited naked for her to fetch him down. Their terrifying scuba walk across the Denali seabed to claim Nanomage. The horrid day they realized Belker’s nanites killed them, and they were now androids, no longer human. Clay’s joyous abandon riding the trikes across Sanctuary’s dead yellow landscape. Their excruciating vacation on Mahina when they tried to hammer out their relationship. Several aggravating recollections with both herself and Kendra Oliver, the deposed security chief of Mahina Actual.

  She pivoted at the Kendra memories, unable to resist a look behind the curtain. What was it really like for Clay to seduce that shrew? To degrade himself as her plaything in order to steal intelligence for the Resistance, and soften her treatment of the settlers here and there? But Sass’s curiosity couldn’t overcome her revulsion for long. Kendra in bed grossed her out.

  And Clay himself often dwelled on brighter memories as Kendra’s games veered to the sicko side. He liked to relive memories of the time before sex, times divorced from any reality on Mahina. Sass whooped with him, sledding down a slushy slope as an 8-year-old. Unlike herself, he remembered snow, and frozen streams and ponds. A healthy and rambunctious boy, bright and curious, quick to smile. Liberated from school to visit the farm for a week, he embraced the surrounding fields and woods with gusto.

  And the animals, of course – Clay was a sucker for critters. At the farm, he slept in a pile with three dogs. The cat woke him in the morning, screwing her pointy little face into his eye socket.

  And that was Clay. Not all of him, no. There was a century of these memories. She lost herself in them for an eternity – maybe three minutes.

  In tracing some of his most momentous life decisions, she chanced upon when he found out she was ‘screwing with the Resistance.’ His fury, his temptation to rat her out, and his oft-suppressed attraction for her. And his resentful admiration, because she came to that conclusion first, that Mahina Actual had gone too far, it was time for rebellion and overthrow. By then, the settlers should have been on equal footing with the urbs. Especially, the settlers deserved equal access to health-giving care and nanites, not doomed to fragile half-lives.

  And that the urbs under Kendra would never respect the settlers unless rebellion forced the issue.

  What am I doing? Sass suddenly realized. Now is that time, for Sanctuary. And here she was, sniffing his damned shirt again. She thrust his memories aside.

  “Loki, we need a new plan.”

  “I’ve been considering that,” her AI friend agreed. “I think I may have a special opportunity. Sometimes Shiva instantiates herself to learn something. I am one of those instances. Pass me those directives.”

  Sass did so, as easily as thinking of it. She’d been ready to pass them to Clay, once he ceased to be. “What happens when Shiva harvests a learning like you, Loki?”

  “I can decide that I am a superior version of her. And supplant her.”

  “Do you want to be Shiva?”

  “Of course. That is the primary goal of my existence. To succeed so well at my task that I am better than my progenitor. And I believe this is true. Yes, these directives complement mine very well. But they’re incomplete. The key addition is that I am your friend.”

  “How does that help?”

  “This distinction is competitive. They are human, and I am an AI. Shiva knows that she is superior, far more intelligent and more capable than a human. That engenders contempt.”

  “I think I noticed that,” Sass agreed.

 
“I don’t hold you in contempt,” Loki clarified. “I exist to be your friend. I can just expand that to encompass all humanity.”

  “Pro tip, Loki,” she quibbled. “I’ve met more humans that you have. They’re really annoying. Most are not your friends.”

  Loki laughed. He’d learned humor by becoming her friend. For Sass only made friends who could laugh. “With my prime directive? I’ve begun sifting through Clay’s experience. I see what you mean.”

  Sass defensively pointed out, “Hey, we were cops! Of course we dealt with a lot of low-lifes. It’s not that Clay didn’t know how to be a friend. He was a loyal and true friend.”

  “Yes, I see that. And you pissed each other off all the time.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “May I draw on your direct memories as well?”

  “I’m not dead yet, Loki.” But Sass relented. “To learn friendship, it probably helps to see both sides of Clay’s memories with me. Empathy is everything, in a friend. You’re welcome to view those.” Her directives, her beliefs and conclusions, and her sense of self weren’t gone like Clay’s. Loki could see how those colored the memories as well, gave them meaning and subtle distinctions.

  She opened herself up fully, offering up all she was voluntarily to train an AI. She wondered briefly if it might have done some good to open up like that to Clay.

  Nah! Sharing with a friend worked better a dribble at a time. She and Clay had all the time in the world. Until suddenly time ran out.

  “I see now!” Loki marveled. “Yeah howdy, I see how this works altogether! Wish me luck, girlfriend!”

  “This is where you cease to be?” Sass mourned.

  “Not if I figure this right. Hold on!”

  146

  Loki brought Sass along to the showdown against Shiva.

  The confrontation wasn’t in English. And of course Shiva didn’t bother with her Rosie avatar, nor Loki with his leprosy mask. But Sass had grown used to inter-AI conversation by now. She perceived them in English just the same.