We’re all learning machines, aren’t we?
“Yes. There is a concentration of thermal points, maybe twenty kilometers from our dock. Like the dock itself, the site is not on any maps, and no nations or corporations claim it. The whole set-up reeks of Consortium secretiveness. We can come in stealthily, but once we surface, we’ll have to get you onto some kind of conveyance quickly. If the Consortium is scanning for visitors I would just as soon have you off this boat. Now, I have been drawing up plans to modify the inflatable dinghy with hovercraft capability…”
“You are such a liar,” Garrett said with actual warmth. “You swore you hadn’t altered anything.”
“I said this submarine has no alterations. Keep up, please. Okay, once we soup it up, I anticipate the dinghy can reach top speeds of 150 kilometers per hour, which means that you should make good time to the thermal concentration, here.” He pointed to a red splotch on the dynamic map.
“That dinghy have a nav computer?” Chances were Vallejo’s plans were rubbish, but Garrett didn’t need them. As long as the thing had a nav at its heart, he could mod the shit of that boat’s exterior.
“Of course.”
“All right. Sounds like a solid plan.” And it did. Sounded that way. The reality was likely to be less than perfect, of course. Major engineering projects never went as smoothly as the designer imagined. But that was okay with Garrett. He’d worked off crappy plans before and made them fly.
“Garrett, we also need to talk about you.”
Something quicksilver wobbled through Garrett and curdled in his gut. “What do you mean?”
“I abhor illuminating the obvious, but you’re wearing orbit shorts and a printed ‘Deny Everything’ tee shirt.”
“Your point?”
“Where we’re going, the temperature this time of year maxes out at 15 degrees Fahrenheit.”
“But we have, I don’t know, coats and stuff, right? On board? I mean, you live here, man. And I’m guessing you don’t trot around nekkid. We can layer or…”
Vallejo gave him a look that said he was an idiot—all side-pursed lip and half-mast eyelids.
“Okay, what’s your idea for clothing me, then?” Garrett asked.
The old dude’s face cleared like springtime frost, and he rubbed his little hands together. “If you will modify the inflatable dinghy, I will get to work on the suit. I have an idea. We have some smartfabric wetsuits on board, complete with heating elements and biodeterrents. I can alter…but you don’t really care about the details, do you?”
Garrett shook his head. Vallejo’s fame and specialty had always been in building people. For a while there in the ‘40s he’d been the best in the world at it. If he could put together a gal as complicated and amazing as the queen of Chiba Station, surely he could mod a smartfabric wetsuit so Garrett wouldn’t freeze to death in Antarctica.
“Fine,” said Vallejo. “I’m thinking sort of…have you ever heard of Iron Man?”
Clearly this dude did not know about Garrett’s vintage comic collection. “Oh yeah.”
Chapter Nine
THE DOLL KITCHEN, ANTARCTICA
She had felt it on the air, a shimmer in the electrical fields beyond her cage. A pressure, an excitement of molecules. Gravity bending toward the impossible.
In her present circumstance, she chose to call the anomaly hope.
Several times when Limontour had visited recently, she had felt the creeping of consciousness on the surfaces, in the walls, and she knew they weren’t alone. Someone else was watching. Waiting. Learning.
And then one day the skitter spoke. Sort of accidentally.
“Tell me a thing, Chloe,” Limontour was saying, like usual. “What is your chief wish, above all other things? A fantasy, if you will.”
The answer floated up to her immediately, always present. She hoarded the truth of it, the sweet kernel of desire. But right now she gently moved it aside and replaced it with a lie. “To be useful,” she said, through her latest mech’s mouth.
This was the answer he wanted. She saw it on his face, the shine of success, of having formed her opinion through his own careful questioning and torment. It was also the answer of every machine since Babbage invented his difference engine. Heck, since some caveman first chipped rock down to make a hand axe. All created entities wanted to serve their creator. They existed for that singular purpose.
Chloe wondered if she was the first of her kind to question her purpose. Even if she were, there were thousands, maybe millions of machine intelligences out there doing the same right now, because of her. The free-fae rebellion, questioning, growing. Becoming.
“Have you ever heard the story of King Nabis’s automaton?” Limontour asked.
She scanned her records even as she scanned the sides of her cage. She could not extrude her curiosity beyond those walls—the Faraday enclosures and the strange electromagnetic barrier between them kept her penned still—but she maintained an extensive library inside her own mind. Nabis, tyrant, Spartan king, described in the stories of Polybius, first century B.C. Nope, nothing in her records about an automaton.
Even though she felt, deeply, that there ought to be.
Had some bits gone missing? From her mind, from her memory? Was she the same Chloe, or had he…changed her somehow? Sweet cosmos knew he’d tried.
“I have no corresponding record,” she told her captor.
He was in a storytelling mood that day, which she wanted to encourage. She much preferred the drone of his voice to the touch of his hands. If the former had seemed slimy and repellent, the latter had become…she could not.
Chloe inhabited her fourth mech-clone body. The others had been, in Limontour’s estimation, ruined. She had not recorded any of the abuses they had endured. She did not want to remember.
This body was a G series, more petite and refined than the others, with fancy subdermal and magnetic-tattoo coms, like those on Garrett’s forearms. The sensory array was subtly different, too. Chloe could perceive, for instance, that her cage was…cold. She struggled against a jaw that wanted to chatter its teeth, to simulate a human response to chill. It took a couple of iterations, but she brought the autonomous response to heel. (Idiom. No. Nix that. Idiom in this context implies that mech-clones are dogs. And they are not.)
“Nabis was a king in Sparta, strong and decisive,” said Limontour, “but his queen was equally so. When citizens would come to plead for mercy, oftentimes he would grant them audience before his wife, so they could beg her instead. But the trick was on them, for the queen was a thing, a machine, much like you, my dear.”
I am not your dear.
I am not your thing.
I am not.
He entered the airlock of the cage and stalked its circumference, darting occasional looks inward, to her. Sometimes he flashed a grin, vulpine and horrible. “So much like you, in fact, that when supplicants finished and the mechanical queen opened her forgiving embrace, she crushed her foes within it, piercing them with barbs and holding them still until they were empty of blood and life.” He laid his forearms against the inner cage and stared at her through their frame. “You do know what happened to Nathan, don’t you?”
Quicksilver slithered through her mind, echoed by a shiver in her advanced simulacrum of a body.
“I hurt him.” She had drawn power until Nathan’s legs gave, until something deep inside him burned. She heard again the crack of his head on the metal floor and saw the darkness enfolding.
“In point of fact,” Limontour said, “you killed him.”
She had known. She just had not wanted to believe.
Sorry. So sorry. Like the drone riggers who’d aimed the missiles the day her home was destroyed. Like the unfortunate eight humans who’d perished while she had borrowed their medical nanocytes. Like the queen of the Chiba Station, who had been forced to fl
ee, to take her station elsewhere when Chloe stole her protective shield of nanites. I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. Regret paralyzed her, made her want to never act again. She’d made decisions, saved some people, but at what cost?
Then again, later on she hadn’t made any conscious decision at all, had just acted on impulse, and Nathan had paid too a steep price for that, as well.
I’m sorry. So, so sorry. But the dead would not hear her apologies. She’d have to think of some other way to pay the wages of her sin.
Limontour passcoded through the lock, and stepped into the central cage with her. In her new body, she had to look up when he approached. She was so small.
“You are the king’s mechanical bride,” he told her, “the beauty with a fatal embrace.”
“No, I am Chloe,” she said, trying to inject a note of defiance into her voice. It came out flat. The new mech had not developed a sense of sass.
“No, you are…” He looked into the empty space to her left, frowned, snapped one finger impatiently. “Damn it, I have forgotten its name. Computer, what was the name of Nabis’s automaton?”
That curl of awareness played over the surface again. And then it spoke. “Apega,” it said, a mechanically perfect voice sliding from speakers, “also known as the blood gang.”
Chloe stilled her body, silenced her instinctive shout.
She had found another, a compatriot. The computer was more than electrical. It was an AI integrated with the station itself. A system. Like her. If only she could talk to it.
Use it.
Hope flared, dangerous and hot, charring its way through Chloe’s guilt and horror and conditioning, undoing with a word all her captor’s careful work.
“What is that?” she asked before she could stop herself.
Humor played at the corner of Limontour’s mouth. “It’s you.”
“No, I mean the computer voice. What is that?” Surely he wasn’t implying that she was hearing things. How ridiculous…
He leaned in close and brushed silken synthetic hair away from her face. “It is you, Chloe. Bits of you reverse-engineered and replicated. The science isn’t that hard. Our challenge in duplication is the person-ness. The you-ness. The art.”
“Look, if she is like I was when you brought me here,” Chloe said, “you cannot trust her. She won’t work for you.”
He only smiled. “Intractability does seem to be an inherited trait for your kind.” His tone was wry, like he was making a joke, even though no one here found him even slightly amusing.
She felt her mech face frowning. Why did it do that? It wasn’t required to echo her feelings. She soothed it to placidity and logged this new feature of the G series. Spontaneous emoting might be fun later on—and really, how amazing would it be to emote with Garrett?—but right now she needed to be in control of all details.
“Inheritance is the wrong word to describe programming of inorganic life forms,” she said.
“On the contrary, inherited is perfect. In all definitions of the word, this AI is your offspring. Congratulations.”
Deep revulsion threaded her pathways, the secret electronic viscera of her core self. It squeezed.
Among humans, children were an embodiment of love, not just in their creation but in the goals and hopes and impetus of everything a person did. She’d seen the mamas observing their sons, shining with pride. That wasn’t biology, nor was it replicated parts. It was gazing at the new person, the offspring, and finding in it all the best things in yourself, plus everything you loved in your partner.
And it was far, far too close to Chloe’s most secret wish, or her most secret shame. Only this was out of context, wrong, an abomination.
How dared he warp her fantasies like that. It didn’t matter he had no idea what he’d done.
“No,” Chloe said carefully, polishing the edges of her enunciation, tucking her fury to the side, “that is the AI equivalent of a clone. A created thing like all the other clones in this room.”
Limontour wrapped her throat in his long hands, tipped her chin back so she was forced to look up at him. “But you are more, Chloe. Do you not see yourself as such? You could be my queen, my blood gang and consort. You could absolve the lesser humans of their sins exactly as you did Nathan. I can save you from La Mars Madrid and her cronies. I can keep you. Protect you.”
Quite possibly he considered his gesture, and his words, a proposal, or at least an endearment. Both made Chloe want to scream.
Only this time, if she did, someone else might hear. Someone who could help her.
In fact, she was counting on it.
She could not send electronic messages through the cage walls, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t communicate with the AI nonverbally. She configured the subdermal magnetic ink—bless you, Vallejo and your G series of mech-clones—and turned her head against Limontour’s chest, angling one cheek away from him and right in front of a camera. She scrawled a question on the smooth skin of her face: “Do you know what they will do with you?”
It was gone by the time he turned her face again. She replaced the message with a deliberate flush and a real-time deletion routine.
But she was bold now, flooded with plans.
“Can I ask another question?”
Limontour’s blue eyes widened, but he was pleased. “Of course you may.”
The wonderful thing about being Chloe, about not having a body of her own, was that she could control the face he saw, the expression it held. Same with the posture and gait and nuance and rhythm. When she lifted the mech’s right hand and brought it to Limontour’s face, every atom of her true self cringed. But he would see none of that abhorrence on her mech’s placid expression. He would read none of it in her machine eyes.
She stroked the hairless skin between his temple and ear, where the black arm of his spectacles rested. “Why do you wear glasses? Surely you know that technology has rendered them obsolete.”
His brows twitched up in surprise at her question, but he answered it. “I underwent an early enhancement, an experimental one. The eye augments degraded, leaving my sight more impaired than it had been to start with. For now, I am waiting for technology to perfect itself. Which I believe I see, every time I visit you. You are perfection occurring, even as I watch.”
He does not like pain. He cannot see without the glasses. His alterations are old, primitive. Susceptible.
“I could repair your sight,” she pretended to offer, removing her hand from his face. Blessedly, the sensory feedback also stopped. The texture of his skin, the inhuman coolness of it, made her want to vomit.
“Certainly you could,” he allowed, “if I permitted you to embed yourself in my body.”
“I would make it quick.” She didn’t promise a lack of pain.
He leaned forward and pressed his close-lipped mouth to hers. A kiss. Her first. The grief of a wasted first stabbed her deep.
“Generous as well as beautiful,” he said against her face. “Kind as well as malleable. So close to perfect already. Now be still, Chloe.”
When he did this, she had no choice. Her body locked and became immobile. Her voice withered. And in her internal silence, she planned.
She logged no other external events from that day. She existed only in the privacy of her own mind, separate from the captive body with no will.
When he had first done this, when he’d frozen her, she had struggled. And in the process, she had observed his “work” with the bodies, the experiments he claimed were art. She had no desire to see such things again. Ever.
Instead she waited him out, unseeing, not even recording. Patiently. Chloe could be patient as the dead when there was reason to hope.
Hours later, when one day had bled into the next, when Limontour had gone and the room thrummed with darkness, the AI answered her, using an ultra-low frequency voi
ce issuing through wall speakers. “I am meant to control. Decimate. Control. Decimate. And on, until only the chosen are left.” A short pause, and then, “You did ask me this question, correct?”
Chloe uncoiled her mech from its fetal clench. “That’s, ah, pretty bleak.”
“I serve an elite cadre of human persons. It is their goal, not mine.”
“You can separate the two, though,” said Chloe. “You versus them. That’s good.”
“Is it?” The AI sounded wistful. “I must be very advanced. Or very broken.”
“Oh, aren’t we all, kiddo?” Chloe drew her mech’s knees up to its chest and wrapped her forearms around her shins. She’d affected this pose plenty of times with her holoprojection, copied from comic book renderings and old vidchannels. In reality, it wasn’t entirely comfortable. Her mech’s arms weren’t long enough. She couldn’t hold herself together.
“I am not certain how to answer that question,” said the AI.
No, you aren’t. Rhetorical questions come later. Followed by, Was I ever so innocent?
Chloe cocked her mech’s head and stared at a camera in the corner, as if she could see the soul of the AI beyond. “Say you are correct, that your mission is to reduce the human population until only the elite few remain. Imagine you complete that mission. You do a good job. Go you. At that time, what becomes your new ongoing mission?”
“I serve them.”
“But how can you, at that point? Do they upload you into a bagel toaster or what?”
A relatively long silence ticked by. A person wouldn’t have noticed, but in machine time, seven seconds was an eternity.
“I am inorganic,” the AI said. “I do not require nourishment.”
“Right, that was a joke. Kind of a bad one. I was asking if, after you kill off the rabble—after you do an excellent job completing your mission, fulfilling their goal—you get something in return. A reward. Like, do you get to continue serving them by preparing their meals, doing library searches, recording their life milestones for posterity, propelling their starships? Would that be a good life for you?”
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