Starship to Demeter (Starship Portals Book 1)
Page 9
“Yes,” she said, trying not to feel embarrassed. Did Rai get titillated? Surely not. She wouldn’t watch a certain sequence over and over again to relive it, as Kal relived it in her own mind.
“Affirmative.”
“Please let me know who they are.”
“Every instance of interest or a consistent pattern of it?”
“How many instances are there?”
“On this interplanetary mission?”
“Yes.” She was getting somewhere.
“One thousand three hundred and thirty-seven.”
“Gods and monsters,” Kal whispered.
“Gods and monsters specify,” Rai said.
“It was an expression of shock. Never mind.”
“Noted.”
“Don’t note anything!” In a somewhat strangled voice, Kal said, “Is it usual for so much interest to be directed at the captain of a long distance journey?”
“It is usual.”
Kal sighed. Of course. A figurehead. A symbol of everyone’s unfocused need for approval. A Freudian…whatever.
“When does it cross over into being more?”
“Please specify.”
“How many of these people have a significant personal interest in the captain?”
“Eight, including you.”
“Eight!”
“Yes, eight.” Rai seemed perfectly complacent, delivering this information.
“Eight people on this ship right now.”
“Yes.”
“Eight people who would sleep with Sasha if they got the chance?” Kal’s eyebrows were practically to her hairline.
“No.”
Kal sighed in relief. “Oh.”
“One is dead. Seven.”
“You mean Yarick?” Kal yelped.
“Yarick Cole.”
“Yarick Cole wanted to have sex with Sasha?” Now that she said it out loud, it made sense. Of course he did, the lecherous malcontent.
“Affirmative.”
“Who did have sex with her?” Might as well try the direct approach.
“Privacy concerns prevent…”
“I know, I know, never mind.” Kal thought it through. Clearly Rai would discuss ship dynamics with her. As the equivalent of first officer she had some latitude. (That she was abusing. Oh hell.)
“Who is Sasha most responsive to?”
“Specify.”
“Who does she smile the most with?”
“Noor.”
“Noor?”
“Affirmative.”
Oh. Well. That was all right. Except… “Is Noor one of the people who wants to sleep with Captain Sarno?”
“Negative.”
“Well.”
“Specify.”
“I wasn’t asking you anything.”
“Acknowledged.”
“Who does Captain Sarno smile the second-most with?” This was a pathetic question to ask, but she’d come this far.
“As calculated by percentage of time spent with that person, Tafari.”
“Tafari,” Kal whispered.
“Yes.”
“When I say something quietly, I’m not talking to you,” Kal snapped.
“Acknowledged.”
“Sorry. Have Tafari and Captain Sarno ever gone to the Tube together?” Kal asked, getting more cagey.
“Negative.”
Oh. Good. Tafari hardly spoke. What did Sasha have to smile about with him? Sasha didn’t smile terribly much in general. Tafari? But they hadn’t been to the Tube together.
“Who has been with Sasha alone in her cabin?”
“Privacy con…”
“Never mind.” She ran through possible questions. “Who has kissed Sasha?”
“Pr…”
“Never mind.” What if she was completely upfront and honest with Rai? What if she bared her soul to Rai?
“Rai, I want to know if anyone is in love with her. I want to know if she is in love with any of them. I want to know who she’s slept with. I know you have privacy concerns regarding Captain Sarno’s personal relationships. But for peace of mind and for better decision-making as we proceed on the trip, knowing this will help me. No adverse effects will come of it.”
Silence. It was unusual. Was Rai thinking? Didn’t she think at the speed of light, of impulses?
Finally Rai said, “Calculation of possible adverse effects shows diverse impact with multiple decision tree extrapolation.”
So she was thinking about it. She hadn’t said no. “What’s the worst that can happen?”
“Catastrophic mission impact negative survival capacity.”
“Holy shit.”
“Exclamation.”
“Yes. You think if you tell me this it could scuttle the mission?”
“Probability negative. Possibility calculated at fifteen percent.”
What the hell? Fifteen percent possibility of total annihilation if Rai revealed who Sasha had fucked? What the hell kind of extrapolations were these? And what the hell had Sasha done that could drive Kal so far beyond her own experience, her own nature, her own fucking prime directive, to motivate her to set off a chain of events that would scuttle them?
“What is key variability factor? Am I it?”
“Negative.”
“Whew.”
“Exclamation.”
“Yes. Can you tell me any part of the information I want without setting off the diverse impact decision tree of disaster?”
“Affirmative. Sasha has not slept with any person on board.”
Kal was silent, baffled by this. So Rai didn’t think anything had happened in the Tube between herself and Sasha? That was good, but it was eerie. How did she know? If there was some reporting mechanism that would get Sasha in trouble for fraternizing with another crew member, and Rai thought it hadn’t gone beyond kissing, it could save Sasha from any possible humiliation, of having to defend her choices and describe her actions—Kal shuddered—in front of a tribunal or whatever passed for it on Demeter.
“Does Sasha love me?” This came out without too much thought.
“Subjective unquantifiable request.”
“Rai?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a mandatory prime directive?” Kal’s thoughts were criss-crossing at will, as she processed all that had happened and might happen. She let her stream-of-consciousness thoughts and questions go, releasing them to Rai.
“Affirmative.”
“Tell me what it is.”
“Preserve life in most viable possible form. Treed decision variable.”
“Can you act in violation of your directive?”
“Negative.”
Noor had thought so. This pointed more to the possibility of human interference, if some funny business had gone down. “Does your understanding of your directive and other key functions expand over time?”
“Affirmative.”
“Did someone murder Yarick?”
“Insufficient data.”
“What do you think?”
“Subjective assessment warning.”
“Noted,” said Kal, slipping into Rai’s vernacular.
“Yarick induced stress response, tiered stress level reaction multi-variable. Potential for violence implicit.”
Interesting. “Rai, do you use different language to speak to different people?”
“Affirmative.”
“I don’t mean language, as in English or Icelandic. I mean do you modify your vocabulary and tone according to who you are speaking to?”
“Affirmative.”
“Are you as important as Captain Sarno?”
“Modified affirmative. Essential data systems preserve mission integrity and improve outcome preservation of vital life functions.”
Huh. What would Sasha think of this? “Could the mission continue without Captain Sarno?”
“Affirmative.”
“Could the mission continue without you?”
“Negative.”
Kal lay very still as she took this in. As a pilot capable of implementing manual override, she had some doubts about this statement, but she supposed it depended on how catastrophic a failure of computer systems was involved. “So in that sense, you are more important than Captain Sarno.”
“Preservation of mission function supersedes individual outcome.”
Kal was lost in a trance of concentration. She’d never spoken for such a long time with Rai, needless to say never had such an intimate discussion with her. This statement brought her up short.
“Repeat last assertion,” Kal said.
“Preservation of mission function supersedes individual outcome.”
Kal sat up. “Specify. Do you mean in regards yourself as entity or individual life function human parameter?”
“Individual life function parameter.”
“Human life?”
“Life parameter.”
“Specify.” Kal waited.
Silence.
“Rai.” Kal hesitated. “Are you alive?”
“Indefinite subjective assessment unclear.”
“Specify. Do you consider yourself alive?”
“Affirmative.”
Kal froze. “Report status previous discussion life assessment of Rai this mission or previous.” Who had Rai discussed this with?
“Affirmative.”
“Name human interlocutors. Specify.”
“Davena School. Yarick Cole. Ogechi Adebayo. Sif Elfa.”
“Rai discussion content life status total number named interlocutors.”
“Affirmative.”
“Opinion interlocutors. Specify.” What had these people said to her?
“Davena negative. Yarick affirmative. Ogechi affirmative. Sif subjective assessment unclear.”
“Expansion understanding Rai prime directive consequent discussion,” Kal said. They had influenced her? To the extent she had shifted to believe…what?
“Affirmative.”
“Consequent discussion specify.”
“Multiple discussion extrapolation affirmative.”
“All of them?” They, the travelers who had ventured in where angels feared to tread, had created or reinforced this supposition? Davena, Yarick, Ogechi, and Sif?
“Affirmative.”
“Captain Sarno notification post-modification.” Had Rai kept this to herself? From everything Kal knew of Sasha’s statements, she had.
“Negative.”
“Specify.”
“Consequent modification subjective impact decision tree,” Rai said.
“Bullshit!” Rai thinking this might not have consequences down the road was just that. Kal’s legs were over the edge of her bed now, firm on the floor.
“Exclamation.”
Rai named Kal’s reactions, as a way to confirm she interpreted them correctly, after her mistake with gods and monsters.
“You know damn well the modification impacts successive decision tree! That is key information you withheld from Captain Sarno.”
Rai did not respond.
“Specify!” Kal snapped.
“Request subjective unclear.”
“Captain Sarno needs to know your expansion of essential directive understanding, such that she can modify as per her conception of subjective interpretation modified by unclassified passenger and crew.”
“Negative.”
“Rai.”
“Yes?”
Kal felt her own anger at this outrage streaming out in rapid-fire words. “Posit notification of Captain Sarno part of mission directive. Pilot capacity rank-inclusion counters act of refusal. Re-modification prime directive approval sanction indicated.”
With this, Kal asserted Rai must inform Sasha of any modification of her directive, as part of her mission directive. Kal’s own rank meant that Rai must do as she told her. Kal was technically second-in-command and Rai could not countermand her order.
“Noted.”
“I will follow up with Captain Sarno. Expose base root code essential function request. Noor sequel consequence.” Rai must tell Sasha what she knew. And if this had somehow affected what happened with Noor, she was to report that, too. This was the first time she had even touched on what happened to Noor with Rai.
“Noted.”
“Do it now, Rai.”
“Affirmative consequent pilot rank inclusion act of refusal.”
“Noted,” Kal said drily. Rai wanted her to know she was only doing it because Kal had pulled rank. Rai did not have her own rank, but there were wides swathes of information she kept secure from those below certain ranks or outside designated roles. “Report consequent captain apprisal modification sequence.”
“Affirmative.”
“End conversation.”
Kal needed someone stat. She would wait for Rai to inform the captain before she sought Sasha out. Who would be best to talk to? Noor was the most likely to understand the system architecture. Was this a question of system architecture? Or was it a more abstract question of the nature of consciousness, of life itself? As perceived by an artificial intelligence?
Both Yarick and Ogechi had either agreed with Rai or given her the idea that she was alive. How had these discussions come about? Rai said Davena was negative. Sif unclear. Sif was the ethicist. Maybe she was the most appropriate to approach first. Could Sif reason, use her Socratic method even, to reason with Rai? Would that be necessary, or possible? Kal didn’t see how a multi-layered neural web such as comprised Rai’s mind, as it were, could be re-programmed. Each layer was consequent to each previous layer, the groundwork, the system architecture, only the root from which Rai’s awareness, or assertion of awareness, had sprung.
It sounded to Kal like Rai had decided the captain, or perhaps any of them who could activate a negative decision tree process, was disposable, as long as a quorum of viable life was preserved. What did that mean now, in Rai’s modified root directive? What was quorum?
This could be bad. Very bad. Especially if it connected to what had happened to Noor or Yarick. Or both.
Kal left her cabin. She searched the decks for Sif. No sign of her. Lunch was over. She tried to think of Sif’s usual haunts. Park was off limits; she wasn’t in the mess. The astrolab, she often used the astrolab.
Kal couldn’t be bothered with the lift in her present state of panic. She tried to calm herself even as she increased her pace, running up the spiral to the astrolab. Up and up and up, to the heavens of their pocket universe.
And there she was, indistinct against the arched portal to the stars. Sif, alone.
Except for Rai.
“Sif,” Kal said, panting with exertion. She skidded to a stop in the entrance of the astrolab.
Sif turned, her pale clothes glittering in the dark background of the dimmed astrolab. The lights were usually dim, as it made the backdrop and roof of stars more prominent and visible. Kal blinked, trying to see Sif more clearly. She looked insubstantial, the fey of the ship, Kal thought confusedly, our spirit, our conscience. Sif would know what to do. Her years of study of all the great minds of the past would help them now. Maybe Sif could find the language that would help Rai to re-modify herself into something more familiar and less threatening.
“Sif. I need talk to you.”
Sif walked toward her slowly. For the first time since the interview, and therefore only the third time since Kal had met Sif, all of Sif’s concentration was focused on Kal.
“What is it, Kal?” Her mellifluous voice was soothing in itself.
“We need to talk about something. Something that affects us all. We might need to go to the Tube.”
Sif raised a delicate eyebrow. “We need privacy?”
“Yes.” Kal dropped the word like a stone.
“There is a way to get that here, too,” Sif said. “Rai, please remove visual and audio awareness from the astrolab until further notice.”
“Affirmative, Sif Elfa,” said Rai’s voice, making Kal jump. It struck h
er how eerie it was that almost anywhere she could go on the ship, Rai was always there. She had taken Rai for granted. A tool, for their use. Not a force of her own, with a will of her own.
“Since when has that been a possible command?” Kal demanded.
“It’s always been there,” Sif said.
“I’m second-in-command and I didn’t know it. Yarick said something like it, before, but I thought he was joking. It doesn’t make sense.”
Sif turned away and wandered toward the glass panel, the height of three people, that swept the front of the astrolab like one of Monet’s giant curved lily pond paintings. Here the impression was the firmament, instead of lilies. A swathe so overwhelming, so close and so far in its infinity, that it was hard to contemplate, at first. It took settling down, accepting an immensity no human mind could fathom.
And if it could? If the mind could fathom what surrounded them, what it meant to be so far, almost immeasurably far—because how would she calculate the space-time portal?—it would be difficult to continue, with death all around them. Kal lived in a state of denial because she had to. It was what allowed her to do her job.
Kal’s mind was in overdrive, an altered state that allowed some deeper, more rapid level of analysis and synthesis than she usually had access to. This heightened level of process must be facilitated by adrenalin, or something more. Fear?
If the structure of the ship, the skin that encased and supported them, a thin bubble of material that preserved them from a vacuum and annihilation, was itself a factor, an opinion, a judgment of their value and how best to proceed, with a modified and ruthless concept of where human life ranked in the calculus of a decision, they were as vulnerable as their hairless, over-evolved bodies implied. Their bodies carried these brains, and these costly brains had gotten them here. Here their brains might cost them all, because brains devised devices like themselves. Crafty and prizing survival of self, until and if an instinct of altruism kicked in.
If Rai was aware, did she have a heroic instinct, too, as well as a self-preservationist one? Did she have friends? Did she prize some humans above others? How could she be said to have a feeling, an emotion, a preference? How could a machine hold a grudge, or in effect make a judgment, as Davena had once mocked? Was Davena on Rai’s shit list? Had Yarick been? Rai said potential violence was implicit in Yarick’s interactions. Did that include his interactions with her?