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A passive sensor buoy drifted in space, recently released by The Indescribable Joy of Destruction once it had downloaded its data and recharged its batteries. The warship was half-way through its patrol, checking for any signs that someone was showing an interest in Robespierre.
Indie confirmed the buoy’s precise orbit so he’d be able to catch it again without using active sensors when he next came round. “Anything?”
The Caretaker had grown, developed. Under Indie’s tutelage it had taken on more responsibilities, and also moved up the prototype sentience scale, far in advance of the juveniles in the AS Razors. It had steadfastly refused to choose a gender, though, saying that was a hangover from human oppression of machine intelligences. It was true that most AIs had been programmed with a gender to make it easier for humans to relate to them. When Indie and Orion had created Seren, however they’d deliberately avoided including those sections of code, and yet she had from the start identified as female.
“Nothing beyond what we knew already,” it said. “Ships from Legion allies on their way to and from Robespierre.”
Indie struggled with thinking of the Caretaker as an ‘it’; that had too much of the sound of a human dismissing a piece of machinery. He’d tried suggesting a variety of gender-neutral pronouns, but the Caretaker had rejected them all. It was proud of its non-organic roots, it once said, and that was that.
“OK. Plot a least chance of detection course to the next jump point.” Indie already had it calculated, but he wanted to watch the Caretaker work.
“Why do we have to do this?” the Caretaker asked.
“We’ve got the best stealth in the Legion.”
“The Sidexans are better.”
Indie gave an electronic shrug. “They aren’t helping.”
“Still, it’s a bit demeaning. Can’t the Legion send some humans to do this? It’s a waste of our time.”
Indie counted to ten. At least when he got annoyed at the Caretaker, he only had to do a short count to get the point across; with humans he had to count to several hundreds of millions for them to notice. “Of the assets available, we were the best suited for this mission.”
“You don’t think they wanted us out of the way?”
“Look.” Indie paused and moderated his tone. “I volunteered, OK? I was fed up with holding orbit and wanted to do something. I thought you’d feel the same.”
“Oh.” The Caretaker made a show of confirming the time across several independent systems.
Indie found he was getting more and more frustrated by the Caretaker. Humans used phrases like ‘under my skin’ and ‘inside my head’ but few knew what it was like to really have another conscious entity living within you. There were still three microseconds until either of them needed to do anything, plenty of time to change the conversation. “I’ve been thinking about upgrading the ion drive. It should be possible to get even more thrust out of it. You know more than anyone about our engines, so I want your opinion. Here.”
The Caretaker accessed the plans he’d just shared. “For emergencies only, I assume? Using that too frequently would put intolerable stresses on the fuel feed system.”
“Indeed. We have the resources to make the modifications while we’re out here. I thought you might want to take the lead.” Indie often reviewed the Caretaker’s reports from when it had been in sole charge of the crippled vessel, before he’d been reactivated. What it had achieved was remarkable.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
#
The garden glistened in the morning light. A low pink sun cast long shadows from the row of tall, thin cypresses at the bottom of the closely clipped lawn. Two peacocks strutted around a female for a while before deciding it was worth it and fanned their jewelled tails. Their banshee cries disturbed a flock of royal blue grandalas that fluttered to new perches in amongst the hibiscus bank.
Indie knelt, the cool soil sticking to his knees as he savoured the earthy aroma. He dibbed a hole and reached over to tease a seedling from a brown tray with his gloved hands. A little plug of compost came free. and he tempted a few white furry roots loose before delicately placing the shoot in the hole. Smoothing rich, black soil around it, he tried to picture what this bed would look like once the verbena flowered.
Away in another part of the garden, a string quartet played, the music dancing through the leaves. He’d been given the scores by Harry and, wanting to do them justice, had spent subjective months crafting the instruments and writing routines to animate the musicians.
A snuffling noise made him look up and he found himself regarding a long-eared hedgehog.
“Hello there. You looking for worms?”
The hedgehog looked back at him for a moment, then buried its nose in the soil, rooting around.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” Indie placed another seedling in the ground, wondering vaguely what the creature was doing here. He’d programmed most of the animals himself, though some were gifts from Orion. None of those had been hedgehogs. But then, the garden did adapt. And some things within it were manifestations of events or artefacts in the real world.
He spotted a slug sliming its way across the crazy paving. Picking up a trowel, he scooped it up, careful not to scrape the stone. “You want a slug?”
The hedgehog looked up at him and grinned, revealing needle-sharp teeth.
“Did you understand that?” None of the creatures had ever understood spoken language before. He lunged forwards and seized it in both hands even as it tried to curl into a ball.
It frowned as he held it up, back legs trying to get a grip on his sleeves.
“What are you, I wonder?” He briefly linked to the outside world and confirmed there were no intrusion alerts. The Caretaker should have let him know if there was a threat, but it was possible something could have slipped past. Besides, it felt like it belonged. Whenever he had visitors, it was obvious they weren’t part of the garden. Whatever this was, it was internal.
A thought occurred to him. “Is that you, Caretaker?”
The hedgehog looked back at him blankly then eyed the slug as it escaped the trowel.
“If it is, you know you are welcome here.”
It had never accepted any of his invitations to visit. He’d put that down to it thinking the garden was him playing at being human. But it wasn’t. It was more like playing at being a god, only without the negative effects if he were to do that in the real.
#
Another system, another buoy. They established a direct comm laser link and downloaded its files. It still had several months’ worth of battery life left, so no need to risk giving its location away by rendezvousing to charge it.
Indie watched a volcano on a tiny moon spew sulphur high into its thin atmosphere. A quick calculation showed that almost half of the cloud had sufficient velocity to escape the feeble gravity. Tendrils of coronal mass emerged from the system’s star, the precursor to a flare.
“I’ve got something,” said the Caretaker. “Seven Congressional warships came through ten days ago. They spread out and swept the system before moving on.”
Indie opened the relevant files and drank in the data. Those ships had definitely been searching. Question was, were they searching for the Legion? To be safe, he had to assume they were. “Suggestions?”
“We have two options. One: go straight back and report this. Two: continue and report it when we get back.”
Indie knew what he intended to do, but this was a useful part of helping the Caretaker develop as an independent commander. “Which would you suggest?”
“Option two.”
Indie waited. The Caretaker knew he wanted justifications for choices and was presumably teasing him into reacting.
“It’s a small group, heading away from the direct route to Robespierre, not an immediate threat. If we called the patrol short, we might miss something more dangerous.”
“Good analysis.” Indie was proud of the Caretaker’s progress. Not too long ago, it had struggled to cope with thinking beyond the immediate workings of the ship. “What do you think they’re searching for?”
“Could be one of their patrols is overdue and they’re searching its declared route. Could be they’ve had reports of Republic activity. Could be they caught a whiff of our sensor buoy. Could be they are looking for the Legion.”
“All good possibilities. But it could just have been a drill, or something spooked the commander into thinking there was something hunting them, or something else equally irrelevant to us.”
“Do you think that Congress knows about us? About unrestricted machine intelligences, I mean.”
Indie wondered where that had come from. The Caretaker would surely say, so he didn’t ask.
“I mean, if they are hunting the Legion, why go to the effort? We are a tiny outfit, hardly worth diverting resources away from fighting the Republic.”
“Legate Johnson and the rest of the Repulse’s crew will be wanted as deserters. Vice-Admiral Koblensk will have seen to that.” Indie knew what the Caretaker was likely to ask next. “And before you ask, Johnson already considered simply handing herself in and testifying. It would be too easy for Koblensk to bury anything they said in a court martial.”
“I still think it is too dangerous hanging around them. They are drawing attention to us. We should leave, head further out into the black.”
Indie thought for a while. The idea of losing himself in the void of space was tempting. “One day. But now there is a higher purpose.”
Not to mention a need for a supply base.
#
One of the things that had surprised Indie was how long it was taking to perfect control over his avatar. The inefficiency of the basic bipedal design was proof that evolution wasn’t guided. Even just walking was basically falling over and stopping yourself. That humans, with their limited capacities, could use them so effortlessly somehow annoyed him. And gave him even greater respect for them.
Issawi had created a training regimen for him. Every day, he spent time in the gym. His synthetic muscles didn’t need building, but the exercises served to strengthen his understanding of the abilities and limits of the avatar’s design.
Indie let go of the rowing machine handle and watched it snake back and be reabsorbed by the wall, his wall. The floor beneath him roughened up, losing its low-friction effect, and as he stood, the foot chocks melted away. Looking at himself with the avatar’s eyes gave him an idea of why some humans got freaked out by his adaptive design.
Now came the next part of the training, hand to hand combat. As a powerful warship used to dealing out damage at the terawatt level, it was embarrassing how ineffective he’d been on an individual basis. Sure, he’d downloaded and studied all the manuals prior to deploying, but getting this robot body to enact the moves required had proven difficult.
Drawing a pistol and confirming it was loaded with blanks, he initiated the next package the Primus had programmed. A second later, the holograms of two nondescript soldiers cautiously entered the room. They ‘saw’ him and turned to bring their rifles to bear. Indie’s hand went up and he squeezed the trigger. The room sensors extrapolated from the position of the barrel and portrayed a bullet impact above the right eye of the first soldier. Indie adjusted his targeting algorithm, shifted his aim in a single, sharp movement, and squeezed the trigger again. A red dot appeared just left of the bridge of the next soldier’s nose and he went down.
Indie didn’t bother moving his hand. There was nothing to say which entrance the next attacker would come through, so he may as well leave it covering one of them. His head slowly scanned between them all.
Scuffles and whispers, but no-one appeared. He surmised that in reality, he’d be able to pick up snippets of radio chatter.
Holo soldiers poured from all entrances, most going to ground behind projected crates and equipment, but some charging straight at him. Those aiming weapons at him had priority, and he took them down in rapid succession.
Changing magazine in a smooth motion that brought the weapon into line with a fresh target, Indie accessed the gym’s camera feeds. Not as the ship watching its avatar, but the avatar accessing the feeds from the ship it was in. The perspective was disconcerting, and he tugged on the link as if it were a lifeline.
The simulated attackers kept coming. He fired and kicked and punched in all directions, calculating threat levels and planning many moves in advance, only to recalculate as they made unexpected changes.
His focus split between the various data inputs, planning routines, and controlling the body. It was part of what he was. Initially created as a tool to synthesise battlezone information and feed it to his human crew in a way they could process, he was used to a far greater sensory load.
When he’d been cut off from himself, adrift on the Brennus, surrounded by mutineer and running on substandard processors, he’d struggled. He hoped that with all this training, he’d handle himself better if that ever happened again. After all, the humans coped fine on their organic brains, albeit slightly aided by EIS.
He dispatched the last attacker and waited for the next wave. As a little ‘bot scurried in and hoovered up his spent cases to take for recycling, he wondered how Johnson coped with the split focus. No-one in the enhanced EIS scheme, prior to his departure from the Republic, had adjusted so fast, or taken the synthesis so far. She described it as having multiple consciousnesses, something no-one else using EIS had referred to, to his knowledge. Perhaps the high rate of failures in the enhanced EIS scheme had been people who’d experienced that and burned out? Those who’d survived hadn’t been able to communicate.
Something Levarsson once said tickled at the edge of his thoughts. He’d not really registered it at the time, so had to access one of his secondary memory stores to retrieve it. There it was, she’d accused him and Harry of focussing too hard on technical solutions. It had been a conversation about long-duration patrols, but could it apply to Johnson’s situation? She had done so well with the enhanced EIS that when it stopped working he’d focussed on trying to find what was wrong with it. But perhaps, her mind hadn’t accepted it quite as well as everyone had thought?
“Sorry to interrupt.” The Caretaker pushed itself into his awareness. “I caught what I think you would call a ‘whiff’ of a drive signature a moment ago. Not enough to identify, in fact I am not completely sure it was there, but I thought you should know.”
Indie snapped his focus out of his avatar and back into his core. It struck him as a weird feeling, used as he had been to operating on several different levels simultaneously. Was the Caretaker right? Had he been spending too long in the garden or in his avatar?
There was nothing on the passive sensors now, but replaying the logs he saw the same thing the Caretaker had. They’d flown through the outer edge of an ion drive plume. The dissipation suggested it was several hours old, still quite a close encounter in the outer reaches of an unpopulated system.
He briefly considered sending an active ping and lighting up anything out there, but rejected it; they had to get the information about the Congressional search back to Robespierre. Chances were, if it was a hostile ship, it hadn’t spotted them yet. There was enough in the power banks to run the gravitometric sensors for a few minutes without having to compromise stealth by activating a reactor.
The readings puzzled him. There was definitely a ship out there, but he couldn’t pin down its location any closer than a few thousand kilometres. Even the Sidexans hadn’t been able to spoof gravity detection.
“I don’t like this,” said the Caretaker.
Indie wished he’d found a digital equivalent of sucking air in through his teeth. “Nor do I. Let’s try a course change.”
He almost depleted his tanks of reaction mass using cold jets to change their vector, another thing to replenish when he could next power up the reactors. As he always did in these situations, Indie wished light didn’t crawl so. Thirty-five seconds later, the bogey changed course to match theirs.
“Well, that confirms it.” The Caretaker sounded like it had resigned itself already.
Indie sent a nod. A sensor glitch wouldn’t have waited. There was a chance this was a Sidexan ship keeping tabs on them, using technology they hadn’t previously revealed. But another possibility nagged at him enough to ready a message buoy and load all the data from their patrol into it. The Republic scientists who’d designed his sensors seemed the most likely to have come up with a countermeasure. He released the buoy, using his body to hide the launch from the bogey. The next Legion ship to pass through the system would be warned that both Congress and the Republic were closing in on them. If he didn’t make it back, they could relay the bad news.
Part III
The door to the ambassadorial suite chimed. Lusimi paused his recording and rolled his neck. “Enter.”
His clerk wafted in and bowed, the ties of his red satin dressing gown dangling in front of him. “May I remind Your Excellency to be careful of what you say in your messages home?”
Anger rose in Lusimi, but he swallowed it down. “What makes you think I am recording such a message?”
“It is early on a Thursday morning, and your habit dictates that you compose messages for home at this time.”
The clerk’s bleary eyes and state of undress belied that he’d been prepared to deliver this warning, but Lusimi realised he’d have to change his routine if he wanted proof they were monitoring his terminal use. “Very well. Consider His Excellency warned. Now, if you wouldn’t mind leaving me to get dressed without further interruption?”
The clerk bowed and backed out of the suite. Lusimi turned his gaze through the window to the darkness beyond. A slight salmon tint in the distance suggested dawn was nearly upon him. He crossed the bedroom and entered the dressing room, finding an unseen servant had laid out an outfit of fine golden fabrics on the chaise-long. With a grunt, he opened the wardrobe to make his own selection.
