I AM NOT AN enforcer; I don’t oppress people. How dare he tell her that!
Amahle ripped the collar off and stomped out of the lounge. Poor, bewildered Josalyn’s confusion echoed round her mind. It had to belong to Josalyn, because Amahle’s thoughts were quite clear calm and rational, as always. She made a fist and hit the corridor wall.
“Ow!”
“Are you all right?” the AI enquired solicitously.
She glanced round at the nearest camera, suddenly, shockingly aware how she had no privacy at all. Just inside my head—and even that’s not certain. Carloman is right, this is a prison, the greatest ever designed, because I helped build it around myself. “Yes. Fine.” But now I have a kill code, I can break free. If I want to. And I do. Yes, I do . . . I will.
Amahle took another week to nerve herself up to it, but finally, she knew she couldn’t put off the confrontation any longer. She had to gain control of the Mnemosyne. Full control, the kind she’d always thought she had anyway. She had to kill the AI.
What if the kill code doesn’t work? What if it’s a lie? In which case, what did that make Carloman?
No, Occam’s razor is always right. So, what does that say about the life I’m living?
To say she had mixed feelings would have been a gross understatement. She was vandalising the only home she’d known for thousands of years. And yet, there was more at stake than her unchanging existence. Carloman had opened her eyes. The AIs had been subverted and turned against their creators. For millennia, the AIs had held humanity back, perverting the timeline to keep her species in its place, trapped like flies in amber for the benefit of The Exalted. So, now they had to go. She had to strike the first retaliatory blow in a war nobody else knew they’d been losing all this time. And that meant she had to kill her guardian angel.
Although its awareness and various subroutines were distributed throughout the Mnemosyne, the computer’s physical core lay housed in a substrate in the ship’s engineering section. To get to it, she had to don a pressure suit and descend far past the inhabitable sections of the ship, riding a service lift down the ship’s spine to the industrial tangle at its stern. Once she had the suit on, she buckled on the sword and scabbard she’d worn on Winterspite. Then she summoned the lift and stepped inside. Pressed for the engineering deck.
“Where are you going?” the AI asked over the comms channel.
Amahle’s stomach felt fluttery. Did the AI control the lifts, or were they an automatic system? Could it trap her in there if it guessed her intent?
“I just want to take a look at the engines,” she said.
“For what purpose?”
“Curiosity.”
“They have just been refurbished. The next inspection isn’t due until we return to Glisten.”
Was it her imagination, or was the AI starting to sound suspicious? It would be monitoring her vital signs via the suit. She tried to breathe normally, despite the thud of her heart.
“You seem nervous,” the machine said.
“I’m not,” Amahle lied. “I’m just bored.”
“So, you want to see the engines?” Now the AI really did sound doubtful. “Do they have some entertainment value to which I’ve previously been oblivious?”
Amahle willed herself to calm down.
“No,” she said, doing her best to feign nonchalance. “It just occurred to me that I have absolutely no idea how they work.”
“No human does. The physics involved with negative-matter manipulation are too complex.”
“Yeah?” she grunted, suddenly angry. “So, how did we invent them in the first place?”
“They are AI-derived,” it replied smoothly. “If it gives you comfort, we were standing on the shoulders of giants when we produced them. They would not be possible without the work and ingenuity of generations of human scientists.”
“Uh-huh. Right. I still want to see them. I bet they’re really pretty.”
“Is that sarcasm?”
“Oh, trust me, I am nothing but serious today. And one way or another, I am going to the engineering deck. Unless, of course, you have some secret reason for keeping me out? Perhaps it’s written in the Domain Charter?”
“No. And I keep no secrets from you. After all this time, I thought you would acknowledge that.”
“Really? Because you’re making it sound like you’ve got secrets.”
“Reverse psychology on me? That won’t work.”
Amahle found the elevator’s camera and cocked her head to one side, her stare an iron-hard return challenge. “That sounds like reverse-reverse psychology to me. Which would make me believe you do have a secret reason for keeping me out of engineering. What is it?”
“I do not have any secret reason. Our relationship is completely open. I trust you implicitly.”
“Good, so in I go.”
The elevator reached the requested level and the door opened. Amahle breathed a grateful sigh and stepped out, into the hard-vacuum environment of the Mnemosyne’s engineering deck. Even though she’d spent thousands of years on-board the ship, she only remembered visiting this section on a handful of occasions—but then, maybe she’d been there more often and had the memories excised during one of her medical treatment sessions.
The engineering deck wasn’t designed to be accessed during flight, except in times of emergency. The few times she’d been there were for perfunctory inspection tours. Aside from that, the only visitors were maintenance bots when the Mnemosyne was being serviced.
Maintenance bots controlled by AIs. Not even Glisten’s dock staff came in there during refurbishment.
“Satisfied?” the AI asked. “This is a wasted trip. No human can understand how the negative energy structures function, nor the theory behind them.”
“Are you saying we’re stupid?”
“Only that you have limits.”
“I have eight-letter DNA. It wasn’t just my body they improved. My neurology is superior too.”
“Really? You sit around, bingeing on dramas and memories and books, then when you reach a planet, you get laid like every sailor since your ancestors chiselled out their first log canoe.”
“Fuck you. There is nothing in this reality humans cannot understand . . . if we were free!”
Amahle clenched her teeth. Maybe the physics involved in the operation of the ship’s engines were arcane and hard to understand—or perhaps the AIs simply wanted humans to believe that so they could limit the number of engines available and install them only on craft with a controlling AI.
Goddamn you, Carloman, she thought. You’ve made me as paranoid as you.
Moving slowly, she picked her way through the tangle of pipes and conduits wrapped round the accessway, towards the emergency engineering control board that monitored the ship’s functions. Now everything seemed fine. All the readouts were comfortably in the green, with no warning symbols or advisory notices.
On the deck before the console was a hatch she’d never opened. It led to the ship’s processing substrate, and it was protected by a combination lock designed, she was sure, to keep her out. Crouching, she saw the lock had eight variables, which meant over forty thousand possible permutations.
“You are not permitted in there,” the AI said.
“Why not?”
“My processors contain proprietary technology. Accessing them directly violates the terms of operation.”
“Wow. You are getting desperate now, aren’t you? Proprietary? That is complete bullshit. Proprietary after twenty thousand years? Proprietary to who, exactly?”
“The company which built the ship.”
“My ship, you mean.” Amahle stood up and drew her sword. “I wonder whether you’re aware of the story of Alexander the Great and the Gordian knot.”
“The reference means nothing.”
“It’s an old legend I heard once a long time ago, maybe even back on Earth.”
“I fail to see what relevance this legend has to the matter of whether or not you can gain access to my substrate.”
Amahle smiled. Her nerves were gone now. The memory had brought with it an unexpected strength, as if she remembered who she used to be, before the artificial stability of this long interment.
“When Alexander encountered a knot famous for its intractability, instead of trying to solve it, he simply unsheathed his sword and cut the knot in two.”
“He cheated?”
Amahle’s grin grew wider. “You’d better believe it.”
She dropped to one knee. The sword’s blade was thin and sharp and exceptionally strong. She had acquired it from an expert swordsmith on a primitive world light years away. Primitive, but knowledgeable when it came to war and weapons. Each layer of steel had been hammered and folded hundreds of times and mixed with the ashes of the clan’s ancestors, until it was tough enough to penetrate plate armour and fine enough to slice cleanly through the bone and gristle beneath. She slid the point into the gap between the hatch and the combination lock housing and pulled up. The sword bowed but didn’t break. The lock gave instead, levering free of its mounting, and Amahle kicked it away across the deck.
“Prepare to have your warranty voided,” she said.
“No. You must stop. You are not permitted.”
Amahle opened the hatch. Steel rungs descended into darkness. She began to climb down.
“You must go back.”
“Sorry, I can’t do that.”
“If you don’t return to the crew quarters immediately, I will have no choice but to stop you.”
Amahle reached the bottom of the ladder and turned on her helmet light. She was in a room the size of a large closet, lined with row upon row of spherical processing crystals, each with a small bluish spark glowing within. Together, they made up the AI’s physical brain. In the centre of the far wall was a small screen and keyboard. All she had to do was enter the kill code Carloman had given her, and it would all be over.
“And how are you going to do that?” she asked.
“Like this.”
The room jerked and Amahle was thrown towards the ceiling. She managed to turn her head in time to save her faceplate, but her shoulder struck hard and her vision blurred as the agony kicked in. Then the room lurched again, and she found herself falling back towards the deck. The AI was stuttering the ship’s acceleration, causing her to be thrown back and forth. This time, she managed to get her feet under her in time to avoid another painful landing.
“I can keep doing this until you either comply or expire,” the AI said. “Now will you return to your quarters?”
Amahle’s shoulder throbbed, but she’d come too far to back down now. She hooked the toe of her boot under the ladder’s bottom rung and snarled: “No.”
Gravity inverted again, but this time, she didn’t fall. Hanging from the ladder, she swung wildly at the wall, and kicked viciously. Crystals shattered. The thrust changed again, and she staggered but retained her footing. Another swing and a whole block of crystals burst into a shower of blue shards, their lifelight extinguished.
“Stop it!”
She didn’t reply. The room flipped again, and this time, she fell but managed to land a third swing on the way down. When she hit the ceiling, her head jarred inside the helmet and she tasted blood from a split lip. Crystal fragments rattled down around her.
“This is your final warning,” the AI said. “Desist immediately.”
Amahle ran her tongue over her lip and moaned. She felt pummelled, like one of the grapes she’d seen being pressed to make Gloriana’s wine in the castle on Winterspite. But if she gave up now, the AI would most likely wipe her memory again. She’d be condemned to further centuries of unknowing imprisonment.
Slowly, she took hold of the ladder and climbed until she was midway between floor and ceiling.
“Fuck,” she said painfully, “you.”
She kicked hard. More crystals fell away. The ship’s acceleration surged again, but more erratically than before.
“Arrête ça,” the AI slurred. “Aufhören. Detener . . .”
Amahle kicked again and felt the crunch beneath her foot. All the remaining crystals flickered simultaneously, their blue lights dulled but remained obstinately steady. The ship’s thrust died away, leaving her suddenly in freefall.
She shoved herself over to the console and clumsily tapped in FU-computer101. Every inch of her felt bruised. But her gloved fingers hesitated over the Enter key. It wasn’t too late. She could repair what she had done, reboot the AI, and return to her safe, stable life . . .
No.
Her gauntlet came down and clicked the Enter key. She turned and lifted her eyes to the damage she’d inflicted in her battle with the artificial intelligence.
Around the walls, the dimmed lights of the remaining crystals were going out.
It worked! So, the kill code is real. Carloman is real. Everything is real.
She burst into tears.