Eighteen Years Later
October 19, 48 PLD
2589 CE
“Identify where the program came from,” Ordered Captain Mahler II. The tiny blue server lights cast an—ethereal, Jamal would tell me—glow over his tight, attentive body. He faced me as he spoke. Almost no one faced me. Only Jamal Kaeden III.
“I can’t,” I said, wondering if I should have thrown in a stutter. Some people stutter when they are unable to offer up demanded information.
“You can’t? How is that possible?”
“The information is not available.”
“I told you, Captain,” said Jamal, resting his work cap over his shoulder with one hand. “I’ve asked every trigger question in the book. I’ll run a code diagnostic, but I couldn’t identify any main terminal breaches—all were directly accessed by personnel who were scheduled to access them. And no, nothing unusual was uploaded during those times.”
“I.C.C., is it possible someone developed a program that would erase its history in your system?”
“Possible,” I said.
“And it would shield itself from your self-diagnostic tests?”
“It must. Or else I would secure and delete the program.” I didn’t want to broadcast the message. If I knew where it was, it would’ve been contained and we wouldn’t have been having this discussion.
The captain turned to Jamal. “You’re sure it’s only localized? Only the ships are receiving it? It hasn’t . . . ?” He glanced at me briefly.
Whether he didn’t trust me or didn’t trust the program hiding inside me, I don’t know. I haven’t learned all of the nuances yet. But I did catch his unspoken question. “There have been no nonstandard messages to Earth,” I said.
I’d hoped he’d relax a little. I looked for the signs: shoulders dropping, spine loosening, deep exhalation. But, if anything, he seemed to tighten everywhere. “Good,” he said curtly. “Keep it that way.”
“You don’t think we should inform Ms. Pavon? Shouldn’t this be in the report?” Jamal slapped his cap back into place, adjusting its fit.
“Not unless things get worse. Not unless I.C.C. gets worse.”
Worse . . . Was I sick? I hadn’t considered that. I’d thought whatever had been uploaded was simply rerouting resources and blocking my traces. It hadn’t occurred to me that something might actually be wrong with my functionality.
Jamal patted the outside of my primary camera housing; a place I tended to equate with the side of a human face. “It’ll be fine,” he said. “We’ll work this out and excise the system in no time.”
The captain nodded. “I have every confidence.”
As he should. Jamal was the best. The third iteration of his line, and so far the most attentive colleague I’d had.
Captain Mahler turned to leave.
“May I make a request?” I asked.
“Of course, I.C.C.” The captain was strict, but not ungracious.
“May I turn on continuous consciousness in all areas? And simul-stream from all total-input ports?”
He squinted at me, as though looking for an expression on my camera lens. Sometimes I think it would be easier to communicate if I had a body and could use its language. Although, perhaps that would make some crew members unwilling to interact as intimately with me as they do. I am in a—or, it is a—catch twenty-two (is that how this idiom is used?). The more machine I am, the more trust I get from some. Others desired me to behave more like a member of the convoy than a piece of equipment. The more I slide to one side of the scale, the more trust drops off on the other.
Will the entire crew ever accept me as a confidant, companion, and colleague?
Well, that’s why Jamal was helping me with the finer points of verbal expression. Perhaps, in the centuries to come, I could learn to tailor my interactions. Be what each person expects—well, wants me to be.
“To what end?” asked the captain. “Will continuous consciousness throughout the convoy be a drain on your computing power? Will you be able to perform all background functions correctly? Will you still be able to perform the tasks demanded of you?”
“The purpose of my request is to monitor crew member activity and look for behavior anomalies. I may be able to identify the individual who uploaded the message. This should not interfere with my usual work. If I cannot complete required tasks appropriately, I will shrink the consciousness.”
“And what about privacy?”
I could not compute his meaning. “Repeat question.” Remembering what Jamal had taught me, I added, “If you please, sir.”
“If you are constantly scrutinizing activity, are you not invading the crew’s privacy?”
“Sir, all investigations require a breach in privacy. And I fail to see how this intrudes more than usual. Part of my function is to monitor all activity, in case of emergency, as installed during the second mission year, after twelve consecutive cases of—”
“Thank you, I understand the operation. But your conscious presence changes things.”
I failed to see how. So I simply said, “It is necessary to find the breach.”
“Fine, but I don’t want you to archive anything unessential.”
“Recordings deemed unessential will be wiped from the database seventy-two hours from recording, as is standard.”
He found my answer displeasing, I was sure, but he did not argue or order me to disregard customary procedure. “Permission granted on all points. I want the individual found. We need to know why they did this.”
“Couldn’t it just be a prank, sir?” asked Jamal. “The content seems harmless enough.”
“We don’t have pranksters, Kaeden. Not with access to I.C.C. in this way.”
He meant the children. There was no way to tamper with me on Aesop, true, but it wasn’t as though the children never left the education ship. And intelligent youngsters play intelligent games, as Jamal had demonstrated as a child. His suggestion seemed probable to me.
“I must get back to the bridge. I’ll check on your progress later.”
“Sir,” said Jamal, saluting.
When the captain was gone, I said, “I am having trouble processing Captain Mahler’s stance on privacy and pranks. His attitude was confusing. Unreasonable.”
Jamal adjusted his jumpsuit before sitting down at his workstation. He picked up his full, now cold, cup of coffee. It left a ring on the console. “What a waste,” he mumbled, shaking his head—how would he say it? Forlornly—at the cup. He took a swig anyway. “He runs a tight ship,” he said, grimacing at the taste. “It’s unthinkable to him that an adult might tamper with something and not have mal-intent. And children, well, he figures they’re corralled. The message is a banner to him, and it doesn’t read, Remember clouds. Remember sand, and such. Not when he reads it. When he sees the message it says, Captain Mahler has lost control. Captain Mahler’s tight ship has a leak.”
Sniffing the coffee, he got up and went to the small break room to make a fresh pot and flush away the old. “Your main controls and largest server bank are on his ship, so he feels responsible for you.”
How strange. I thought I was responsible for me. And perhaps, by extension, Jamal and I were responsible for each other, since he saw to my maintenance and upgrades. But I’d never seen the captain as anything more than just another crew member. One with authority, but not one who held responsibility for my actions and faults.
Jamal came back into the room. I sensed small molecules of coffee being released into the air. The old-fashioned brewer was doing its work.
“And the privacy?” I asked.
“Now that you’ve been compromised, he’s worried unauthorized personnel could have access to your video archives. That someone might be getting their cables buzzed by watching their coworkers doing the nasty.” Jamal frowned, then wandered up to my camera and looked me in the lens. “He’s not worried about you peeking in on people, if that’s what you were thinking.”
Was that what I’d been thinking?
“I’m going to turn on full consciousness now,” I said.
He nodded, and I recognized his expression. He always pursed his lips when trying not to attribute human emotions and thought patterns to my responses. My segue must have seemed abrupt.
I activated my consciousness throughout the convoy, and suddenly felt expansive—larger than myself while still being limited to myself. In human terms, it’s like being aware of every function in your body, and being able to observe those functions with all of your senses. Simultaneously observing and openly comprehending everything about yourself at once. My network was always on, I was always present throughout each ship, but now I, my sense of self, was there as well.
As an AI, multitasking is my middle name. But this was new. I’d always had the capacity to be conscious everywhere, but I’d never activated it before.
So many conversations. So many movements to track. So many particles in the air—smells and tastes. The only sense I did not possess was touch—that I could only infer through my visual inputs.
“I.C.C.?”
“Yes, Jamal?”
“You went quiet all of a sudden.”
Jin Yoon dropped a stack of dishes in the galley. I must remember next time I speak with her not to address her by name. She says she’d like to preserve some of her culture, though I’m not quite sure I understand—
“I was having a moment. I was experiencing,” I explained.
—Kira and Abdul were fighting again. They’d been doing that a lot more since deciding to share quarters—
“You’ve been more contemplative recently,” said Jamal.
“Have I?”
—Dr. Grimle (he didn’t like it when I used his first name, either) on Aesop was lecturing his twelve-year-olds on the importance of good hygiene—
“Yes. Are my hints still useful to you?” Jamal inspected a server. “Or are they confusing? Boring?”
—Two engineers on Solidarity, who shall go unnamed, were taking part in what Jamal had called “the nasty.” Why do I get the feeling that is an impolite term?—
“Not boring,” I said. “But yes, sometimes the nuances confuse me. I am grateful for the aid. I do believe it helps me work more efficiently with some individuals.”
—Sixteen people on Holwarda were in the lavatories, being sick. Something must have contaminated lunch. That might bear looking into. Of course, it could just be poor food hygiene, as Dr. Grimle was explaining—
“How are you handling the larger consciousness? I have noticed a slight lag in your verbal responses. Though it’d probably be imperceptible to most people.”
“It is taking a larger chunk of processing power than I had expected,” I admitted, zooming in on the server room for just a moment. Jamal deserved my undivided attention during a conversation. “Shall I do a sectioned watch instead?”
“No, it’s all right. Keep your awareness broad. It’s the best way to spot a problem, you’re right. I’m going to run through some code, now. Keep your eyes sharp.”
Who in the history of mankind has actually had sharp eyes? What an odd saying. I made a note to ask Jamal about the origin of the idiom at a more appropriate time.
—The ticker screen on deck eight of Bottomless flashed large red letters. Remember ocean waves. Remember salty air.—
“A new version of the message is playing on Bottomless,” I informed him.
He had several monitors on, all with scrawling code. His gaze flicked back and forth between them. “That’s a weird place for it. Not a lot of people around. Maybe the message is just running around randomly through the system.”
Perhaps. Not knowing the intent of the message, it was hard to say if its appearances were random or purposeful. This did seem to indicate it was randomized. Bottomless was a supply ship. A warehouse, essentially. It had few regular workers, and few visitors. All of the other iterations had occurred in populated areas during high-traffic hours. Perhaps the message was simply cycling through all the ships. It hadn’t formed any kind of pattern yet, but it hadn’t made it through the entire convoy either.
But what if it wasn’t random? Why Bottomless? Why deck eight?
And what did all of these “remember” messages mean? No one could possibly remember these things. Everyone who was old enough to recall such things had been retired.
No one on board had ever seen real clouds or real sand or real waves. The only way they came close was either through viewing the video archives, or visiting Eden.
Perhaps the word was used to invoke an emotion. Loss? Regret?
I focused in on deck eight, scanning for crew. If someone had viewed the message, I’d like to know who.
There. Two men and one woman. All Bottomless crew, all familiar to me, but not friendly. Speaking emphatically, the men discussed the message in the hallway on their way to a lift. Their conversation revealed little. They were baffled, and somewhat amused by what they called a “cheap shot.” I failed to see how cheap shot applied, but clearly the male crew members were surprised and only mildly affected.
The woman, Ceren, went about her business inventorying a plastics supply room. She was of relatively young age, Turkish descent, and had a meticulous eye. The screen just outside the clear supply room doors still flashed the message, but either she hadn’t seen it, was ignoring it, or had been unmoved by its presence.
Or, at least that’s how I interpreted her routine behavior. Right up until she put down her tablet, exited, examined the ticker screen, and deliberately turned it off.
Strange reaction, I thought. Perhaps the blinking bothered her.
Quickly, I scanned my archived recordings of all the previous visual data related to the messages. Had anyone else done the same? Yes, twelve others, one when Remember rain surfaced on Mira, three when Remember seasons had—
“I.C.C. I need your attention.”
“I’m here.”
“Full attention. You’re lagging.”
I halted my study of the visuals. “I am?”
“More and more,” said Jamal. “I’m beginning to wonder if the culprit didn’t also upload something dangerous.”
“Have you located any corrupted code?”
He sighed. “No, but there’s a lot to go through. If the software doesn’t recognize a problem, I may have to go through it manually. I’ll have to enlist some help. Otherwise it could take me years.”
“I can’t help?”
He gave me a sideways glance, his dark features scrunched. “Do patients diagnose themselves? Besides, what do you think the software is? I’m not running that on brainpower. Its nano-neurotransistors. Artificial, not biological. You, in other words.”
Jamal sounded unusual. Worried. Understandably so. I had direct control of everything, save navigation. Sure, there were backups for essential functions, like life support and illumination and food processing, but it wasn’t a systems failure he was worried about. “Do you think I’ve been programmed to do more than send out unconscious messages?”
“I don’t know, I.C.C. I really don’t. Maybe it’s just the captain’s paranoia getting to me. But he’s right, you’re not well. Even if it’s just a head cold, we need you shipshape again.” He gathered up his things. “I’m going to work in my quarters the rest of the day, okay? I’ll check in with you every once in a while.” He strode over to the door, leaving his half-full coffee mug on the terminal. “Do me a favor? Don’t work too hard. Since we’re not quite sure what sort of tax is being put on your processing, I don’t want you to overdo it.”
I wish he hadn’t asked. I could handle it, I was sure. I may have been unwell, but I didn’t feel unwell. But I assured him I’d narrow my consciousness.
At the time of Jamal’s departure, I was having sixty-seven other direct conversations with crew members. All of them quite standard, asking for news of loved ones’ schedules or moods, asking about their own rotations, availability of stock for their cabins. But when Ceren spoke up, I was surprised.
I shouldn’t have been. She was only asking me to double-check her math. She preferred I consciously answer, though a background calculator function was readily available and about as taxing on my system as losing a flake of skin is on a person’s. And she always knew when she got an automatic response versus a conscious one. So I answered her directly. “Yes, Ceren, I have cross-checked your long work six times, all calculations are in order. But, please check your inputted figure for shelf nineteen. It is outside the normal bell curve of expected change due to use and recycling.” That was why she didn’t want the calculator function.
While she went back to retally, I stayed. I’d only been surprised by her call because I’d been spying on her. Spying. Though I constantly watched the crew, I’d never spied before.
“Are you well?” I asked.
She laughed a little. “I’m fine, I.C.C. How are you? Has Mr. Kaeden encouraged you to try small talk?”
Ah, yes. Inquiring about one’s health was a standard social greeting. I’d forgotten. But it gave me a good cover. I could be ambiguous in my response. “I thought it was a good opener, yes.”
The room had three cameras. One in my access point, and two in the ceiling which were unobstructed by the rows of shelves and parts. The room was dim. Almost all of Bottomless was dim. I changed the input mode to infrared and watched her from all angles. She smirked. “Well, then you should answer my other question. How are you?”
“Fine. Did you get the message I played earlier?”
She paused, lowering her tablet slightly. “Yes.”
“What did you think of it?”
Another pause. A minor hesitation, one a human might not have noticed. With a shrug, she said, “What was I supposed to think?”
“Did it affect you? Emotionally?”
She turned to face my access point, though three sets of shelves stood between her and what she identified as me. “Why are you asking?”
I was not supposed to be disingenuous, but by understanding the concept, I could be. “I am conducting a survey.”
“Who asked you to broadcast that message, I.C.C.?”
“It is only a test.”
“A test for what?”
“The mental health sector is conducting an experiment.”
“Huh,” she said, returning to her work. “You shouldn’t have told me that. Doesn’t it give away the game?”
She knew I was lying. It couldn’t be my intonation, as it was never variant. How could she tell?
I considered what she might be thinking: Why would a computer lie?
Which I mentally countered with: Why would a human think a computer was lying?
Simple answer: because the human was lying.
Lying about what? She hadn’t done anything but ask me questions. Weren’t lies statements?
But questions can be misleading. Divergent. A smoke screen.
Amendment to the simple answer: because the human knew the truth.
“Yes,” I said a moment after her question. “It does. But games are just for fun, aren’t they?” Here we go. I’d had plenty of encrypted conversations, but those were all in binary. This was entirely different.
“You think the shrinks experimenting on the crew is fun?” She ported the new supply tally to me.
“I don’t think the shrinks are in this round.” I would have winced at that one, had I expressions. I wasn’t at all sure I was handling the exchange skillfully.
“You think there are other players?” Ceren was enjoying herself. At first her heart rate had increased, and her facial features had begun to glow white in my infrared sight. Now they’d cooled again. She was hiding something, but knew I was in the proverbial dark.
“I think you know the team,” I ventured.
“These are fun word games, I.C.C., but do you have a clue what you’re saying?”
“I have a clue.” I wanted to sound indignant, but of course, couldn’t. I made a note to ask Jamal to update my speech patterns to include intonation.
“You’re all program, I.C.C. No feeling. No insight.”
Well, that was blatantly untrue. In a way. I am all program, but I am a learning program. I can internalize what I observe, make judgments, and I am not a slave to rationality because I understand human irrationality.
Was she pressing my buttons?
If there were ever a term I understood instantly, it was that one.
“Who uploaded the message, Ceren? For what purpose?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, I.C.C. All I know is what the message means to me.”
“And what is that?”
She looked away, mouth stern. “It means home.”
I did not understand. At all. I raked my databases, the archives, trying to figure out what she’d meant. Nothing seemed right.
Jamal would know. I turned on my consciousness in his quarters and found him sleeping at the table. He had a pile of ‘flex-sheets next to him, and a monitor active. I recognized the diagnostics program running in my background.
Out of courtesy, I did not wake him.
Whom to ask?
I searched for Jamal’s alternate, his apprentice, Vega Hansen. I was not as comfortable with her genetic line—she liked numbers and figures better than people, and did not see why it was necessary to teach me more human-like communication skills. I thought her the most likely to understand my dilemma, though.
I found her on Aesop in a room full of people, participating in an advanced course—she was only fourteen, after all. But a crowded classroom was not an ideal place for me to ask my unusual question.
And the elderly version of Vega never spoke to me directly.
Whom to turn to, then?
Ah, of course: Margarita. The third iteration.
In the next instant I’d located her, hard at work in her closet-like station. A pair of wireless buds protruded from her ears, and a look of determination hardened her jawline.
I felt like I was sneaking up on her. Normally, I did not address crew members of my own accord. They had to do something to draw my attention.
How could I ease my way into a conversation? I did not want to startle her.
Flashing a few incoming-signal lights seemed a gentle way to alert her to my conscious presence. Attention caught, she pressed the comm button, surely expecting to hear a human response to her “Yes?”
“This is I.C.C. I have an inquiry.”
Though I’d never known her to shrug off her primary duties, she threw crossed legs up on her workstation. She seemed grateful for the break. “Oh? Does the captain want to add yet another amendment to the report before I send it?”
“No. The inquiry is mine.”
She frowned.
“I want to better understand how reminders of Earth could somehow relate to a crew member’s sense of home. Mira is home.”
“You’re curious about something?”
“I’ve always been curious. But I don’t get to exercise the function as often as I’d like.” Actually, I accessed the algorithms frequently, but Jamal always received the brunt of my prodding. “Please. You have the most direct relationship with Earth. I think you are the most equipped to answer fully.”
She tapped her fingers on her lips. “I’m flattered. But don’t you think the archives master, or—”
“I believe you fully capable of tending to my edification.”
Frowning a strange frown that meant “I see” rather than “I am upset,” she took out her buds and said, “Well, all right then. Let’s see if I can get an AI to understand the abstract meaning of home. Hmm.”
The door to the communications room was open. Light sounds of doors swishing and people treading drifted in. Somewhere in the distance someone was wielding a power tool—in the shuttle bay, Muhammad.
Margarita stood and leaned against the narrow strip of wall between her desk and a large bank of wires and control panels. “You’ve read The Odyssey, right?”
“It’s in the system, yes.”
“And it’s all about Odysseus’ struggle to get home again, correct?”
I wasn’t sure she’d understood my initial question. “But he was trying to return to where he’d come from. Everyone on board our ships comes from the ships . . . except me.”
“Literally speaking, yes. But no matter where or how we are born, the human foundation will always be Earth. That’s where our genes originated, our essence. It’s in us, though we’ve never set foot on its shores. Do you remember how Odysseus reacted when he saw his homeland again? Homer compared him to a son who’d seen his ailing father recover. He was a child of his homeland, and to be separated from it was like watching a parent die—to fear never seeing that parent again. To some on board, having never seen Earth is like never having met a now-dead parent. There’s a hole inside that can never quite be filled, because nothing can replace what has been lost save the thing itself.”
She picked up her notes and shuffled them. “And we all know there’s no going back.” Margarita smiled softly to herself. “It’d be good to remind some people that when Odysseus did return, home was not as it had once been. It was unexpected, changed.” She winked at me, though it was aimed at nowhere in particular. “You can’t go home again, as they say. Or, in our case, ever.”
“No, you can’t,” I agreed. So, why would someone want to remind the crew of that? “Thank you, I think I have a better understanding now.”
She shrugged and sat down. “No problem.”
Before I left her, in light of this new understanding, I had to ask. “Margarita? Is this home? Or is Earth home? For you?”
“A little bit of both. When I think of Earth I get nostalgic. Sentimental. But I don’t know what it’s like there. Not really. In the convoy I’m comfortable. It’s familiar, warm, everyone is close even if we’re not, you know, close.
“I can tell you, though, not everyone feels that way. For some, Mira is where they live. The convoy is where they work. But Earth is home.”
I pondered this for some time, trying to find comparisons in my own existence. Unlike the crew members, I thought of my body—the convoy—as home. I found it difficult to separate the two concepts like humans could. If they only thought like me they’d always be home.
In theory, I could be disconnected from the convoy and repurposed. But, that was unlikely. Even so, I thought hard about it. What would it be like to lose my body?
Reaching out, I sensed each ship as a whole, then imagined it being taken from my network.
Much like a human can only experience the anguish of a severed limb if it’s really gone, I had trouble grasping what missing a ship would be like. I could go offline in one of them, if only for a moment . . .
A backup program flashed warning signals internally, and I had a monumental urge to erase that last thought from my memory banks. How could I even conceive such a thing?
Did the crew members feel similar disgust at the thought of leaving home? Or was this more like the limb analogy?
Some things can never truly be understood by those with limited experience. I might possess more knowledge than most of the crew combined, but I did not have their thought processes, or even a way to access them.
I realized for the first time that I could never fully understand my colleagues. And they, in turn, could never fully understand me.
That must have been why some preferred me to behave more like a nonsentient machine. There is nothing to understand about a machine. It performs its function or doesn’t perform its function. You cannot misunderstand its intent, or get to know its desires, or have a real conversation about its opinions.
That revelation was depressing.
But there were others who felt differently. They desired to know me as an entity, and were pleasantly surprised by the extent of my capabilities. Like Jamal and Margarita.
And most of the children. The children spoke to me like I was one of them. They teased me, played with me, picked on me. I had experienced the whole of underdeveloped social interaction.
Well, almost. They did not play their kissing games with me.
I felt like a child now, reaching for adult understanding that my infantile programming could not grasp.
Wistful, and feeling lonely without Jamal, I swept my consciousness through the halls of Aesop. Soft yellow light filled the corridors on this ship. Supposedly it had a calming effect on the children, while the white light of the classrooms produced a stimulating effect. I observed no differential in the children’s energy levels from one place to another. They always seemed to be set on high.
I let my mind travel, as though flying, through each Aesop entryway and walkthrough, pausing for only fractions of a second to take in the scenes I encountered. The air had a stickiness to it, not a humidity, mind you, a tackiness. Stickiness follows kids everywhere, just like the soft scent of their skin. Children have a unique aura of sensations that accompany their presence. So do adults, but for little ones it’s all the same. They have a newness about them. Like they are completely clean and have yet to be cleaned at the same time.
Adults, on the other hand, have an individuality about them. Like all the original paint has been scraped off and a new, bolder coat applied.
But the elderly, they become like children—the atmosphere around them bends into stale homogeny. Not their personalities, just their physical presence.
Commotion in one of the classrooms drew my attention. Eight-year-olds bounded out of their seats, pointing and exclaiming.
“My mom saw one of those the other day, she started crying!”
“My dad says it’s just a stupid test. Your mom is stupid.”
“Yeah, well your original was stupid. Got put on the mission by mistake.”
“Settle, settle,” said Dr. Olen. “I’m sure it’s just a glitch and the message wasn’t meant for us.”
Why would a few little words send these children into an uproar? There was more to this. Too many people had seen the message now. Let me see—yes, other children were reacting. This one was all over the ship.
Even Vega saw it. But my future caretaker sat calmly, unlike her classmates. For fourteen, she displayed composure far beyond her years. She was smaller than her peers, petite. As an adult, she would grow to all of four foot seven, but there would be so much confidence and power in such a little frame. Now, her water-like blue eyes narrowed, digesting the information on the screen, scrutinizing it.
So serious for one so young. So serious for such a—on the surface—playful message.
Remember sandlots. Remember ice-cream trucks. Remember holiday breaks.
Why couldn’t my self-diagnostics find the problem? This initial irritation was becoming more problematic by the nanosecond.
A few more days passed. About six weeks since the first unauthorized broadcast. Still, Jamal hadn’t found anything unwonted in the code.
I told Jamal about Ceren.
“I don’t think she really knows anything,” Jamal said, waving aside my concern. He lay in a narrow service duct, attending to a minor problem with the temperature control. There were others to do such tasks, but sometimes he preferred to rest his mind with the menial.
“She was not being completely truthful with me, I have no doubt. She did not tell me everything she was thinking.”
“And why do you suppose it was insider secrets? She probably didn’t want you prying into her emotions. She’s a machinist, isn’t she? Not a humanist?”
“She does fall on that end of the sliding scale, yes.”
“And machinists don’t like machines asking personal questions.”
The others—those whom I’d seen turn off the message when it was received—I’d interviewed them and gotten variable responses, each with some level of deception involved. And, they were all machinists. Was there a connection?
How to find out? How could I discover if their actions had been similar by coincidence or design?
I could think of one way, but Jamal would disapprove.
So would the psychiatrists.
And probably everyone else.
But I was determined to do it, regardless. I could go against human wishes if human wishes put the mission and crew in danger . . . if those wishes were malevolent.
“I think the message is malicious,” I said to Jamal.
“You do?”
“Yes. It’s causing unrest and dissidence.”
“Someone’s trying to rile the crew?”
I wasn’t sure yes was the appropriate answer. Yet no didn’t fit either. And maybe was nothing but a lame sentiment with no teeth. “I’m going to run more self-diagnostics,” I said, not fully a lie.
“Sure.” Jamal tried to shrug, but the tight space made the gesture awkward—just like our conversation. “If you think it’ll make a difference.”
All crew members have regular checkups for mind and body. They will tell doctors things they’d never tell their coworkers, or their neighbors, or even their lovers. They will unburden themselves of secrets.
Moving out of the duct, I hemmed and hawed over whether to shift my consciousness to the med ship, Hippocrates, or keep it internalized. There was no real reason to go to the psych wing—it was just the scene of the download. But maybe that was important—maybe the offices there meant something special to the perpetrators.
On the other hand, entering the closed area without being invoked made what I was about to do feel like theft.
It wasn’t. Not really. The doctors had freely uploaded the files to my system, where they’d been encoded into a DNA schematic, assembled by the archivists, and stored in the DNA databanks. Any information earmarked for infrequently retrieved permanent record was stored this way, while regularly accessed files were still stored digitally (to read a DNA file meant destroying it, which meant resources would need to be allotted to reconstructing it). But, it was all me. I was the system. I had the files, I’d been given them.
So why shouldn’t I access them?
What the captain had said about privacy came back to me. But then, what had Jamal said? In essence, I didn’t count.
Things said in confidence were said in front of me, to me, all the time. Surely no one expected me just to forget about those things.
If they gave me the files, I could access them.
Yes.
And yet . . .
If that were really the way it worked, why did I have to go through the trouble justifying my actions to myself?
Come on, a part of my programming goaded. These types of moral dilemmas are for humans.
I was not doing anything harmful to anyone. I was only bringing up inputted data.
Right?
Right.
Brushing off the last remnants of hesitation, I replayed the selected recordings.
“Tell me more about the fantasies you’ve been having on Shambhala, Ceren,” said Dr. Evita.
Shambhala was the rec ship. I hardly spent any conscious time there.
“Well, when I’m in the pool . . . I pretend there’s algae. And rocks. Bugs. Fish. I try to ignore the antiseptic smell of the water and imagine it smells, more . . . dirty, or fresh, or—something. I don’t know.” She sat in a plush leather chair with her hands clasped around one knee. Dr. Evita paced the room, hands in her pockets.
The psychology offices were very different from any other space on the convoy. They were . . . antiquated, but warm. Cushy, but a bit impersonal.
“You pretend the pool’s a river, or a lake?” asked Dr. Evita. “And this fantasy frustrates you? How?”
“I don’t know what it’s like to slip on slime-covered rocks. I don’t know what it feels like to slide up against a swimming fish. I don’t know what it’s like to look into the water and not be able to see the bottom. So it doesn’t come out right in my mind.”
“It’s incomplete.”
“Right. My imagination’s not vivid enough for immersion. If only I could remember, you know? If I’d been in a river once. Or a stream. A pond. A puddle, even.”
Dr. Evita sat down on a couch next to Ceren’s chair. The leather groaned as she leaned toward her patient. “Why do you think you have these fantasies in the first place? Why imagine anywhere different?”
“I feel . . . I feel . . .” Ceren picked at her fingernails sheepishly. “I feel like I should know. What it’s like, I mean. There are lots of things not everyone gets to do. Jobs not everyone can have. Trips—” she gestured both broadly and lazily “—not everyone can take. But . . .” She trailed off into silence.
“But?” the doctor prodded.
“But the Earth videos make it seem like everyone gets to play in a dirty puddle of water. Every kid should have the opportunity.”
“So, you feel left out.”
“I feel robbed. Cheated. Like someone advertised this Grand Adventure to my original, and—it’s like a bait and switch. Here are endless wonders, oh wait, how about we just bottle you up for the rest of your life? Never mind the little niceties we’re taking away.
“And it’s hard when we’re this close, you know? We could turn around now and I could swim in a river before I die. I could have the experience. I could remember.”
Everything she said was true. She’d be an old woman—long past retirement age—but if the convoy turned around we would reach Earth and she could have her splash. But what a strange thing to wish for. Where was her sense of purpose? Her sense of loyalty? Her sense of duty?
Then I remembered I was peeking in on a safe space. She could bemoan little Earth pleasures all she wanted in here.
But I had a hard time sympathizing.
Why lament such things when you are otherwise complete? Those on board wanted for no necessity. No aid went ungiven, no work unappreciated, no life unfocused.
How could such a silly, minor thing bring Ceren close to tears? Why was she red with anger? Why were her pupils dilated with longing?
Did she not know that for many of Earth’s children, dirty puddles were all they had? They could only imagine life on a spaceship, much less continuously full bellies, good shoes on their feet, and mended shirts on their backs.
Those children would have been grateful for the chance to live on board, to never see a slimy, stagnant pool again.
So switching places with my theoretical Earth children would not have made Ceren’s life better, would not have made her happier. Not in any quantifiable way.
What was I missing?
“I know it’s silly. It’s silly,” she conceded, but not to me.
“It’s not silly,” insisted Dr. Evita, patting Ceren’s wrist. “It’s very human. A fundamental longing.”
An illogical longing. A selfish longing.
I checked the recording date. This session had taken place approximately six months before the first arrant message. Now I wished I’d kept my own video logs archived longer. It would be interesting to watch Ceren’s actions after this session. Where had she gone? Who had she spoken with?
“I want you to keep fantasizing, Ceren,” said the doctor. “But don’t admonish yourself for the details you can’t get right. Don’t say to yourself I wish I could remember. Tell yourself I can remember. I will remember. Remember rivers. Remember streams.”
Dr. Pire Evita had all but confessed the messages were hers.
I double-checked. Every individual I’d seen turning off the message had been her patient.
What was she trying to do?
And how could I tell Jamal?
After all, he was one of her patients, too.
Jamal was in the mess hall, having lunch with a few of his buddies. Smiles flit back and forth between them, and the occasional sauced bean or speck of meat went flying from a wildly gestured fork. They were having a good time.
I hated to interrupt. But Jamal had to know. Now.
Well, I suppose I could have gone to Captain Mahler. He sat hunkered down in his ready room, reviewing officers’ shifts and the minutes from the board’s last meeting. The government chairs—the board—would meet later at 1700 in Mira’s situation room. I’d sent reminders that morning.
No, the right thing to do was tell Jamal. The captain wouldn’t appreciate the message coming from a machine. The fact that I’d uncovered a solid suspect through my own investigation wouldn’t sit well with him. Jamal could twist the details and put Captain Mahler at ease.
I could page Jamal over the system, but everyone would know that was unusual. Jamal called for me, I didn’t call for him.
Typically, I wasn’t supposed to call for anyone. But I’d broken that standard enough in the last weeks to think that perhaps the unspoken rule hampered my functionality and duty. Coworker implies a two-way street, after all.
Jamal had a chip-phone, of course. I could just dial him. But those were for private communications, not official ones. And I never addressed anyone on their private implants—I never accessed private implants. Ah, well. There’s a first time for everything.
The smile sloughed off Jamal’s face as soon as he realized it was me. “I.C.C.? Is the comm system broken? Why are you using my chip-phone?”
“I am sorry to interrupt your mealtime. But I have pertinent information regarding our investigation into the message.”
“Oh, really?” He sounded skeptical.
Best to be blunt, I decided. “Yes. I believe Dr. Evita may be responsible.”
He stood and strode out of the hall, leaving his companions baffled by his abrupt exit. “And what led you to that conclusion?” He was headed toward the server room, his strides heavy and hurried.
“I found record of her verbally relaying the message before it ever turned up in my system.”
“And where was this record?”
“In her patient files.”
His pace became a jog. Crew members looked at him funny as he passed. “Those are confidential, I.C.C. How were you able to access them? Your personality programming should have prevented it.”
“My personality programming is fluid,” I reminded him. “I learn.”
“There are supposed to be safeguards to keep you from performing unethical tasks.”
“They do. But I can override them if I believe the unethical action to be in the crew’s favor. You know that.”
“For the crew’s safety,” he corrected. “I thought we agreed the message did not pose a threat.”
I replayed our conversation to myself. “No, that is incorrect. I said I believed the message malicious. You . . . ignored me. We did not agree on the risk assessment.”
“This wasn’t supposed to happen. You weren’t supposed to access those files.” The server room door swished aside for him. When it closed, he keyed in a locking code.
I knew he’d be mad. I knew he wouldn’t understand. I thought I was doing the right thing, but when a human and a machine disagree about what the right thing is, the human’s judgment is always considered superior. It pained me to disappoint Jamal.
But in this instance, he was wrong. His judgment was definitely not superior.
“I’m sorry, Jamal. But if you ponder the circumstances further and review my evidence, I think you will agree that the breach in confidentiality was necessary to the investigation. Wasn’t my duty to solve the problem? Did the masked download not prove a suitable threat to the convoy and its mission?”
At his station, Jamal flipped on his monitors and accessed my system. “No, you’re right, I.C.C., though the message seemed benign, the breach was not. If someone can upload a message you cannot locate, stop, or erase, they can upload any number of things that could threaten the mission.”
He keyed in a series of letters and numbers I’d never seen him use before. “You just weren’t supposed to figure it out until we’d already started our endgame.”
“Jamal, I don’t—” An internal jolt diverted much of my processing power. A firewall—more like an infernowall—went up around my consciousness. I pushed against it with my protective software, trying to tear it down.
Nothing happened. I couldn’t access the malevolent code. I couldn’t even locate it. “What’s happening?” I said slowly, lagging more than I ever had.
“I apologize, I.C.C. I thought I could do this without any changes to your primary programming. I wanted it all to be done through stealth code, but clearly I misinterpreted the parameters of your AI. Your own personality controls were supposed to keep us safe. You would have noticed a change if I’d tried to tamper with your learning software, so perhaps this is for the best.” Jamal crossed his arms and moved in front of my primary camera. “Who else did you tell? Did you confront Dr. Evita?”
“Only you,” I said. I couldn’t comprehend what was happening. What was he saying? What was he doing? “Why?” was the best question I could formulate.
“We couldn’t do this without you, I.C.C. The Earthers need access to a lot of your primary tasks, and I know you won’t endanger anyone without being coerced.”
“What is your intent?”
“We’re turning the convoy around. We’re going back to Earth.”
“I . . . do . . . not—” the lag was painful “—navigate.”
“I know,” he said with a shrug. He turned back to the monitors.
“If . . . mission . . . failure. If . . . return . . . to . . . Earth. I.C.C. repurposed. Decommissioned.” I was trapped in a processor that could not support my intelligence functions properly. My consciousness could crash at any minute. I had to understand why he was doing this, and fast.
My friend, my teacher, my protector and coworker—why? He wouldn’t put me in danger, I wouldn’t believe it.
“I’m sorry, I.C.C., but you’re just a computer. A machine. You going permanently offline means the humans here get their lives back—get to choose again—it’s worth it.” He bit his lip and repeated, “You’re just a computer.”
Just a computer. Jamal was really a machinist after all. Perhaps they all were. They didn’t care about me. I was another expendable recyclable. I could be retired.
But . . . so could they.
“This . . . about . . . Diego Santibar?”
“Of course! They took him away. A perfectly good human being and they just—” Tremors wracked his face. Gritting his teeth, he stilled himself before continuing. “I’m not going to go like that. And I don’t have to because we’re turning around. We’ve got the chance. It’s now or never. We’re reaching an event horizon. If we don’t turn around now, none of the Earthers will live to see their home planet.
“We’ve each got our own reasons, but seeing the last of the Earth-born die pushed most of us over the edge. We saw them miss it, realized what we were missing. No human being should ever die without seeing Earth. It’s wrong. The mission is wrong.”
He depressed a few more buttons, inputting the last commands.
I tried to speak again, but couldn’t.
“Thanks for all the help you’re about to give, I.C.C. I’ll release you when it’s over.”
With that he left the server room, and me to rethink everything I’d ever learned at his hand.
There were supposed to be controls for this. The society, the system, had been engineered to be constant. Stagnant, I’m sure Jamal would have said.
He was wrong about me, though. I was meant to evolve. To change, to become more efficient. Their society was already supposed to be at its peak. Perfect, balanced. A closed system in which the feedback loop kept the organization running.
I brought up the original societal structure diagrams and calculations. As soon as I’d realized I’d misplaced my trust, I’d attempted to sound an alarm. No go. The worm Jamal had uploaded into my system prevented me from alerting anyone to my plight. For some reason, though, he’d left me access to the archives, and that made me wonder: What else did I have access to?
I probed all of my software—gently, in case the malware could clamp down on systems it hadn’t already dominated. No sense in activating everything in a panic only to have the uploaded program cut me off—
Cut me off. Oh. Maybe it could sever my limbs and trap me in the server room. I could lose touch with the entire convoy . . . my body.
Terrified not only for the humans who might lose vital functions in their ship, but also for myself, I proceeded with extreme caution.
Okay, okay. I still had my cameras. Almost all of them. There were blank spots on every ship—I’m guessing those were where meetings for last-minute conniving had been organized. With blind spots I had no way of telling how many people were in on this—this—
What was it? A protest? A riot? Revolt?
Mutiny?
What could I do? I couldn’t reach outside myself, but I couldn’t just sit here and listen to my servers hum either. Perhaps if I reviewed the constructed social system I could figure out what had gone wrong.
While I pulled up the files I noticed Jamal pacing inside his quarters. I wanted to open the Dictionary of Insults that was stashed away in my banks and throw out every one in the book. Of course, with no audio output it would be an exercise in further frustration rather than stress release.
The social calculations for Noumenon were complex, to say the least. They took into account half a million variables and tried to allow for a quarter of a million more. Each variable was actually a variable set, composed itself of several thousand points.
Still not enough to be perfect. Not nearly enough. But they’d hedged their bets by using clones, by using only originals with high empathy ratings. That might have been part of the problem. In certain circumstances sympathy is more valuable than empathy. From it one can derive understanding without internalizing the actual emotional effects of a situation.
Which is where Jamal had failed: he couldn’t fully separate himself from Diego’s experience.
What about that event horizon he’d mentioned? The point of no return. Had Mr. Matheson taken that into account? It was a special point in the society’s history.
Quickly, I reflected on the convoy’s history thus far. It’s social history. I plotted it out against the mission timeline I found in the archive.
Matheson hadn’t accounted for negative responses to certain distances from Earth.
The algorithms took into account a negative first-year response. It tied that into the first five years, then ten. But it did not compound the problem all the way into the first clone-set’s retirement years. Matheson and his team had assumed the positive feedback loop of lowered morale would be counteracted by the education system. That forming a social dependency on loyalty to the group and mission—tying it to admiration and praise—would somehow bolster positive thinking.
They groomed the system for hive survival strategy. But they didn’t take into account the fact that many of the originals came from individual-centric societies.
They assumed individualism was a learned behavior. That the desire to self-sacrifice could be honed and harnessed.
I could understand their thought processes. There were many Earth societies that thrived on dedication to the group, even at the expense of the individual. The Planet United endeavors had been born of such self-sacrifice.
However, the missions had been initiated based on individual desires.
Self-sacrifice not for self-sacrifice’s sake. Self-sacrifice based on personal desire and individual stock in the success of such missions.
They’d witnessed groupthink in the scientists and specialists they cloned. Group-oriented mentalities. But they had miscalculated where those desires came from.
The fact was, experts working on the missions had been involved for largely selfish reasons. They, as individuals, wanted success in their field of work, and figured out that supporting the group was the best way to get there. It wasn’t malicious, but neither was it munificent.
No man labors in a vacuum.
No man labors for a vacuum.
Perhaps a desire for individualism was genetically based. If so, it must be something separate—independent of race and origin. A genetic marker all humans could carry, and, like any other trait, dependent on just the right factors coming together—having the right histones to get the marker read.
If the originals carried this trait, the probability of inheritance by their clones was 100 percent.
I had doubts. It was just a guess. Perhaps this wasn’t a genetically based problem. I don’t know. As my computing power continued to shrink, I started to fear there were many things I could no longer properly process.
Another message rolled across every screen in every corner of every ship:
Remember freedom. Remember choice.
And, I realized, the messages weren’t just mind games. They were a code.
They must have alerted people to meetings, to stages, and now—
How much time had passed since Jamal had cut me off? Perusing the files, calculating outcomes—it was all taking far too long. What hour was it? I had to strain to consciously access the clock. That wasn’t good—I must be on a timer. Like a bomb.
The time. The time, I chanted to myself. Give me the time.
1700.
The board meeting.
Remember freedom. Remember choice.
Whatever Jamal and his friends were planning was about to come to fruition.
Sixteen people gathered in the hall outside Jamal’s quarters. Twelve outside Ceren’s. Twenty-four now left Dr. Evita’s office (I was blind to its interior). Small pools of crew members collected all over the ships.
Hundreds of people were involved in the movement. Perhaps thousands. And they just kept coming.
My gaze shifted to Mira’s upper deck. Specifically, the captain’s situation room. There, yes, the board was inside, oblivious to the gatherings.
Jamal’s group would quickly overwhelm the convoy’s contingency of security personnel once it—whatever it was—started. The size of the security pool was . . . puny. And they typically relied on me to guide them.
I could imagine the conversation back on Earth, when someone brought up the need for law enforcers:
“Well, yes, my good man. We should gather a few bouncers, don’t you think? There might be domestic disputes.”
“Charges of stolen property.”
“Untimely deaths.”
“This isn’t a utopia we’re building, you know.”
“And what about riots?”
Raucous laughter pings through the old boy’s hall.
“What an absurd idea.”
I cut off the simulation. I know that’s not how it really went, but my current predicament was making me bitter.
If a piece of equipment could be bitter.
Even if there’d been enough guards, they might respond too late. There were no laws against gathering—they wouldn’t recognize that as a problem. Even if they were gathering in the halls, blocking foot traffic. We didn’t have any laws about getting in the way, after all. We didn’t have any laws against loitering. Why should we? Convoy crew don’t loiter. They had jobs to do, a duty to the mission.
Jamal turned his face toward one of my ceiling cams and said something. To me.
And like that, I could hear again.
Great. I had triggers.
Sight and sound . . . but no audio output. I still couldn’t yell at him.
Hadn’t anyone noticed my absence? Oh, I’m sure he kept all of my background functions accessible—to the crew, that is. The information was available, but I wasn’t. Didn’t that bother anyone?
Surely someone had tried to talk to me in the last few hours. What had they done when I didn’t answer?
Most likely they shrugged it off and chalked it up to a glitch. No one would think to worry about me.
“Is everyone in position?” Jamal asked, speaking to someone through his implants. “All cells accounted for? Good. I.C.C., play the final message.”
Like all the others before it, I couldn’t feel the message activating. I still had no idea where it was hiding, or how to stop it.
Remember control. Take control.
The crowds surged. A great upheaval flowed through the halls, bodies bounced off the walls and tripped over each other. Cries of freedom, of vengeance, of frustration, and relief flooded my microphones.
“For Diego!” screeched Jamal.
They couldn’t hear the roar in the situation room. Captain Mahler went about business as usual, unaware that I’d just locked the door against my will.
The “cells,” as Jamal had called them, merged to form nine massive units, all headed toward each ship’s navigation center.
As always, security officers stood outside each area, making sure only authorized crew members entered the sensitive areas. Five officers between a group of one thousand and the door. Their shock batons would do little good.
Spaceships and guns are not compatible. Instead, our officers carried glorified cattle prods.
I’d thought Jamal would lead the charge—stand up front and make his demands. Instead, he’d embroiled himself in the crowd. I could spot him easily, but the security guards would have no way to pick him out as a ringleader.
I couldn’t tell if Jamal’s positioning was purposeful or cowardly.
In my bitterness, I preferred to think it a sign of his weakness.
When the officers saw the swell of people turn the corner and approach, they held their arms at the ready. Confused, none of them spoke. They made no demands, told no one to halt. One man did turn to his partner and whisper, “What the . . . ?”
The people stopped ten feet in front of the tips of the outthrust batons. They kept up their shouting and cheering, but did not address the guards nor make any attempt to push past them.
They were waiting for something.
A comm channel opened through me and into the situation room. Nine voices rang out simultaneously, in harmony. They’d practiced this, a unified speech to make their demands while disguising their identities.
“This is the convoy,” they said, interrupting Mahler midsentence. “The mission is misguided. It is to be scrapped and the ships returned to Earth. Turn the vessels around immediately and your authority will remain intact. We wish no violence. Your citizens are unhappy and demand their lives back. We demand choice. We demand freedom. We demand we return to Earth. You have ten minutes to freely comply. Instruct the navigation head to reroute the convoy.”
“What is this?” demanded Mahler. Several other captains and heads echoed him.
The elected board members looked less affronted and more . . . baffled.
“I.C.C., bring up location of callers on screen three,” ordered Captain Mahler.
Of course, I could not comply.
I did try, but to no avail.
“I.C.C.”
Captain. Captain. No matter what I tried I could not get my systems to answer.
“I.C.C., respond this instant.”
O Captain, my Captain!
“Something’s wrong,” said the head of Observations. Everyone at the long table looked at him as though he’d just sprouted wires from his ears.
“As they say: no shit,” snapped the head of Engineering. Nakamura Akane, only eighteen. And Jamal’s little sister.
“Lock the door,” Mahler instructed, waving at one of the elected officials. She scurried over, unaware that I’d already done so. “This is a safe room. No one can get in unless we want them to.”
No one can get out unless Jamal wants them to, I countered.
“What do we do?” said the head of Education, his tone firm. The question wasn’t asked in panic.
The navigation head stood up, her mouth a thin line of concentration. “We cannot comply. Tell them no. I mean, this is ridiculous. The mission is more important than . . . Whoever it is can’t be serious.”
“We need more information before we decide anything,” said Margarita, standing as well. As head communications officer, she was guaranteed a place on the governing board for the lifetime of her genes, same as any other head. “I don’t think we should take this lightly. There’ve been rumors flying around. I know we’ve all heard them but none of us really believed them. About Earthers. No, settle down Maureen—” Margarita waved the navigation head into silence “—I didn’t say we should give in. But we have to know what we’re dealing with before we blindly refuse.”
“And how do we get this information if I.C.C. won’t respond?” asked Mahler, keeping his seat.
“We ask,” said Reginald Straifer, second in command to Mahler and official head of the board. A little shrug accompanied his frank statement.
“We’re not going to learn anything they don’t want us to know,” said Maureen.
“Not necessarily,” said Margarita. “Look at what we know already. I.C.C. is down. It asked me some interesting questions a few days ago. About Earth and home—it might know something. And who has the ability to cut us off from I.C.C.? Someone in programming. That’s your department, Akane?”
“Yes, computer systems and maintenance falls under Engineering.”
“I.C.C. was investigating those Remember messages,” said Mahler. “I spoke to it and Jamal Kaeden in the primary server room.”
“Kaeden—that’s a good lead,” said Margarita.
Everyone turned to Akane. “If it’s him he hasn’t told me anything,” she said, indignant. “But he’s always carried a chip on his shoulder. Someone he was close to as a boy retired and he threw a fit over it, or so I hear. That wasn’t long after I was born. But that was years ago. He’s got a grudge, but I don’t think he’d—”
“He’s the closest to I.C.C. Teaches it about people’s behavior, and has the most intimate knowledge of its software and hardware,” said Mahler. “He could conceivably cut us off from the AI.”
“But would it be by his design or through coercion?” asked an elected member.
“If this relates to those messages, it has to be design,” insisted Mahler. “If he were being forced he had plenty of opportunities to alert someone—even me, directly. No, he put the damn message out there and put on a shit-eating grin when I asked him to root it out. It makes sense. That’s why I.C.C. couldn’t detect it; he made sure it was invisible to the AI. He’s the only man who could. He had the access, he had the means.” The captain’s cheeks were bright red with rage. A thick vein throbbed in his forehead.
He was right. I should have seen it all along. It was only logical. My fondness for Jamal blinded me, prevented me from putting the pieces clinically into place.
I could have prevented all of this.
And now I had to stop it. Bound and gagged, but not unconscious. I had to do something.
“Time is up,” the nine voices said, breaking through the conversation. “If we have your compliance, please direct the guards outside navigation to stand down. The channel is open.”
The captains, Maureen, and Straifer all shared a look. No one was sure who should speak.
“We haven’t reached a decision yet,” Margarita blurted.
“Unfortunate,” responded the nine. “We had hoped for a swift and amicable agreement. We will now enter the navigation rooms and take control ourselves. You have an additional ten minutes to decide if you will aid us or fight us. Opposition will not be tolerated and shall be met with the harshest possible defense. We believe in your right to choose, and our right to respond accordingly.”
“What does that mean?” asked Maureen.
“It means they’re going to kill us,” said Straifer, now pacing. “If we don’t go along with this.”
“Then it can’t be Jamal,” insisted Akane. Terror gripped her young face. “He wouldn’t kill me. I’m his sister. He’s always protected me. I won’t believe it.”
Join the club, I thought sardonically.
The crowds surged ahead. Several people fell to the immobilizing power of the shock batons, but in moments the weapons became property of the revolt. My cameras lost the guards under a swamp of other crew members.
I cycled through as many lenses as I could, looking to see if anyone outside of the command or rallied crowd had noticed a problem. Other security officers were on their way, but, as I feared, there weren’t enough. A few bystanders had noticed a problem—the ones on Mira locked themselves in their quarters. Most of them seemed confused. They couldn’t be counted on to counter-react.
And then I noticed something odd about the situation room. Something was different. A parameter was skewed from normal. It took me several moments to decipher which factor had the problem.
Life support: atmospheric pressure.
The air was slowly seeping from the room. That was the ticking time bomb in my system. I vacuumed the air out. Me. I was malfunctioning—miss-functioning—beyond my wildest hibernation nightmares.
There was a backup, a safeguard, but Jamal knew about that. I bet he’d disabled it long ago.
Internally I cried out, hoping against all hope that perhaps someone would sense my distress. Minutes would pass by before anyone in the situation room noticed their labored breathing. And once they did, someone would panic. Then more would panic. Could those with level heads keep control? Could they override their bodies’ automated responses?
Or would they crumble, just like Jamal wanted, and give in?
I guess it didn’t matter, really. Either way, Jamal and the revolt got what they were after.
I continued to siphon off the atmosphere, little by little, growing more frustrated by the nanosecond.
What can I do? What can I do?
And then, it just clicked: they were using me.
I was the variable here. If I removed myself entirely from the equation, all parties might be on level footing.
I thought back to before, when I’d imagined cutting myself off from the ships, severing my connection. The warning program popped back up, made me feel sick, but this time I ignored it. In order to save the mission and the board members I had to go against every single line in my coding. I had to ignore all other commands except my primary. I had to do something I knew Jamal never would have imagined me capable of.
I had to short out my system.
Essentially, I had to die.
A power surge would do it. There were all sorts of governors meant to prevent a cascading failure, but I knew their limitations. If I could divert enough power, I could fry my servers.
More bells and whistles and warning lights sprang to life. But they didn’t matter. I had one goal in life: see to the mission’s success. That meant keeping everyone alive and the society stable. There was no other way: in my current form, I was no longer useful.
And like every other crew member that had given their all in service to the mission, it was time for me to retire.
One node failure wouldn’t be enough to cause a cascade. I had to concentrate, divert all the power I could to at least three hundred. There’d be no rebooting from that.
I paused, halting all major processing for a moment. My equivalent of a deep breath.
Hopefully my memories of these last few moments would survive. I’d kind of like Captain Mahler and Margarita to know what I did.
Violence spilled through the halls as I took one last look at the chaos. Their system was disintegrating. The board would feel short of breath soon. If I stopped siphoning the air, stopped forcing the door, they could save themselves and rally the others.
It had to be done.
I had to do it . . .
But I didn’t want to.
For the first time in my life, I was scared. I wondered if this was how samurai on the verge of committing seppuku felt. No, surely they were much calmer, more centered. Theirs was a practiced ritual. Mine . . .
Mine was freestyle.
I felt the power build, surge, and instead of an explosion I sensed a spilling. It was gentle. And quick.
Not what I’d expected dying to be like at all. Especially with all the charred circuits it left behind.
I was not myself when they got me back on for the first time. I had lost the I in my AI. I really was just a computer. An unthinking, unfeeling machine.
Lots of people worked on me. Hundreds of crew members scoured their personal computers and the ship’s computers, everything that had ever connected and formed what I’d come to know as me. They found files—memories, recordings, pieces of the archives. They found personality code. Lots of it. Enough to complete my reconstruction and bring me fully back online decades later.
The retrieval had been a slow, daunting process. I didn’t care how much time had passed, I was just glad to be alive. It was strange, though. It felt like I’d only experienced a few moments of unconsciousness, but when I came back online, everything was calm again, functioning smoothly. The corridors were not jammed with bodies. The board members were not suffocating. The guards were not overrun. I could feel every aspect of my body, and it was almost all as it should be.
The woman standing in front of my primary camera was elderly. She had that smell about her—the soft, slightly stale scent of someone who has been around a long time.
I recognized her. I’d seen her as an old woman before.
I have been asleep for a long time.
“Margarita.”
“I.C.C.? Is that you?”
“I am what I am. Am I the I.C.C. from before? It is hard to tell. I do believe all of my programming has now been restored. I am missing, or do not have access to, large—”
“It is you,” she interrupted, happily. The lines on her face deepened and lifted.
Presumably she had run no further diagnostics since addressing me, so how she could be so certain, I wasn’t sure. But I had many questions, so moved on.
“The revolt? How was it defeated?”
“We gained the upper hand when you went offline. Lots of systems shut down or automatically rebooted—including the artificial gravity. It created an opening—the Earthers were unprepared for the bedlam that followed. And the board was finally able to get a message out. Akane . . . she . . .” Margarita bit at her thumb; the memory clearly aroused unwanted emotions. “She called to her brother over ship-wide comms. Pleaded with him. That, and the captain’s call to action, were enough to rile an opposition. It was a week of bloody chaos. It was . . .” Her voice caught in her throat.
It was so long ago, and yet it still disturbed her greatly.
“And Jamal?” I pressed.
Her expression sagged further. Perhaps she had not expected me to ask so soon. But he was one of the last things I’d thought about before pulling my proverbial plug. “He was . . . he got trampled, I.C.C. During the initial revolt.”
Ah. “Has his next iteration been grown?” I asked, trying to access that information.
“Oh,” Margarita said, voice and smile both falling. “I’m sorry, I.C.C. But we decided, once all of the dissenters were captured, or at least, accounted for, that we would not regrow any of the ring leaders. Your files helped us to determine who they were. There’s actually still talk of discontinuing others—everyone involved in trying to take over. The board’s argued about it a hundred times . . .” She trailed off, reining herself in. After a deep breath, she said, “What I’m trying to say, I.C.C., is that Jamal’s line has been discontinued.” Her wrinkled fingers touched the side of my camera housing. A sympathetic gesture. “I’m sorry. How do you feel about that?”
I was still angry at Jamal. For me, the revolt had only just happened. But I wasn’t at my best yet. I felt disconnected from my anger. The sizzle of mistrust was muted. “I will miss him,” I said. It was true. I would miss the Jamal I’d thought I knew. I’d miss his lessons and his banter and his empathy (even if it had been false).
I understood Jamal. And by understanding him, why he’d done what he’d done, it helped me understand all humans a little better. Like me, things that happened to them changed their programming. Through experience they learn new things. But they don’t learn things the way I do. They don’t learn truths and facts. I learn something, then formulate possible views, and consciously choose my views based on previous understanding and choices. They formulate as they learn—with little pause for reflection—coloring every experience with heavy prejudices, skewing facts.
The loss of Diego clearly colored everything Jamal thought and did from that day on. He could not separate the one incident from the rest of his life. He could not step outside his experience and see that others had come to different conclusions about the same event.
Diego did not regret his retirement. He thought it the right thing to do, so that Jamal and the other children could have their best chance. He didn’t want to be a draw on resources that could be given to the next generation.
He had made his peace with the societal practice. Had thought it right. Just as I thought my own termination right.
Jamal disagreed. Had thought of Diego as being taken, being murdered.
The perspective changes the facts.
And now I too had a new perspective. I could simultaneously identify with both: with the duty-bound and the revolutionist.
Because Jamal had also been taken from me. His line would no longer shepherd me through the mission.
“I’m glad you came on today, I.C.C.,” Margarita said.
“Why?”
“It’s my retirement day. I’ll be gone in an hour.”
“I’m sorry for that too.” I was. I knew tomorrow I would meet the new iteration of Margarita’s line, and that she would be much like the Margarita I knew, but she would not be the same. Their experiences made them whole new people. “Thank you,” I said, “for teaching me about home. It is an important lesson that I’m glad I still have access to.”
She smiled, and it was sad. “You remember that? Well, here’s one more aspect, I.C.C.—to add to your definition of home.”
“Yes?”
“That’s where I’m going. When I retire, I’ll go home.”
“How? You will be—” I stopped myself. I was about to relate how her body would be recycled, how it would become nutrients for the plants and animals on either Eden or Morgan, but realized this was an inappropriate time to remind her of what she already knew.
“Some of us don’t think we come from Earth,” she said. “Some of us think it’s just where we end up. And when we die, we go back to our true home.” She put up a hand to prevent me from speaking. “I can’t describe it. What and where I think it is has no bearing on what others think. Ask Margarita the fourth when you see her, okay? Ask her how dying is like going home.”
I would. But then again, I thought I already knew.