That caught me off guard. “No? I mean, she’s listed as a crew member, and she seems happy enough.”
“Of course she is. She was designed to crave the life she currently leads, and to be content with it. She loves Jenna, Lina and Kara with all her heart, because they’re her pack and her bonding instincts are overwhelmingly strong. She loves her work, because she was designed to enjoy it. She loves Chief Benson even more, because while she’s nominally free her instincts still see him as her master. All of these feelings are as real as anything you might experience, but they were all carefully engineered to make her embrace a life of subservience.”
I scowled, and kicked idly at a bulkhead. “Is that what they do here, then? Make people, and program them to want to be slaves? Is that supposed to make it right?”
“That is a topic of great contention, Alice. Most colonies allow serfdom of one kind or another, provided that the serfs are kept reasonably happy. Some forbid the practice, or restrict it to bots and specialized AIs that clearly fall short of proper sentience. But it would hardly be practical to limit our business to those rare exceptions.”
“We lost that fight a hundred years ago, kiddo,” Dusty commented over the com. “Mind you, it’s kind of suspicious how many slave revolts there are these days. The mind engineers say a place like Hoshida should be stable for hundreds of years, but I can hardly think of one that doesn’t have some kind of unrest. Ah, but old Dusty couldn’t possibly have anything to do with all the hacking and smuggling that must go into making that happen, eh?”
Naoko gave a frustrated sigh. “Dusty, she’s impetuous enough as it is. Please don’t encourage her.”
“That’s a fair point, I suppose. Stops like this, it’s best for an innocent young lady to keep her eyes open and her lips sealed. Shit’s always complicated, especially these days. Once you know what’s what, then you can decide what you’re going to do about it.”
“That sounds like good advice, Dusty,” I said. “Could we maybe talk about it more, when we aren’t so busy?”
“Ol’ Dusty’s always happy to run his mouth, kiddo. Ask anyone, they’ll tell you.”
I still wasn’t happy about it, but he was right. I needed this job, and it would be stupid to raise a fuss when I didn’t even know what I was talking about.
We had the baggage handling checkpoint set up by the time the Square Deal dropped into the Beta Layer. The transition sent a barely-perceptible vibration through the ship, and I don’t think Naoko even noticed. But I couldn’t help stopping to check the external view.
The Beta Layer is an antimatter universe, after all. Sure, space is mostly empty, and the Square Deal’s deflectors would keep stray debris from touching the hull. But a million vidshows had taught me that you don’t mess with antimatter, and I couldn’t help but be a little nervous about it.
Maybe it made the captain nervous too, because we were there for barely twenty minutes. As soon as the hyperspace converter was back down to a safe operating temperature we made our Alpha transition, and I turned my full attention back to my work with a sigh of relief.
Throwing together a couple dozen miniature palaces for a bunch of rich guys and their hordes of servants was a lot of work, even with bot crews doing most of the labor. Bots are only smart enough to handle routine work, and even the class two AI Naoko used as an assistant got confused pretty easily. It didn’t help that our passengers all submitted their requirements using different data formats, and they had all kinds of weird requests. I still can’t figure out why anyone would want a bathtub that fills with chocolate milk.
But they were paying, so I got to run around trying to supervise twenty different work crews at the same time. We converted a whole cargo hold to passenger quarters, laying out quick-fab walls and floors to subdivide the cavernous space, and then went to work on the detailed floor plans. Naoko did all the hard parts, translating the passenger requests into a standard design format and then compiling that into step-by-step directions for the bot crews. My job was keeping an eye on the bots and letting her know when they screwed up, which inevitably happened a lot on a rush job like this.
It would have been a real pain, except that around the time we got the fifth work crew started I remembered what Doctor Misra had told me about multithreaded awareness. Searching the ship’s stores I found some little flying observation bots that had a data stream I could interface with, and requisitioned one to keep an eye on a work crew.
Sure enough, it was no trouble at all to watch one crew through the bot’s cameras while I kept an eye on another one in person. There were five more of those bots in inventory, and using them all at the same time turned out to be just as easy. So I ended up with seven viewpoints to watch all the work crews, which was enough to keep up as long as I paid attention.
I worked right through lunch, grabbing a couple of meal bars and my nutrient shake to eat on the run. It was starting to look like we’d actually be ready by the time the ship docked at Takeo Station, but it was going to be close.
Then we dropped into normal space, and started getting calls from our passengers. Or rather, from their servants. It seemed like every last one of them wanted to make sure that they’d have a spot on the ship, and never mind that we’d already sent them automatic confirmations. They all wanted to talk, too. After the third five-minute call Naoko was about ready to tear her hair out.
“Alice, I need you to handle my overflow,” she said, hurriedly setting up a call manager program. I accepted an electronic invitation from it, and it opened a virtual display panel for me showing a list of incoming calls.
“Are you sure about this, Naoko? I don’t look like I should be in charge of anything.”
“We can fix that. Computer, set up a cosmetic com filter for Alice. Make her look ten years older, change her voice to match, and set her rank label to ‘Assistant Stewardess’. There, now use that to answer the calls I can’t get to.”
“What if-”
“Just smile and nod and tell them everything will be taken care of,” she interrupted. “As long as you don’t quote any prices we can work things out later. Hello, this is Naoko Sokol of the Square Deal. How may I be of service?”
I listened with a fragment of my attention. Darn it, I was bad at handling people. I didn’t know how to do this. What if I messed everything up, and lost us a passenger? These people were paying thousands of credits for their fancy quarters and giant cargo allowances.
Another call appeared in the queue. I glanced at Naoko, but she was still busily assuring someone that they’d be able to board tonight. She caught my eye, and waved at the indicator.
Darn it.
I took a deep breath, and accepted the call.
“Hello, this is Alice Long of the Square Deal. How may I be of service?”