“Like I said, there’s a colony called Amity that’ll take them in. There’s a few humans there that act as masters for the androids that have to have one, and help the ones with a lot of restrictions get by. But mostly it’s just free androids from a thousand different colonies, living their own lives and doing whatever they want. So what do you say? Will you help a few hundred cute little mouse girls make it to their new home?”
“Mouse girls?” I had a sudden image of Dika carelessly tossed in one of those crates, lost among thousands of mindless bots.
“Boys too,” he said. He reached for the computer, and sent me a file.
Four hundred and thirteen database entries. Names, pictures and ID codes. Notes on their job skills, restrictions, personalities and habits. It all flooded in, assimilated in an instant by my overly-efficient subconscious, and then they weren’t strangers anymore. I knew their names, their faces, and their stories. Could I really leave little Kiri to be plugged into a bot, and never make music again? Or let Don and Lena be sold to different buyers, after they’d been together for so many years?
No. I couldn’t.
“Alright,” I relented. “I’ll help if I can. Have you found one of them yet? Maybe if I compare one to a bot module I can spot something different.”
“Not yet,” he admitted. “There’s a lot of AI cores to check, and it takes a minute to plug one in and wait for it to boot up. Probably take me a week to go through them all, and that’s if I didn’t have shifts to work.”
I picked up a bot core, and looked it over carefully. You’d think something like this would have a label somewhere. Aha! There was a long number inscribed in the smart metal surface. Probably a serial number, and I bet an android that was decade old would have a different number of digits than a bot that was made a few weeks ago.
Unfortunately the numbers were so small that Dusty could barely read them, and it took him forever to count the digits on each one. So it was mostly up to me to dig through the crate looking for one that was different.
“Why would anyone ship a container full of bot cores anyway?” I asked as I worked. “Couldn’t the buyer just fab them?”
“No one gives out the designs for their newest models, Alice. That’s why these cores are all packed in tamper-proof cases. Try and take one apart to see how it works, and it’ll melt itself. So if you want the latest and greatest you have to buy it.”
“Does that mean these things are live, and they’ve got sensors watching us?” I frowned at the module in my hand. It wasn’t emitting anything, but neither was I so that didn’t mean much.
“Probably. I was hoping there’d be some way to ping them for ID codes, but damned if I can figure out how. Ah, pardon my French.”
“Don’t censor yourself on my account, Dusty. Oh, I think I’ve found something.”
Near the bottom of the crate I’d found a core that didn’t gleam as brightly as the others. There were scuff marks here and there on the smart metal surface, and it was almost half a gram lighter than the other ones I’d handled. I turned it over, and found that the serial number was engraved in a different spot.
Wait, I recognized that ID code. That was Emla, entry thirty-seven in Dusty’s database. The white-furred mouse girl who worked in a breeder reactor, and snuck into the cooling ponds to go swimming when she was off shift. How odd, to think that I was holding a person in the palm of my hand.
Also a little suspicious.
“Seriously, Dusty? How could anyone mistake this for a bot core?”
He took the core from me, and gave it a doubtful look. “Looks the same as all the others to me, girl. You sure that’s one of them?”
I rolled my eyes. “Duh! It’s not even the same color, and the engraving is three millimeters to the right of where the bots would have it. Besides, that’s Emla’s ID. I should have realized those are universally unique ID codes and not serial numbers.”
He looked closer, and then shook his head. “If you say so, Alice. Let me just plug this in, then. Gotta be sure.”
“You really can’t see the difference?” I asked.
“Nope. Guess ol’ Dusty’s eyes must be going.”
Huh. Baseline senses must be even worse than I’d thought. How did humans even find their way around when they were basically blind?
Dusty plugged the AI core into his computer, and we waited for it to boot. A few moments later the holoprojector came to life, and a furry face appeared.
“Hello?” She said uncertainly, in French. “Oh, this is a computer. Is there… yes, I see the camera now. Hello sir, madam. I am Emla 5391. Is one of you my new master?”
“Naw, we’re just making sure we know who you are, Emla. You’re on a ship right now, but the next time you wake up you’ll be on Amity.”
Her whiskers twitched, and her ears perked up. “Thank you, sir. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Actually, yes,” I said. “Dusty, is it going to hurt anything if we leave her out for a few hours? Now that I know what to look for I’m sure I’ll be able to find the others, but it will go faster if I have someone to pack the crates back up after I go through them.”
“Seems to me a bot could do that bit,” he mused.
I gave him an exasperated look, and turned back to projection. “Ignore him, he’s being difficult. I’m Alice, by the way, and he’s Dusty. If I fab you a body, can you help me out for a bit?”
“Yes, Mistress!” She said enthusiastically. “I know how to clean, pack and organize things. Thank you for letting me serve.”
I chuckled. “Alright, then. I’ll be putting you in a bot, but I found a design in our open source database that’s a lot like your old body. Hopefully it won’t be too weird for you, but let me know if you have any problems with it. Driver glitches, dysphoria, whatever.”
“Yes, Mistress!” She chirped. “Ready for shutdown!”
I unplugged her, and the image vanished. Dusty shook his head.
“Careful there, Alice. That one’ll imprint on you if you give her half a chance. What are you up to?”
“You’re supposed to be on shift in half an hour,” I pointed out. “She’ll be better company than a bot, and maybe I can quiz her about her life. I want to know more about what things are really like for them.”
“I suppose that’s harmless enough,” he said. “Just don’t get the poor girl’s hopes up.”
“I’ll try not to,” I assured him. “I’m looking through manuals now, trying to figure out what triggers her programming so I can avoid it.”
I paused.
“Dusty? What is imprinting, really? Naoko doesn’t want to talk about it, but I think she’s afraid I might have something like that.”
His eyebrows rose.
“Is she, now? Well, I can’t say as I’ve seen any signs of that. Have you ever been in love?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I mean, there was someone I liked back on Felicity, and I may have met someone else last night. But the stories all talk about love like it’s some huge thing that just sweeps you away, and it wasn’t like that.”