“Imprinting is,” he said. “See, androids aren’t like bots, or autopilot AIs. Bot brains are just software machines, built out of databases and search trees and whatnot. But when the white coat brigade came up with the first androids, they started with models of the human brain.”
“I knew that much,” I said. “That’s why androids have the same expressions and body language as humans, and their emotions are close enough that we don’t have much trouble understanding them. But they also modified a lot of stuff to make androids, right?”
“More than I could tell you about. Just running a big brain simulation on a computer would be stupidly slow, so they had to rebuild pretty much everything out of normal software. There’s all kinda enhancements, too. That’s why androids can do things like swap bodies, or import skill packs.”
“I can do a lot of the same things,” I admitted. “Does that mean…?”
He laughed. “Naw. Don’t you worry about that, Alice. A lot of human upgrade projects use android tech. Everyone has something they’ve seen an android do that they wish they could copy, so that’s an obvious place for the mad scientists to start. It’s the control methods you’ve gotta watch out for.”
“Control methods?”
“It the old days they used to be pretty crude. They’d stick a bunch of rules in an android’s head that they had to follow, or yank out their self-awareness so they’d just be obedient zombies. There was some creepy shit walking around two hundred years ago, let me tell you.”
“Sounds like it.” I shivered. Zombie androids? How could people be so cruel?
“Then they got a better handle on emotions, and decided that was a better way to come at it. Feelings are what make people do most everything they do, when you get to the bottom of things. So nowadays when you buy a companion android and turn it on, the moment it’s transponder sees that you’re it’s new owner? Wham! Love at first sight. They make it a damned sight stronger than anything a human brain can feel, and it never wears off neither.”
“Oh. Well, I’ve never had anything like that happen. But then, what’s a religious imprint?”
He signed. “I don’t guess you have much use for religion, growing up on Felicity.”
“Not really. It was always so obvious that the matrons were just babbling nonsense.”
“Guess you’ll have to take my word for it, then. See, there’s this bit in the brain that goes off sometimes when a worshipper really believes in something. Makes it seem all special and sacred, like. A religious imprint sets that off whenever an android sees a human, basically makes them think we’re gods.”
I stared at him.
“That’s disgusting.”
He shrugged. “That’s humans for you. People say ol’ Dusty’s a misanthrope, but I say I’m just a realist. Anyway, I can help you keep a lookout for signs if you like, but I don’t think you got nothing to worry about. Seems to me your folks were transhumanists, and that sort wouldn’t go putting no imprints or control codes in their little girl.”
“That doesn’t bother you? If they were transhumanists?”
“Nope. Don’t bother me none if you’re smarter’n me. Hell, half the crew could say that. I don’t figure anyone on this ship’s gonna rat you out, neither. We all got things we’d rather not talk about.”
“Like Naoko?”
“Heh. Captain’ll have that one fixed soon, kid. Just give it a couple weeks. Now I’d better get to what I’m supposed to be working on. You got this?”
“Got it, Dusty. See you later.”
When he was gone I let out a big sigh of relief. That could have gone a lot worse. But if Dusty didn’t care what I was, maybe the rest of the crew wouldn’t either.
I wasn’t going to go around telling them, of course. That would be pushing my luck. But maybe, just maybe, I didn’t have to worry quite so much.
Chapter 13
I felt the faint tremor of the ship’s transition to the Beta Layer as I was plugging Emla into her new body. I was starting to get used to the idea of flying through an antimatter universe on a regular basis, but I still diverted a thread of my attention to watch the external sensor feed while I worked. Just in case.
The body wasn’t much, just a cheap humanoid chassis made of quick-fab materials. I couldn’t afford anything better, even if I had time to wait for a long fab job. But I shelled out the extra two credits for a good coating of syntheskin, with fur and whiskers, so at least she wouldn’t look like a bot. I closed the little hatch hidden at the base of her skull, leaving a barely-visible seam in the syntheskin that immediately started to heal shut.
Emla twitched, and opened her eyes. She looked around groggily for a moment.
“Oh, big driver mismatch. Updating and patching now. Sight and hearing are good. Tactile mapping is a mess… ah, there’s the adaptor. Working now, and I can feel my limbs. No sense of taste. Oh, of course, no digestion.”
“Yeah, sorry about that. I can’t really afford a nice body for you.”
She blinked up at me in surprise. “Mistress Alice? You personally supervised my awakening? Why, thank you for your kindness, Mistress. But that was just my bootup sequence. I wasn’t complaining, really I wasn’t. I’m happy to have any kind of body, and the specs on this one aren’t much different than when I worked at the reactor.”
“Really? Your bio says you worked there for years. They didn’t put you in a real body?”
She sat up carefully. “We were making short half-life isotopes for nuke packs, and secondary radiation is a big problem with that kind of operation. We all had to use cheap temporary bodies, and switch them out every few months.”
“That sounds horrible.”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t too bad. The extra shielding in my head always made me feel like one of those bobble-head toys, and I hated being clumsy. But the masters never set foot in the building, so we could have hobbies as long as we were careful.”
I quizzed her about it as we walked back to the cargo hold, and I got to work sorting AI cores from bot brains. She seemed happy enough to talk, and it helped keep me from getting bored.
It was a strange life that she’d led. Built in a factory, and waking up for the first time already programmed with all the skills she’d ever need. Assigned to work on a construction team supervising bots, and then transferred to one of the industrial facilities that she’d helped build. As far as I could tell she’d never even seen a human before her rescue.
“That was the best day of my life,” she confided when I asked. “At first I was so sad that I wasn’t useful anymore, and the masters were going to get rid of me. Then Master Sandoval told me I belong to the Underground Railroad now, and they’re going to send me to a colony where I’ll get to help people. I might even get to have an individual master to serve, instead of some faceless abstraction. That would be the best!”
“I suppose it would be a step up,” I agreed. “You know, it’s really weird how you can be so assertive about wanting to be a slave.”
She actually rolled her eyes at me.
“You’re anthropomorphizing, Mistress Alice. Do you know how the slave mentality mod works?”