“But the yakuza could,” I realized. “Sounds like a big conspiracy. But why would they try to blow us up, when they’re trying to get information out of us?”
“Rival groups,” he pointed out. “It seems to me that someone is more concerned about keeping his rivals away from the prize than winning it for himself.”
“Oh. What are we going to do, sir?”
“I’ll take care of it, Alice. We’ll have to leave our route, which is going to cost us, and you won’t be seeing another civilized port for some time. But we can’t do business with crime bosses causing us trouble at every turn. I’ll just have to take things to the oyabun, and hope for the best.”
I thought about how neatly he’d arranged for backup to show up at just the right moment to handle that pirate ship.
“Hope. Right. Somehow, I bet you’ll have a few aces up your sleeve to go with the positive thinking, sir.”
“Now you’re starting to catch on. First, though, we’re going to have to get Naoko’s problems taken care of. If you want to get yourself looked at while we’re there, it’s probably the best opportunity you’ll get.”
“This is the mystery genius who can break hardware locks? I think I’m fine, sir, but is there any chance he could help Emla?”
Captain Sokol glanced at the carrying case that someone had left on the nightstand next to my bed.
“I’d say there’s a decent chance. She’s not part of my crew, so the agreement we have won’t cover her. But sometimes my contact does people favors. I can take you along, if you want to ask.”
“Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.”
Chapter 16
I wasn’t expecting Captain Sokol’s contact to live in subspace.
Most of the crew probably didn’t know where we were, since the outside feed had been blanked out for the last two days. But I could sense the ship’s maneuvers by the flexing of the manipulator field that protected the crew compartments, and even the gentle transitions across subspace layers were obvious to me. I’m not sure why Mom thought I’d need high-fidelity strain gauges built into all the long bones of my skeleton, but they picked up even the minute stress of our drop into Subspace Three easily enough.
The subspace universes are outside of normal space, in the same way that hyperspace is rolled up inside it. Each layer is older and less dense than the one before, and the further you get from normal space the wonkier the cosmological forces are. Not many people go there, because even the first subspace layer doesn’t have much star formation. The layers beyond that are even emptier, until you get down to Subspace Five where space is expanding so fast it can tear a ship apart.
Well, I guess that made the outer layers a good place to hide out.
“This place always gives me the creeps,” the First Mate grumbled as we boarded the Speedy Exit.
“I know, Beatrice,” Captain Sokol replied. “But you know it doesn’t trust anyone else to dock with its ship. It’s you or me, and we both know you’re the better pilot.”
“That doesn’t mean I have to like it, sir. I’m just glad you don’t have to go inside anymore. I don’t even want to know what kind of weapons that crazy thing has.”
I frowned. Beatrice was nice enough to Naoko and the techs, and she even seemed to get along with Chief West. What could get that kind of reaction from someone who was friends with an infomorph?
There was only one thing that made sense, but I waited until we’d passed through the security checkpoint to say it.
“So, your contact is a rogue AI?”
Beatrice gave me a shocked look, but the captain just nodded.
“I told you she was a bright girl, Beatrice.”
Beatrice shook her head, and opened the hatch to the bridge. “Guess so. Just be polite and follow the captain’s lead, Alice. Strange Loop Sleuth is probably the most alien mind you’re ever going to meet, but it won’t hurt you as long as you don’t do anything stupid.”
I clutched nervously at the carrying case holding Emla’s core. “Um, just what kind of AI is this?”
Captain Sokol claimed a set, and carefully settled the carrying case holding Naoko’s core in his lap. He motioned me to the third crew seat with a serious look.
“There’s no way to be certain, but I suspect Strange Loop Sleuth is the product of one of the less famous superintelligence projects.”
I gulped.
“In school they told us that kind of thing always ends badly, sir. Like, glass the planet before it finishes killing everyone and builds its own navy badly. I don’t suppose that’s just propaganda?”
Beatrice snorted. “Nope. Anything with an IQ above two hundred is a ticking time bomb, kid.”
“This bomb has been ticking for at least a century, Beatrice,” the captain said mildly. “But it’s true that such projects are generally ill-fated. Making a sane, stable artificial mind of human intelligence is a difficult enough project, and it took centuries of trial and error to perfect the modifications that we see in androids today. A mind ten times more intelligent would likely require a thousand times the complexity, and a billion times more processing power. Attempting to leap directly from the current state of the art to an undertaking on that scale requires considerable hubris.”
“The first prototype is always nuts,” Beatrice interjected. “But you have to run the damned thing to figure out what you did wrong, and how to fix it. So now you’re trying to keep an insane AI that’s ten times smarter than you are locked up for years while you tinker with its code. If you’re really lucky the thing might just escape and slink off into Dark Space, but usually they’re too crazy for that. So instead you get mindhacks and memetic weapons, and then the badness escalates until everyone is dead.”
“Oh. So, I guess Strange Loop Sleuth is the kind that was smart enough to just escape and disappear?”
“It calls itself an artist of applied mathematics,” Captain Sokol said. “It has no interest in interacting with humans, and no need to collect resources on a scale that would draw attention. I’ve been supplying it with data deliveries for some decades now, and it provides occasional technical assistance in return.”
Applied math. I guess that would mean cryptography, and hacking, and maybe physical engineering too… wait. If you actually understand how things work, is there anything you couldn’t describe as ‘applied math’? You can’t just simulate everything from first principles, of course. The quantum math is too intractable for that, and even if it wasn’t you’d need infinite information to predict chaotic systems like weather or cultural evolution. But that was probably where the ‘artist’ part came in.
Tricky.
“How should I act, sir?” I asked.
“Be polite. Answer any questions it asks you honestly. Don’t try to make small talk, or bring up anything aside from our business here. Don’t use gendered pronouns to refer to it, and assume it can hear anything we say from now until we jump out.”