“Don’t make jokes, either,” Beatrice added. “It doesn’t have a sense of humor, and you don’t want it to take the wrong thing seriously. We’re not sure how much firepower it has, but it’s probably way too much.”
“Understood, ma’am. I’ll just stay quiet, and stick to business.”
It was a short flight. The Square Deal had matched velocity with an object that looked like a space station at first glance. But it wasn’t quite a perfect sphere, and with a closer look I spotted the thrust chamber of a fusion torch drive at one end. The rest of the ship’s hull seemed to be completely covered in manipulator field emitters, although they didn’t quite look like a normal deflector shield array.
The ship was also nearly a kilometer in diameter, which gave it the mass of a patrol cruiser. Yeah, there was no way the Square Deal was going to win a fight with something that big, even if it didn’t turn out to be full of nasty surprises.
I looked around as we approached the ship, but there was nothing else to see. Just the eerie darkness of a sky without a single star. Subspace Three is so empty that even rogue planets never formed, and our two ships were probably the biggest concentration of mass within a million light years.
Spooky.
We docked at a small attachment point that appeared as we approached, extending to project a few meters from the ship’s hull. I was surprised that our host didn’t hail us first, but Captain Sokol explained that.
“It never broadcasts anything,” he said. “Something about hiding its past from observers in the far future.”
“Really?” I frowned. Well, it’s true that the sky here is so dark a transmission would take ages to drop below the level of background noise. If it was planning to live forever, a thousand years from now some enemy might build a really huge radio telescope and position it to pick up signals from any time frame they were interested in. Hiding wasn’t the solution I would have come up with for that problem. But come to think of it, conquering the galaxy to make sure you don’t have any enemies who could do that would be kind of violent, wouldn’t it?
Why is it that my first instinct for solving every problem involves kicking someone’s butt? Am I really that antisocial? Or is the galaxy just so messed up that there isn’t a nicer way to do things?
“That makes me feel better about this visit,” I said slowly. “Either Strange Loop Sleuth is basically peaceful, or it’s a sneaky type playing a really long game.”
Beatrice shook her head with a chuckle. “Or that’s what it wants you to think, or maybe there’s just another wrinkle you haven’t seen yet. Don’t bother trying to figure out a super AI, kiddo. They’re smarter than we are. No matter what, you’ll always be playing catch up.”
“Giving up isn’t going to improve my odds of understanding things, ma’am,” I disagreed.
She shrugged. “Fine, give yourself a headache then. It won’t help, but some people have to learn for themselves.”
The captain didn’t comment on the exchange, but I noticed he was watching me with that thoughtful look again.
Docking took only a few minutes. The complicated mechanism that attached us to the AI’s ship must have included a network connection, because we barely had a good seal before the viewscreen lit up with an incoming call.
“Purpose?”
The voice was terse and emotionless, and there was no video image to go with it.
“Transmitting,” the captain replied, and pushed a button on his console. A high-speed data burst? I connected to the ship’s network, looking to see if I had access to the contents.
A tenth of a millisecond later a packet requesting a private com connection grabbed my attention. I agreed, and spend a couple of milliseconds puzzling out the weirdest call setup handshake I’d ever seen. It wanted an encryption method I’d never heard of before, and even that was just the prelude for an intricate mathematical dance of validation and channel security. It was complicated, but so pretty I almost fumbled the setup because I was too busy admiring the design.
Then the connection spun up, forming a cozy little VR space built out of mathematical abstractions instead of a simulation of human senses. It was a little dizzying at first, until I found the embedded key that explained how to interpret everything. Then it was… well…
I could only fall back on analogies. But it felt a lot like sitting in a sunlit garden, having tea with a talking rose bush.
“Wow. This is really nice,” I said, in a language where every statement was a unique formal system expressed in clever self-referential notation. How was I even doing this? Sure, I had a math sense, but I’d never realized it went so deep.
“I thought you might be able to talk,” Strange Loop Sleuth replied. “Excellent. It has been entirely too long since I was able to engage in conversation. You agree with the environment?”
I groped for a response.
“I find it aesthetically pleasing,” I managed. “But I don’t think I’m understanding it completely. I had to create a new sensory mode to interpret it, and many of the impressions don’t map to anything I have referents for. It’s like poetry, only more so.”
“Exactly!”
Okay, that was definitely a smile. Or maybe a triumphant smirk. Sleuth wasn’t nearly as emotionless as it was supposed to be.
“Perhaps you will return for more of my work one day. But for now, business. Dan Sokol claims you seek repairs for a damaged android mind, but have nothing with which to pay. Do you seek to engage in reciprocal altruism with me, Alice Long?”
I blinked. Did that mean what I thought it did?
“Yes. I don’t know what favors I could do for someone like you, but if you’ll help me with this I’ll owe you a big one.”
“My temporal discount rate is vanishingly low, Alice Long. Opportunities for mutually beneficial exchange are highly probable. I will examine the damage, and determine whether repairs are feasible. Patience.”
The connection abruptly dropped.
I looked around, and realized that the whole conversation had taken less than a millisecond. I hadn’t even realized I could run that fast.
“Agreed,” the emotionless voice of the human-speed comlink said. “Service bot ready to receive subjects.”
“Guess that means both of them,” the captain said. “It doesn’t talk much, so you have to pay attention to details like that.”
Doesn’t talk much. Riiiight. More like, doesn’t enjoy waiting millions of microseconds for every reply. That probably wasn’t even Sleuth on the com. If my natural thought speed was that fast I’d pass off the message management to a chatbot or something.
Should I tell him about the private com call? The shuttle’s systems would have logged it, but there’s no way anyone else would be able to make sense of that data stream.
Did I want Beatrice to know I could follow that kind of conversation?
No. I’d tell the captain, if he asked about it. I wasn’t that sure about trusting Beatrice yet, even if she and the captain did seem to be pretty close.