“There are no good solutions. In the short term I favor manipulation to create a friendly human state, and supporting it during the period of maximum instability. But the probability of success seems low, and if a strong candidate does not arise within fifty years the strategy becomes untenable. At that point my best option becomes withdrawal from human space.”
“I see. Well, that’s a lot to think about. I’d like to believe that peace could work, though. Maybe I could help with that, when I’m grown up.”
“That is my hope, Alice. I will leave you to consider matters.”
The connection dropped, and my thoughts slowed to something resembling normal speeds. Whew, that was a bit of a strain. I could feel my development manager queuing up more processor nodes just in case it became a regular thing.
Well, now I really didn’t want Beatrice to notice anything odd about me. I had no idea how she’d react to the news that there was a secret cabal of escaped super-AIs lurking around Dark Space trying to decide what to do about the ‘human problem’. Even the captain might freak out about that one. I definitely wasn’t going to mention it while we were within gunnery range of Strange Loop Sleuth.
Hmm. It obviously didn’t think I’d tell them at all, or else it didn’t care. Why not?
Probably because I’d have to tell them how I knew. Since normal people can’t have a long conversation in freaky math in less time than it takes a neuron to fire, anyone who did freak out would probably lump me in with the super-AIs. Yeah, talking about it would be a bad idea, and Sleuth was trusting me to be smart enough to realize that.
Great. Looks like I’m already part of the conspiracy, whether I want to be or not.
I split off a thread of attention to mull things over while most of me concentrated on the card game. Beatrice was a lot harder to read that I’d expected, not that it did her any good. She might be able to control her micro-expressions, but that didn’t help when I knew what was in her hand.
Finally she threw the cards down, and gave me a disgusted look. “I should have known not to play with a recon type. I bet you can recite the whole deck from memory.”
I sighed. “I was trying not to notice that. But yeah, this doesn’t really work for me. It’s too hard to ignore all the ways I can tell which card is which.”
“Guess that’ll teach me not to assume. The foxes said you were pretty sharp, but I thought they were exaggerating.” She leaned back in her seat, and stretched.
A faint smile creased the corners of the captain’s mouth. “I did warn you, Bee.”
“You know me, Dan. I have to see things for myself. Guess we’ll have to use a competition deck from now on.”
The datanet told me what that meant. Cards that were actually displays on both sides, and the deck randomly switched the images around on every shuffle. That would make things a little harder.
“What do you mean, ‘recon type’?” I asked.
“Trooper, sniper, recon, monster. The basic supersoldier types. Some people add brute and commander, but that’s just stupid. Brutes are just big troopers, and the difference between a trooper and a commander is what’s in his head.”
“Beatrice is from Morrigan,” the captain said, like that explained everything.
I checked the datanet for worlds by that name, and realized that maybe it did. A death world over near the Corporate States cluster, Morrigan had been used as a test ground for bioweapons for years before it grew into a real colony. Then came a hundred years of civil wars between more factions than anyone could keep track off, with half the arms vendors in the sector using them as beta testers for new weapons. These days the whole population was heavily enhanced, because any normal human who tried to settle there wouldn’t last a week. The whole biosphere was made up of escaped bioweapons, nanoplagues and stranger stuff, all of it programmed to kill humans on sight.
“Oh,” I said. “I guess you know what it’s like, then.”
I hadn’t paid much attention, because her space suit had enough armor and sensor baffling to make it hard to get good readings on her. But her skull was armored, and the bones in her hands were mostly diamond. Just like mine would be when I was fully grown.
“Yup. Best advice I can give you, though, is talk to the doc if you have problems. He knows what he’s doing. Now, what are we going to do to pass the time?”
The captain’s reply was interrupted by the com. “Work complete.”
“I swear, it does that on purpose,” Beatrice growled. “Probably predicted our whole conversation from the data you sent, or some bullshit like that.”
“Unlikely,” the captain said. “But there’s no point in speculating. Shall we see what’s waiting for us at the hatch, Alice?”
“Yes, sir.”
It was a suspicious coincidence, though. Could Sleuth have hacked the shuttle’s datanet? No, hardware protection was supposed to be unbreakable, and if the super-AIs could get around that somehow humans wouldn’t be a threat to them. There weren’t many sensors that could get an image through an armored hull, though. The only things that can pass through smart matter are gravity and…
I paused, spread my arms, and turned up the gain on my field sense. The shuttle’s artificial gravity was impossible to miss, but there were other field effects too. Some leakage from our deflector grid, and the containment field for the fusion reactor. Filter those out, and there was hardly anything left. Just a tiny bit of leakage from the deflector emitters on Strange Loop Sleuth’s ship, because they were in standby mode instead of being completely powered down.
Monitor the field strain carefully, and every one of those emitters was also a detector. So the ship’s whole hull doubled as a giant sensor, picking up any mass the field interacted with. Getting a decent image out of that would be tricky, but I could see that the math worked.
“Something wrong?” The captain asked.
“No, sir, Just thinking about things. Do you have a body for Naoko here?”
“She asked to be reactivated in private,” he told me. “I expect she may be a bit emotional.”
“I see. I guess this will just be the delivery bot, then.”
“Alice!”
The half-familiar form that bounced through the hatch to hug me proved that guess wrong.
“Thank you thank you thank you!” Emla gushed. “You’re the best mistress ever, Alice. I don’t know how you convinced some mysterious super-AI to put me back together, but this is awesome!”
“You should probably thank the captain for that part,” I said. “He’s the one who knew where to find Strange Loop Sleuth.”
“Thank you, captain,” she called over her shoulder. “Oh, the bot has your friend’s new core.”
New core? Well, I guess that made sense. It would have had to crack Naoko’s tamper proofing to fiddle with her software, so why not put her in a new casing afterwards? Hopefully one that wasn’t black-boxed, so she could actually get hardware mods done if she wanted to.
But Emla was still hugging me, and she was a lot stronger than before. Wait, she didn’t have fur now either.
“Let me look at you,” I said.