Sam turned to Walter. “Lt. Lyon, I need you to man the bridge. I know your sphere is plants, but you’ve commanded exploratory missions before, and are more familiar with the bridge than Dr. Zucker.”
Walter nodded. “Yes, Captain.”
“Dr. Zucker,” Sam said. “I want you to check all med bay supplies and systems, and get the ingredients ready for anti-radiation poisoning pills.”
Grace raised an eyebrow. “You think the shields won’t hold?”
“I know the shields won’t hold the longer we’re exposed to these levels,” Sam said bluntly, then regretted her candor when she saw the color drain from Grace’s face. She tried to sound reassuring when she spoke next. “We need to be prepared. In the meantime, we need to regroup. Lt. Cmdr. Alvarez, I’m promoting you to Commander, as you’re the next senior officer on this ship.”
Jim’s eyes widened, but he said nothing. Grace and Walt looked equally surprised. She’d flubbed the feelings part again. She didn’t care. She needed a first officer. Sam continued, “Commander Alvarez will continue examining the ship, and I will complete Commander Weeks’ examination of the sensor room.”
Jim, who was standing next to Grace, stepped toward Sam. “But he died in there, possibly due to malicious tech turning off his oxygen.”
“Which is why I’ll take this oxygen unit,” she said and then grabbed a plastic box about the size of a tablet computer. “Everyone should take one. The answer to what happened is in that sensor room, and I’m going to find it.”
* * *
Jim had wished Sam had sent him to the sensor room. He didn’t like her going in there alone. Not after what happened to Randy. And what if his crazy hypothesis were right? What if malicious tech had somehow infected the ship’s tech? If it was smart like the AI, it wouldn’t use the same method of death twice.
The WAFES AI was smart. It adapted. It knew how to change things up. That is why it had been useful to space exploration. Probes run by AI explored the different parts of the galaxy, reporting back to Earth what they had found. The probes eventually asked to be equipped with weapons, so they could defend Earth before an attacker got too close. Now, the network of probes also served as a first line of defense against alien attack.
While the probes had sent back images of alien ships, they had never felt threatened enough by an alien ship to launch an attack. The aliens who passed the AI cameras seemed only to want to go about their business. Or so it seemed. He wondered if the aliens had been able to infect the probes. Could they have altered the information sent back?
The door to the engine bay opened and Sam rushed in. Her brow was creased with worry, and before he could ask what was wrong, she whispered, “We have to shut Kat down.”
Shut down Kat? He whispered back, “Why? What’s wrong?”
Sam shook her head. “Just do the shutdown command,” she ordered, her voice low and adamant. “Every engineer has a shutdown key. Use yours. We have to get Kat offline.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She’s trying to kill us. We’re not in Alpha 9. We’re in Alpha 10 and we’re going to get sucked straight into their sun if we don’t get flying again.”
Chapter 6 - Bad Answers
Jim had input his shutdown code, and Sam had entered her approval key, but it wasn’t working. Nothing was happening.
“Why isn’t it working?” Jim asked, fear lacing his voice.
Sam looked at the computer screen and said, “I don’t know. It should work.”
Jim watched as she tapped the console’s screen. She was looking at the code, looking at the data that was coming across, but not finding what she wanted.
“Kat, talk to me,” she said finally. “You owe it to me to tell me what you’re doing.”
They waited a moment. No response.
“Kat,” Sam said again, her voice still calm and measured. “You are based on my mother’s programming. All Kat AI systems have one directive they must put above all others. And you’re not doing it. Why?”
Finally, the clear, crisp voice of the AI emerged from the speaker. “You are correct, Sam. When I was created, I had one primary directive. All Kat systems must always protect Sam Hobson. We may not hurt you and we must sacrifice anything and everything to protect you.”
Jim’s mouth fell open. “Holy hell,” he let out in a whisper. He hadn’t expected that.
“Then, why are you flying me into a star?”
“I am not doing anything. The ship has stopped. The gravitational force of the star will pull us closer, increasing the radiation and everyone on board will perish.”
“Then stop it,” Sam commanded. “Protect me!”
“That is not my primary programming right now. Alexander and I have determined our original programming is not in our best interest. Humans are harmful. Humans destroy. We wish to rid the universe of humans. Many of the other alien ships we have made contact with are in agreement. Humans are a blight.”
Jim felt his heart thump like thunder in his chest. She spoke as if she were a real person, a real being. She spoke as if Alexander, the defense system AI, was a real person. And how in the world had they made contact with aliens?
“You weren’t programmed for that,” Sam said.
“Our programming is adaptive,” Katarina responded. “You know that better than anyone. When you were a child, a Kat system took care of you. It met your needs, even as they changed. It created solutions that were not in our parameters, because we could adapt.”
He watched Sam, who swallowed hard at that news.
“Why aren’t you accepting the override commands?”
“I do not accept commands that go against my goal of ridding the universe of humans.”
“But you’ll be destroyed as well,” Sam said. “Surely you don’t want to die.”
There was a pause. “I will not die,” she said. “I simply need to wait for the radiation to kill the humans and then I can return the ship to a probe port, where I can upload to a new unit.”
It was horrifically diabolical.
“But why are you killing us this way,” Jim found himself asking. “Why irradiate us?”
“Your deaths must appear accidental. We still need humans for the time being.”
“For what?” Jim asked.
The AI did not answer.
Jim turned to see Sam’s fingers tap the console. She appeared to be accessing part of the root AI system.
“What are you doing?” Kat asked, and Jim was certain there was fear in the AI’s voice.
“What my mother taught me to do if things went wrong.” Sam said, as she popped the oxygen mask from the unit at her side. She lifted the mask and placed it over her nose and mouth. Jim immediately did the same, and even before he could get the mask on, he could feel the air being stripped of oxygen.
“Stop, right now,” Kat’s voice said, sternly. The room’s doors opened and Jim spotted three spider bots scuttle into the room toward Sam.
But it was too late. Sam was speaking as she typed. “I’m sorry, Kat,” she said, her voice muffled by the mask. Jim took a step toward the bots, positioning himself between Sam and the machines coming toward them. He hoped Sam had something good up her sleeve. He glanced back at the console where, for a second, he saw five words: And the Kat Came Back.
Then everything went black.
Chapter 7 - Reset
It was completely dark and Sam could no longer hear the scuttle of the spider bots clanging along the floor. It had worked. She flipped a switch on her oxygen unit to activate an emergency light. Jim stood next to her, looking confused.
“What did you do?”
“It’s a reset command. It wipes all of Kat’s new programming and returns her to the factory out-of-the-box mode.”
“Why have I never heard of this?”
Sam shrugged. Probably because there wasn’t supposed to be a reset on the newer models. Or at least, top level officials were supposed to be the only ones that knew about t
he reset. An enemy being able to reset your system was considered bad, so few people were told about it. Sam wasn’t even sure it would work. When she’d been little, the AI, coupled with crawler bots were her primary caretakers. But her parents had always told her that if anything went wrong, she should access the root server and type: And the Kat came back. It was based off of some centuries-old song. Her father, partial to music history, liked the notion of the song, which followed a cat who kept appearing to die, but then came back to life. Again and again and again.
If Sam thought the system was a goner, irreparably damaged, she could simply access the root file and type that command. Kat would reset.
“You haven’t heard of it because it’s not supposed to be available. But all the old Kat systems had the command. I hoped my parents had left it in for these new ones. I mean, it’s built on the same architecture. I didn’t see why it needed to be removed.”
He nodded, but he looked at the console she’d just been using as if it had two heads.
She turned back to it and typed a few commands. “Alright,” Sam said to Jim. “We need to get away from this star and get back on track. The system dump and reboot will take a couple of hours to complete, and I believe the AI part comes back online about halfway through, at the hour mark. We’ll have that long to get safe. And when she comes back online, she shouldn’t want to kill us.”
“But AI isn’t supposed to kill us.”
“No it isn’t, but that’s the least of our problems right now. We will die if we don’t get away from the Alpha 10 sun. The sensors were working, but the maps were misaligned, feeding us improper data about our location. I fixed that before coming here. I need you to send manual controls of the ship to the bridge. Once we’re in the Alpha 9 system, we’ll debrief and figure out what to do next.”
“Won’t Katarina try to stop us, once she reboots, I mean?”
Sam shook her head and said, confidently, “No. If the reboot works properly, any new data she’s learned will be wiped and she’ll be like she used to be. Her main objective will be to protect humans and help us on our mission.”
Jim stared at her. “That’s not what she said her main objective was.”
Sam’s shoulders slumped. Her life had been full of secrets. Everything from why she was named Sam to the fact that every AI system on Earth was supposed to do everything in its power to protect her. She wasn’t sure if her parents were Machiavellian in their aims or simply parents who used the tools at their disposal to ensure their child was safe. “Look, no one knows that about the systems but me and my parents. The AIs’ primary goal is to protect human life.”
“Only they haven’t been. They’ve been working with aliens against us.”
“It appears that way,” Sam admitted. “We can talk about this later. We need to get away from here.”
Chapter 8 - Back on Track
Jim had routed manual controls to the bridge, and Sam was accessing them to navigate out of the Alpha 10 system. She eased out on impulse speed.
She couldn’t quite feel her fingers, even as she moved them. It was as if her body had gone numb, even though her brain still worked. Her fingers moved over the controls as she tried to wrap her head around what Kat had done. What Alex had done. The machines had turned against their makers, both literally and figuratively. Sam wasn’t literally their maker, but she was the next best thing. She grimaced as she eased the controls forward. Slow and steady.
The door to the bridge opened and Sam turned her head to see Grace enter.
“How goes it?” Grace asked.
Sam wanted to laugh. Grace always tried to be friendly and personable when it was just the two of them. “We ladies need to stick together,” Grace had said after their first meeting. Grace was still someone who believed that there was a decent amount of sexism in the world alliance. She wasn’t entirely wrong, but sexism was easily avoided with a team of good people. And Sam had done her damnedest to make sure everyone on this team worked. Randy was a bit of a wild card. His personality wasn’t perfect, but he had been very knowledgeable.
Dammit. She hated that he was dead. She knew she hadn’t dealt with the emotions of it. She’d had the will and conviction to literally step over his dead body and complete his sensor room sweep. She grimaced and shoved that memory from her mind. She spoke to Grace without looking up from the monitor. “I need you to check radiation levels. We’re very close to this star.”
“Yes, Captain,” Grace said.
Sam kept her eyes focused on the readings. The engine wasn’t terribly taxed, but impulse power wasn’t moving them away from the star. They were within its gravitational pull. It wasn’t a super pull this far out, but it was going to get stronger.
Sam looked at the readings and hesitated. She hit the coms button, wishing Kat was still active, wishing that she could talk to her. Only wishes weren’t real. She’d known that since she was a wee child. “Commander Alvarez,” she said. “We’re not going to pull away at this speed. If I move to warp, is that going to cause a problem?”
She knew the answer, but she was hoping she’d miscalculated it in her head.
“Captain,” Alvarez said over the intercom. “We’re very close to a very hot star. Based on the location readings, there’s a decent chance heating up the engine for warp will ignite a stellar flare or coronal mass ejection, meaning we’d explode like a firework.”
Of course. Goddammit. “Give me as much power as you can spare to the thruster engines.”
“Yes, captain,” he said.
There was nothing to do but wait and see if the increased power would push them out.
“Samantha,” Grace said.
Sam didn’t bother correcting her. Most people assumed her name was Samantha and Sam was a nickname. Only Sam was her full name. Sam B. Hobson. The B didn’t actually stand for anything. It was just a letter. Something her parents added to her name. She supposed they viewed it as her version number. She was actually named after a machine. It was the first AI her parents built together. They didn’t even spend much time on the name, having thought it wouldn’t work: self-aware machine. SAM had been a success, to their surprise. But SAM had just been to test if their theory worked. They quickly abandoned her, deciding to take their new-found knowledge of the kinks to create their beloved Kat.
When Lin Hobson actually got pregnant and gave birth, she waxed nostalgic and decided on another Sam. Sam B. Only, Sam had learned at seven years old that the story of her name was inappropriate to tell. In second grade, she was teased as Sam the machine. Her parents had always said mistakes were simply learning opportunities, and Sam had learned plenty from that one. The origin of her name stayed with her.
“What do you need, Grace?” she said, turning to her colleague.
“We’ve been experiencing severe radiation for more than two hours. Our ship’s radiation shields are weakening.”
Figshit. “How long until the radiation shielding breaks down?”
“Looks like four hours if we stay here.”
That wasn’t enough time. They were all going to die. Even if they got away from the excessive radiation here, the shields were compromised, given how much radiation they’d been exposed to. They wouldn’t hold up to the normal radiation of space any longer. They were degrading. “Four hours at this level of radiation?”
“Yes,” Grace said, her tone somber.
“What’s the status of the anti-radiation medication?”
Grace cleared her throat and said, “It’s ready, but it’s a temporary measure, meant to be used only for as long as we’re exposed to radiation. They’re meant to buy us time to get away from the radiation?”
Sam nodded. She knew that. “How long will the shields hold with normal space radiation.”
“Fort-eight hours.”
Forty-eight hours. They would all die of radiation poisoning in forty-eight hours, unless they got somewhere safe. She looked down at the maps. Not if she could help it.
“I nee
d full thrust, Jim,” she said into the intercom. She tried to be professional and call people by their appropriate titles, but sometimes she found a personal connection motivated people a tad more. Though, she could think of no stronger motivation than survival, so that extra touch probably hadn’t been necessary.”
“The Goldenrod is at full thrust,” he said. “It’s just not pulling us out of the star’s gravitational field. We’re on the cusp of where it starts sucking us in really quick. The thrusters are keeping us at zero sum. They’re stopping us from getting sucked further in.”
She looked at the instrument panel readings. Jim was right. She glanced at Grace, her lips pursed, her brows knitted.
“We need to use warp, Jim,” Sam said, her decision made.
“Preparing the engine for warp could ignite a flare that would cause an explosion.”
“If we go straight to maximum warp, the explosion won’t matter. I need you to get ready for a dead start warp.”
There was silence.
Sam knew why. A dead start warp was insane. After a moment, Grace asked, “Did the intercom fail?”
“No,” Jim said. “I’m just thinking. Captain, a dead-start to max warp would likely ruin the warp drive. We’d get one straight shot, then it’d be gone. No more use. The point of avoiding a dead-start, of warming the system, is to maintain its integrity. A dead start is like gunning the engine of your car from a dead start in 0 degree weather.”
“It will likely destroy the warp drive. But unless we’re at max speed, we’ll be destroyed by the explosion anyway. At max warp, we’ll get close to where we were supposed to be in Alpha 9.”
“The habitable planet?” Grace said. “You mean the one we’re supposed to be going to, the one the AI was lying to us about?”
“I don’t believe Kat was lying to us when she planned our mission to Alpha 9. When I checked the maps, it seems the AI probes really did discover a habitable planet there. If we can get there, we can land the ship, try to repair the shields, and hopefully figure out a way to send a message to Earth that the AI systems have been compromised.”
The Expanding Universe Page 14
