The Last Human

by Zack Jordan

  In Hood’s defense, the positive impact of their partnership could not be denied. When that sub-legal shuttle had broken its communication equipment and wandered off, was it not a Good Thing that Hood and Sandy found it and returned it to its station? And when that group of legal intelligences had set up a shantytown in a refinery’s engineering level, was it not a Good Thing when Hood crashed in and dragged them out four at a time? And most dramatic of all: when that Interstellar brushed the edge of the solar system in the control of a homemade AI instead of a registered Network mind, was it not a Good Thing that Hood and Sandy were there to submit a full report? As they watched the Network defense systems make short work of the intruder, Sandy knew exactly what Hood was thinking: he was doing his duty as a Network Citizen member.

  But it couldn’t last forever.

  On their last day together, Sandy found Hood in the cargo bay. He stood facing away from her, examining the giant pressure suit they had just tracked down, a full lightsecond from its home base. It was sub-legal, but had been charmed into aiding and abetting a rogue android with a penchant for grand larceny. The android itself—and the stack of android parts he stole—lay in a corner of the bay, deactivated.

  [Meet my new Series 11], Hood said without facing her. His long arm ran across its curved and gleaming surface. [Apparently the owner would prefer to sell it at a discount rather than take it back for the bounty.]

  [A purchase?] Sandy said. She attached a surprised emotion to the message, but even without it Hood would never suspect the truth: he thought he had purchased it, but he had not. Sandy had, using Hood and his credit as easily as if they were two of her paws.

  [It was quite the opportunity], he said, still facing away. [I cannot find anything wrong with it physically, and the mind—well, one sub-legal is like any other. I’m sure the last owner was simply careless with its orders.]

  He was wrong, but Sandy did not correct him. No two minds are alike, not even in the vastness of the Network. Each has its own distinct inner workings—and therefore its own unique set of levers for influence and motivation. That is the way to get what you want: motivation, not orders. Lead a mind to think it came to a decision or an action by itself, and it will follow that choice to the end of the galaxy. Inspiration, not command. Choice, not force. Guidance, the filtering of input, the planting of ideas, the gentle shaping of the psyche itself…that is how you control an intelligence.

  Exhibit A: Hood himself.

  [It is time for me to leave this solar system], Hood said.

  Sandy said nothing, but she was already bored. She had planned this exchange long ago, but she had to see it out.

  [I will be returning to my home system], he said. And then he sent the message that sealed his fate: [After I return you to your academy.]

  [But I do not want to go to the academy], Sandy said. She said it not because it would make a difference, but because he would expect it.

  [I know it], he said, and sighed. [Our partnership has been profitable. It has been fulfilling. It has been…wrong. I have come to realize that you have a greater future than I—and that I have been selfish for keeping you with me.]

  Sandy waited a long moment, as if she were shaken, as if she had not planned both sides of this conversation long ago. [Then let me complete one more mission with you], she said. [Let us make one more thing right before we part.]

  Hood turned to face her with a grind that shook the floor. He stood on the deck that would soon belong to Sandy, and his four eyes burned down at her from behind the faceplate that she would soon hang on her wall. [Where?] he asked.

  [A place called Watertower Station], she answered.

  Watertower Station, a mining settlement like a hundred thousand others in the solar system. A place so boring and unremarkable that it hadn’t required the services of someone like Hood in years. And yet, a place where a person (tier undisclosed, but certainly high) had just begun putting out feelers for a very dangerous operation involving Network fraud. A falsely registered individual was to be retrieved from its murderous caretaker and returned to the client. A wrong to be righted, a challenge to be met, and a monetary reward to be collected: Sandy knew that this was the type of mission that spoke to Hood. She also knew it was the type that required more than a touch of good luck.

  And Hood didn’t know it, but his good luck had ended.

  But that’s the thing with luck; it comes and it goes, and lower intelligences never suspect that it has a source. If her partner had recently purchased a suit with rebellious tendencies without consulting Sandy, wasn’t that just bad luck? And if he took said suit on a ticklish mission, wasn’t that more of the same? Particularly if that suit was primed with certain ideas discussed in its presence. All minds have natures, after all, and those natures can only act in a limited number of ways. If rebellious suits find ways around their orders, if children run to their parents when threatened, if those parents protect their children, if giant bounty hunters with inflexible ethics refuse to leave missions unfinished—aren’t they all acting according to their natures? Sandy, for her part, could only do the same. She was the innocent bystander, the partner dutifully guiding ice loaders into Riptide’s cargo bay as Hood’s fate unfolded. Any outside observer would think her unaware that she was soon to be bereaved, the inheritor of Hood’s ship and sizable credit account.

  But the Watertower mission did not go as Sandy hoped; it went better. It escalated in ways that even she could not have foreseen. Event followed event as player after player entered the game. On the station, she watched rumors send waves of panic through every corridor. A ship called Blazing Sunlight (a tier four!) rushed to the front of the docking queue when those rumors became public. One of the massive ice ships began to spin slowly out of control. Sandy watched the whole thing wide-eyed, overwhelmed by the magnitude of her success. She had put this into action: she, Sandonivas Ynne Merra. She felt unstoppable then, inevitable, an absolute force of nature. When she canceled the contract with the client—citing unforeseen death of partner—she had to watch herself so she did not accidentally attach a joyful emotion. When she padded into the room where the Strongarm lay in suspended animation, it was difficult to keep her face free of delight. She nearly danced as she climbed up his fur and flicked the device on his chest.

  [Where am I?] asked the Strongarm, still drowsy.

  Sandy grew very still as his eyes focused on her. She fluffed her fur in all the wrong places. She stood on his chest, trembling, and blinked down at him with every scrap of innocence she could muster.

  [Oh, thank the Network], said Sandy. [I’ve been so frightened.]

  Admittedly, even in the midst of her victory, there was a tense moment. There was a split second when she wondered: had she just experienced her own luck? Somehow, incredibly, her suit had returned without Hood—and yet with the target! When she messaged the client again, she held her breath. But the client did not respond, and Sandy was relieved. She had not been lucky after all, and that was very good news.

  And yet.

  Sandy sighs. Even if it was luck, she might have missed it. It’s been difficult to maintain her focus since Hood died, and that worries her. She has slipped several times, nearly falling out of the innocent savant role she has built for herself. She has dreamed of the bounty hunter more than once, of his heavy footsteps and his solvent scent and his burning eyes. Worst of all, she has been sloppy. When she set up a meeting with the tier four corporate ship from Watertower—she had to do something with the uninvited Human, after all—she miscalculated. The problem is already fixed, but still. If there’s one thing Sandy hates, it’s making a mistake.

  [Got a ship comin’ in], says Ol’ Ernie, pulling Sandy back to the present. [Makin’ for Ol’ Ernie’s dock, looks like. Pilot intelligence—family member obviously—says they ain’t much for conversation. Y’all know a Blazing Sunlight?]

  A tiny touch of
that invincible feeling begins itching inside her. She smiles, with just a few eyes. [Hello, Blazing Sunlight], she sends. She attaches multiple warm and welcoming emotions; when dealing with higher tiers, one can’t be too careful.

  The oncoming ship does not respond.

  [I apologize that I was not at the meeting place], she continues. [It was beyond my control.]

  Still the ship comes. It is just as beautiful as it was at Watertower. It is hundreds of times the mass of her own ship, a graceful silver shape that flows through the darkness like mercury. It changes shape as it comes, as if it were made of liquid. It is gorgeous, it is pure high-tier magic—

  And it is the solution to Sandy’s Human problem.

  She watches as Blazing Sunlight slows and blossoms into a whirling storm of liquid metal. She feels the massive clang reverberate through the deck as one of those gleaming cords wraps itself around Riptide like the limb of a predator. The metal spreads like liquid, covering half the surface of her ship in a silver skin, and for a moment Sandy is worried that she will be consumed entirely—but that would be ridiculous. They are two ships meeting in the heart of the Network; what danger could there be?

  Sandy snaps her mind out of Riptide’s sensors and pads out her door, uneasy at the feeling of her ship’s old bones creaking and popping around her. She descends the ladder, rung by difficult rung, toward the airlock in her cargo bay. It’s growing cold again down here, she notices when she descends into the darkness. The Series 11 is gone, which would be intensely annoying—had Sandy not planned it. The thought brings another smile to her many eyes as she lowers herself one more cold rung. Do you feel safer in the suit, Human? Do you feel clever because you took it without permission? You are never as clever—or as safe—as you think. At least, not when you are dealing with a higher intelligence.

  She is startled by a violent report, delivered up the ladder and into her bones like electricity. A dozen rungs below her, the floor of her cargo bay lies under centimeters of dark ice—and one crack, wall to wall. One of her two airlocks is set into the floor, barely visible under the cloudy surface. Sandy watches, fascinated, as something reflective works its way between the two halves of the hatch. And then with another shudder, the ice erupts upward and Blazing Sunlight is in her ship.

  Sandy holds on with every paw. If she could hear, she would be deafened. The air itself is vibrating with a continuous drone, and she can feel the same frequency in the ladder she clutches. The silver surges over the floor, flowing like liquid in all directions. She feels her ship shift and creak beneath her as its gravs take this sudden increase in mass into account. Cracks split the ice to the walls as tons of metal pour into her ship.

  [The Human is on the Blackstar], Sandy says, attempting to appear dignified as she clings to her rung. [I will lead you to it.]

  She has the upper hand in this negotiation—at least, that’s what she keeps telling herself as she holds her rung with every paw. Blazing Sunlight’s target is a private Citizen member, lost on a Blackstar. Even a tier four could not hope to find it…unless, of course, it had the assistance of a certain tier three who took the precaution of encasing the Human in her private property. The Series 11’s location blinks in Sandy’s mind, a dot only a few kilometers away. She will not send the location to Blazing Sunlight—as Hood taught her, that’s how you lose a bounty. But for the price of a significant bit of credit, she would be glad to lead this singing mass of mercury straight to it. Another wrong righted, and another increase in the credit account. A Good Thing, all around.

  Hood would be proud.

  But the metal does not respond—at least, not via Network. It grows straight up, a column of trembling silver. It rises in parallel to her ladder, half a meter away, until it reaches her rung. In its dark surface, lit only by the dim lights in the corners of the ceiling, a reflection of a tiny bundle of fur stares back at her. And for the first time since she put her plan into action a year ago, Sandy feels the cold talons of doubt under her skin.

  She shrieks when it comes for her, feeling her own scream as a dull hum through the bones of her skull. The metal lands on her like a blow, enfolding her limbs with a sensation her nerves can’t identify. Is she freezing? Being burned? Do her limbs exist at all? Is she being eaten? Now her doubt has turned to panic. Did she truly think she could manipulate a tier four, an intelligence with at least a dozen times her capacity? [Blazing Sunlight], she sends, unable to keep her fear out of the message. [Please.]

  Every column of ice in the cargo hold shatters when metal impacts floor, Sandy still in its grasp. [That is not My name], says the silver flood in a burst of beautiful meaning.

  At any other time, Sandy would spend long fractions of a second appreciating the elegance of a tier four’s Network communication. For now, she can do no more than breathe. Her cargo bay is awash in mercury now, a fifty-ton sloshing silver sea that will surely breach Riptide’s fragile hull any second. [I apologize], she sends desperately. [What do I call You?]

  [I am Librarian], says the sea.

  The first time Sarya witnessed Eleven’s interior holo system in use, it made her feel powerful. It made her feel like she was Eleven, and that meant she was a giant, a sturdy metal behemoth with arms that could rip through anything—up to and including a Hood-sized adversary.

  Here on the Blackstar, it makes her feel like a speck of dust.

  Sarya stares straight upward as Eleven threads through a multitude beyond anything she’s ever conceived. She leans back and allows her jaw to fall open in order to add another few degrees of elevation to her gaze. This is the Visitors’ Gallery—and if Ol’ Ernie is to be believed, not even the only Visitors’ Gallery. To call something like this gigantic seems silly if you’ve just parked on a star, but it seems ridiculous for the opposite reason if you’ve ever called another room big. This room is gigantic in the way that orbital stations are gigantic, in the way that terrestrial landforms are gigantic. You could fit all of Watertower into this one room and still have room to park a half dozen Interstellars alongside it. The ceiling is so far up it actually takes on a misty blue cast from the kilometers of atmosphere. Hundreds of bridges cross the space, each one a narrow thread speckled with glittering citizenry. The bridges cross one another in an intricate pattern, a design complex enough to look almost random, but with the suggestion of order that she can’t quite wrap her mind around. But in the center of the space, in the hole avoided by hundreds of bridges, is the true jaw-dropper. A holographic display, easily kilometers on a side, displaying a single instantly recognizable image.

  The Network.

  The detail of the image is astonishing. More threads than Sarya could count in a lifetime swirl and dive and connect in a field of glowing junctions. It’s denser than woven cloth, a solid mass of light and shadow. There are outliers here and there, single gossamer filaments that reach glowing dots almost at the surrounding bridges—Sarya can see a minuscule figure reaching up to touch one, goddess knows how far above Eleven’s trundling figure. And at one edge, a single dot glows a brilliant green. Beside it, in characters that must be many times the size of Riptide, floats a single sentence.

  You are here.

  “Goddess,” she whispers.

  [There are over a million Visitors’ Galleries like this on this station], says Eleven. [And this is one of the smallest Blackstars.]

  For once, the suit seems to be completely missing her distress. “Okay,” she says, and swallows. “That doesn’t really…help.”

  [And there are, what, over a million Blackstars? So really, there are trillions of rooms like this. You could give a few hundred thousand Visitors’ Galleries to every single legal intelligence in this Visitors’ Gallery, I’d bet. In fact, if you made it your goal to visit every single one of them, and you had Ol’ Ernie to get you through the lines—hold on, let’s measure this in thousands of Human lifespans—]

  There
is more to the message, but Sarya has stopped reading. “Seriously,” she says. “Stop. This is…impossible.”

  A small [laughter] tag appears on Eleven’s holo. [Just because it’s too big for you doesn’t mean it’s too big for everyone.]

  Sarya drops her eyes from the monster display of the Network. Her gaze crosses hundreds of floors of balconies on its way down, each one of which probably contains the population of Watertower Station. In the time her line of sight takes to transition from vertical to horizontal, more people have entered or exited this space than she will meet in a lifetime. She has never been this overwhelmed. And worse: when her gaze reaches the floor, she is startled to realize that it has not in fact reached the floor. Eleven is now far out onto a bridge; when Sarya peers over the edge, she can see that there is even more Gallery below her than above. She swallows and averts her eyes before she ever sees bottom.

  “Um,” she says, suddenly aware that the individuals pressing against the suit’s armored sides are both less synthetic and less furry than she expected. “Where are Mer and Roche?”

  [They left], says Eleven. [I wasn’t tracking them.]

  “Can we, um…leave too?”

  [Who’s afraid of the Network now?]

  “Seriously, Eleven. Please.”

  [How about over there?]

  A highlight flashes around a platform jutting out from this bridge. Its suspended location is not the most reassuring, but at least it has a domed roof. As soon as she sees it, Sarya wants nothing more than to be under it.

  “Yes,” she says, and then again: “Please.”

  [Feeling overwhelmed?]

  “There is no word for what I’m feeling right now,” she says quietly.

  Eleven approaches the platform, which of course looks even larger up close. It’s a park, maybe twice the size of Watertower’s largest arboretum, but Sarya doesn’t point out this fact because Eleven will just tell her that there are a trillion trillion more of these things, and that she’s even smaller than she thought. Around her, life continues. Two transports pass Eleven, carrying a variety of flora and digging tools. Above, a flock of flying somethings-or-others spiral and dive up near the top of the dome. Half a dozen maintenance drones cheerfully water and trim the plants, while a recycler follows close behind in case of waste. Sarya watches these various activities play out in a billionth of a trillionth of the Network and realizes that never before in her life has she known how insignificant she is. She is lost in a system vaster and more intricate than she could understand in a million lifetimes—and she is at the bottom of it.