Mavericks (Expeditionary Force Book 6)

by Craig Alanson

  “Great! So, was it like you?”

  “Its basic matrix was very much like me, which is troubling because of what else I learned.” The avatar froze and flickered for a second, nearly making my heart stop but before I could say anything, the avatar moved again. “I would like to double-check my analysis, but I am confident there can be no mistake about it. Joe, that AI was involved in throwing the planet Newark out of its original orbit. That Elder AI wiped out an intelligent species.”

  “Holy shit.” That revelation completely floored me. Because Skippy said Elder-level technology had been used to throw Newark farther from the star, and the dead AI was presumably an Elder device, there had been speculation among the crew that the AI the scavenger team of Kristang found on Newark had been involved in committing genocide. At the time, Skippy had been adamant that no Elder AI could have harmed an innocent species. Now he was admitting he had been completely wrong? “Are you-Ah, of course you’re sure about it. Damn, Skippy, I am sorry.” The little beer can had to be feeling completely miserable. As far as he knew, he was the only remaining one of his kind, he was alone, and now he learned a fellow Elder AI did something utterly unthinkable.

  “Not as sorry as I am, Joe. The reason I asked you to meet me here is I need you to do something for me.”

  “Sure, anything. What is it?”

  “Get out, close the hatch behind you, and eject this pod.”

  “Uh, what?” All I could think of was, he needed to be away from the mass of the ship so he could better detect the ripples his mini energy virus was creating.

  “I am a potential threat, Joe. I now know an Elder AI is capable of committing an act so monstrous, I can hardly speak about it. Remember when I said whoever threw Newark out of orbit needs to get paid back, big time? Now I am sad to say the guilty party is one of my own, Joe. An AI like me, with a base matrix similar to my own. If that AI could do such a terrible thing, then I am also capable of the same thing. I am a threat, Joe, I need to remove myself from the ship, before I lose control of myself and do something I would be ashamed of.”

  “Skippy, I,” I what? My brain locked up, panicked. “Look, we’re in the middle of nowhere, orbiting a totally anonymous gas giant planet. We can’t just leave you out here.”

  “Hmmm, that is a good point, Joe. If I am floating in space, I could send out signals to lure in other ships, and potentially do something unspeakable. No, you need to drop me into this gas giant planet, or even better, the local star. Red dwarves last a long, long time, so the closest star would be perfect to keep me locked away for the foreseeable future. That way, I could never get out to threaten the galaxy.”

  “Uh huh. Skippy, you’re missing the point. No way am I going to drop you off anywhere. You’re worried that someday, maybe a long time in the future, you might become a threat. Right now, you are Earth’s only defense against all threats. We need you.”

  “Joe,” the avatar shook its fists in frustration. “You are only thinking about humanity. I am a danger to all intelligent species in the galaxy. You need to look beyond your petty little concerns and think about the wider galaxy, or-”

  “No, I do not. I am not responsible for the entire freakin’ galaxy, Skippy, saving my home planet is enough.”

  “You disappoint me, Joe. Many times, you have offered to sacrifice yourself for the greater good, but when I make a noble gesture, you-”

  “You’re not making a noble gesture, you’re making a premature, stupid gesture.”

  “I am trying to safeguard the galaxy, Joe, while all you can think about is one planet full of ignorant monkeys.”

  “The galaxy is a dumpster fire, Skippy. The species in charge have been tearing each other apart and making life generally miserable for everyone, for longer than anyone can remember. Humanity has been lucky to be the only species not caught up in an endless war that rips societies apart and forces everyone to devote most of their resources to defense. You say the Maxolhx started it? Well, fuck them, and fuck the Rindhalu for being too lazy to stop this never-ending cycle of misery. One rogue AI isn’t going to noticeably make things worse for the average person in the Milky Way, because life out there is already pretty awful. I didn’t start this war, I don’t want to fight it, and I sure as hell am not responsible for the safety of other species. I am a soldier in the US Army and the mission I was assigned was to ensure the safety of Earth, period. That’s enough, damn it.”

  “Ok, Ok, Joe, I get your point. Please understand that if I am a potential threat to one species, I am a threat to everyone.”

  “Yeah, there’s that word again; potential. You could become a threat. You are an asset, right now. Listen, Skippy, you are an irascible, arrogant asshole, but you are a good person. I know that, because you are my friend, my best friend. Listen,” I cut him off as his avatar raised a hand to protest. “The AI who attacked Newark maybe went crazy or something. You were buried in the dirt on Paradise for a very long time, and you think you were alone even before that. Maybe the same thing happened to that other AI, maybe, uh,” I snapped my fingers. “Maybe this Collective thing that used to connect AIs got taken offline, and the isolation drove that other AI insane. Nagatha told me that you suspect you were not originally sentient, right?”

  “Technically the correct word is ‘sapient’ but we’ve been using the term ‘sentient’ all along, so go ahead. Yes, Joe, based on changes in my matrix over time, I believe there is a strong possibility that me being fully self-aware is a fairly recent event, like within the past five or ten million years.”

  I sat back against the hatch frame, absorbing the idea that Skippy was a being who considered five million years to be ‘recent’. “Ok, so maybe what happened was the AI on Newark also became self-aware on its own, and something went wrong, so it became crazy. Hey,” another thought hit me. “You said the Elders designed that worm to protect the galaxy from AIs who went rogue. That AI is dead, so the safeguard worked.”

  “If it worked, it was too late to save the inhabitants of Newark,” Skippy grimaced bitterly. “Joe, if you are trying to assure me that the Elders will step in to prevent me from harming anyone, you are wrong, and that is what truly frightens me. I defeated the worm, remember? Not just recently, the ancient antibody subroutines inside me are proof that I survived a worm attack before I crashed on Paradise. Maybe I did something horrible a long time ago, and the worm tried to stop me, but somehow I survived. After I destroyed the worm this last time, I upgraded my antibodies. Joe, I am now immune to the worm, or any technology like it. There are no longer any safeguards to prevent me from causing truly unimaginable havoc.”

  “Tell me, do you feel like doing anything evil?”

  “No.”

  “Then that’s your safeguard, Skippy. You. You being yourself.”

  “That is a rather thin layer of protection. Joe, you understand that if the Maxolhx are not safe from me, humanity is certainly not safe from me.”

  “What I know for certain is humanity isn’t safe without you, Skippy the Magnificent. How about this: you used to talk with Nagatha all the time, right?”

  “More than I like, yes,” he groaned, although Nagatha had told me that Skippy was the one who just could not ever shut up.

  “Great. Then, after you revive her, if she notices something different about you, the way you talk or the way you’re acting, or your thought patterns or whatever, she will warn you, and warn me. There are plenty of stars in the galaxy for us to dump you into, Skippy.”

  “That is a comforting thought, Joe. Uh, all right,” he sounded deflated. “You are taking a huge risk with the entire galaxy, you know,” he added in a scolding tone.

  “I can live with it. I’ve been taking huge risks with the galaxy, ever since I let a beer can in a dusty warehouse talk me into a lunatic scheme to shut off the wormhole near Earth, and I did pretty well with that.”

  “The jury’s still out on that one, Joe. Earth is still not safe in the long term.”

  “Yeah,
well, I’m beginning to think Earth won’t really be safe until everyone in the galaxy is safe, but right now I have enough on my plate dealing with this little bioweapon scheme of the Kristang.”

  “In the long run, you are likely correct, Joe. Earth will not truly be safe while this endless war continues. As Chotek has stated, you monkeys need a long-term plan, instead of us racing around putting out fires.”

  “I’ll get right on that, Skippy,” I rolled my eyes, happy that our conversation was returning to our normal irritating back and forth. “How about you promise me you won’t commit suicide until, like, after lunch, and we’ll talk then?”

  “I am not fully persuaded, but oh, very well. I suppose we should keep this discussion away from Chotek?”

  “You got that right,” I agreed quickly. Hans Chotek would throw a supernova of a hissy fit if he learned an AI like Skippy had wiped out the inhabitants of Newark. And he would throw a galaxy-sized hissy fit if he learned I knew about it and didn’t tell him. Although, crap, maybe I should tell Chotek about this. Oh, what the hell, I could always tell him later.

  If there was a later.

  Lunch was good, provided by the Chinese team, although I confess I don’t remember what I ate, and didn’t pay much attention while I was eating. My thoughts were occupied by a debate over whether to rush through lunch in case Skippy had decided to do something rash, or linger over lunch long as possible, to give the beer can time to think. After a second glass of iced tea and forced small talk with people I was barely paying attention to, I excused myself and fairly jogged forward to Skippy’s mancave. This was a conversation I wanted to have face to face, or face to avatar. “Hey, I see you’re still here,” I announced as I squeezed into the escape pod. What the hell, if Skippy still wanted to kill himself to protect the galaxy, he couldn’t eject with me blocking the hatchway.

  “Still here, yes. Joe, I’ve been thinking, and I am still quite concerned about the risk I pose to sentient beings across the galaxy.”

  “I’ve been thinking, too, Skippy. You want to guess my thoughts?”

  “You just came from the galley, so you’re thinking something like ‘wish I had a beer right now’?”

  Crap. I had been thinking that. “That too, yeah. You are ate up with worry about your responsibility to the galaxy, right?”

  “Yes, Joe. Although my memories are incomplete, I believe the Elders put me here to protect the inhabitants of the Milky Way.”

  “Great, then let’s do that.”

  “I’m not following you, Joe.”

  “Do what you were built to do. Protect us. There was a whole lot of bad shit going on in the galaxy after the Elders left and before the Rindhalu developed spaceflight. We thought there must be an unknown third party out there, but now it’s possible all those Elders sites that got blown up were the work of rogue AIs, right?”

  “Oh, crap. Damn it, I hadn’t thought of that! That is a truly frightening thought, but yes, you may be right about that.”

  “Elder sites were blown up, or missing entirely, an entire moon was vaporized. Plus something destroyed a Sentinel in the Roach Motel. I don’t think one rogue AI did that all by itself.”

  “Agreed, that is unlikely. Damn, Joe, if multiple AIs went rogue, that makes me even more worried that I could inevitably have that happen to me also. Maybe I should-”

  Crap, that was the opposite of what I wanted him to think. “Maybe you should stick around to protect us, in case another rogue AI pops up.”

  “What?”

  “Come on, Skippy, do I have to do all the thinking for you?”

  “What?” His avatar froze in astonishment. “You thinking for me?”

  “Apparently you are determined to be a total dumbass about this, so, yeah. Think: if Elder AIs routinely go rogue, the galaxy needs someone capable of squashing them when they go berserk. I sure as hell can’t do it, and you constantly tell me even the Rindhalu are no match for your awesomeness. That leaves you as our only defense against rogue Elder AIs.”

  “Crap, Joe!” His avatar rubbed its chin thoughtfully. “I really had not thought of it that way. Huh. You’re right, I am the galaxy’s only possible defense if another Elder AI goes crazy. Unless, you know, the crazy one is me.”

  “Let’s burn that bridge when we get to it, Ok? Until you show signs of crossing over to the dark side, how about you keep on being our knight in shining armor, and protect the galaxy even though the rest of the galaxy doesn’t know how much they owe you?” I added that last part to feed his awesomely massive ego.

  “A knight in shining armor,” he rolled that phrase around on his tongue to get the feel of it. “I like it, Joe. Ok, you’ve got a deal. As long as I’m still the Skippy the Magnificent you know and love, I will pledge myself to protecting the unworthy inhabitants of this galaxy.”

  “Deal.”

  “And, remember, if anything goes wrong, it will totally be your fault.”

  “If anything like that goes wrong, I’m screwed anyway. Hmm.”

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking, there’s no way for your ginormous processing power to calculate the odds of you going rogue on us, is there?”

  “No, dumdum, I would have told you that already, duh. There isn’t enough data for me to work with.”

  “Then I was thinking, man, this is something the Jeraptha would love to bet on.”

  “Except if they bet wrong, they probably would not live to collect,” he chuckled. “That wouldn’t stop those beetles from taking the action anyway.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  I didn’t have much to do while we slowly took on fuel, so I had too much time to be stuck inside my stupid head. Yeah, I was trying to think of a better way to find a single stealthed Kristang ship in the vast distances of a star system, but my mind kept getting dragged back to other things. Like, mostly, Shauna. Specifically, Shauna and Cornpone. I should call him Jesse, I guess, old habits are hard to break. It had been years since I last spoke with Jesse, or Dave or Shauna. The last time we were at Paradise, to plant the fake Elder artifacts that persuaded the Ruhar to keep that planet, I had asked Skippy to give me a view of people I had known there. No, I was not doing anything creepy, I just wanted to see and hear them when they were using the video feature of their zPhones. It had been heartbreaking to see people I considered my friends, even Perkins, and hear their fears of being trapped on Paradise forever. Their fears that the population of Earth might be enslaved or extinct.

  So, that was my distracted and depressed mindset when I came around a corner of the passageway, and I saw Count freakin’ Chocula standing in the open doorway of a cabin. It wasn’t his cabin, his was forward, on the opposite side of the bridge/CIC complex from my own cabin. This cabin was aft near the cargo bays our science team used as workspaces.

  What was Hans Chotek doing? He was leaning forward into the cabin, and a woman from the science team was leaning outward, and they were smooching. ‘Smooch’ is a nice neutral term for whatever ballet their tongues were doing in each other’s mouths.

  I stopped dead in my tracks. Chotek saw me and instead of being shocked and embarrassed like I would have been, he merely nodded and touched Doctor Reinfall’s cheek. She had a guilty look but there was a twinkle in her eye. “Colonel Bishop,” Chotek acknowledged me in a matter-of-fact manner and right there, I understood why he was not embarrassed by my presence. To him, I was like one of the servants in the house where he grew up. Hans Chotek had been raised to be accustomed to having maids, nannies, cooks and maybe even butlers around, and to him they were almost invisible, like part of the furniture. I guess that is the aloof attitude you need to have if staff are living in your house, but it irritated me.

  Not knowing what else to do, I said “Mister Chotek,” and resumed walking purposefully forward, as if I had an important task and could not waste time on small talk. As I passed the still-open cabin door, I saw Dr. Reinfall was wearing a long shirt and if she had anything on under the shirt,
I couldn’t see it. With my cheeks burning red, I took the first turn I came to, and slapped the access panel to walk into a dimly-lit cargo bay that was half empty. “Skippy!”

  “Hey, Joe, what’s up? If you plan to take inventory in there, don’t bother. Major Simms and my bots did it yesterday.”

  “No, I do not want to count socks, or,” I waved a hand angrily at the crates. “Whatever. Why didn’t you warn me about Count Smoochula?”

  “Count Smoochula?” He laughed. “That’s a good one! I get it, because he was checking Dr. Reinfall’s tonsils with his-”

  “I don’t need to-”

  “That wasn’t all they have been doing. I didn’t watch or listen, because of that stupid privacy thing you told me about,” he grumbled. “Man, what a pain in the ass your monkey culture can be sometimes. I’ll tell you what, though, those two have been getting up to some serious gymnastics in there, they bounced around enough that the ship had to make a minor course correction. I mean, sure, those two don’t compare to the way Adams was-”

  “Ah! Skippy! I do not need details. Don’t want details. I need to not hear details, got it? That ‘privacy thing’ as you called it, is absolutely vital to crew morale aboard this ship. We’ve been stuck in this tin can together for way too long.”

  “You forget about the time on Gingerbread, Joe, people had plenty of opportunity for shore leave then.”

  “That’s not the point, Skippy. You should have warned me what I would see when I came around that corner.”

  “To be fair, Joe, I did not know Smoochula would open the door at that exact moment. I would have known if you allowed me to use a camera in people’s cabins, but noooo, monkeys need privacy when they are mating. Jeez, it’s not like your species does anything worth watching.”

  “That is also not the point. Also, don’t ever use the word ‘mating’ again. Ok, Ok, this was an accident, he opened the door at the wrong time.” Crap. What were the odds I would be in that exact spot the one time Chocula visited Reinfall’s cabin? “Do not give me any details, but how long have those two been, uh, together?”