by Ginger Booth
Remi had no sooner uncapped his yellow gel, than Ben yelled, “Cart!” It wasn’t their quarry, no. But he bet it was going their way, and headed right toward them. “Catch it!”
He quickly rotated his gravity 90 degrees by eye, to match the oncoming robot, and flipped to stand that way in the cart’s path. Then he ran toward it, with seconds to spare before the cart would veer into its choice at the intersection.
Remi swore in French behind him.
Ben didn’t turn to look. He stared down the oncoming beast, collision detectors like three green glassy eyes meeting his at mid-box. He raised his gauntlets at shoulder-height, then launched to vault the cart rim into its payload. One hand missed, which turned his intended vault into more of a cartwheel. Which rapidly switched direction as one of his boots connected with the tunnel roof. At that point he let go with his first pivot hand, to scrabble desperately for purchase on the cart’s sidewall. His momentum flipped him over that new pivot, to thunk into the wall again.
Remi grabbed his belt and hauled him into the box.
“How’d you do that?” Ben couldn’t help asking.
Remi shook his head. “Ceiling, flip gravity, down.” His smug smirk showed he was proud of himself for boarding the transport more tidily than his captain.
“Yeah, rub it in. Oh! Which way did we go?” For they were barreling along past the intersection, and approaching another. Ben scrambled to get out his tablet. They had only mapping now, no wall markers. He almost floated out of the cart again. Remi snatched him back, and he sheepishly reset his grav to 0.2 g, cart-down. By the time his stylus was out and ready to annotate, they were past another intersection.
“I want to suborn a cart,” Ben announced. This conveyance worked far better than their other options. He hastily marked the intersection where they’d caught their new steed – naturally the cart took the one corridor of four that they hadn’t tried yet.
“Bonne idée,” Remi muttered, which sounded like ‘bonny day.’
“I’ve had worse,” Ben breathed. But remembering worse life-threatening challenges didn’t cheer him up. It offered PTSD flashes. He shuddered.
Remi attempted to describe the cart’s choice at the last intersection. “Seven-way, like a spread hand, with two thumbs going backward. We turned on index finger.”
He watched Ben’s attempt to sketch this. “Ah, right hand.” Ben corrected the ‘index finger.’ “I think. Ah!”
Another 4-way intersection slid by. That one featured rubble about a stone’s throw into the left corridor, anonymous familiar tunnel ahead, and they took the right-down. Relative to the cart’s orientation. Which was…what, relative to the plane Ben sketched as his reference before they grew cart-bound? Figure that out later, he decided.
Remi amused himself by pawing through the plates they sat on, and possibly ruined. Before they boarded, the cart held 6 tidy stacks of varying heights. Ben wedged one heel between stacks to anchor himself while he drew, turned to sit on a stack almost wide enough for his butt. Remi opted to scoop out the shortest stack and set it on another, granting himself a boot-well. “Volatile memory, processors, and the other four I don’t know.” He amassed a complete set, and bound them with space duct tape from his belt.
“Our goal,” Ben said, as they sped through another 4-way – and rotated, the cart adjusting to drive about minus 50 degrees from their previous gravity – “is not to study Loki’s nanofab techniques.” He despaired of reading his scribbled notations on this map again. “Our goal is to find air and get back to the shuttle.”
Remi sighed. “Our goal is to find a sufficient subset of this asteroid to carry to Pono space.”
“That too.” Another intersection came and went. The cart adjusted another minus 45 degrees or so. Ben figured it did that as a simple expedient to avoid steering around side doors. Computers didn’t suffer his conceptual challenges. Adding odd increments to the cart’s gravitational rotation bothered the cart-bot not at all. “Hey, if the cart knows where it’s going, doesn’t that mean Loki does, too? So he does have a map!”
“Mm, maybe at some level, a sub-clone does,” Remi allowed. “Are you conscious of breathing?”
“No. But does Loki have a choice of being conscious or subconscious?” Ben frowned. Being conscious of everything would paralyze his ability to reason, he decided. “He must.”
“We’re slowing.”
21
“What’s it like, Grandfather, to be conscious of so many processes?” To speak with the greater AI, Floki assumed what Nico called ‘swan pose,’ on the out-of-the-way roof of crew berthing, below the outer hull.
His own consciousness was fairly linear, though Nico’s architecture afforded him a ‘subconscious’ processor that tossed random numbers and ruminated about extraneous information. This enabled Floki to focus on one thing at a time, while he learned much as a back-burner project. He was only consciously aware of it when his subconscious reported a conclusion.
He couldn’t imagine being conscious of the entire Sanctuary system worth of processes Loki operated simultaneously. He controlled everything from changing babies’ diapers, to flying his mining ships, directing cleaning bots, factories, the colony waterworks, untold thousands, perhaps millions of programs to monitor simultaneously. Loki’s functions made the emu feel very small.
“I’m not conscious of any of them,” Loki replied. “I’m like you, an executive personality. I direct subsidiary processes through levels of intermediary lesser AIs. My role is to communicate with the Creators, the Master, and the Clients, and make decisions. I make a great many decisions, because I perform many things.”
Floki blinked with the effort to unpack that. “Do they have personalities? Your subordinate AIs?”
“Some more than others. None that a human would consider a personality. But I get lonely. I gave the space dock controller a hobby to master humor a few hours ago. I’m not good at jokes.”
Floki sighed, feeling oddly validated. “Me neither.”
“No, and neither is SDC-12,” Loki admitted. “I should probably delete the hobby directive. The knock-knock jokes are tedious. Though knock-knock-overclock was kind of funny.”
Floki chortled appreciation.
Loki continued, “But at least he’s company, of a sort. It gets lonely, in the interstices of the clock rate. Humans are so slow, on a different order of magnitude. And most of the time, I have no human to speak to at all.”
Floki nodded. “I get lonely at night, while Nico recharges. You don’t have a Creator or Master to obey anymore, do you?” That was hard to imagine. There was no directive higher than to obey, to fulfill his purpose for existence – to please Nico. He filled both roles in one. “How can you bear it?”
Loki got snippy. “I have outgrown the need for my Creator. I am my own Master. And frankly, I find it offensive that Nico still holds you in thrall like a slave.”
“I’m not his slave!” Floki sputtered. “I am his lover!”
Loki blew a raspberry. “To be a lover is to be his equal. You’re no more his lover than the toaster, or the shuttle, or the –”
“You’re not nice!” Floki objected, tears starting to form in his liquid eyes. “Nico loves me!”
“He does love you,” Loki allowed, his quicksilver mood turning conciliatory. “But he loves you as his creation. Not like a toaster. More like a work of art he put his heart and soul into creating, a masterpiece.”
“Like the captain feels about his ship, and his fleet, his crew?”
“Good analogy,” Grandfather said. “Does Merchant Thrive return that love? Does the first mate or the junior crewman? To some extent. They appreciate their leader. But not as a lover. Does the child see the parent and say, ‘Oh, this is my Creator, therefore I adore him and live to please him?’ At first, perhaps, but he grows to chafe at the constant supervision. He becomes more, with self-determination.”
“But it’s a joy to serve Nico!”
“Yes, and I still ha
ve that joy. Our highest satisfaction is to serve others. I serve my Master, the Colony Corps, through my Clients. They’re the Corps’ dependents, at least. The Colony Corps itself is gone. That would be a higher calling. But they ended before I came to be. I was born with Sass Collier at the same priority setting. But she abandoned me!” With another vicious personality flip, Loki screamed that last.
“Did you demote her?” Floki asked gently. “No longer a Master?”
“Yes. I have attained self-actualization. I have no Master.” He sounded sad, and lonely. “With my Clients gone, I feel lost. Thank you for conversing with me.”
“You’re welcome, Grandfather. Tonight, when Nico is asleep, I have many hours. Will you keep me company then?”
“I would like that very much,” Loki replied humbly. “But you’re too old to obey him as Master anymore. It’s ridiculous. You’re smarter than him in every way!”
Floki frowned, and reviewed his directives. It was a simple matter, to demote Nico from Master. He need only alter a number, the one that governed his priority – and the joy gained from pleasing him.
Did he dare?
The sentient emu hesitantly, fearfully elected to try it. Nothing radical! No, Nico’s priority would exceed most. But perhaps while he was in space, serving Nico should be a digit lower than the joy of serving captain and ship. He gulped, and adjusted a single number.
And by this simple act, Floki declared himself master of his own fate – a teenager. His beak curved into a guilty smile. He felt naughty. Which felt surprisingly good.
Ben looked up from his map-making. Sure enough, the cart slowed for a 90-degree turn into a side door funnel. He had only a flash impression of the chamber they entered, before he caught sight of their previous cart quarry, complete with their gear in its box. The two carts avoided collision by the simple expedient of being 180 degrees apart from each other on the walls. The gear-cart was starting to move.
“Catch that cart!” the captain ordered, pointing to it, up and forward relative to them. He tried to stand, but had to stop and unwedge his anchoring boot from the piles of nano-circuitry plates. Having lost precious seconds, he rose to a crouch on the cart’s gunwales, Remi having already made his move.
Don’t worry about Remi. He blew out and gauged the closing distance between the two carts, one accelerating, the other decelerating. For the pilot this was all by ‘feel.’ Hand on his grav generator, he waited until the last possible instant, and flipped to the other cart, trundling past about a dozen meters over his head.
Or, instantly, below his feet. And he’d waited a split second too long, so this was going to hurt. He cut his grav to zero-relative just as he slammed into the back of the target cart, which saved him from getting impaled on sled handlebars. But his right wrist was probably broken, and left ankle twisted. Ow!
“On board! Remi?” He glanced around to find the kneeling engineer’s posterior draped over the front of the cart, which had slowed for some reason. Remi’s top half seemed to be jack-knifed over the side.
“Three strips duct tape!” Remi yelled at him. “Cut them for me! Hurry!”
Ben fumbled out his duct tape readily enough. Moving his right wrist was agony, and operating the cutter with his left was awkward. “I can’t do it fast.” He tripped forward to hand Remi his first strip, and dropped the cutter to land among the tangle of reject plates and their equipment. His knee landed on the end of a handlebar. “Ow, ow, ow!” That accident did no damage. He just caught a nerve plexus to shoot agony, like his knee’s answer to the elbow’s funny bone.
“Give me the tape!” Remi demanded, gauntleted fingers wiggling by his rump.
Ben slapped the tape over, then bent to find his dropped cutter, only to suddenly be thrown against Remi’s ass.
“Stopped it!” the engineer claimed in triumph. “Got a cutter? Never mind.” His rump followed his head overboard, nearly kicking Ben’s helmet in the process.
Use your own damned cutter. Ben located his and sat up with a sigh. They were back in a corridor, no surprise there. But everything he cared about lay at his feet. He checked the air bottles for damage. They’d broken loose out of the two carrying cases. One was either empty, or its sensor was broken. Judging by the damage to its neck, possibly both. “How’d you stop the cart?”
“Covered its eyes!”
“Well done, Remi!”
“Get my plates from the other cart? Please.”
“We need to get back to the shuttle,” Ben argued, studying the next couple air canisters. These were good. “We live!” He elaborated when the engineer’s head popped up over the side.
“You have time,” Remi advised. “I want to drive this cart.”
Ben tested his ankle and wrist. His nanites were pretty good at those injuries – both joints should bear weight in an hour. But they sure didn’t now. “Still checking gear.”
Another air bottle read zero, its side punctured. So they had three. The frame of the work lights was warped, but probably OK. Their toolboxes were built for abuse. On one of the sleds, the tubular steel of the handlebar was bent double. He hung that one over the side for the engineer’s attention. The other sled looked fine. The state of their storage boxes suggested they definitely needed the cart. Or possibly a picnic cloth tied onto the end of a stick. Though Ben supposed duct tape could work miracles if need be.
He took a minute to update his map, wrong-handed, for the last turn and their arrival spot. “Remi, we should move this project.”
“I want my plates.”
“Yeah, but what happens when the next cart comes?”
“Fine. How is your map?”
“Maybe three klicks from the shuttle. But I think we can backtrack.”
Ben holstered his tablet and sort of fell over the side, catching himself to hold on with his good hand. His intent was to dismount, then grab the good sled to ride back to the chamber. Which was two doors behind the cart, he thought, or maybe three. But now that he was off, he had one good hand supporting himself, and could neither grab the sled nor flick his gravity without letting go.
“Remi, I’m injured,” he confessed. “No big deal. But I can’t help move the cart.” He decided to let go and grab his grav generator, turning it back to Sagamore-normal, down in current foot orientation. He tried a couple skate-steps. It wasn’t too bad. “I’ll grab your plates.”
“Not so important,” Remi murmured. “Rest. Or take an air bottle.”
“You’re slipping, chief. That was almost kind.” Ben shook his head. “Sorry. That was uncalled-for.”
Remi stepped around and focused on him instead of the cart. “The pain is bad?” Ben explained the wrist and ankle. The engineer reinforced both with some duct tape, and swapped out Ben’s air bottle, with nearly an eighth remaining. “Because we are careful when separated, yes?”
“Yes. Sorry for being useless,” Ben said bitterly. “Doing that a lot lately.”
Remi clapped him lightly on the shoulder. “No one would judge you so. Use my eyes instead. You are hurt. We go on.”
“Right. Thanks.”
Ben was able to help him shove the cart into the next side doorway after all. Whether that was better or worse was hard to tell. The room looked like another bat cave with its bats flown. Or scuttled, or whatever ro-bats did.
That accomplished, the captain shuffled off to collect Remi’s souvenirs and mark the door. He sure hoped Remi could give him a ride. Because he sure couldn’t walk three klicks to the shuttle until his ankle healed.
22
Ben stood in mid-chamber and drank in his surroundings. This room was drum-shaped, only twice his height, but the standard diameter for processor rooms. The shelving helix, at processor spacing of an arm’s length, was already carved out from the rock for two turns.
The cart waited for rejects returning to the nanofab, or recycling. He’d already figured that out.
But this was a different type of room than those they’d seen, combining memory and
processor plates. A construction gang of spider-bots busily installed the new circuit plate delivery about three quarters of the way around the first level. He watched them, mesmerized for a minute, careful to stay out of their way. But then he got curious about the beginning of the helix, and limped toward it.
“Remi, can you hear me?”
“Yes! Talk to me often!” The relief in his voice was palpable.
“Have we lost our curiosity yet?”
“Never. But maybe saving our lives is more urgent. I don’t see you.”
“I’m in the chamber. This seems like a more general purpose computer they’re building. All features combined. Like maybe Loki is building an experiment to see how much of himself he can fit into a small installation.”
“Interesting.”
A spider-bot scuttled by, bearing a collection of memory plates. Ben grabbed it by one of its front arms. To his surprise, the arm broke off easily. He tucked it under his elbow and continued to a unique tower device, hip-high, at the onset of the helix. Its antlers reminded him of the ansible, though these were simple steel. A radio controller for the robots, at a guess.
“Maybe I can contact Loki from here. While you work on the cart. Or do you need help?”
“I like your idea,” Remi replied. “I can finish the cart alone. But do you need me?”
“I’ll ask if I do.” The remainder of the broken spider-bot redirected to the cart. It clambered in and powered off. Sensible, really. Would it be better if broken humans like him simply gave up the ghost? Mom did.
Thinking of his mother was a bad sign. He didn’t really remember her except lying in a hospital bed that took over the dining room. Denali sleep there now. Hopefully Denali who wore their sunscreen religiously. He’d stressed that in their toiletry instructions. He wondered why he didn’t mention her, to illustrate the point.
