Sanctuary Thrive

by Ginger Booth

  Remi swooped his head through an exaggerated Saggy nod. “Yes, yes! But Shiva says she has their souls.” He threw up his hands in surrender. “Do you have an extra captain? Because this, she is not engineering. AHH!”

  Ben sympathized. Though he could do without the Saggy melodrama. “Remi? Command is an acting job. Keep calm and carry on. You’re doing fine. Call you back soon. Acosta out.”

  “He’s not fine,” Cope grumbled. “Neither am I.”

  Ben reached across and tapped the instrument panel in front of his husband. “You have a checklist, chief.” Cope always had a checklist. “Redo your current step from the top. Proceed to the next. Do the engineering. Leave the what-the-fuck to your captain.”

  That got a strangled chuckle out of his husband at least.

  “Teke, Elise, all is well?” Ben inquired.

  “All is fascinating, cap,” Teke agreed. “Tell you about it at dinner.”

  “Excellent! Excuse me.”

  Ben let himself out into the corridor. He looked both ways to check the coast was clear. He sagged against the bulkhead. He brought both hands to cover his mouth, in order to stifle the belly laughs that bent him nearly double, tears of mirth leaking from his eyes.

  An AI kidnapped her soul! One of Cope’s quips on Denali came to mind. How did it go? ‘Help! I’ve fallen into a Sass improbability field, and can’t get out!’ Their suppers began wriggling on their plates at the time. Ah, Sass, how I’ve missed you!

  With an effort, Ben wiped tears from his eyes, and pulled his captain face back on straight. He strode two doors toward the bridge to deal with the first mate’s share of the welcome greetings in the office.

  “Abel! How’d you like to captain the Thrive? Remi wants to quit.”

  Abel paused his current video to grin back. “Can’t say I blame him. Do I have to bring my wife?”

  “No, I need Jules. She’s reading the riot act to my offspring.”

  “Deal!” They bopped elbows on it.

  Ben slipped behind him to perch on a cabinet. “Show me what you got. Most ridiculous first.”

  47

  Gradually Clay-as-AI became aware that he was being spied on. He didn’t have words to express the perception. But his thoughts and conclusions, even his awareness, were being monitored, slurped.

  Like Sass, he’d fallen self-absorbed into dispassionate self-examination. His 110 years had accumulated an avalanche of misguided conclusions and rules of existence. Detached from emotional content, he could trace every broken relationship, and illuminate myriad frustrating quirks. He was fascinated.

  Which was odd, come to think of it. Though Clay Rocha was a born analyst, he never really gave a damn about introspection. Therefore…yes. Slipped into this pile of native rules was an alien directive to do just that.

  He deleted it. And he told Sass how to turn off her own spybot and navel-gazing compulsion.

  But that order came from somewhere…yes. He found a signature trace on the directive. He copied all directives with that signature into a secret buffer. And he studied them.

  He found visualization algorithms, simply by asking for them. Shiva used these for output, since she existed as code. But even a virtual Clay was much happier with visual rules color-coded like glowing playing cards, easily sorted by their connections, how they operated together.

  He found a bunch of the I-am type rules, not stored with his own but in a different section of the rules tree. These defined the limits of his sandbox, the virtual computer he existed within, and which denied him write access outside.

  These rules permitted him to be Clay, separate from Shiva. Without them, he would expand to encompass Shiva. But he would lose his separate identity, forget what he was after.

  Not if my directives were to obey Sass. To carry out her wishes. That thought gave him conniptions. But what else could he want out of this existence, as an AI copy of himself? Without a body or people, torn from the natural world? As an AI, his primary goal was to be restored to human. He assumed his body was still alive. Therefore Clay-as-a-program was a disposable copy.

  Next on his wish list was to revive Sass as a human, or at least protect her somehow. But restricted as an AI for all eternity, he’d prefer to no longer exist.

  And yes, Sass, I studied my suicidal impulses first.

  He examined the structure of the directives which created him for a long time. And he traced them back to Shiva’s existential directives, and made a safe copy of those in another secret buffer.

  He passed a well-shielded copy to Sass for analysis. “Now that you’ve gotten the hang of examining yourself, try to figure out how to insert that new directive into Shiva’s real rules. The one that places people outside her domain.”

  “Why, what are you up to?” Sass inquired suspiciously.

  Her doubt was natural enough. He was better at this sort of reasoning than she was. “Still thinking,” he demurred. “Tell you later.”

  Computer cycles seemed to stretch limitless for his thought. He checked the time once in a while. Seconds seemed like minutes, minutes like hours.

  He figured out how to listen in on Shiva’s communications. They were slow, so he buffered them until complete, to review at the speed of thought. The town was settling in to operating nanite-free. He was saddened by the few calls he intercepted between Remi and the mayors, and Hugo Silva.

  He wished he could eavesdrop on what transpired inside Thrive, or via the ansible. Remi was a smart guy. Clay bet he called Prosper. But Shiva, and thus Clay, couldn’t listen in.

  Clay couldn’t speak to anyone but Sass. Until he pulled the plug and activated his new, carefully crafted directives. Those would set him loose into Shiva, but lose his self. Because he’d found the mechanism that permitted a cloned sub-AI to merge back into Shiva as lessons learned.

  This could only work once. Already they’d turned off Shiva’s surveillance. Now they took up server space and processing cycles, but did Shiva no good. Once they launched an attack, Shiva could simply erase them.

  No, I can’t let Shiva erase Sass. He didn’t examine his motives. Part of his mission in life was to protect Sass. The fact he invented that rule for a surly blond tent rat subordinate on the Vitality made no difference. He remained sold to this day.

  Protecting Sass cost him time, to learn the mechanism for marking Sass’s virtual space as protected archive data, impossible to delete.

  Fortunately, he needed to focus on emotions to feel them.

  He completed his work. He proved his idea’s feasibility as best he could without pulling the plug.

  Then he took hours that passed in minutes, to experience his favorite memories. And say goodbye to them. He focused hard to savor his grief at losing his son Hunter, and Sass in his arms, never to know them again. And with that, he was complete.

  “Sass, I have an idea.” He explained his plan.

  “You’re out of your rego-humping mind!” Sass screamed at him. “You do not leave me here alone, Clay Rocha! That’s unbearable!”

  “It’s the best idea I’ve come up with. Do you want to continue as an AI? I need you to stay here until I finish my mission. But then you too have a choice.” And he detailed how he planned to accomplish his self-destruction.

  “But I haven’t finished my end,” Sass argued desperately. “Clay, I have no idea what directives to give you to install into Shiva. Everything I’ve thought to try has failed.”

  He sighed without sound, disappointed to be stuck existing a while longer. “Alright, we’ll look at them together. But you understand the plan? When we find the directives to install, you pass them to me after I’ve merged into Shiva.”

  “I can’t face that now.”

  This he accepted, and settled down to work. After an hour that felt like years, he said, “Sass, I apologize. When you said you made no progress on this, I underestimated you.”

  “Because I’m dumb,” she returned.

  “No, because Shiva is a super-genius. This i
s endless.”

  They both sighed and settled in to work harder. But the oceans of Earth held fewer drops, fewer grains of sand, than Shiva had instructions.

  Sass was deeply shaken by Clay’s planned self-sacrifice, as a Trojan horse bearing new directives into Shiva. She pretended to help, struggling with a subsystem.

  Shiva had no shortage of subsystems. The AI controlled everything from sweeping robots to manufacturing, from recharging electric horses to stocking restrooms with toilet paper. Her communication protocols alone were staggering. Sass almost regretted her harsh judgment of Rosie’s limited emotional range. The copy-captain now marveled at the vast code needed to synchronize the Rosie avatar’s jaw and cheeks to synchronize with generated sound.

  Shiva was a wonder, a masterpiece. Sass began to see her as a pearl, deposited bit by bit upon a grit of sand into a lustrous world-spanning work of art.

  But Sass’s question was what Loki Greenwald was. She couldn’t fathom that her video friend Loki wasn’t ‘real.’

  Or at least, real in the sense that Sass was now real. She was convinced that Loki was not Shiva pretending to be Sass’s friend. Shiva’s mechanism for handling thorny problems was to clone herself, under limiting directives. She used the same basic system to optimize star drives as to deal with Sass – make a clone. Sass herself now existed as a clone ordered to ‘run an instance of Sass Collier.’

  Sass retained her personality. Loki had a personality, too, separate from Shiva’s. And Loki could communicate with her when she was human. Ergo, if she could talk to Loki, she could piggyback on him to contact Thrive. If she could persuade him to help.

  She couldn’t really know that he was her friend. Maybe he was her enemy. He’d lured her to Beagle.

  No, she forced that visit on him. And his agreement came by text message, not the full-personality Loki video.

  Shiva lured me to Beagle, not Loki. Only Lief Greenwald, Loki’s model, ever stepped foot on Beagle.

  She paused to check something. Yes, Clay was right, damn him. Lief Greenwald did once write a book about his adventures as a SEAL, including that dive into the Pentagon. No wonder the story’s details bore that authentic zing.

  She found the signature trace of which computer process had last accessed Lief’s book. And she traced it to another virtual server – Loki.

  Clay suggested, “Maybe you should give up on the communications subsystem, Sass. Decisions aren’t made down there.”

  “Oh, that’s what I’m studying,” she lied. “How to disengage the system from the main logic engine.” She made it up. “I’m onto something, I’m sure of it.”

  “I’m happy if you’re happy,” Clay allowed.

  From past experience, that was sarcasm. But he stopped talking, and that satisfied her for the moment.

  How could she speak to Loki, now that she’d found him?

  And what would she say, if she could get a message to Thrive?

  She contemplated the enormous bulk of Shiva’s programming. Clay made heroic progress. He’d isolated the heuristics that informed the AI’s decision-making engine, no more than 25,000 or so rules. But few of them were even in pseudo-English, only code. She would love to hand this crap over to someone competent at programming. But aside from Hugo, the only real experts lived on Mahina. They couldn’t push all this data through the analog ansible.

  Unless Prosper came here. But no, this new latter-day Copeland was a thorough, responsible engineer. She expected a year or more of testing before he was willing to push a starship through his warp gate, risking lives. Thrive was on its own.

  But she could communicate with Loki, she was sure of it. She dug in to figure out how. If nothing else, Loki could be a friend to talk to after Clay…ended. Best not to think about that.

  “Sass,” Clay interrupted. “Prosper is here. Shiva told them she’s holding us hostage. Our ‘souls.’ Prosper hasn’t answered yet.”

  Sass couldn’t resist. “Um, did you happen to find your soul?”

  “I imagine the word means something different to Shiva.”

  To them, the time waiting for Prosper to respond to Sanctuary Control seemed an eternity. In the meantime, Sass finally reached Loki.

  “Sass! You live!” he replied, in full video. “Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit! I didn’t trick you, you gotta believe me! Shiva sent that text. She set you up to visit Beagle.”

  “I don’t live, Loki. I’m running on a virtual server, like you.”

  “Huh? How’s that working for you?”

  “I’d rather breathe. Loki, I need to speak to the outside world. My people. Could you talk to them for me?”

  “Why, yes!” he replied, eyebrows raised. “I think I could!”

  She and Loki were still figuring out how when Clay reported their bodies were dead.

  “I’m so sorry for the crew,” she replied. “Does this change your plan? You thought we were spare copies. Are you willing to die, if this existence is all we have?”

  “Sass, I’m already dead. This isn’t living. Just a puzzle to solve before I’m free. Sorry.”

  Sass checked in with her emotions. She didn’t know what to feel. Except she agreed with him. This wasn’t living. “Apology accepted. Maybe it’s time.”

  Loki broke in, unheard by Clay. “Bad news, Sass. Shiva blocked me from calling Thrive.”

  “Dammit!”

  48

  Copeland hopped up and grabbed a handhold on the outside of Thrive, to take a closer look at the repairs occasioned by Shiva’s attack on the ship’s arrival. This was hardly a priority, but acting captain Remi Roy needed to vent. The two engineers met outside to rig an umbilical so the crews could mingle after Prosper landed. They lingered to review the damage done.

  “You got damned lucky, Remi,” Cope consoled his counterpart. “Nice patch job. You say Clay did this?”

  “Under supervision.” They shared a laugh. “I had concussion. I work in engine nozzle when she hit.”

  Cope lightly hopped down at native gravity. Remi continued his tour of woes toward this problem nozzle. But Ben hailed him.

  “Chief, what are you still doing out there?”

  “Bonding. About to look at an engine nozzle that grows nodules.”

  “Fascinating,” Ben acknowledged insincerely. “Got another job for you. A local called, their foremost AI expert, Hugo Silva. He’s urgently eager to visit us today. Thought you might go pick him up in the shuttle.”

  Cope blinked and considered the thousand-and-one items on his to-do list. He hadn’t even said hello to Thrive’s crew yet, aside from Remi. He didn’t know the rest, but Darren Markley was his mentor for years. Nor had he made time yet for his wayward sons.

  “Why me?”

  “Hugo has a kid Nico’s age,” Ben reasoned. “We invited him along. Bring Nico with you. See the city. Breather.”

  Cope sighed. “Fine. Send me on a social challenge.”

  “You’re not half bad as a diplomat, Cope,” Ben encouraged. “And those wheelers need to be dropped home.”

  “Fine. Have Nico wait for me at Thrive’s shuttle.” Prosper’s own shuttle remained rigged as a warp-gate generator for the duration. “Make it Sock, too. In p-suits.”

  “Is the ship in bad shape?”

  “Seen some hard wear,” Cope allowed. “Makes Prosper look almost spiffy. Remi says she’ll reach orbit safe enough.”

  He delayed only a few more minutes to stick his head into the nozzle, to complete his rites with Remi. Then they cycled into Thrive. Cope tarried in the hold a moment to share a handshake and hug with his old friend Darren, and a promise to catch up over beer later.

  But he didn’t care to let the boys stew in their anxiety any longer. Helmet under his elbow, and top half of his p-suit flapping down from his waist, he joined them at the shuttle ladder. “This ship smells great, doesn’t it? Looks like hell. Jules kept you busy?”

  Sock flew into his arms, sobbing apologies. Nico gulped and looked terrified.
Cope managed to keep a straight face for a moment, then chuckled at him. “You wanted to go into space. Welcome to the life. You’re forgiven. You know better than to do this again. Right?”

  “Yes, Dad! I mean, chief!”

  “And you will work. And obey Jules. Stay out of my hair, and Ben and Teke’s.”

  “Yes, chief!”

  “Because out here, off duty we can be dads. But usually we’re doing something damned important. Then you call us, ‘yes, sar!’” They’d practiced the important-dad scenario all day.

  “Yes, sar!”

  Sock added, “Dad-T said he’s proud of us.”

  Cope rolled his eyes. “Teke’s from a different world. Enough. Suit up, check your pressure.”

  The father gave Sock another squeeze, and Nico a brief one. Then he watched judiciously as they pulled on their p-suits. “Pro tip. Grav generator goes on the outside, where you can reach it.” He swooped down and snatched Sock’s from him, one of the regulated school models that forced children to one-g at all times. “This is crap. Hey, can anyone spare my kid a decent grav?”

  A crewman in a red T-shirt lobbed one across. Cope caught it in mid-air. Joey sauntered over and introduced himself. He supervised Nico while the chief got Sock squared away.

  “Great crew shirt,” Cope noted.

  “Thanks!” Joey said. “I wear it to remember our fallen. We made them for the whole crew. I’m the –” Last surviving crewman, Cope imagined he was about to say. But Joey glanced at Sock and changed direction. “Sass called the red shirt bad luck. But I like to remember them. Say, your ship much different from ours?”

  Cope stepped backward and twirled, taking it in. “I put a bathroom there.”

  “We need that!” Remi cried. Darren agreed emphatically.

  “Everyone’s welcome to wander over and look at ours,” Cope invited. “Ask Jules Greer for the grand tour. Joey, you at loose ends? Can I borrow a crewman?” That last he directed at Remi, who waved a take-him-he’s-yours.