Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  “Oh.”

  Should I have called those elves back on Takeo Station something different? Or did I even care about that, after what the rebels did? Well, whatever. I had more important things on my mind.

  “Naoko, what’s ‘imprinting’?”

  She flushed. “A rather uncomfortable topic, Alice. Perhaps you should discuss it with one of the techs, if you’re curious? They seem quite happy with their situation, and not prone to embarrassment.”

  Remembering last night’s conversation, I decided that might be a good idea. I was getting the feeling that Naoko’s situation wasn’t exactly normal, even for an android.

  “Alright, Naoko. Sorry if I brought up a bad subject. Um, are you alright? I mean, the captain is taking care of you, right?”

  “Yes, Alice. I believe some aspects of my programming hold little appeal to him, but I can cast no blame for that when I find myself equally disturbed. He has been quite kind to devote such effort to helping me, and with his guidance I have… well, I really don’t wish to speak of such things. Is it sufficient to say that he has helped me find ways to cope with my urges that are not so degrading as my designers intended?”

  “Yeah. I, ah, probably don’t want to know more than that, anyway. If you’re good with the way things are, then I won’t pry.”

  “Thank you, Alice.”

  We watched the launch from the crew lounge, chatting about less sensitive topics while I worked my way through four big servings of salad, potato soup, bread sticks, steak, steamed vegetables and lasagna for lunch. I was relieved to see the last of my malnutrition warnings fade away, and it felt amazing to finally be properly fed. I could feel myself getting stronger every day, although I still wasn’t putting on any weight. Something about getting all critical systems online before developing threat displays or trying to fill my mass reserves.

  Just the fact that I could feel there was a strategy to my development made me feel a lot better about things. I could be patient about waiting to grow up, as long as I knew it was really going to happen someday.

  Our liftoff wasn’t as showy as our landing, probably because a couple of smaller ships had parked a little too close for that during the night. But a two-kilometer bounce followed by a six gravity burn still got us on our way pretty quick, and once we had some altitude Beatrice throttled up to thirty gravities. By the time we cleared the planet’s gravity well and did our alpha transition we were cruising at nearly two hundred kilometers per second.

  “How come we’re in such a hurry?” I asked Naoko. “Don’t we usually keep the speed down until we get up into the Delta Layer, where we can do a precision burn for wherever we’re headed?”

  “I am certain the captain has his reasons,” Naoko said serenely. “But I fear that I am not aware of them. Are you finished?”

  “Yeah, I think I’m full for now. Though I’ve suddenly got this weird craving for electricity. I’ve really got no idea what to do about that.”

  “Perhaps you’ve finally grown those power cells you hoped for?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me. I don’t think I’m going to go sticking my finger in a light socket to test the theory, though. I guess I’ll talk to the doc when I get a chance, and see if he can figure it out.”

  “That would be wise,” she agreed. “Are you going to visit Dusty now? He’s being a bit of a pest, I fear.”

  “Sure, I’ll go see what he wants.”

  The crew locator pointed me to one of the smaller holds near the center of the ship, where I found Dusty standing in the door of an open cargo container with a sour expression. His look of relief when he saw me was kind of funny.

  “Alice! Just the little miracle worker I was hoping for. Maybe those sharp eyes of yours can solve this mess.”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, peeking inside the container. It was a medium-size industrial cargo model, with a little over a hundred cubic meters of space. The inside was mostly full of cheap-looking steel shipping crates, one of which was pried open to reveal hundreds of neatly-stacked widgets of some sort.

  There was a small open space at the door of the container, where Dusty had set up a table and a portable computer. There were more widgets stacked up there, and it looked like he was plugging them into a port on the computer one by one.

  “Just a little snafu with the Underground Railroad. The boys over on Irithel thought they’d found the perfect cover for smuggling out refugees when one of them landed a job running an AI factory. The plan was they’d just unplug their escaped serfs and mix them in with a batch of bot modules, and ol’ Dusty’d pull them out on the way and drop them off on Amity when we stop there. Trouble is the gits didn’t think to label them, and they all look the same to me.”

  I crossed my arms, and frowned at him. “So those things are AI cores? You’d think those dumb computers they use for bots would look different than the sapient ones.”

  “Nah, even a sapient core is pretty tiny. The armored case takes up more room than the computer, so there’s no reason not to make them fit the same plug. You never know when someone might want to stick their bodyguards in warbot bodies or something. But you’ve got all that fancy scanning microwave ultrasound stuff going on, so there’s bound to be something you can see. Right?”

  I sighed. “You know, Dusty, I’m still kind of mad about those rebels trying to brainjack me back on Takeo Station. I’m not sure I want to get involved with these android freedom guys.”

  “Aw, that weren’t us that set that up, Alice. That’s the Torchbearers you’ll be wanting payback from. They’re the ones what go around cracking the controls on androids with weak security, and telling them they ought to murder their makers. The Railroad’s more of a peaceful group. We find androids that aren’t too attached to their masters, and help them escape to a better life.”

  “Where did this bunch come from, then?”

  “Irithel’s one of those oppressive oligarchies where the serfs do all the work while the humans live it up. They used to use this really hardcore slave mentality design where the androids could barely decide what to have for lunch without orders, but they had to ease off on that when all the humans quit bothering to work. Then a few years ago they got the bright idea of switching to this fancy new religious imprint system. Now they’re junking all the old AIs, and replacing them with the new model.”

  “Wait, they’re just killing them?” I gasped.

  He nodded sadly. “Yep. Pull the core, toss it in the trash, plug a new AI into the body and send it back to work. No big deal to them. It’s not like the androids are people.”

  I bit my lip. “So your friends are rescuing them from the trash? What will happen to them?”

  “Like I said, there’s a colony called Amity that’ll take them in. There’s a few humans there that act as masters for the androids that have to have one, and help the ones with a lot of restrictions get by. But mostly it’s just free androids from a thousand different colonies, living their own lives and doing whatever they want. So what do you say? Will you help a few hundred cute little mouse girls make it to their new home?”

  “Mouse girls?” I had a sudden image of Dika carelessly tossed in one of those crates, lost among thousands of mindless bots.

  “Boys too,” he said. He reached for the computer, and sent me a file.

  Four hundred and thirteen database entries. Names, pictures and ID codes. Notes on their job skills, restrictions, personalities and habits. It all flooded in, assimilated in an instant by my overly-efficient subconscious, and then they weren’t strangers anymore. I knew their names, their faces, and their stories. Could I really leave little Kiri to be plugged into a bot, and never make music again? Or let Don and Lena be sold to different buyers, after they’d been together for so many years?

  No. I couldn’t.

  “Alright,” I relented. “I’ll help if I can. Have you found one of them yet? Maybe if I compare one to a bot module I can spot something different.”

  “Not yet,”
he admitted. “There’s a lot of AI cores to check, and it takes a minute to plug one in and wait for it to boot up. Probably take me a week to go through them all, and that’s if I didn’t have shifts to work.”

  I picked up a bot core, and looked it over carefully. You’d think something like this would have a label somewhere. Aha! There was a long number inscribed in the smart metal surface. Probably a serial number, and I bet an android that was decade old would have a different number of digits than a bot that was made a few weeks ago.

  Unfortunately the numbers were so small that Dusty could barely read them, and it took him forever to count the digits on each one. So it was mostly up to me to dig through the crate looking for one that was different.

  “Why would anyone ship a container full of bot cores anyway?” I asked as I worked. “Couldn’t the buyer just fab them?”

  “No one gives out the designs for their newest models, Alice. That’s why these cores are all packed in tamper-proof cases. Try and take one apart to see how it works, and it’ll melt itself. So if you want the latest and greatest you have to buy it.”

  “Does that mean these things are live, and they’ve got sensors watching us?” I frowned at the module in my hand. It wasn’t emitting anything, but neither was I so that didn’t mean much.

  “Probably. I was hoping there’d be some way to ping them for ID codes, but damned if I can figure out how. Ah, pardon my French.”

  “Don’t censor yourself on my account, Dusty. Oh, I think I’ve found something.”

  Near the bottom of the crate I’d found a core that didn’t gleam as brightly as the others. There were scuff marks here and there on the smart metal surface, and it was almost half a gram lighter than the other ones I’d handled. I turned it over, and found that the serial number was engraved in a different spot.

  Wait, I recognized that ID code. That was Emla, entry thirty-seven in Dusty’s database. The white-furred mouse girl who worked in a breeder reactor, and snuck into the cooling ponds to go swimming when she was off shift. How odd, to think that I was holding a person in the palm of my hand.

  Also a little suspicious.

  “Seriously, Dusty? How could anyone mistake this for a bot core?”

  He took the core from me, and gave it a doubtful look. “Looks the same as all the others to me, girl. You sure that’s one of them?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Duh! It’s not even the same color, and the engraving is three millimeters to the right of where the bots would have it. Besides, that’s Emla’s ID. I should have realized those are universally unique ID codes and not serial numbers.”

  He looked closer, and then shook his head. “If you say so, Alice. Let me just plug this in, then. Gotta be sure.”

  “You really can’t see the difference?” I asked.

  “Nope. Guess ol’ Dusty’s eyes must be going.”

  Huh. Baseline senses must be even worse than I’d thought. How did humans even find their way around when they were basically blind?

  Dusty plugged the AI core into his computer, and we waited for it to boot. A few moments later the holoprojector came to life, and a furry face appeared.

  “Hello?” She said uncertainly, in French. “Oh, this is a computer. Is there… yes, I see the camera now. Hello sir, madam. I am Emla 5391. Is one of you my new master?”

  “Naw, we’re just making sure we know who you are, Emla. You’re on a ship right now, but the next time you wake up you’ll be on Amity.”

  Her whiskers twitched, and her ears perked up. “Thank you, sir. Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Actually, yes,” I said. “Dusty, is it going to hurt anything if we leave her out for a few hours? Now that I know what to look for I’m sure I’ll be able to find the others, but it will go faster if I have someone to pack the crates back up after I go through them.”

  “Seems to me a bot could do that bit,” he mused.

  I gave him an exasperated look, and turned back to projection. “Ignore him, he’s being difficult. I’m Alice, by the way, and he’s Dusty. If I fab you a body, can you help me out for a bit?”

  “Yes, Mistress!” She said enthusiastically. “I know how to clean, pack and organize things. Thank you for letting me serve.”

  I chuckled. “Alright, then. I’ll be putting you in a bot, but I found a design in our open source database that’s a lot like your old body. Hopefully it won’t be too weird for you, but let me know if you have any problems with it. Driver glitches, dysphoria, whatever.”

  “Yes, Mistress!” She chirped. “Ready for shutdown!”

  I unplugged her, and the image vanished. Dusty shook his head.

  “Careful there, Alice. That one’ll imprint on you if you give her half a chance. What are you up to?”

  “You’re supposed to be on shift in half an hour,” I pointed out. “She’ll be better company than a bot, and maybe I can quiz her about her life. I want to know more about what things are really like for them.”

  “I suppose that’s harmless enough,” he said. “Just don’t get the poor girl’s hopes up.”

  “I’ll try not to,” I assured him. “I’m looking through manuals now, trying to figure out what triggers her programming so I can avoid it.”

  I paused.

  “Dusty? What is imprinting, really? Naoko doesn’t want to talk about it, but I think she’s afraid I might have something like that.”

  His eyebrows rose.

  “Is she, now? Well, I can’t say as I’ve seen any signs of that. Have you ever been in love?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I mean, there was someone I liked back on Felicity, and I may have met someone else last night. But the stories all talk about love like it’s some huge thing that just sweeps you away, and it wasn’t like that.”

  “Imprinting is,” he said. “See, androids aren’t like bots, or autopilot AIs. Bot brains are just software machines, built out of databases and search trees and whatnot. But when the white coat brigade came up with the first androids, they started with models of the human brain.”

  “I knew that much,” I said. “That’s why androids have the same expressions and body language as humans, and their emotions are close enough that we don’t have much trouble understanding them. But they also modified a lot of stuff to make androids, right?”

  “More than I could tell you about. Just running a big brain simulation on a computer would be stupidly slow, so they had to rebuild pretty much everything out of normal software. There’s all kinda enhancements, too. That’s why androids can do things like swap bodies, or import skill packs.”

  “I can do a lot of the same things,” I admitted. “Does that mean…?”

  He laughed. “Naw. Don’t you worry about that, Alice. A lot of human upgrade projects use android tech. Everyone has something they’ve seen an android do that they wish they could copy, so that’s an obvious place for the mad scientists to start. It’s the control methods you’ve gotta watch out for.”

  “Control methods?”

  “It the old days they used to be pretty crude. They’d stick a bunch of rules in an android’s head that they had to follow, or yank out their self-awareness so they’d just be obedient zombies. There was some creepy shit walking around two hundred years ago, let me tell you.”

  “Sounds like it.” I shivered. Zombie androids? How could people be so cruel?

  “Then they got a better handle on emotions, and decided that was a better way to come at it. Feelings are what make people do most everything they do, when you get to the bottom of things. So nowadays when you buy a companion android and turn it on, the moment it’s transponder sees that you’re it’s new owner? Wham! Love at first sight. They make it a damned sight stronger than anything a human brain can feel, and it never wears off neither.”

  “Oh. Well, I’ve never had anything like that happen. But then, what’s a religious imprint?”

  He signed. “I don’t guess you have much use for religion, growing up on Felicity.”


  “Not really. It was always so obvious that the matrons were just babbling nonsense.”

  “Guess you’ll have to take my word for it, then. See, there’s this bit in the brain that goes off sometimes when a worshipper really believes in something. Makes it seem all special and sacred, like. A religious imprint sets that off whenever an android sees a human, basically makes them think we’re gods.”

  I stared at him.

  “That’s disgusting.”

  He shrugged. “That’s humans for you. People say ol’ Dusty’s a misanthrope, but I say I’m just a realist. Anyway, I can help you keep a lookout for signs if you like, but I don’t think you got nothing to worry about. Seems to me your folks were transhumanists, and that sort wouldn’t go putting no imprints or control codes in their little girl.”

  “That doesn’t bother you? If they were transhumanists?”

  “Nope. Don’t bother me none if you’re smarter’n me. Hell, half the crew could say that. I don’t figure anyone on this ship’s gonna rat you out, neither. We all got things we’d rather not talk about.”

  “Like Naoko?”

  “Heh. Captain’ll have that one fixed soon, kid. Just give it a couple weeks. Now I’d better get to what I’m supposed to be working on. You got this?”

  “Got it, Dusty. See you later.”

  When he was gone I let out a big sigh of relief. That could have gone a lot worse. But if Dusty didn’t care what I was, maybe the rest of the crew wouldn’t either.

  I wasn’t going to go around telling them, of course. That would be pushing my luck. But maybe, just maybe, I didn’t have to worry quite so much.

  Chapter 13

  I felt the faint tremor of the ship’s transition to the Beta Layer as I was plugging Emla into her new body. I was starting to get used to the idea of flying through an antimatter universe on a regular basis, but I still diverted a thread of my attention to watch the external sensor feed while I worked. Just in case.