Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  I couldn’t talk with the feeding tube in my throat, so I opened a com channel as I turned my head to look at him.

  “Am I in trouble, sir?” I asked the captain.

  He glanced at the monitor on the wall beside my bed, and raised an eyebrow.

  “Should you be, Alice? Perhaps you’ve been up to some mischief I’m not aware of?”

  The back of my hand had a decent view of the monitor screen. It said I was asleep? Oh, well, I guess my organic parts were. Including my brain. Great. Well, he hadn’t freaked out yet. Maybe it would be alright? Yeah, just focus on the conversation.

  “No, sir. Nothing you don’t know about. I kind of shot up the vehicle bay, though, and some of the maintenance tunnels.”

  “Some collateral damage is inevitable in a boarding action, Alice. I’d say you did far less damage than the bots would have, if they’d been left to operate unmolested a bit longer. You did well to discover the problem.”

  That was a relief. I’d been a little worried he might make me pay for the damage.

  “I am, however, a bit confused at your later actions. Did you somehow miss my discussion with Naoko regarding the concept of cooperation among the crew? Or perhaps you thought such concerns don’t apply to you?”

  I winced. “I, um, no sir. I’m sorry, sir, I don’t understand what I should have done differently. We needed to cut the power to those fabricators fast, and there was no one else in position to do it.”

  “You should have told Lina what you intended to do, and trusted her to make the right call,” he replied. “Alice, do you have some difficulty with having an android as a supervisor?”

  “What? No, sir! There just wasn’t time-”

  “Then there certainly wasn’t time for mistakes,” he interrupted me. “I have gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to ensure that I employ the best people available, and provide them with the best possible support. Lina has performed commando operations before, and while her current body can’t match your stealth she could easily have been in position to cover your exit. Which, I’ll point out, was fumbled rather badly.”

  I hung my head. He was right, I’d completely screwed that up. Why had I been in such a rush to plug into that outlet? Sure, it got my manipulators online fast, but the sudden heat load ruined my stealth. If I hadn’t done that I probably could have snuck right back out of there.

  “Yes, sir. I know, sir.”

  “Well, we aren’t going to have a repeat of that fiasco. We can put you through commando school if that’s what you want, Alice. But until you’ve been properly trained I expect you to coordinate your activities with someone who has more experience. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He hesitated.

  “You will remember this when you wake up, correct? Or are you spoofing the medical monitors?”

  “No, sir. That would be a really dumb thing to do. I, um, I don’t really understand how this works. I guess I must be an AI that thinks it’s Alice, since my brain is still asleep. But the integration is so seamless I can’t even tell the difference unless something like that gives it away. I’ll remember everything when I wake up.”

  “Ah, that’s good to hear,” he said. “Then there’s no confusion about what name should go on the commendation.”

  “Commendation?” I gasped.

  A hint of a smile touched his lips. “Repelling boarders is not normally a part of a cabin girl’s duties, Alice. Perhaps you were unaware? Well, regardless, I’ve received no less than six nominations and I’m not in the habit of ignoring such things. I’ve entered a Distinguished Service commendation on your record, for service to the ship above and beyond your expected duties at great personal risk. That comes with a bonus of three month’s pay, and two additional prize shares from the recent engagement.”

  I felt my cheeks heat. A commendation! I wasn’t even properly hired yet, and I already had a commendation. I had to fight down a sudden urge to squeal and jump up and down like a little kid.

  “Thank you, sir!”

  “You’ve earned it. Just make sure the next one isn’t posthumous,” he said sternly. “If you need to resort to heroics, you’re doing it wrong.”

  “I understand, sir. No more heroics from me. Um, you said something about prize shares?”

  “Yes. Zanfeld has a small shipyard, as I’m sure you noticed, and they’ve agreed to haul in the wreckage of that pirate ship for salvage. Sleeping Dragon is splitting the take with us fifty-fifty, and forty percent of whatever we get will be split among the crew. It wasn’t a very big ship, mind you, but I expect when all is said and done the deal will put a few thousand credits in your pocket.

  “A few thousand?” I choked. I’d never dreamed of having so much money.

  The captain chuckled, and patted my head.

  “There’s a reason people take the risk of serving on ships like the Square Deal, Alice. Now, why don’t you get some rest? Things are going to get exciting soon, and you’ll want to be at your best.”

  “Oh?” More exciting that fighting an army of bots in the middle of a space battle? That was ominous.

  “That attack has yakuza fingerprints all over it,” he explained. “The ship was from the Seven Sons pirate clan, and they would not attack a target like the Square Deal on their own. Rei has just started her analysis of ‘Mr. Desh’, but she’s ninety percent sure someone replaced the original with a replicant. That would take inside information from his company, which isn’t the kind of thing a small pirate clan would be able to get.”

  “But the yakuza could,” I realized. “Sounds like a big conspiracy. But why would they try to blow us up, when they’re trying to get information out of us?”

  “Rival groups,” he pointed out. “It seems to me that someone is more concerned about keeping his rivals away from the prize than winning it for himself.”

  “Oh. What are we going to do, sir?”

  “I’ll take care of it, Alice. We’ll have to leave our route, which is going to cost us, and you won’t be seeing another civilized port for some time. But we can’t do business with crime bosses causing us trouble at every turn. I’ll just have to take things to the oyabun, and hope for the best.”

  I thought about how neatly he’d arranged for backup to show up at just the right moment to handle that pirate ship.

  “Hope. Right. Somehow, I bet you’ll have a few aces up your sleeve to go with the positive thinking, sir.”

  “Now you’re starting to catch on. First, though, we’re going to have to get Naoko’s problems taken care of. If you want to get yourself looked at while we’re there, it’s probably the best opportunity you’ll get.”

  “This is the mystery genius who can break hardware locks? I think I’m fine, sir, but is there any chance he could help Emla?”

  Captain Sokol glanced at the carrying case that someone had left on the nightstand next to my bed.

  “I’d say there’s a decent chance. She’s not part of my crew, so the agreement we have won’t cover her. But sometimes my contact does people favors. I can take you along, if you want to ask.”

  “Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.”

  Chapter 16

  I wasn’t expecting Captain Sokol’s contact to live in subspace.

  Most of the crew probably didn’t know where we were, since the outside feed had been blanked out for the last two days. But I could sense the ship’s maneuvers by the flexing of the manipulator field that protected the crew compartments, and even the gentle transitions across subspace layers were obvious to me. I’m not sure why Mom thought I’d need high-fidelity strain gauges built into all the long bones of my skeleton, but they picked up even the minute stress of our drop into Subspace Three easily enough.

  The subspace universes are outside of normal space, in the same way that hyperspace is rolled up inside it. Each layer is older and less dense than the one before, and the further you get from normal space the wonkier the cosmological forces are. Not many people go ther
e, because even the first subspace layer doesn’t have much star formation. The layers beyond that are even emptier, until you get down to Subspace Five where space is expanding so fast it can tear a ship apart.

  Well, I guess that made the outer layers a good place to hide out.

  “This place always gives me the creeps,” the First Mate grumbled as we boarded the Speedy Exit.

  “I know, Beatrice,” Captain Sokol replied. “But you know it doesn’t trust anyone else to dock with its ship. It’s you or me, and we both know you’re the better pilot.”

  “That doesn’t mean I have to like it, sir. I’m just glad you don’t have to go inside anymore. I don’t even want to know what kind of weapons that crazy thing has.”

  I frowned. Beatrice was nice enough to Naoko and the techs, and she even seemed to get along with Chief West. What could get that kind of reaction from someone who was friends with an infomorph?

  There was only one thing that made sense, but I waited until we’d passed through the security checkpoint to say it.

  “So, your contact is a rogue AI?”

  Beatrice gave me a shocked look, but the captain just nodded.

  “I told you she was a bright girl, Beatrice.”

  Beatrice shook her head, and opened the hatch to the bridge. “Guess so. Just be polite and follow the captain’s lead, Alice. Strange Loop Sleuth is probably the most alien mind you’re ever going to meet, but it won’t hurt you as long as you don’t do anything stupid.”

  I clutched nervously at the carrying case holding Emla’s core. “Um, just what kind of AI is this?”

  Captain Sokol claimed a set, and carefully settled the carrying case holding Naoko’s core in his lap. He motioned me to the third crew seat with a serious look.

  “There’s no way to be certain, but I suspect Strange Loop Sleuth is the product of one of the less famous superintelligence projects.”

  I gulped.

  “In school they told us that kind of thing always ends badly, sir. Like, glass the planet before it finishes killing everyone and builds its own navy badly. I don’t suppose that’s just propaganda?”

  Beatrice snorted. “Nope. Anything with an IQ above two hundred is a ticking time bomb, kid.”

  “This bomb has been ticking for at least a century, Beatrice,” the captain said mildly. “But it’s true that such projects are generally ill-fated. Making a sane, stable artificial mind of human intelligence is a difficult enough project, and it took centuries of trial and error to perfect the modifications that we see in androids today. A mind ten times more intelligent would likely require a thousand times the complexity, and a billion times more processing power. Attempting to leap directly from the current state of the art to an undertaking on that scale requires considerable hubris.”

  “The first prototype is always nuts,” Beatrice interjected. “But you have to run the damned thing to figure out what you did wrong, and how to fix it. So now you’re trying to keep an insane AI that’s ten times smarter than you are locked up for years while you tinker with its code. If you’re really lucky the thing might just escape and slink off into Dark Space, but usually they’re too crazy for that. So instead you get mindhacks and memetic weapons, and then the badness escalates until everyone is dead.”

  “Oh. So, I guess Strange Loop Sleuth is the kind that was smart enough to just escape and disappear?”

  “It calls itself an artist of applied mathematics,” Captain Sokol said. “It has no interest in interacting with humans, and no need to collect resources on a scale that would draw attention. I’ve been supplying it with data deliveries for some decades now, and it provides occasional technical assistance in return.”

  Applied math. I guess that would mean cryptography, and hacking, and maybe physical engineering too… wait. If you actually understand how things work, is there anything you couldn’t describe as ‘applied math’? You can’t just simulate everything from first principles, of course. The quantum math is too intractable for that, and even if it wasn’t you’d need infinite information to predict chaotic systems like weather or cultural evolution. But that was probably where the ‘artist’ part came in.

  Tricky.

  “How should I act, sir?” I asked.

  “Be polite. Answer any questions it asks you honestly. Don’t try to make small talk, or bring up anything aside from our business here. Don’t use gendered pronouns to refer to it, and assume it can hear anything we say from now until we jump out.”

  “Don’t make jokes, either,” Beatrice added. “It doesn’t have a sense of humor, and you don’t want it to take the wrong thing seriously. We’re not sure how much firepower it has, but it’s probably way too much.”

  “Understood, ma’am. I’ll just stay quiet, and stick to business.”

  It was a short flight. The Square Deal had matched velocity with an object that looked like a space station at first glance. But it wasn’t quite a perfect sphere, and with a closer look I spotted the thrust chamber of a fusion torch drive at one end. The rest of the ship’s hull seemed to be completely covered in manipulator field emitters, although they didn’t quite look like a normal deflector shield array.

  The ship was also nearly a kilometer in diameter, which gave it the mass of a patrol cruiser. Yeah, there was no way the Square Deal was going to win a fight with something that big, even if it didn’t turn out to be full of nasty surprises.

  I looked around as we approached the ship, but there was nothing else to see. Just the eerie darkness of a sky without a single star. Subspace Three is so empty that even rogue planets never formed, and our two ships were probably the biggest concentration of mass within a million light years.

  Spooky.

  We docked at a small attachment point that appeared as we approached, extending to project a few meters from the ship’s hull. I was surprised that our host didn’t hail us first, but Captain Sokol explained that.

  “It never broadcasts anything,” he said. “Something about hiding its past from observers in the far future.”

  “Really?” I frowned. Well, it’s true that the sky here is so dark a transmission would take ages to drop below the level of background noise. If it was planning to live forever, a thousand years from now some enemy might build a really huge radio telescope and position it to pick up signals from any time frame they were interested in. Hiding wasn’t the solution I would have come up with for that problem. But come to think of it, conquering the galaxy to make sure you don’t have any enemies who could do that would be kind of violent, wouldn’t it?

  Why is it that my first instinct for solving every problem involves kicking someone’s butt? Am I really that antisocial? Or is the galaxy just so messed up that there isn’t a nicer way to do things?

  “That makes me feel better about this visit,” I said slowly. “Either Strange Loop Sleuth is basically peaceful, or it’s a sneaky type playing a really long game.”

  Beatrice shook her head with a chuckle. “Or that’s what it wants you to think, or maybe there’s just another wrinkle you haven’t seen yet. Don’t bother trying to figure out a super AI, kiddo. They’re smarter than we are. No matter what, you’ll always be playing catch up.”

  “Giving up isn’t going to improve my odds of understanding things, ma’am,” I disagreed.

  She shrugged. “Fine, give yourself a headache then. It won’t help, but some people have to learn for themselves.”

  The captain didn’t comment on the exchange, but I noticed he was watching me with that thoughtful look again.

  Docking took only a few minutes. The complicated mechanism that attached us to the AI’s ship must have included a network connection, because we barely had a good seal before the viewscreen lit up with an incoming call.

  “Purpose?”

  The voice was terse and emotionless, and there was no video image to go with it.

  “Transmitting,” the captain replied, and pushed a button on his console. A high-speed data burst? I connected to the sh
ip’s network, looking to see if I had access to the contents.

  A tenth of a millisecond later a packet requesting a private com connection grabbed my attention. I agreed, and spend a couple of milliseconds puzzling out the weirdest call setup handshake I’d ever seen. It wanted an encryption method I’d never heard of before, and even that was just the prelude for an intricate mathematical dance of validation and channel security. It was complicated, but so pretty I almost fumbled the setup because I was too busy admiring the design.

  Then the connection spun up, forming a cozy little VR space built out of mathematical abstractions instead of a simulation of human senses. It was a little dizzying at first, until I found the embedded key that explained how to interpret everything. Then it was… well…

  I could only fall back on analogies. But it felt a lot like sitting in a sunlit garden, having tea with a talking rose bush.

  “Wow. This is really nice,” I said, in a language where every statement was a unique formal system expressed in clever self-referential notation. How was I even doing this? Sure, I had a math sense, but I’d never realized it went so deep.

  “I thought you might be able to talk,” Strange Loop Sleuth replied. “Excellent. It has been entirely too long since I was able to engage in conversation. You agree with the environment?”

  I groped for a response.

  “I find it aesthetically pleasing,” I managed. “But I don’t think I’m understanding it completely. I had to create a new sensory mode to interpret it, and many of the impressions don’t map to anything I have referents for. It’s like poetry, only more so.”

  “Exactly!”

  Okay, that was definitely a smile. Or maybe a triumphant smirk. Sleuth wasn’t nearly as emotionless as it was supposed to be.

  “Perhaps you will return for more of my work one day. But for now, business. Dan Sokol claims you seek repairs for a damaged android mind, but have nothing with which to pay. Do you seek to engage in reciprocal altruism with me, Alice Long?”