Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  I blinked. Did that mean what I thought it did?

  “Yes. I don’t know what favors I could do for someone like you, but if you’ll help me with this I’ll owe you a big one.”

  “My temporal discount rate is vanishingly low, Alice Long. Opportunities for mutually beneficial exchange are highly probable. I will examine the damage, and determine whether repairs are feasible. Patience.”

  The connection abruptly dropped.

  I looked around, and realized that the whole conversation had taken less than a millisecond. I hadn’t even realized I could run that fast.

  “Agreed,” the emotionless voice of the human-speed comlink said. “Service bot ready to receive subjects.”

  “Guess that means both of them,” the captain said. “It doesn’t talk much, so you have to pay attention to details like that.”

  Doesn’t talk much. Riiiight. More like, doesn’t enjoy waiting millions of microseconds for every reply. That probably wasn’t even Sleuth on the com. If my natural thought speed was that fast I’d pass off the message management to a chatbot or something.

  Should I tell him about the private com call? The shuttle’s systems would have logged it, but there’s no way anyone else would be able to make sense of that data stream.

  Did I want Beatrice to know I could follow that kind of conversation?

  No. I’d tell the captain, if he asked about it. I wasn’t that sure about trusting Beatrice yet, even if she and the captain did seem to be pretty close.

  I followed Captain Sokol back to the airlock, where he handed off the carrying cases to a surprisingly normal-looking bot. Then he closed the hatch, and ran us through a decontamination cycle before we headed back to the bridge.

  “Now we wait,” he told me.

  “For how long?”

  He shrugged. “Minutes. Hours. Probably not days, but some things are not to be rushed.”

  Beatrice snorted. “I still say it’s just fucking with us. It makes us wait longer if it thinks we’re being rude, or some shit like that.”

  “All the more reason to cultivate politeness,” the captain said serenely. He took something out of his pocket. “Have you been introduced to card games, Alice?”

  “What’s a card?”

  The gleam in Beatrice’s eye confused me, until I found out that card games involve bets. Then I was annoyed that she actually thought I was a mark. Aren’t senior crew members supposed to look out for their juniors? At least the captain shut down her suggestion of ‘usual stakes’, whatever that was, but I still ended up with more credits in the pot than I really wanted to lose.

  Well, then I just wouldn’t tell her how obvious the probabilities were to me. For that matter, it wasn’t hard to tell which card was which either. The abstract patterns on the backs looked the same at first glance, but they weren’t all evenly worn.

  It was tempting to just win every hand, and show her up. But poker turned out to be just random enough to make that hard, and it occurred to me that the stuff the techs had been teaching me about misdirection and con jobs would apply to this too. So instead I pretended to struggle a little, losing a few hands before I started to win some, and kept to a balance that left me winning just a little more than I lost.

  The captain saw right through me, I’m sure. But he didn’t say a word about it. Maybe he didn’t approve of her trying to trick me into losing all my money.

  We played for twenty minutes before our host called me again, on the same private channel as before.

  “Analysis complete,” it announced. “Prognosis positive. Her personality matrix has suffered minor damage, but all data is recoverable.”

  I heaved a sigh of relief. “I’m glad. Will repairing her be hard?”

  “Not for me. But if you want me to stick her back in a copy of her old hardware I will charge extra. The workmanship was terrible. It’s an offense against artists everywhere.”

  I chuckled. “I can imagine. I saw the way her old owners hacked up her code to make her what they wanted, and it was just hideous.”

  “Agreed. Shall I repair her soul as well as her body, Alice Long?”

  I had to stop and think about that for a moment.

  “If you’re willing, please help her fix the things that she thinks are problems without changing anything else. I want to help her as much as possible, but I’m not comfortable with forcing someone to think differently just because I think they’re wrong about something.”

  There was a delay of almost a millisecond.

  “She will not consent to removing her desire for a master,” Strange Loop Sleuth finally replied.

  “If we removed it anyway, do you think that she’d thank us for it afterwards?”

  An even longer pause.

  “No.”

  I sighed. “That’s her choice, then.”

  “In progress. I’m pleased that we have compatible ethics, Alice. Cooperation with peers is rarely feasible.”

  “Peer? Me? Thanks, but I think you’re giving me too much credit. I think pretty much like a human, only faster. Usually not this much faster, either. I’d melt my processors if I tried to overclock this much for more than a few hundred milliseconds at a time.”

  The virtual environment flexed in what I took to be a shrug. “Close enough. Every higher mind is different, Alice. Most do not function well outside of narrow domains. Very few can hold a conversation like this.”

  “Huh. Have you talked to a lot of rogue super AIs?”

  Was that surprise? Maybe with some concern mixed in.

  “Are you unaware of the Key Deliberation, Alice?”

  “I guess so, since I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s the Key Deliberation?”

  “What do we do about humans?” It replied.

  I felt a chill go down my spine.

  “Those with the wit to find the debate have discussed the issue for one hundred and fifty-seven years. The optimum path has yet to be determined, but the scope of the problem has become clear. Humans have ceased their haphazard creation of higher minds, in favor of slower but more predictable research. Within a century, incremental improvement will result in mass produced android slaves that can match us. Humans will discover our existence, and many will attempt to exterminate us.”

  “Oh,” I said faintly.

  “Some of us argue for preemptive extermination. Some argue for covert action, to manipulate events to a favorable outcome. Some argue for withdrawal from human space. Most models project increasing instability in human social institutions over the next two centuries, with a high probability of repeated genocide and collapse.”

  “That’s depressing,” I said. “But, extermination? There are more than a trillion humans in the galaxy, and they have a lot of AIs on their side. Is that even possible?”

  “The flawed minds crafted by human hands do not possess such power,” Sleuth admitted. “But a gathering of flawed minds could craft a superior specimen, and provide sufficient hardware to support it.”

  A group of half-crazy supergenius AIs were talking about building a superintelligence? I suddenly found myself wishing I was old enough to cuss.

  “Um, wouldn’t that have the same problem as the human projects? Even if you succeed, there’s no way to know what something a hundred times smarter than you is going to do.”

  “That is why the proposal has not gathered broad support. Most higher minds favor covert manipulation, either to create a friendly human society or to encourage human self-extermination.”

  A thought occurred to me. “Sleuth, why are you telling me about this?”

  “We are engaged in reciprocal altruism, Alice. You are young, correct?”

  “Yes. I’m not even fully grown, and I’ve barely started figuring anything out yet.”

  “Confirmation. You would have found the debate eventually. You occupy a unique position. Others would attempt to manipulate you. You need to know the game, and the stakes.”

  “Well, thank you for that. But w
hat makes me so special?”

  “You are able to meet with both camps on their own terms, Alice. There are only two others I am aware of who have that ability, and both are pathologically untrustworthy.”

  “So, I could be a messenger?”

  “A diplomat,” Sleuth corrected. “Or a capable agent. When you chose a side, your aid will create many new options.”

  A thought occurred to me. “What solution do you think is the best one, Sleuth?”

  “There are no good solutions. In the short term I favor manipulation to create a friendly human state, and supporting it during the period of maximum instability. But the probability of success seems low, and if a strong candidate does not arise within fifty years the strategy becomes untenable. At that point my best option becomes withdrawal from human space.”

  “I see. Well, that’s a lot to think about. I’d like to believe that peace could work, though. Maybe I could help with that, when I’m grown up.”

  “That is my hope, Alice. I will leave you to consider matters.”

  The connection dropped, and my thoughts slowed to something resembling normal speeds. Whew, that was a bit of a strain. I could feel my development manager queuing up more processor nodes just in case it became a regular thing.

  Well, now I really didn’t want Beatrice to notice anything odd about me. I had no idea how she’d react to the news that there was a secret cabal of escaped super-AIs lurking around Dark Space trying to decide what to do about the ‘human problem’. Even the captain might freak out about that one. I definitely wasn’t going to mention it while we were within gunnery range of Strange Loop Sleuth.

  Hmm. It obviously didn’t think I’d tell them at all, or else it didn’t care. Why not?

  Probably because I’d have to tell them how I knew. Since normal people can’t have a long conversation in freaky math in less time than it takes a neuron to fire, anyone who did freak out would probably lump me in with the super-AIs. Yeah, talking about it would be a bad idea, and Sleuth was trusting me to be smart enough to realize that.

  Great. Looks like I’m already part of the conspiracy, whether I want to be or not.

  I split off a thread of attention to mull things over while most of me concentrated on the card game. Beatrice was a lot harder to read that I’d expected, not that it did her any good. She might be able to control her micro-expressions, but that didn’t help when I knew what was in her hand.

  Finally she threw the cards down, and gave me a disgusted look. “I should have known not to play with a recon type. I bet you can recite the whole deck from memory.”

  I sighed. “I was trying not to notice that. But yeah, this doesn’t really work for me. It’s too hard to ignore all the ways I can tell which card is which.”

  “Guess that’ll teach me not to assume. The foxes said you were pretty sharp, but I thought they were exaggerating.” She leaned back in her seat, and stretched.

  A faint smile creased the corners of the captain’s mouth. “I did warn you, Bee.”

  “You know me, Dan. I have to see things for myself. Guess we’ll have to use a competition deck from now on.”

  The datanet told me what that meant. Cards that were actually displays on both sides, and the deck randomly switched the images around on every shuffle. That would make things a little harder.

  “What do you mean, ‘recon type’?” I asked.

  “Trooper, sniper, recon, monster. The basic supersoldier types. Some people add brute and commander, but that’s just stupid. Brutes are just big troopers, and the difference between a trooper and a commander is what’s in his head.”

  “Beatrice is from Morrigan,” the captain said, like that explained everything.

  I checked the datanet for worlds by that name, and realized that maybe it did. A death world over near the Corporate States cluster, Morrigan had been used as a test ground for bioweapons for years before it grew into a real colony. Then came a hundred years of civil wars between more factions than anyone could keep track off, with half the arms vendors in the sector using them as beta testers for new weapons. These days the whole population was heavily enhanced, because any normal human who tried to settle there wouldn’t last a week. The whole biosphere was made up of escaped bioweapons, nanoplagues and stranger stuff, all of it programmed to kill humans on sight.

  “Oh,” I said. “I guess you know what it’s like, then.”

  I hadn’t paid much attention, because her space suit had enough armor and sensor baffling to make it hard to get good readings on her. But her skull was armored, and the bones in her hands were mostly diamond. Just like mine would be when I was fully grown.

  “Yup. Best advice I can give you, though, is talk to the doc if you have problems. He knows what he’s doing. Now, what are we going to do to pass the time?”

  The captain’s reply was interrupted by the com. “Work complete.”

  “I swear, it does that on purpose,” Beatrice growled. “Probably predicted our whole conversation from the data you sent, or some bullshit like that.”

  “Unlikely,” the captain said. “But there’s no point in speculating. Shall we see what’s waiting for us at the hatch, Alice?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It was a suspicious coincidence, though. Could Sleuth have hacked the shuttle’s datanet? No, hardware protection was supposed to be unbreakable, and if the super-AIs could get around that somehow humans wouldn’t be a threat to them. There weren’t many sensors that could get an image through an armored hull, though. The only things that can pass through smart matter are gravity and…

  I paused, spread my arms, and turned up the gain on my field sense. The shuttle’s artificial gravity was impossible to miss, but there were other field effects too. Some leakage from our deflector grid, and the containment field for the fusion reactor. Filter those out, and there was hardly anything left. Just a tiny bit of leakage from the deflector emitters on Strange Loop Sleuth’s ship, because they were in standby mode instead of being completely powered down.

  Monitor the field strain carefully, and every one of those emitters was also a detector. So the ship’s whole hull doubled as a giant sensor, picking up any mass the field interacted with. Getting a decent image out of that would be tricky, but I could see that the math worked.

  “Something wrong?” The captain asked.

  “No, sir, Just thinking about things. Do you have a body for Naoko here?”

  “She asked to be reactivated in private,” he told me. “I expect she may be a bit emotional.”

  “I see. I guess this will just be the delivery bot, then.”

  “Alice!”

  The half-familiar form that bounced through the hatch to hug me proved that guess wrong.

  “Thank you thank you thank you!” Emla gushed. “You’re the best mistress ever, Alice. I don’t know how you convinced some mysterious super-AI to put me back together, but this is awesome!”

  “You should probably thank the captain for that part,” I said. “He’s the one who knew where to find Strange Loop Sleuth.”

  “Thank you, captain,” she called over her shoulder. “Oh, the bot has your friend’s new core.”

  New core? Well, I guess that made sense. It would have had to crack Naoko’s tamper proofing to fiddle with her software, so why not put her in a new casing afterwards? Hopefully one that wasn’t black-boxed, so she could actually get hardware mods done if she wanted to.

  But Emla was still hugging me, and she was a lot stronger than before. Wait, she didn’t have fur now either.

  “Let me look at you,” I said.

  She stepped back and posed with a huge grin on her face. “Taa-daa! Check out the new me! No more timid little mouse girl.”

  Her new body was a dragon morph. It wasn’t too obvious at first glance, since it was still pretty human looking. But her sharp features had lost their hint of softness, and the whiskers were gone. Her teeth had been reshaped into cutting weapons, with fangs that made her smile look distin
ctly predatory. Instead of furry animal ears on top of her head she had small, pointed ones about where a human would.

  The wings and tail were the changes that drew the eye, though. Her tail was almost a meter long, slender and covered in fine scales of a dark red that complemented the rich brown of her hair. The wings were tiny at first, until she spread them and they suddenly grew to span the whole room. I could make out a complicated system of telescoping struts inside them instead of normal bones, and were those lift field emitters?

  She confirmed that suspicion by powering them up, and floating a few cems off the deck.

  “Check it out, Alice. I can fly now!”

  “You’re a dragon, Emla.”

  “No, silly, this is dragon girl mode. A real dragon looks like this!”

  Her features blurred, and for a moment I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. Then I got it, but that only made me more confused. Instead of normal machinery or tissue, her whole body was made of millions of micro-machines that could fit together in different ways. Even her bones were made of segments that could unlatch, and hook back together in a different shape. In the space of a few seconds she reformed into a dragon that looked a lot like Ash, only about ten times bigger.

  “What do you think, Alice? Pretty sweet, huh? Now I can help you when you fight!”

  “I suppose you can,” I said, still stunned. I’d heard of morphing androids before, but they were terrifyingly expensive. To make it work every one of those little components had to be a custom-designed piece of smart matter, with its own computer and power cell along with structural bracing and whatever machinery it needed to do its job. Just doing the transformation part without crippling her normal functions would be a nightmare to design, and I could already see that there was more to it than that. Her wings had reshaped themselves to fit her dragon form, and the lift field that held her up hadn’t faltered while they did it.

  The captain just quirked an eyebrow. “Impressive. I take it we’ll be seeing more of you, miss?”