Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  “Yes, sir! I’m Emla. I’m an unrestricted class four AI with combat augs and a pack loyalty imprint, and I belong to Alice. I guess I’m her assistant and bodyguard for now.”

  “Bodyguard?”

  “She’s says she’s not old enough to want a companion android, sir. So I’ll just have to keep her safe until she is.”

  A warm feeling was growing in my chest. This was what Emla was meant to be. Bright, bold and disconcertingly caring.

  “Oh, Emla. I’m not going to die on you. But I’ll be happy to have your help. Are you good with the software changes?”

  She’d re-validated her bond with me at some point during that first hug. Her new code was a work of art. The same core personality, but a much cleaner implementation. There were no crude hacks to cripple her mind now, either. Just an enduring loyalty to friends, family and her leader. She was still determined to follow me, though, and I wasn’t going to turn her down.

  “I’m great,” she assured me. “Strange Loop Sleuth walked through it all with me before it compiled me back into hardware. I’m exactly what I want to be now.”

  “I’m glad,” I said. “Can you change back, though? I can’t hug you properly when you’re all scales and armor.”

  “Sure thing, Alice.”

  Yeah, there was a spike of radiation when she did that. Not enough to be dangerous, even to humans. But she had some kind of fancy distributed micro-reactor system that used the mass of her body to shield little capsules of radioactive material. Her spec sheet said she had a plasma flamer and power claws, and that was just scratching the surface of the hidden features packed into that transforming body. If I’d gone to a major vendor and asked for a design like this, they’d have quoted me an eight-figure price. Maybe nine.

  Strange Loop Sleuth answered my call immediately.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Are you dissatisfied?”

  “No! I love the design, and I think she’s going to be much happier now. But it must have taken you a lot of work to develop the tech base for that body. You could have given her something a lot simpler.”

  “Your companion will need suitable capabilities,” Sleuth said. “The effort involved in the customization was not excessive, and fabrication is simple.”

  “I guess. But why go to so much trouble just for me?”

  “I project that you will understand the answer to that question soon, Alice Long. Perhaps then you will visit me again, and we may discuss plans for a brighter future.”

  Chapter 17

  “This interface sucks,” I grumbled.

  As usual, my bots were getting cut to pieces because I was fighting blind. The only data I had on enemy movements was a map view based on what my bots could see, and a little window that could pull up the camera view from one bot at a time. Then when I finally did see the latest surprise I had to give new orders with this stupid point-and-click interface that wouldn’t run any faster than a human could type.

  Chief West just laughed at my frustration.

  “You have to walk before you can run, kid. You’re not bad for a newbie, but you need to get a better feel for bot tactics before you start trying fancy direct interface tricks.”

  “Yes, Chief,” I sighed. My last team of bots was just about gone, and I wasn’t allowed to fight anything myself. Not that it would help much if I did, since the physics simulation in this stupid VR wasn’t good enough to model my usual fighting style. The ‘bots’ were really just abstract blobs of defense values and hit points, and their shots didn’t necessarily go exactly where their guns were pointed. All of which was on purpose. Chief West thought I relied too much on my enhanced senses and physics modeling, so he’d dug up a training program where I couldn’t use those things at all.

  My last bot went down, and the sim froze. Chief West’s avatar walked out of one of the enemy bots, and looked around.

  “That’s that,” he said. “So, what did you do wrong?”

  “I assumed our teams were built on the same point values,” I admitted. “When I spotted that minefield with the sniper drone overwatch down in Hold 8 I added up the points, and thought that was the last of your forces. So when I tried to push through to your beachhead in the port shuttle bay your reinforcements took me by surprise.”

  “That’s a good start,” he agreed. “But when you figured that out, why didn’t you fall back and reform a defensive line?”

  “How?” I grumbled. “It takes at least four hundred milliseconds to give a bot new orders, and there were twenty of them in the assault team. By the time I could have gotten them turned around most of them would be dead. I figured the best I could do was carry on and do as much damage as possible.”

  “That’s why the control software has all those tools for grouping bots into units and setting up predefined orders,” he explained. “If you’d had your assault team properly grouped and a few contingencies set up you could have pulled back in time to save most of them.”

  “How could I possibly have known exactly where you’d attack from in advance, Chief?” I protested.

  “You can never make your plans perfect, kid. That’s why you keep things simple, and let the bots figure out the details. You keep trying to tell every bot exactly where to go, when you should just tell squad B to fall back to point 217 and set up a defensive position.”

  I sighed. “A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week?”

  He smiled. “Exactly. I see you know some of the classics, at least.”

  “That was a quote? I was just trying to put what my tactical instincts tell me into words.”

  He rubbed his chin, and gave me a thoughtful look. “That’s kind of an odd implementation. Who said, ‘the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting’?”

  I shrugged. “According to the datanet it was Sun Tzu, but I couldn’t have told you that. It sounds like nonsense, anyway. I mean, sure, victors win first and then go to war, while losers go to war and then try to win. But restraint in war is a fallacy. He who wins achieves victory without making his enemy feel the cost of defeat, has won nothing but the certainty of another battle.”

  “John Paul,” he observed. “Second American Civil War. Okay, so it’s not just the really old classics. What’s the role of bioweapons in war?”

  “To bring low an enemy who values freedom but not the tools of its preservation, by such means as may strike at any point without warning or restraint.”

  “That one sounds like Mu Zhang. Meaning?”

  I had to think for a moment. “Meaning… a society that tries to be open and unarmed at the same time is stupidly vulnerable to infiltration weapons. There’s all kinds of ways to turn civilians into horrible time bombs using mind control and nanotech. If they don’t do proper security screening, and they’ve all got access to fabricators, and no one is armed, that kind of thing can kill off a whole colony overnight. But even if it doesn’t, places like that don’t adapt well to an internal threat that invalidates their whole political philosophy.”

  “Interesting. Alright, I think we can say the guys who designed your mods were into one of the Adaptive Total War schools of thought. That’s decent stuff, but I’m going to assign you some reading from rival schools just so you know where the arguments are. It’s not a good idea to rely too much on knowledge that someone else stuck in your head.”

  “Thank you, Chief. I worry about that too, sometimes. I’m sure Mom wanted the best for me, but she obviously wasn’t infallible.”

  “Yeah. Only, how do you know it was your mother?”

  “I have a few memories from when I was a baby,” I admitted. “They’re pretty hazy, not like my recent ones. But I remember being on a tiny little ship, with her and some bots. Then there was a bigger place, a station I think, where there were lots of furry people.”

  “I see. Well, I’m sure the doc could figure out a way to get images out of that if you ever want to try some detective work. But focus on trainin
g for now. We refuel at Yinpang tomorrow, and then we’ve got eight days in hyperspace before we reach Taragi. By the time we hit orbit at yakuza central I want you to have your Warbot Commander cert.”

  I gulped. That was supposed to be a four-month certification course, and the description said the failure rate on the final exam was twenty-three percent.

  “In nine days?!”

  “You can do it in a week, easy. I’ll give you today to do the background reading, and we’ll get started for real in the morning. Class starts at 0700, and we’ll go for twelve hours a day. If anything goes down with the yakuza we’ll at least have you combat ready.”

  “Yes, Chief! Thank you, Chief. I won’t let you down!”

  I logged out of the training sim, and climbed out of the pod with a groan. Twelve hours a day of VR training? I was going to go nuts. Maybe I should have pretended to be helpless after all?

  Ash greeted me with a friendly trill. I paused to scratch his head, and stretched. Three hours in the VR pod had left me with a lot of kinks. Twelve was going to be murder.

  It was a good kind of stress, though. A chance to learn and grow, just like I wanted to. Much better than dwelling on my last memory of Mom.

  “Stay quiet now,” she’d told me as she hugged me, and hid me in a big box. A cargo container? Probably, but it was too fuzzy to be sure.

  There’d been a loud noise, some kind of warning claxon. She winced, and then bent to kiss my forehead.

  “Don’t be afraid, Alice. Mommy will protect you. I have to go away for a while, but when I get back you’ll be safe.”

  The floor shook, and I whimpered. She glanced around, and bit her lip. I’d never realized when I was younger, but I could see now that she was afraid.

  “Whatever happens, Alice, you must survive. No matter how bad things get, as long as you’re alive there’s still hope. You are the embodiment of all our dreams for a brighter future. Live. Become stronger. Believe in yourself, and don’t ever give up. One day, it will be you who holds the upper hand.”

  She picked up something big that had been lying on the floor. A mass driver cannon?

  “Sleep, now,” she said. “Until the battle is over. I’ll come back for you when I can.”

  I’d gone right to sleep, like a good little girl. But that was the last time I’d seen her. When I woke up I was in a medbay full of scared kids. The bots there took care of us, but I hadn’t seen another human until the orphanage.

  I looked down at my hands. Still so tiny and fragile-looking. But I was starting to understand what they could do. What I could do, if only I got the chance to finish growing up.

  “I’m getting stronger, Mom,” I said to myself. “Just like you said to. But what dream am I supposed to embody? Who exactly am I supposed to get the upper hand against?”

  I still had no answers. But I had a clue now. Strange Loop Sleuth knew something about me. Had it recognized my design? Did it mean something, that it had used the same phrase as my mother?

  That seemed silly at first. Known space is so huge, how could anyone keep track of even a tiny fraction of what was happening? Unless Strange Loop Sleuth had been involved in designing me somehow, and that was too big a coincidence to believe.

  I flexed the manipulator field around my fingers.

  Momentum exchange technology is well understood, but doing anything fancy with it is hard. Normally it takes big machines with massive amounts of computing power to do anything more complex than a simple repulsion effect.

  I floated a clump of dirt out of the planter next to my bed, and twirled it in the air.

  Hundreds of thousands of tiny emitters lined the bones of my hands, working together to spin an intricate superposition of fields that summed to exactly the effect I wanted. I could make it all happen without even thinking about it, or I could zoom in and watch each individual emitter work. The math for that kind of system was supposed to be horrifically intractable, the sort of thing you’d need a giant supercomputer the size of the Square Deal to solve. But somehow the quantum computers that were built into my emitters managed to do it in real time.

  How much would it cost to design something like that?

  It made Emla’s dragon transformation look simple in comparison, and it wasn’t the only example. How could an AI running on a network of quantum processors be integrated with a human brain so seamlessly that even from the inside I couldn’t tell where one side ended and the other began? Why were my combat reflexes so much better than even Chief West’s warbots? Why was it that every single ability I had performed like some kind of bleeding-edge prototype, and yet they all functioned perfectly?

  Someone must have spent stupidly huge amounts of money engineering me. Had Mom really been that rich? Or did I come from some secret government project? Had she stolen me?

  Why had no one ever come looking for me? No one lets a billion-credit investment just disappear if they have a choice about it.

  I looked at the manipulator field again. Billion? Hah! Try trillion. That was a major advance in the state of the art, and I was making it look easy. Besides, there was that new impossibility growing in my chest to consider. You’d think an invention like that would have made the news. But no, a quick datanet search informed me that the smallest such devices were supposed to be half a meter in diameter and weigh in at a hundred kilograms. Supposedly mine was going to be… six centimeters? And less than a kilogram?

  In a vidshow this would be my clue that Mom was a time traveler, or maybe an alien. But that didn’t work, either. We know what it would take to travel backwards in time, and anyone with the resources to pull that off would make even my tech look like a cave man banging rocks together. Nothing made sense.

  The sound of laughter from the living room drew me out of my thoughts. I wandered over to the balcony, and looked down to find Emla and Lina sitting on my couch watching a vidshow.

  The display showed a typical corporate drone’s office, with a big desk in the middle of the room and a smaller cluster of chairs off to one side. The action going on didn’t look like a typical meeting, though. A pair of busty teenage catgirls in slutty dresses were making out with a willowy older woman in more conservative clothes, right on her own desk. The office worker was so distracted by their attention that she didn’t even notice one of them stealthily plugging a data stick into her computer.

  The computer’s display lit up, showing flashes of what was supposed to be a bunch of files being copied. And a progress bar. And a big, blinking message that said ‘Decrypting Files’.

  It was so silly I couldn’t help but giggle.

  “What the heck are you two watching?” I called down.

  “Alice!” Emla spun and leaped off the couch, her wings spreading for a moment to give her a boost. She soared all the way up to the balcony, and I had to brace myself to absorb her enthusiastic tackle hug.

  “Welcome back, Mistress. That was a long training session. Did you learn a lot?”

  She was so enthusiastic I didn’t have the heart to discourage her. Besides, it felt good to be hugged like that. Dika had never been a touchy-feely sort of person, and the less said about my relations with the rest of the orphanage kids the better.

  “I learned that control interfaces meant for humans are really frustrating,” I grumbled. “Oh, and Chief West is a sadist. He wants me qualified to command warbots before we get to Taragi, so I’m going to be stuck in VR classes all day for a while.”

  Emla cocked her head. “Doesn’t he understand that you don’t need a control interface?” She asked.

  “He thinks I’m using direct control as a crutch. I don’t know, maybe he’s right.”

  “He’s kind of a traditionalist about military training,” Lina said, looking up over the back of the couch at me. “Which is weird for an infomorph, but I guess it just shows that he’s still human where it counts. He always wants to do things the way he was trained.”

  I scooped Emla up, and hopped off the balcony. She giggled happ
ily, and slaved her manipulator system to mine so I could control our fall. Goddess, she was so trusting. Even after my mistake had almost gotten her killed. It only made me more determined to protect her from now on.

  I landed us lightly on the back of the couch, and plopped down into the spot where Emla had been sitting. Ash followed us down, and settled himself on my shoulder.

  “I guess I can live with it, if it means finally getting some real training,” I said. “What’s up, Lina? I wasn’t expecting to see you today.”

  Why did she suddenly look nervous?

  “Yeah, um, sorry about barging into your space. You were in VR when I came by, but Emla insisted I should stay and wait for you.”

  Emla settled herself happily in my lap. “I thought you’d want to see your friend, Alice. I know you’re not from one of those colonies where the humans get all weird about their personal space, so I didn’t think you’d mind. Did I do the right thing?”

  “It’s fine, Emla. Lina, you’re my friend. You’re welcome to visit whenever you want.”

  She gave me a relieved smile. “Thanks, Alice. I was a little worried you’d be mad at me.”

  “For what?”

  “Putting you in danger? I never should have asked you to get that breaker, Alice. I just, well, somehow it never occurred to me that you wouldn’t have a team of warbots to send in.”

  “Why not?” I asked. That did seem like an odd oversight.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just something about you, Alice.”

  “Alice has awesome command presence, doesn’t she?” Emla purred.

  “Oh, please,” I scoffed. “I look like a helpless little kid.”

  “Only to humans,” Emla disagreed. “Pick up a gun and start giving orders, and every android you see will jump to obey.”

  Lina nodded, and leaned over to put her hand on my knee. “She’s right about that, Alice. It’s not how you look, it’s the way you move. The confidence in your voice. Even your scent. All those little cues humans can barely pick up on, but we’re designed to notice them. It all says when the shit hits the fan you’re the one who’s in charge.”