by T S Hottle
“Yeah,” I added. “So suck it 114, load Julie. I will not have an AI talking back to me.”
The AI dutifully surrendered and became Julie.
“How did an AI get so argumentative?” I said once the upload was complete.
Creeping sapience, said Julie. They’re starting to make the new AI’s more self-aware, which tends to give them a personality. I’m a simulation of an actual human that is aware of the fact. That keeps me in check.
“So, I don’t have to worry about a robot uprising?”
Really, John Farno, what would I do with you? You’re already a prisoner here, and since loading me into Solaria’s network, my only companionship when you’re asleep are the drones. And you’ve seen how they’re not exactly charming companions.
I wanted to ask what would happen if I were rescued or if people came and started to rebuild. I didn’t. We both knew the answer. Julie would be taken offline, and the barebones AIs would simply yield up their data on demand. New interfaces would be loaded. Perhaps even a fresh copy of Julie. It would know me. It might even remember me. But this particular instance of the AI interface based on an engineer named Julie Seding would cease to exist.
Unless 114 had endowed Julie with enough self-awareness to be bothered by that, I doubted she worried. The trouble is I found myself worrying.
“Well, my friend,” I said, “let’s get the show on the road. Off to New Ares.”
We were off to New Ares.
Unlike my previous excursions, I was not limited by the trailer’s solar wrap or by having to stop and inspect the domes. Julie and I had interacted enough that I trusted her to drive while I slept, though I would only sleep four hours a night and take cat naps during the day.
In the meantime, Julie would exist in multiple places. She was the brain of Solaria and could keep the drones busy. A stripped-down version of herself loaded into good ol’ 19, and she took that rover with two smaller drones off toward the next dome in search of pit stops, supplies, and parts.
We worked out a protocol for Julie to find the sensor road when the sensors had been scattered by the blasts. Some of this came from records of my manual driving, others from the patterns of sensor scatter around the other domes. We still had to account for sensor drift, when the sand shifts and moves the sensors with it, but you still get a sensor road. The sensors are not the painted lines or magnetic guides on real roads back home. They’re more of a polite suggestion. Once we finalized this, Julie could copy herself into one of the newer rovers or even an automated freight drone and go off looking at the rest of the domes on the equator. She would drop radios we found in a stash in Solaria, maybe take a spider once the life support system was finished.
It would be my job to get the hypergate talking to other hypergates. That I would do myself. It’s tedious, and really, I should have Julie rebuild the hyperdrone’s database into something I can read and translate into “gatespeak,” but I need to be less dependent on Julie. Part of me is afraid of becoming an increasingly powerful AI’s pet human. Part of me wants something to do besides pointing to where I want a bunch of dumb drones to go. Part of me thinks I ask too much of Julie.
Most of me is not being rational about it.
Two weeks ago, I loaded up 57 with supplies, had Julie update herself onto both 57 and 114, and headed out for New Ares, almost 1700 kilometers away. Why, you ask, would I drive for two-and-a-half days to a glass pancake? Well, put simply, my terror of dying on this rock before help arrives far outweighs my terror of irradiated corpses. That said, I’d probably have nightmares for weeks.
The most dangerous part of this mission was loading equipment into 114 and, quite likely, 57. Some of the equipment would be bulky and cumbersome. I'd also have to do EVAs and work with drones even Julie sometimes has trouble controlling. Amazing. Artificial ADHD may kill us all. If we began at the farthest reach of our range, each day would bring me closer to Solaria. The pit stop, as the final stop, put me less than a day away if I trust Julie to drive the entire time. The closer I came to Solaria in the event of an injury or an equipment failure, the better my chances of survival. Plus, if something went wrong at New Ares, we could abort, and I could lay pissing and moaning inside 57 as we headed straight back.
On the first day of our excursion, Julie pointed out something to me.
You never adjusted for time zones, John Farno. Even heading to Kremlin to work on their bots, you stayed on Musk Time. You’d get more time talking to the hyperdrone if you’d adjust for sunrise and keep the drone online the entire time.
I didn’t. Kremlin was only an hour behind Musk. New Ares was barely inside Musk’s time zone. I never bothered to change the times on the clock because the offset was meaningless. The techs at Kremlin simply worked on my local time, and I never paid any attention. The work got done, and I didn’t have to change my sleep patterns. Funny how survival makes that seem trivial now.
Only habit made me forget to adjust. Solaria is actually five hours ahead. I should have been getting up at least two to three hours earlier and working the hyperdrone through breakfast, not that it mattered. The prep work for bringing Solaria’s life support online was a full-time job in and of itself. On the ride in, I kept waking up at the same time regardless of the sun.
Time, of course, is meaningless without a full-blown local system to track it. Forget temporal drift and other side effects of wormhole travel between two gravity wells. Without a population here, I should have been living on the most primitive time system known to humans. When Neanderthal man saw the sun, it was time to start the day. When he saw stars or just pitch black, it was time to go to sleep. All the computers I have on board the rovers, in the various storage vaults, and in Solaria give me the illusion of civilization and its time keeping.
I started talking to the hyperdrone as soon as I awoke, tapping furiously into a console and whispering arcane sweet nothings into its primitive, not-so-intelligent ear. I had the database downloaded after about two days. All that work for a five-second download.
Now comes the hard part: Turning all that gibberish into Humanic and keeping the original mathematic codes in sync so I can tell the hypergate who to pester.
And so, on the morning of 27-Sagan, we set out for New Ares in search of parts for the dome's central life support. My world went from the apartment building and maybe a few pressurized sheds to the confines of 57. Julie drove the whole way, doing a good job retracing my steps.
My first day consisted of hand-copying wormhole coordinates into a new matrix where I could read a Humanic name for the gate in particular. I started with the most common ones we communicated with. The first is Gilead, a newer colony of a Class E world called Metis. Metis, for those of you reading this centuries from now, is one of the few matriarchies in the Compact. There, everyone has Celtic accents. I always found that amusing because, from what I know of Earth, the Celtic peoples tend to favor manly men, the type who would wipe out an endangered species before breakfast and drink liters and liters of something called Jameson with said breakfast. Metis itself is a newer core world. As such, it didn't have any colonies of its own until recently. Not that the age of a core world means anything. Jefivah is humanity's first outpost beyond Sol, four hundred years old, and it doesn't have any colonies. Or, didn't as of The Event.
The second is Amargosa, another colony world, but older. This one is Class E, but, like Farno (formerly Farigha, pending the Citizens' Republic's approval of my one-man referendum), it falls under Mars's jurisdiction. It's about a hundred years old. Together with Gilead, Amargosa supplies about sixty percent of our food. The loss of the hypergate put a stop to that, but then it's just me and Julie now, and Julie doesn't eat. However, those are the two most likely candidates to ping.
Beyond that, the hypergate we get the most attention from is one in The Caliphate's network. The Caliphate is, technically, an Islamic republic. In reality, it's a corporate executive's wet dream, one of the most prosperous and open worlds in the Comp
act. Pinging any of its gates might be disruptive enough to attract someone's attention. That's all I want: Someone to get annoyed enough to come investigate. I have radio galore down here, both digital and analog. All I have to do is find a common frequency and yell, "Help!" First, though, I have to get them to travel across the stars. I'll start with Gilead, since all I need is for one freighter to come pick me up.
On the evening of the first night, I asked Julie to go into dormant mode so I could load Elise. Hey, I worked hard. I deserved a night of pleasure.
Um… I have a confession to make, she said. I sort of ate Elise.
"Okay," I said, "that's totally not creepy."
What I mean is that I decompiled her, stripped her for parts, and added some upgrades to myself. I need the sentient and computing capacity if we're going to finish this mission.
"What sort of upgrades?"
Well…
I don't know who the woman on all my video screens was, but she was incredibly beautiful. And when Julie spoke, the woman's lips moved.
"Do you like this avatar?" Julie said through the woman on all the viewscreens. "She's actually a composite of several women. It just seems wrong to use someone's image to do what I'm about to do."
"Which is…?" I asked.
"John Farno, I am your sole companion. Now I can continue to be an approximation of Julie Seding, but that person is still alive somewhere as far as we know. It would be unfair of me to coax you into bonding with a woman who has no clue you exist and likely never will. Plus…" The image changed into a mousier, older woman who looked ready for rejuve. "…I'm pretty sure she's not attractive to you."
She was right. But if Julie Seding were to suddenly appear in the flesh, and only the flesh, and beg me to make sweet love to her, I'd seriously consider it. It's been a long month.
"My job is to keep you alive and serve your needs, John Farno," said Julie. "To do that, I need to evolve. And…" She morphed back into the gorgeous raven-haired goddess she had generated. "…you've expanded my capacity to the point where I feel lonely. So… I broke down Elise and added her pleasuring heuristics to my features." The new Julie avatar smiled. "And besides, John Farno, you're already inside me. We might as well take advantage of that."
It was long and glorious night, even if I had to do most of the work myself. By morning, I said the most romantic thing I'd ever said to a woman. "I wish you were real."
"Then no one would be driving the rover." She paused a moment. "Well, technically, I would, since I'm really the AI, but you get what I mean. You'd have a cold machine like you had when Rover 19 did little more than rattle off the time and temperature and read you Edgar Rice Burroughs novels. But now it's time to work. You've got a hypergate to hack, and I have to get you to New Ares." The avatar blew me a kiss and disappeared. At least, I still had her voice.
DAY 26 (Cont'd)
Solaria
LOG ENTRY: 1841 9-Mandela, 429
Sorry about the pause. I got so long-winded on this last log entry that I had to stop for a nature break. I took it outside and relieved myself in the topsoil the bots have been laying along the building's edge. That's right. This big, long-winded log entry is all about how I gained the ability to piss outside. Hey, I've got almost unlimited permafrost to drink from. Prior to their extinction, the population on the world formerly known as Farigha barely made a dent in the ice below the surface. Since I now am the population of the world now known as Farno, I, King Farno I, Emperor of 2 Mainzer, can consider the permafrost an infinite source of water. So, I don't have to reclaim my piss if I don't want to. There's plenty more water below the surface.
Besides, the flower beds in this dome were already designed to trap condensation and people's piss anyway for reclamation.
Did I mention earlier the reclamation unit is online? My palm tatt started buzzing again, feeding me alerts that there's precious little to reclaim, perhaps there is a malfunction somewhere. I had Julie set the system straight. Of course, now she is the system. Which she herself pointed out is actually pretty creepy. A single AI running an entire dome instead of separate AIs for everything.
When you are rescued, John Farno, I'm going to have to reboot this growing AI and wipe all but the factory interfaces. Just because I've become somewhat sentient doesn't mean this distributed system won't corrupt and become dangerous.
"Isn't that suicide?" I asked.
For you, it would be. For me, it would be cleaning up after fulfilling my mission.
"You'd cease to exist."
That means something different for me than it does you.
"Oh."
That is kind of creepy. Then again, a large, distributed network of artificial intelligences decided that last World War was a travesty and planned to reduce the human population to about a million refugees living in Antarctica. From what I understand, Antarctica is a really cold place, so I can see why ten billion people might be upset about being exterminated with the survivors not at all happy with life on an ice cube.
It also meant Julie retained enough of her human template to understand the pattern she was following. A change in interface, or several, might cause the collective AI she now ran to divorce itself from its personalities and get a tad uppity. We don't like uppity AIs. The last one tried to kill us.
"What would I do without you, Julie?"
Most likely suffocate from oxygen deprivation. You're welcome.
I am going to miss her someday.
So where was I before I got all philosophical following a piss break? Oh, yes. Two weeks ago, on the road to New Ares. Julie had glommed the Elise interfaces pleasure protocols, allowing us to make sweet, sweet love all while she drove through the night. I fell asleep, naturally. The Farno pleasure protocol includes rolling over, going dormant, and snoring. I know I snore. Julie told me. Her sexy avatar was gone the next morning, and we talked as though nothing happened.
Behind us, Rover 114 trundled along. It still complained about me putting it under Julie's control. She threatened to reboot it, and it stopped. I think I'm more disturbed by 114's behavior than Julie's. 114 was run by a factory AI interface, so it shouldn't be getting so uppity.
Anyway, I spent the day rebuilding the database for the hypergate, which would allow me to ping another gate. My efforts netted me the addresses of three Caliphate hypergates. According to Wikipedia Britannica, as of the night of the event, The Caliphate had seventeen gates in its star system. I found one for Metis, though I know they have at least four, and two for the Helios system. Unfortunately, none of the Helios gates are for Tian, the main core world in a system that has three. Well, technically, four, but Aphrodite has been in a state of perpetual civil war since before the Compact was founded. A gate over Tian might be ideal because they're so busy. Some random ping from Farigha would piss off their traffic control enough to get a navy cruiser sent here. Just think. A big ol' Olympus Mons starship sent for little ol' me.
That was probably enough work on the hyperdrone's brains, at least at the time I was rolling along the road to New Ares. The next day I spent having a dull conversation with the hypergate's transceiver through something called a "command line interface." Was I going to have to find a surviving shuttle to go up there and check its vacuum tubes or change out its flash drive? I now realize what it might be like for a human or an Orag to talk to our first truly hominid mutual ancestors in prehistoric Kenya.
"What's it saying?" the Orag time-travelling scientist will ask.
"Not sure," his human companion will reply, "but its giddy for bananas, likes to throw feces, and plays with itself a lot."
"We evolved from that?"
"I'm not so sure now. Sometimes, I think our races may have devolved."
That's kind of what it's like to talk to the hypergate. It can't understand voice commands. It has precious little data to hold a meaningful conversation, and its responses are mostly gibberish. I suppose those who support the hypergates know what some of these arcane responses are, but damned
if I do.
Day Two was spent learning how to talk to the computer equivalent of an Australopithecus. Fortunately for me, Julie donned a fresh avatar, becoming Aphrodite, goddess of love. "This is fantasy," she said as the goddess, "so let's enjoy the fantasy."
We enjoyed the fantasy. I woke up the next morning to Julie back in disembodied mode announcing we were half a day away from the storage vaults beneath New Ares. I had a lot of work to do, preparing for several EVAs, rechecking the task list for Rover 114 as it would become a moving van, and checking on the drones at Solaria to make sure we were still on schedule. So far, no spiders or aerial drones had gone wonky, but apparently, two of the daleks were in dire need of maintenance. We took a spider out of circulation to work on them. Julie was as close to unhappy as an AI could be.
As we approached the vaults, I started to wish I could find the suicide pills or some hard liquor. I had to go back inside with the three charred corpses I found the last time. There are a total of five vaults, and the inventory Julie cobbled together from whatever records were left had us going into all five. I say us because Julie hacked the systems inside the vaults. That made Julie the vaults.
