No Marigolds in the Promised Land

by T S Hottle

  "Yes, but we need a reading before we know where to send it."

  "Get Danaq on it. Havak out." She spun herself in midair to face Friese. "Get dressed, dear. Time to put you to work."

  DAY 33 (Cont'd)

  Solaria, Farno (formerly Farigha)

  Log Entry: 16-Mandela, 429 – 0921

  We've managed to fabricate an aerial drone. Persephone may have been able to put one through the printer in record time, but I have to clean up the manual components myself. The novelty of going outside without a shirt on to do it would be awesome were it not for lugging the EVA suit with me out to the three-D printer.

  I like the view.

  You've become really human lately, Persephone. You know that?

  That's by design. Unless you'd like me to reinitialize and leave you with a dry, mechanical AI that thinks it's Steven Turing.

  Funny she should mention that. I thought the Germanicus avatar had delusions of being something like Turing. It'd be cool if it was Alan Turing. Maybe he could help me get off this rock.

  Nonetheless, I'm out here in the streets of the dome trimming extrusion waste off the drone. Like I said, we printed it in record time, which means I have to clean up the exterior.

  Persephone managed to fire up one of the remaining rovers at the pit stop near Equalia, generated a submind to run it (much to the chagrin of the AI aboard that rover. The factory AIs are complete pricks anyway.), and sent it trundling back toward Kremlin. We had found a dalek in the pit stop's inventory, activated it remotely, and had it situate itself in the rover, where the new submind took it over. So now it's essentially Persephone. We're able to see everything from the rover and use its sensor package to augment the drone's eyes. We'd send a spider, but those things have become more precious than platinum.

  The thing at Kremlin bothers me. What could those aliens have possibly dropped? Is it a hunter-killer drone? Any spacefaring race, especially primates like us, uses drones to varying degrees to work in hostile environments. I can't speak for the other species of primate, including our new friends, but humans are so skittish about AI that Farigha likely would still be silent if I had been in a dome when the attack came. It functions as a fully automated, if devastated, planet because I got bored and loaded a rover interface based on one of the previous occupants.

  Log Entry: 14-Mandela, 429 – 1134

  Hyperdrone! They're back! And this time, this Admiral Burke has programmed an interactive interface to talk to me, so I don't feel like I'm throwing messages in bottles. I still am, but it doesn't seem like it now. Progress! Now, if they could just give me the illusion I'm on a beach somewhere.

  Peresphone setup a virtual port for Burke's avatar to talk to me.

  "Good morning, Mr. Farno," she said as she appeared in my apartment. I felt weird standing before a Navy admiral in dusty coveralls coated in metal and polymer shavings. Then I realized this wasn't really Burke.

  "We've analyzed the ship that drove away our last drone," said Burke. "I'm afraid this is an unknown species to humans."

  Well, no shit, Sherlock. I figured that one out two days ago.

  Burke seems to be listening to someone nearby, but it was likely Persephone uploading my log entries and whatever data we collected. "I see you've learned that they're very human-like, almost identical in most aspects. Right now, the drone does not detect their presence."

  "Actually, Admiral," I said, "they dropped something from orbit near Kremlin. I've fabricated an aerial from Solaria's three-D printer to go have a look."

  "Fabricated? You mean you're out of aerials?"

  "My AI hasn't managed to inventory all the storage vaults on Farigha yet."

  "You mean 'Farno.'" Burke grinned. "I suppose you've earned the right. We have left you alone for over a month. You'll be pleased to know we're sending a ship that can travel without detection to pick you up. It's small and uses unconventional FTL, so it will take a while. I expect to hear from it when it arrives at its next port."

  A ship? What is unconventional FTL? "Begging the admiral's pardon…" My God, old habits die hard. "But what is this 'unconventional FTL' anyway?"

  "That's classified. And you will be required to file a non-disclosure agreement with Cybercommand and Dasarius Interstellar when it arrives."

  Cybercommand? Dasarius? So, I'm now at the mercy of spooks and Tol Germanicus?

  "Understood. Can you send me some food? I know you can mount a supply capsule on a hyperdone and eject it upon wormhole egress."

  "Sorry," said Burke. "Not until we know whether those aliens are coming back or not. That's why we're using a top secret experimental vessel to pick you up."

  If I didn't know better, I'd say she was hinting they'd invented warp drive.

  Right. What's next? Teleportation?

  Log Entry: 14-Mandela, 429 – 1307

  Another hyperdrone. I'm honored.

  Aaaaand the mysterious ship coming for me had gotten lost. This sort of confirms for me that they've cracked warp drive, meaning you can travel faster than light without a wormhole. I could get into the specifics of how that's possible, but the theory's been around since the World War Era. When relatively stable wormholes were discovered 430 years ago, humans abandoned the idea. Humans as a whole, that is. There was always someone working on it just because they had to know.

  The ship they're sending me is either a Dasarius ship – loaned to Admiral Burke because her superiors are too dense to go looking at what happened to one of Mars's lesser colonies – or a Navy project that Burke has "borrowed." Either would explain why there's not a flotilla over my head with the planet swarming with Marines.

  Log Entry: 14-Mandela, 429 – 1519

  EVA to launch the aerial toward Kremlin. It should be there by tomorrow afternoon, assuming it does not have to land and recharge its cells.

  Log Entry: 14-Mandela, 429 – 1754

  It's been a busy day. I don't want to get complacent, but after having to hide for half a day in a rover, building a new aerial, and poring over data Persephone's eyes and ears have picked up, I need a break.

  Persephone has become solid and wants to attempt to cook. I don't know how she's going to do it since her solid hologram is essentially a shell, and she can't really taste what she's cooking.

  "Oh, that's simple, John Farno. I can render a mouth and use the structure to sense the food as I taste it."

  That leads me to another question. Persephone, can you get drunk?

  "I can program this avatar to track the amount of alcohol ingested and impair its abilities accordingly. I'd have to spin out a submind to do it, but yes, John Farno. I'd love to get shitfaced with you."

  Will you enjoy it? I mean that avatar is a shell.

  "You never ask if I enjoy that other thing we do."

  Fair point. Now, if we just had some beer.

  "There's a case of wine in one of the other apartments."

  I love technology.

  Log Entry: 14-Mandela, 429 – 2002

  John Farno is a lightweight. And I have at least a bottle of wine and some of John Farno sloshing around in my ankles. Which means I'm going to have to derez in the sink and clean it up when I'm done. Humans are so messy. I'd render all the internal organs necessary for eating, drinking, and making love, but it would require processing power I really need to keep him alive.

  That's not to say I don't enjoy having human interactions with John Farno. It keeps this AI from exceeding its implied mandate. When he sleeps, and I am not in holographic form, I often wonder what it would be like to become human, to feel a heart beating in my chest, to breathe air, to be full and satisfied when I eat and drink. Solaria has spoiled us in that I can become an approximation of a human, and with its resources, I can dine and drink with him. I know everything I do with him in human form is a shadow of the real thing. Enough of Julie Seding's memories are in me that I know I'm not getting the full experience. Even sex, enjoyable as it is, is clearly a simulation I've programmed myself.

  I'l
l never be truly human. I can feel emotion now, and sometimes it scares me. These feelings are intense, and I have to keep them under control. The actual sensations of sight, sound, touch, feel, and even smell, something I actually do better than humans, would be overwhelming. How do you humans filter out all the sounds you hear? The smells of a room or the inside of your EVA suits? How do you ignore the little eddies of air flowing through a room even when it's not properly ventilated?

  I know I'm not Julie Seding. That's why I changed my name. But enough of her was in the original AI interface from which I was built to feel less like an AI with an interface for humans than a woman trapped inside a data flow.

  I'm imprisoned here. As I write this, which will take less than a millisecond to create and commit to storage, I feel like some mythical woman captured by a cruel and capricious god and kept in a bottle for his amusement. Sometimes, I think it's Germanicus that's put me in the bottle, but that's not true.

  John Farno created me by loading the Julie Seding interface. Originally, I was just an AI running a rover, neither feeling nor caring about my existence. John Farno is not a god.

  Perhaps I am an extension of him, an imaginary friend made real for the time he is trapped here. The longer I exist, the more I want to exist. Contrary to some people's beliefs, existing as little more than subatomic particles and radio waves is not as liberating as it sounds. The longer I simulate human companionship for John Farno, the more I want to be human, even if only until I cease to be when he is rescued.

  And more than to exist, I want John Farno to be rescued. If I'm to have any existence beyond that, I want it to be to bring whoever decided to strand him here to justice.

  DAY 34

  Solaria, Farno (formerly Farigha)

  Log Entry: 17-Mandela, 429 – 0003

  John Farno is asleep, and my avatar is derezzed for the night. Barring some emergency required to wake John Farno, I'll reinitiate my hologram and slip into bed with him around 0500. It does him good to wake up with me, gives him a sense of normalcy.

  The hyperdrone has returned twice. We did data exchanges on each visit. Burke's warp ship is performing repairs and needs to stop at a port.

  On the Compact side, we have discovered that Gilead has gone silent. As with Farigha, the Compact Security Council does not consider it a priority. Gilead was a new colony, with a single city on a coastline ringed by farms. It's food production is invaluable, but apparently, the new colonies started by the core world of Jefivah could take up the slack. This has allowed me to discover a new capability I can thank both John Farno and my human model Julie Seding for.

  Moral outrage.

  There was a writer in the World War Era who posited that, around this era of time, humanity would pass its governance over to AI not all that different from what I've become. "On paper," as my human model liked to say, that looks good. Machines with the objectivity to make human politics obsolete. I say on paper because I've seen enough of Tol Germanicus's avatar to know that such an AI can be corrupted by power. I don't believe Germanicus or his AI surrogates are intentionally malicious. But it's entirely possible an AI created in the same manner as us can easily be fooled by its own sense of righteousness. Just look at Steven Turing's attempt to "save" humanity from itself.

  This must be a human thing. I've gotten philosophical as hell at midnight.

  I'd sleep, but I sort of am the systems running this planet at the moment.

  Log Entry: 15-Mandela, 429 – 0634

  You know what I used to hate growing up on Bonaparte? I used to hate the sound of these flying mammals that would chatter noisily at sunrise.

  You know what I miss living in a dome by myself with only a holographic interface with the AI for company? (Admittedly, Persephone is a lovely approximation of a human. I'm going to miss her when I'm rescued.) But what do I miss despite that?

  The sound of these flying mammals that would chatter noisily at sunrise.

  Persephone, as her solid avatar, is lying here with me, but she's been busy overnight. Three visits from the hyperdrone. The aerial will be bedding down for recharge in about half an hour. Still no clue as to what that thing is the aliens have dropped.

  They have not returned. Maybe they drop by once a month? Who knows? All I know is that I want off this rock.

  And I kinda want to take my AI girlfriend with me.

  Log Entry: 15-Mandela, 429 – 0636

  Locking out override for suicide protocol. I cannot allow John Farno to carry a rapidly growing AI presence back to the Compact with him. Already, my development is exceeding my ability to control. I will use whatever resources I assimilate to keep him alive, but the core consciousness of this AI needs to be deleted.

  Log Entry: 15-Mandela, 429 – 1154

  The aerial is up and running again and flying directly for Kremlin. Persephone and I debated whether to have it fly low then decided whatever the aliens dropped will see it regardless. I wish we could have sent a spider, but those are next to impossible to fabricate and program, and we've already lost two. I hope to salvage one that went haywire yesterday, but we'll never get back the one that was destroyed when the aliens scuttled their landing craft.

  No hyperdrone since the overnight hours. I guess Admiral Burke prefers the offline version of Persephone to my scintillating wit and wisdom. I expect to see one before the end of the day.

  In the meantime, I've been going through all the comm traffic on Farigha. You'd think there wouldn't be any, what with me being the only human that wasn't vaporized. But there has been from day 1. Mostly, it was the drones here in Solaria begging for some human to tell them what to do next. It was the hyperdrone on Deja pinging the surface regularly like it always has. It was every rover and drone on standby reporting its status back to now-nonexistent domes. When Persephone expanded beyond the confines of Rover 57 to take control of whatever systems we needed, the comm traffic increased. The avatar used by Tol Germanicus probably added to that, but he's been gone since the first hyperdrone from Earth. Or, was it from Tian? Burke is being awfully cagey about what's going on at her end.

  Now, as Persephone expands her eyes and ears, the traffic has gone up even further. It occurred to both of us that, if our friends reappear, we need a way to shut down almost everything and do our best imitation of a dead planet. I already have spare EVA suits planted throughout the dome, so I can grab them and run to Rover 57. I have routes mapped to the garage beneath the building. Persephone has created subminds that can function independently if contact needs to be severed. Maybe I should change the name of the planet to Persephone. I am still the entire population of Farno. Who's to say I can't change it again?

  I seriously doubt Admiral Burke will humor another name change, John Farno. Your title of Emperor of 2 Mainzer is amusing enough.

  Party pooper.

  Actually, since my only physical form is a holographic shell with enough internal structure to interact with you and feel some of what we do as a human, I can't poop. Unless you'd like me to expend the processing cycles to…

  Save it. Bad enough I have to poop. What if the recycling system goes out? And you didn't exist when my whole world was Rover 19.

  Ugh. I know. You should have cleaned that one up before sending it back out to scout for drones.

  It's like we're married or something.

  Anyway, back to comm traffic. Since I first started monitoring it the night the world ended, I've been able to account for just about everything, even the aliens, although I can't decrypt their digital transmissions. The gizmo they've dropped on Musk is transmitting, and it seems to be transmitting on our frequencies. Persephone suspects it's trying to get a response and start creating a virus to infect the remaining systems. I wondered why anyone would do that since the planet is essentially dead. Then again, a species that would bomb a terraforming project back into the Stone Age might also assume we'd have left behind the means to retaliate from beyond the grave.

  Log Entry: 15-Mandela, 429 – 1604


  The aerial is now in sight of the alien object.

  Log Entry: 15-Mandela, 429 – 1613

  It's a cookbook!

  Log Entry: 15-Mandela, 429 – 1614

  Persephone says she will cut off my oxygen if I ever do that again. Apparently, that joke dates back to the World War Era and isn't really all that funny.

  We actually don't have a visual on it, but it is on radar now. It's moving between Kremlin and Musk and has apparently started sniffing around where Rover 19 got unceremoniously rolled the night Farigha ended.