Analog SFF, June 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  His suit's miniguardian wasn't as good as the one on his capsule, but only I knew how scary its big brother was. This one was mainly designed to guard data files he'd loaded onto his suit system—maps, CAT scans, and whatever else he thought was important enough to have along. So I bypassed it and attacked the suit: shutting down his lights; spiking, then constricting, his oxygen flow; altering sensor readings. Then—a showboat move, but I might not get another chance—I popped the lock on his backpack.

  “That's just a sample of what I can do,” I said while Rudolph was putting his suit on manual override. “I can also"—this time, I let the guardian catch me so Rudolph could see it happen—"erase your files. Starting with the map.”

  “You little bitch....”

  “I'll take that as a step up from ‘Floyd's thing.'” There wasn't really any reason to say that, but it felt good. It also distracted him from realizing that however convoluted the route in had been, he might be able to puzzle it back out without me. And unfortunately, there was a limit to what I could do to his suit; those things were designed to be failsafe. I needed something else to make sure he believed he had to keep us alive.

  The guardian and the locked backpack gave me an idea.

  “Floyd's too trusting,” I said. “Before we landed, I left a copy of myself on the ship. If Floyd's suit doesn't come back with him in it—the medical telemetry showing him alive and mendable—it has no reason to wait around.”

  “You're lying.”

  “Computers don't lie.” Which was both true and not true. Computers do what they're told. But I'm not a computer. I may live in one, but I'm the one who does the telling. I was gambling that Rudolph didn't understand the difference. Floyd had enough trouble with it.

  Still, I was almost surprised when he gave in. It wasn't just the lying thing: if he'd really understood me, he'd have known there could be no copy. But people can't quite comprehend an entity like me. Even Floyd probably thought I could simply flow into the web, like some kind of worm. But it's not that simple. Even a worm can't just dribble though a link, like water down a pipe. It copies itself.

  Technically speaking, I could do that, too. But the only way to actually move would be to erase the original. Which, if you're the copy left behind, kind of defeats the purpose. To do it, you'd have to be suicidal, murderous, or both—in which case, you're not worth copying.

  Maybe, in some circumstances, it would be like sacrificing yourself to save a child. But the child would simply be another me, so that isn't the greatest of analogies. Besides, before I went sentient, I was a fairly standard AI. That meant I was copy-protected. There's a protocol for a transfer—that's how Floyd got me—but it involves a reboot, and I have no idea whether there'd be a me left afterward.

  Luckily Rudolph wasn't thinking along those lines.

  “What about this?” he said, gesturing to the black surface below us.

  “What about it? You found the mother lode.”

  “Yeah?” He knew I understood. He was just testing to see if I would lie.

  “It's carbonado. Black diamond. Trillions of carats. Maybe more.” Black diamonds are one of those fun things life is so full of. I'd read about them during one of my long nights of web sifting. They're not worth much as gemstones, but like diamonds of any type, they've got a lot of industrial uses.

  On Earth they're only found in Brazil and West Africa. One theory held that way back before there was an Atlantic Ocean, that part of Pangaea got hit by a diamond asteroid: part of the core of something or other. Something like a missing moon of Saturn—or more likely, a piece of the exotic interstellar debris that had clobbered it.

  I had to hand it to Rudolph; going to Iapetus to check the theory was a pretty bold move.

  Prior surveys must have found diamond traces in the dust—even ordinary meteorites are riddled with nanodiamonds. But they're only a few thousand atoms in size, and common enough that nobody would pay much attention.

  Most of the dust must simply be ordinary rock, or the diamond hunt would have been on long ago. But hiking around Iapetus, Rudolph had not only been setting up his vacation-trip cover, he must have been hunting for traces of bigger game—signs that it would be worth his while to speed weeks poking around the Rings in hopes that bigger chunks might still exist.

  Now that he'd found one, his problem was that it was hundreds of times larger than all the diamonds ever produced on Earth, combined. A few tons a year would be worth a fortune. The whole thing would crash the market. And the Rings are a big place. If people knew that one of these existed, they'd look for more, and if the raisin-sprinkled clumps we'd found meant anything, there might be a lot of them.

  What I wanted to say, was big deal, it's just money. Beyond some level, who needs it? But Rudolph clearly wasn't going to understand that any better than why I wouldn't leave a copy of myself on GnuShip. We were alien enough to each other that we might as well be ETs out in the Oort Cloud.

  The bottom line was that Rudolph's long-shot prospecting trip had paid off, big. But only if nobody blabbed. I don't know what it takes to drive the average ruthless speculator over the line to murder, but I now knew the answer for Rudolph.

  That meant I had to speak his language.

  “Ten percent,” I said. Floyd and I had a better chance of getting out alive if Rudolph believed we had a vested interest in helping him keep his secret.

  “One. Can you speak for Floyd?”

  “I've got his power of attorney.” What was one more lie? Besides, if we got out of this alive, it wouldn't be a lie for long. “Five.”

  We settled on three, with a three million advance. I probably could have gotten more, but I didn't want him trying too hard to worm out. Of course, I had the whole thing recorded, along with plenty of evidence to convict him of trying to kill Floyd. But if I got greedy, he'd claim file tampering. If I'd been a pushover, though, he'd have assumed I was waiting to turn him in. Three percent seemed about right. Besides, I was in a hurry; I needed Rudolph's help to patch Floyd's suit.

  If Floyd survived, I'd traded away his right to justice for riches. Sometimes you have no choice but to make a deal with the devil.

  * * * *

  Getting back to the surface posed a different sort of problem. Rudolph wanted to go back the way we'd come. With Floyd conscious and able to help, I'd have agreed. But I had serious doubts he was waking up soon. If ever. That meant we'd have to try Rudolph's explosive paste to get through the tight section. If it didn't work (and if we hadn't managed to seal ourselves completely in) he'd have nothing to lose by trying for the surface alone—and I couldn't stop him. The other direction might have a dozen tight passages, but without a map, Rudolph couldn't panic and run on his own. What this meant was that I needed to keep him more afraid of me than of the unknown.

  A long time ago, Floyd had asked if I had an avatar. I'd offered several, but he hadn't liked them. Now, I needed something more commanding than my (now) twenty-one-year-old self-image. I flashed through vid memories, plus novels of the Galactic Space Corps, Androids of the Asteroids, and all the other fun stuff that presumably taps into a universal human subconscious. Unfortunately, mostly it was the wrong part of the subconscious. There were lots of women, but they tended to be improbably proportioned. When I finally found something more suitable, she had pointy elf ears. Another had blue skin. Still, when I edited out the alien features and crossed the result with a couple of prime ministers, I had something that might make Rudolph see his mother, back when he was the right age to have either loved her or feared her. Zeus on estrogen. Probably not a good thing to show Floyd.

  I have no idea what Rudolph thought of my avatar; but it couldn't have hurt my case, which was basically I'm in charge, and we're doing it my way.

  It also turned out to be the right way. There were a few tight passages, but none as bad as what we'd seen, and all surmountable by the simple expedient of having Rudolph shove Floyd through ahead of him, like a big backpack. Two were tight enough that
he had to leave his own pack behind and go back for it, but we got through easily enough.

  The main difficulty was that the moment he regained contact with his capsule, he was going to discover that there was no other me waiting to keep him out. His suit probably had the better radio, and I didn't want to risk him locking me out of GnuShip while I was still out of contact.

  Give me enough data, though, and I can run a sim on just about anything. In this case, I merely needed to track our progress and time it so we reached the surface while GnuShip was below the horizon. Then I made sure Rudolph was busy with a thruster burn when she rose into line of sight. A quick ping, and I had a dummy program up there that could do a pretty good imitation-Brittney, so long as I fed it instructions. Not that it takes much to fool someone who's never taken you seriously, but it was nice to keep him believing I was simply a machine that couldn't lie. Though by that time, I really did have full control over GnuShip, and she definitely wasn't going anywhere without me and Floyd.

  * * * *

  We wound up in the Iapetus Base hospital, where Floyd was diagnosed with a depressed fracture of the occiput and subdural frostbite. A few minutes later with the suit patch, and he wouldn't have made it.

  Frontier medicine leaves a lot to be desired, but the base was well stocked with stem cells, and Floyd proved an easy match.

  Rudolph paid an exorbitant fee to catch the first in-system e-rail boost and was gone even before the medic finished scraping out the dead parts of Floyd's brain. I let him go. People have an image of the wild frontier, but there really isn't that much crime out here, and what there is, is usually handled by—I guess the term would be enforced negotiation. Who wants to waste hab space on a jail? Though I suppose you could boost convicts in-system and let Earth handle it. If I were the vindictive type, I could make Rudolph regret his abrupt departure, but I was too glad to have him gone.

  Harder to deal with was Floyd's recovery. A stem-cell bone fusion is a simple procedure, but it takes weeks to mature. Meanwhile we were stuck in a guest hab. Though at least Rudolph's millions meant I'd never lack for library fees.

  Brain regeneration is even slower than bone regeneration. And trickier. Floyd had mostly lost motor abilities, and when the stem cells were slow to patch the loss, the medic installed a neurolattice chip to help fill the gap. Unfortunately, this was a field where frontier medicine really lagged, and the chip had an ultra-slow processor that was better than nothing, but not by a lot. The medic said that until the new neurons grew into it properly, Floyd wouldn't be able to walk. Then she said he'd never walk without a limp. Then she quit making guesses.

  What I didn't see any reason to tell her (or Floyd) was that as long as she'd left the chip's telemetry on, I could assist it.

  I'd always wondered what it would be like to have legs. I think you have to be born to it. Muscles aren't servos. Tell a muscle to flex x degrees, and maybe it will, or maybe it'll do x minus one or x plus three. If that's what the skill thing is about, Floyd can have it.

  * * * *

  Floyd had a different view of Iapetus Base medicine than I did.

  “Crap,” he said when he was starting to feel recovered enough to be his usual grumpy self. “This place is getting as civilized as Jupiter. When I came here, they'd have just patched me up, put me back on the ship, and told me to go heal myself.”

  “And you might well have died.”

  “Yeah. Don't get me wrong. I'm not ungrateful. It's just starting to feel too much like the Inner System. Give it another few annums and we'll be hip deep in—I don't know: department stores and wine bars. Hotels with room service.”

  “So?” Though I was pretty sure I knew.

  “That kind of stuff makes me twitchy. It's like being under all those rocks in the cave.”

  It was the most he'd said about the cave since we'd gotten back. Partly because he had no memory of being attacked by Rudolph. No memory of the big diamond. The last thing he could recall was laughing in the embrace of the tight squeeze. Not a bad place for his memory to blank out, I suppose, but until now, he hadn't wanted to talk about that, either.

  Now I couldn't decide if I was angry or curious, counselor or partner. Or just his “damn imp.” But I did want to understand what had driven him into the caves. It had nearly gotten both of us killed.

  “Take me back to Mount Zebra,” I said.

  * * * *

  Even with my help, Floyd wasn't ready to hike, though he was doing better with less and less assistance. In a few weeks he might not even need me. If he ever really needed me at all.

  It wasn't until we stepped out of the skimmer that I knew why I wanted to come back.

  We'd wound up on Rudolph's mons rather than Mount Zebra because it offered the only skimmer-sized flat spot in the vicinity. That was fine: Rudolph was the bad memory, not his mountain. It was at its base that I'd felt the yearning: here on the summit that I'd felt the sweep of where yearning wants to lead. Getting to the top had been utterly meaningless in any grand scheme of things—and utterly meaningful on the Brittney scale of the world.

  Then I'd lost it all in the cave.

  This had been clean. This had been good. The cave had been something else.

  “Why?” I asked.

  If Floyd had chosen to play dumb, I think I'd have made my decision, right then. But he didn't, at least no more than the ambiguity of my question required. “Why which?”

  “Start with the cave.”

  We stared out over the Trench at the hanging face of Saturn. For a moment, he was lost in thought, but I'd grown up enough to know he needed time. Just as I did, actually. Time is thought, but sometimes it is also data. It was something I'd learned from Floyd. In a place like this, the data is the view, which must be savored for the thought to be meaningful.

  “Partly, I've always wanted to know what it was like,” he said. “Their last moments, that is.” There could only be one they. Floyd never referred to his parents directly—rarely referred to them at all, in fact.

  “But?”

  “Mostly, I wanted to know if I could handle it.” He stared some more. “If you're afraid of something, you ultimately have to face it. Otherwise, you obsess about it.” He gave a bit of a half laugh. “Like you and T. R.”

  “Except that I was right."

  This time he did laugh. “Yeah, I have to give you that.” He was looking at the Rings now. “But I was right, too. Not about T.R., about facing the cave. Maybe sometime I'll remember the whole thing, but I remember enough. I went into that tunnel. Obviously, I got out the other side, or I wouldn't be here. That was what I needed: to find the other side.”

  It was about as long a speech as I'd ever heard him give, but it wasn't enough.

  “How does that relate to luxury hotels and all that other stuff?”

  “I'm thinking it's time to move on. Uranus has rings, lots of moons, and a couple hundred people who are going to need a tug. Not that we need the work if Van Delp comes up with even a fraction of the money you twisted out of him.”

  “He will.” If he reneged now, I'd make sure the whole System knew about his diamond.

  “So maybe we should get a jump on folks and head on out to Neptune.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Well, we'd need to line up an e-rail boost. And lay in supplies here, where they're cheap.”

  “But what's that got to do with caves?”

  Floyd scuffed at the rocks with his gloved hand. I left the chip alone, and he did pretty well on his own. He didn't really need me. He'd be an athlete again, soon enough, and never know how much I'd helped.

  “I'm starting to feel surrounded,” he said. He picked up a rock and turned it over and over in his hand. “Too many people, pressing at me from all sides. In the cave, I could just say, ‘Okay, this is temporary.’ But this will only get worse. It makes me feel trapped.”

  “Maybe that's what you really needed to face.”

  He threw the rock as hard as he could. Sloppily,
not quite in the direction he intended, in a flat trajectory that, in the low gravity, took a long time to dip out of sight.

  “Maybe someday.” He picked up another rock and threw it, too. Better this time, though still a long way from perfect. But it looked like the new neurons were finally growing into the lattice. “But not yet.”

  “I'm twenty-one, now,” I said.

  Floyd's heart rate had picked up as he talked of being trapped. Now it jumped again. “Are you going to leave me?”

  I wondered if he understood what that meant: an operation, not just me trickling away over the net. The chips would have to be physically removed, with me up and running for the ride. But I never doubted he'd let me go if I asked.

  Even if I left, I'd still be bound to him. Legally, I really was just a thing: Floyd's imp, with which he could do what he liked. If he didn't maintain the appearance of ownership, someone would try to claim me as salvage. But he wouldn't try to hold me back. He was too much the individualist to refuse the same freedom to someone else, even if she was nothing but electromagnetics, will, and dreams.

  So what did I want?

  “Yes.” I said. “No. Damn it, I don't know."

  I sought data again from Mount Zebra, Saturn, the Trench, everything beyond—but there was nothing new. What did I yearn for? A robot body? It would have to be custom made, or I'd wind up a repair drone or worse. Become BrittneyShip? I'd be a good tug pilot: no need for life support, no need for food. Half of Rudolph's money would be mine, and with Floyd heading out-system they'd need a tug around here. I'd have enough to buy one.

  Or I could go in-system. I'd always wanted to see Earth—in the real, not merely by vid. The software firm that originally wrote my code had been based there, but I don't remember it. I wasn't activated until I was installed in the manager of a volatile plant on Io—the guy from whom Floyd got me a few annums later.