by E. M. Foner
“Poker,” Justin told her. “It’s our canary in the coal mine.”
This time she understood the expression immediately. “An early warning system.”
“I saved rule #7 for you because going native is the greatest risk for Observers,” I told Helen. “We’ll know there’s something wrong if any of us start displaying human behavior in our betting patterns.”
I think the poker-test is best exemplified by the apocryphal AI who long ago took control of the Permeasean Empire’s flagship and told her creators to choose between granting full legal rights to sentient machines and death. Artificial intelligence doesn’t need to bluff.
Two
By the time the meeting wrapped up, I was out nearly twenty dollars and beginning to wonder if some of my team members were cheating. Sue agreed to give Helen a place to keep her things until our new team member found student housing, and I headed home to check in on Spot before going to my real job. Alright, I might have already said that commanding the observation mission was my real job, but it doesn’t pay much by galactic standards. I earned a good hourly rate at my cover job, but there were plenty of expenses involved in living on Earth. My goal was to come away from this assignment with enough credit banked at Library, the AI homeworld, to cover my information needs for the next few decades.
I could see the data stream flowing out of my apartment before I even opened the door. eBeth was sitting on the couch, and Spot was competing with the laptop for attention. Judging by the look of intense concentration on the girl’s face, the dog was losing, but he seemed to enjoy the heat from the cooling fan. I discretely sampled a few packets and saw that she was taking on a skeletal dungeon boss with a friend and had nearly depleted the monster’s hit points.
“Bingo,” she shouted as the skeleton crumbled, dropping an enchanted sword and a purse with twenty gold pieces. I never understood what a skeleton warrior needed with money, but as eBeth told me, I wasn’t gamer material. She completed the quest with a flurry of keystrokes, and then closed the laptop and scratched Spot behind the ear. “Hey, Mark. Were you late for your meeting?”
You could make an argument that eBeth’s knowing about my meetings was a violation of the rules, but if you’re going to split hairs, I shouldn’t have given her a laptop that’s basically window-dressing for the Bereftian computing core I’d substituted for the original motherboard. The core was a centuries-old model, so it didn’t exactly count as advanced tech, though I could expect to get an earful if word got out in the wrong circles. To say that its computational capacity exceeded that of all the existing microprocessors in the state put together would be an understatement. The laptop now ran Windows in a virtual machine without ever showing an hourglass.
“New team member looks like she’ll fit in nicely,” I replied to the girl. “Speaking of which, have you thought about what I said?”
eBeth scowled. “I have plenty of friends. You, Spot, Death Lord….” She paused, holding the middle finger of her left hand between the thumb and forefinger of her right as she ran out of names to count off. “Anyway, the kids at school all hated me.”
“Did you even go this month?” I asked. I didn’t enjoy playing the heavy, but her mother’s parenting skills were limited to whipping up a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a good day, and there hadn’t been many of those in the three years since I moved into the building.
“I learn more by myself. School is a waste of time and all of the teachers insist on calling me Elizabeth.”
“Socializing with other members of your species is—”
“Can we go already?” she interrupted. “Spot, go for a ride?”
The dog came off the couch like a rocket, jumped up to grab his leash from the coat rack, and brought it to me in his mouth. Most, if not all of my attempts at providing guidance to eBeth ended in a similar manner, but I thought I’d give it one more try.
“Have you ever met Death Lord in person?” I asked, though I suspected I already knew the answer to that one. He was her partner in Caverns of Corruption: Part Four, the massively-multiplayer online role-playing game she had been immersed in when I came home.
“Every time he tanks for me,” she replied, using gamer terminology for a warrior with high levels of constitution and strength who could lead the charge and take serious damage, while spell-casters like herself could stand back and deplete the monster’s hit points with ranged attacks. “What?”
“I meant in real life—IRL,” I said, to make sure she understood. I knew he was a nice enough kid and not some middle-aged stalker because I’d tracked him down when she’d first started partnering with him, just to be on the safe side. He even lived in town on the good side of the tracks, and he still attended high school.
“Real life is overrated.”
“As compared to killing innocent monsters all day?”
eBeth shrugged. “Are we going already?”
Spot growled impatiently despite having a tennis ball in his mouth, so I attached his leash and the three of us headed out to my van. I keyed the remote for the cargo door to slide open and then I let go of the leash. Spot raced ahead and leapt in.
“Can I drive?” eBeth asked.
“You don’t have a license, you don’t even have a learner’s permit, and you’re not old enough to be behind the wheel at night.” I always felt that it was important to remind her of the rules before I handed over the keys. She went around to the driver side, and when I opened the passenger door, Spot had already wriggled through the space above the center console and claimed my seat.
“Back,” I told him. “eBeth’s driving.”
Spot gave me a look of concern, dropped the tennis ball, and grabbed the shoulder-belt buckle in his mouth and strapped himself in. Smart dog.
“Never mind.” I clambered in the cargo door and sat on a toolbox. When eBeth had started pestering me about driving a year ago, I had taken the minivan to Paul’s shop and had him install servo motors on the steering rack and a wireless transponder on the antilock brakes. If I’d turned around the backup camera to point out the front, I could have driven the van remotely from the other side of town.
Although I’ve been on Earth a few years already, I sometimes think I understand less about the economic system than I did before I arrived. Why driving instructors aren’t among the highest paid employees on the planet is beyond me. Despite the fact that my body wouldn’t be harmed by anything as innocuous as an automobile accident and my mind is backed up at Library, there’s just something about being in a car with a teenage driver that triggers a primal fight-or-flight response, even in AI.
It took twenty seconds for the motor to move the driver seat from its normal position up to the very front so that eBeth could reach the pedals. Then she adjusted the rear-view mirror, the side mirrors, and we slowly pulled out from the parking spot. I flinched at the blaring horn from the pizza delivery guy she cut off.
“He wasn’t there a second ago,” eBeth complained.
“No, a second ago he must have been a good thirty feet back at that speed. I was watching, and you didn’t check the mirror after adjusting it.”
“You can’t see my eyes.”
“Actually, I can. Look in your rearview.”
“So how am I supposed to drive with your big, fat head in the way?”
“Just trying to help,” I told her. “Turn left.”
“I know how to get there,” she said, braking hard to make the corner. “You distracted me.”
Spot let out a worried whine.
We drove on in silence for a minute before eBeth said, “This jerk in front of me is all over the road. I’ll bet she’s texting.”
I took a break from watching eBeth’s eyes in the rear view mirror, and sure enough, I could see the telltale reflection of a phone in the windshield of the car ahead of us. I used the backdoor access I’d discovered to blow the phone up, Greek style.
“What the—” eBeth shouted as she stood on the brakes and simultaneousl
y laid on the horn in an impressive show of hand-foot coordination. My van stopped a few inches short of the Audi’s back bumper.
“Oops,” I muttered. “Who stops in the middle of the road because they can’t read their texts?”
“I warned you that you’re going to cause an accident doing that one day,” my unlicensed driver lectured me as she backed up without checking the mirrors. She pulled around the Audi in the right lane, splashing a sheet of freezing water running along the curb onto the sidewalk and drenching a group of high school students. Then she looked over her shoulder at me and asked, “Can I take the highway?”
“Yes, take anything. Just watch where you’re going,” I begged her.
eBeth cut the wheel hard to make the onramp, and Spot made a noise that sounded like he was going to throw up. I reached around his seat to hit the button for his window, and he squirmed around under the safety belt until he could stick his nose out in the wind. Seconds later, he was one happy dog.
“It’s the next one, right?” eBeth asked, all business now that she was driving on the highway. The diversion from local streets would add about two miles to the trip, but it was worth it to go straight for a while.
“Main Street, Exit 14.” Knowing I would regret the following statement for the rest of my time on Earth, I added, “I never thought I would say this, but you should be driving faster.”
She mashed the gas pedal, getting us from 45 to 75 just in time to reach our exit.
“Sorry,” eBeth said, braking again. The steering wheel shook in her hands and the whole front of the minivan vibrated. “What should I do? Do I have a flat?”
“Ease off the brakes a second,” I told her, and the vibration vanished. “You must have warped a brake rotor when that Audi stopped in front of us back on Elm. I mean, we must have warped a rotor, it’s not your fault. It was getting time to replace them anyway.”
“Can I keep driving like this?” she asked. “Oh, it’s not so bad braking now that we’re going slower.”
“We’ll stay off the highway on the way home and I’ll bring the van to Paul tomorrow,” I told her. “Just take it easy until we get to The Portal.”
Spot gave a happy bark when we turned into the parking lot of my restaurant and training school, which is where I make the real money. I call it a school, but we weren’t certified by any accreditation organizations, and as a fully-functioning restaurant and bar, the profit was mainly in the booze. The owner before me had run an actual culinary school, but I was primarily interested in training bartenders and waitstaff, along with providing an informal program in banquet facility management.
Most nights we had a pretty good crowd of people willing to eat what they called ‘practice food’ for half the price of what you’d pay elsewhere. And the downtown had been depressed for decades, so our main competition was supplied by the VFW, Knights of Columbus, and three places with neon palm trees on their signs. Tuesday nights we featured Karaoke in the banquet hall, and the Prime Rib Special brought out the older price-conscious citizens.
“Evening, Mark,” Chief Harrow said to eBeth as she opened the driver door and hopped out next to his cruiser. “You seem to be shrinking.”
“We switched after pulling in just to fool you,” the girl retorted. “Actually, Spot drove us here.”
I got between them quickly and shook the chief’s hand. “Not singing tonight?”
“No. Martha has a bit of a sore throat and I’m not getting up there alone.”
“Coward,” his wife croaked.
“Next week, then,” I told her. She jabbed the chief with her elbow.
“What? Oh, and thank you, Mark. You’ll have to let me pay next time.”
“I’m holding out for a free pass to the police and firemen’s cookout on the Fourth,” I replied automatically. My staff had strict instructions not to charge the mayor, the fire chief, the police chief, or Lieutenant Harper, and to be fair, all four of those luminaries insisted on leaving the waitstaff generous tips. I also carried a book of dinner-for-two gift certificates with me at all times, just to grease the municipal wheels, so to speak.
The chief and his wife got into the cruiser and headed home, and I followed eBeth and Spot into the banquet facility, through the side door featuring a sign that read, ‘No dogs or unaccompanied minors.’
“I’m with him,” I heard eBeth tell the new bouncer, pointing at Spot.
“They warned me about you,” he said, ushering the pair in before turning to greet me. “Hi, Boss.”
“Settling in alright?”
“Piece of cake. The bartender, uh, Donovan, asked me to tell you to find him as soon as you came in.”
“I’ll do that. Did they warn you about Julio?”
“The guy who thinks he’s Julio Iglesias and won’t give up the mic?”
“Yes. If it happens, don’t wrestle with him. Mary will turn off the Karaoke machine and call a break. It only takes a few minutes for him to snap out of it.”
“I’ll remember.”
I watched eBeth and Spot disappear through the ‘Employees Only’ door at the other end of the banquet room and then I headed over to the central bar that served the dining room as well.
“Mark,” Donovan cried in relief as soon as he saw me. “I just realized that we’re out of Jack Daniels and Bud.”
“Didn’t Jesse show you how to do the ordering last week?”
“Yeah, I don’t know what happened. I must have messed up on the Bud because we’re out of bar bottles but we’ve got six too many kegs. And I thought that there was a whole case of Jack in the storeroom, but the box was full of paperbacks.”
“Jesse’s. I’m letting her store a few things here temporarily until she’s ready to have them sent on.” I pulled out my wallet and extracted a hundred-dollar bill. “Take this and buy a couple of 1.75-liter bottles of Jack at the SuperPak before they close. You can funnel them into the pour bottle as needed.”
“I thought it was illegal to buy retail for a bar.”
“Is it? But you’re not buying for the bar, you’re buying for yourself and loaning it to us.”
“Oh. Sorry about the mistakes. I never realized how much work Jesse did around here before she got that sweet job offer from the Australian resort. Between the waitresses, cooks, and bouncers, we must have provided half the staff for that place.”
I gave him a wry smile and headed for the door that eBeth and Spot had taken. It led to stairs down to the basement, which was mainly taken by storage. I could hear eBeth in my office peppering Jesse with questions as I made my way around the mounds of broken chairs and frayed tablecloths. Most of the stuff really should have gone into the dumpster, but through some unknown force of nature, it migrated into the cellar instead.
“And they have how many eyes?” eBeth asked excitedly.
“Just four,” Jesse told her. “I think the Medusa hair will be harder to get used to, it sort of looks like the females have a lot of little snakes growing out of their scalps.”
“Ew, that’s so gross. Let me see the brochure.”
“Ladies,” I said, alerting them to my presence. “Did you finish the paperwork, Jess?
“Yes. And I haven’t left the office since you let me in this afternoon, except to grab a roll of toilet paper. I made sure nobody else was down here before I snuck out to get it.”
I snapped my fingers in irritation at myself. I’m always telling my team that it’s the little things that trip you up, like not keeping toilet paper in your private bathroom. Fortunately, Jesse and eBeth already knew about me, but a mistake is still a mistake.
“I’ll make sure not to run out again in the future,” I said, closing the office door behind me and accepting the sheaf of papers from Jesse. I checked quickly to make sure that she had filled out all of the proper blanks and signed wherever necessary. “Is that all you’re taking? You won’t be able to come back until we announce our presence on Earth and get the real system connected, and that’s still a few months
off.”
“I’m sure,” she said, nudging her backpack with her foot. “I can’t believe that all those funky drinks you taught me to make are actually going to come in handy. I just have to get the substitutions straight in my head and I should be able to slip right into the job.”
“I’m sure you’ll love it and the Dinkles are big tippers.”
“Can I work the portal?” eBeth asked.
Technically, she shouldn’t have known about the existence of the portal in the basement of my restaurant, much less how to browse the carousel. The portal was protected by a Level Twelve security field that could only be disabled by my team members, so there wasn’t any risk of unauthorized usage. If somebody exploded a thermonuclear device directly over the building, the portal would still exist in the same place, floating in the air at the center of a giant radioactive crater. The League of Sentient Entities Regulating Space has its issues with acronyms in some languages, but they’ve been building intra-dimensional portals for over fifty million years.
eBeth grabbed the joystick attached to my office computer and turned to face the wall behind the desk. The building was almost a hundred years old, with a red brick foundation that needed repointing, but when I issued a silent command with my entry code, the solid wall was replaced with an inky black tunnel large enough for a baby elephant to walk through.
“All right, Spot,” I said. “I’m trusting you here, so let’s not have a repeat of last time.”
The dog nodded energetically and settled down on his belly, eyes wide and tongue lolling.
“It’s the same resort we sent Karen and Dianna to last month,” I informed eBeth. “You’ll see—”
“A gold reception desk surrounded by giant potted plants that look like pear trees with silver fruit,” she interrupted. “Open it already.”
I transmitted the selection code to bring up the carousel with some extra parameters to limit the selection to a hundred options so we wouldn’t be there all night. The entrance of the tunnel rippled and then was replaced by a sunny beach of pale blue sand on an emerald green sea. Vacationers from a dozen species lounged under large umbrellas, sipping, lapping or siphoning drinks from glasses festooned with umbrellas that matched the unique patterns of the bigger ones providing shade.
