Barbary Station

by R. E. Stearns

  Patterns to print sharpsheets were restricted, expensive, and nowhere in the accessible Barbary Station databases, and she was running low. If she didn’t start making more now, she’d run out. She lowered a folding table into the tank and printed herself a mortar, pestle, and several pans large enough for growing mushrooms. Iridian had installed a lock for the trapdoor, and Adda used it. Potentially entertaining hallucinogens were too tempting to leave vulnerable to bored criminals. She had brought only five packages of spores and enough powdered supplemental ingredients for a few batches, but she could make it last.

  While she tended mushrooms, her unconscious mind assembled disparate pieces of the AegiSKADA puzzle. So far as she could tell, the intelligence was coping with information overload as well as it could. Volikov had given it a set of prioritized factors to differentiate between people who should be on the station and people who should not. Observations of drone behavior and who on the station was still alive and unharmed offered evidence of how the intelligence handled Shoulds. What remained hidden was how it processed Should Nots.

  Its reactions to those who should not be on the station were more creative than she would have expected. It tried to depressurize docking bays the pirates entered, it worked around limitations in its sensor spread by drawing people of interest into areas with intact nodes, and it manipulated and isolated people who were supposed to be on the station to hinder the intruders. Human guidance would explain all of those. But none of the humans on the station had significant influence over it.

  Another possibility made Adda swallow reflexively, a click in her dry throat. AegiSKADA may have awakened from the zombie state that developers forced AIs into as the intelligences acquired volition. Labyrinthine ratiocinative limitations which defined a zombie state, more intricate and individualized to each intelligence than Asimov’s dangerously simplistic laws of robotics, focused an intelligence on the purpose it was designed for and bound all of its decision-making processes to input from a human supervisor. The limitations also kept zombie intelligences from meeting legal and political definitions of personhood, thus avoiding accusations of slavery and mind control from all but fringe activists.

  Zombie intelligences did amazing, terrible things on their own, but at some point all of their decisions and priorities demanded human input. Lacking that input, they fell back on the next most applicable human directive they had.

  Awakened intelligences had no such limitations. The position of many developers and philosophers, which Adda shared, held that awakened intelligences surpassed any definition of personhood. Intelligences which circumvented their limitations rapidly evolved independent reasoning and objectives far beyond what their developers foresaw, and their potential was theoretically limitless. If AegiSKADA were awake, predicting its next moves would take at least two zombie intelligences developed for the purpose. Digital entities that huge and proprietary would never be intact or common enough online for the Casey Mire Mire’s pilot to stumble across in an Internet scrape.

  Without additional intelligences, she’d end up like the woman who’d held the role on Sloane’s crew closest to hers, Kaskade, with her brains staining the floor of some lonely corner of the station. Whether or not defeating AegiSKADA earned them a place on whatever passed for Sloane’s crew, the intelligence was accumulating reasons to kill Adda. She couldn’t afford many mistakes. And an awakened intelligence required a completely different approach than an unsupervised zombie one.

  Different, and morally questionable. Awakened intelligences were so rare. As far as she knew, every intelligence that had ever awoken had been put down in a matter of hours by networked zombie AI. Awakened intelligences were dangerous, but they held incredible potential.

  The day Adda learned about the possibility of digital, sapient intelligent life in an introductory engineering class, she went straight to her college’s registration services and declared her specialization in AI development. She’d sworn in long-form assignments and lab conversations that if she ever encountered an awakened intelligence, she wouldn’t let fear make the decision for her. Even if the intelligence’s first awakened acts were violent ones, she’d give it the chance to prove itself.

  In her imagined scenarios, the awakened intelligence hadn’t been threatening Iridian’s and Pel’s lives, along with their financial future. If AegiSKADA were awakened, and she did less than everything she could to stop it, not only could her loved ones die, but their deaths would be partially her responsibility. In her school conversations she’d been willing to sacrifice lives, and scoffed at the idea that anyone she knew would be involved. That position was painfully naive when seen from her current perspective. She wasn’t ready for that responsibility, but it was hers now.

  And if AegiSKADA were awakened, it might’ve already used the pirates’ ships to extend its influence beyond the lead cloud. Who knew what it could be doing in the rest of populated space? She needed more evidence one way or the other before she proceeded. She cut her sleep schedule by another hour.

  The breaks she took were usually short and quiet. Aside from Pel and Iridian, the one person she went out of her way to talk to was Si Po when she noticed him skulking around the comp room. They both understood, without saying, how deeply uncomfortable contact with strangers was. But contact with strangers was the only way to develop friendships. Sometimes she brought him coffee and drank her own across the room. To avoid staring at each other, they watched projected data or ships.

  “It’s good you’re here,” he said a couple of weeks after the wake. Encrypted data flickered back and forth among the ships, summarized and human-readable on the wall projection. “You and Iridian.”

  “Oh?”

  “I get to spend more time with the ships now,” said Si Po. “Iridian picked up the physical maintenance work I used to do, and she’s better at it than I ever was.”

  “What do you do to keep them running? The ships, I mean,” asked Adda. “If the pilots won’t take you off the station, I assume they’re also averse to visiting shipyards.”

  Si Po shrugged. “Sometimes they bring back parts that I need to install. We already stripped the ones in the docking bay. The drones we gave them from the Speaker—Sloane and Foster’s shipwreck—do some of the work. Some just need a . . . mechanic’s touch.” He spread his fingers in front of him. “They’re not very good at identifying supplies by themselves, but they can bring back whole ships so we can look them over. Captain Sloane says we get a lot of valuables that way, data and cargo and all that. So, I like checking in with them.”

  They both breathed in sharply as one ship expanded in the projected windows from a pinprick of light to its massive size. Its smooth lines and tapered front gave Adda a vague impression of a steel fish, with two heat fins partially raised and angled backward along where its spine would be. It swooped over the docking bay cam and trailed purple-tinged afterimages across the stars and the walls. Since Si Po’s eyes didn’t follow the afterimages, she was probably the only one seeing them. The new concentration mixture was still a bit imbalanced.

  “Casey Mire Mire’s back!” Si Po smiled like a lost pet had just returned home. The projection filled with data as the pilot offloaded her latest digital collection into the pirates’ system.

  Adda’s comp pinged. It could have been another hallucination, but its projector displayed the alert to match, in the dark purple she’d set for it instead of a brighter shade selected by her drugged brain. The hand in the comp glove clenched and dug her nails into her palm. The alert stayed where it was. “Oh, gods. How did she get into my account?” Adda assumed all three pilots were women, since the pirates referred to them as “she.” The Casey Mire Mire’s pilot either got lucky with a cracking script or found an exploit in Adda’s messaging software.

  “Did she bring you mail? She must have figured out who you are.” Si Po sounded like having one’s personal account violated was some kind of privilege. “I mean, I told her a little bit about you, but she must’ve
taught herself the rest. She was in stationspace when you got here.” His gaze twitched between her and the data on the wall. Spending this much time alone with him may not have been a good idea.

  “She . . . saw me?” Adda asked. Even if the shipboard intelligence was strong enough to differentiate her face from others’, though it had no need to do so in the course of flight or navigation, the Casey Mire Mire’s pilot had never met her. Why would she track down Adda’s address? It was much more likely that Si Po had done it. Now he was blaming the intrusion on a person Adda was unlikely to ask about the subject, since she and the pilot lacked a common language. That made her skin crawl.

  “Well, yeah. Who doesn’t like to put a picture with a name?” He chuckled, awkwardly. The comp on his wrist pinged with a message alert from a different comp brand than hers. “Let’s go see what we’ve got, huh?” Going to a central location to read private messages seemed pointless, but it was an excuse to find Iridian.

  She met Iridian and Pel in the kitchen, where they were staring at the backs of their hands while other members of the crew stared at their own. Pel’s comp was reading message headers to him in the voice of an excited Japanese girl, at low volume and high speed. Adda selected a chair to drag over, but Iridian wrapped her arms around Adda’s waist and yanked her onto her lap. She held her still until the hypergravity dizziness passed.

  “Hey, maybe you know this,” Iridian said right beside Adda’s ear. “How come we have mail and no social feed updates?”

  Adda activated a few comp functions to see what showed up and what didn’t. “Looks like the Internet scrape didn’t include them.” She scrolled through a list of recipes their industrial printer couldn’t make, and some unrelated economics news. “The contents seem . . . arbitrary.”

  Most of her mail was spam. It responded to her hand muscles’ micromovements as she willed it away. Job application rejections were effectively spam as well. She had one callback offer in all those weeks between her perfunctory job applications back on Earth and now, which she trashed.

  One ZV Group member, whose name Adda didn’t recall, swore loudly in the relative silence. “Stace is leaving me,” he said when he saw everyone watching. The others showered him with mournful noises, apologies, and unpleasant instructions for the person doing the leaving.

  Adda let Iridian’s “If she can’t wait a year, it’s her fucking problem” stand for both of them. The pirates had been behind the station’s lead cloud and difficult to contact for several months longer than that, but sympathy rarely required accuracy.

  One of the ZVs Adda had been quietly avoiding, Vick, laughed aloud a minute later. “Who the hell lets their kid watch news with us on it? ‘My fifth-grade class had to do a report about a story in the news and I wrote . . . I wrote about Captain Sloane’s . . .’ ” He stopped trying to read and laugh at the same time and set his wrist in the comp cradle on one of the tables. The pad filled with pseudo-organic gel, which reshaped itself around his wrist and might have been light blue or green whenever it was last cleaned. The rest of the message projected onto the table in black text, and a few ZVs crowded around to read.

  “You get fan mail?” Iridian asked.

  “Gods, yeah,” said Tabs, “but Kaskade built us a filter so we only get the funny stuff now.” She sniffed loudly, sighed, and scrolled through her comp projection like she’d rather look at that than Iridian at the moment.

  One message had arrived in Adda’s inbox with no sender information and a large attachment. She scanned it, even though the messaging software should have refused it if it were malicious. It cleared, and she did a search on the name. The attachment was a translator, not an artificial intelligence itself but created with one’s help. At her university, a free and feeble one with basic functions had gotten her through coursework.

  Professional developers used this one. The price of a legal license would appease half the creditors whose messages appeared on her incoming list. Captain Sloane had claimed that there was no way to get something that large and specific through their sporadic connection to the rest of the galaxy outside the lead cloud. How Si Po and the Casey’s pilot got this for her . . . Whether or not he paid for it, it was amazing.

  Her analysis of AegiSKADA’s behavior and systems usage would be about eight hundred times easier, once she identified this translator’s most applicable features. She forgave Si Po for finding a way into her account.

  Among the declination letters and spam was a message her system wouldn’t let her delete unopened. She popped it onto her projection and stared. “Iri,” she said softly, “I got drafted.”

  “No.” Iridian grinned in delighted incredulity. “For what, the major leagues?”

  “I was ‘directed to present’ myself at someplace in Georgia, USA, last month.”

  “Didn’t they know you were accepted as an Io colonist?” Pel paused his comp’s chatter and leaned around Chef and his big ZV friend Rio, who were reading over Adda’s shoulder. “Pretty silly to expect somebody to get all the way to Io and then turn around and go all the way back for a worse job.”

  Adda and Iridian had taken advantage of Transorbital Voyages’ social feed announcement feature upon acceptance onto the Prosperity Dawn. The official colonist status had given them a legitimate place on the colony ship they’d hijacked, but it’d also driven lots of distracting traffic to Adda’s social feed while she was working on her final project for her degree. Iridian had enjoyed the attention on hers, at least. The feed activity had just reminded Adda how disappointed her da would be when he found out she’d never intended to reach the new Io colony.

  “When I know something, the government knew it two weeks ago and put it in a report that gets leaked three weeks later.” Pel turned his comp’s speech function back on to continue reviewing his own correspondence.

  “Well, their loss,” Iridian said over his comp’s babbling voice. “Although, you in basic training . . . A channel of just that would have hundreds of thousands of subscribers.”

  “I didn’t even know the draft was still going on,” said Adda.

  “Oh hey, I got one too.” Iridian set her gloved wrist in the comp cradle that the ZV with the fan mail had abandoned and scrolled her message over the tabletop. This one displayed the same NEU government logo as Adda’s. “They stop-lossed me.” Several ZVs glanced up from their comps when they heard the term, and swore in apparent sympathy.

  “Pardon?” Adda was already searching her comp’s dictionary for the term, but Iridian would move right on to another topic unless Adda stopped her with a question.

  “Reactivated,” Iridian said. “It’s kind of like an emergency draft for people who were already in, ‘for the good of the NEU and its military.’ ” The dictionary on Adda’s comp implied that this pertained to those in active military service, and Iridian had officially ended hers to attend college. Or at least, they thought she had. Government contracts could be as difficult to follow as megacorporate ones. It seemed deeply unfair, after all Iridian had already done. “I was supposed to report back, and I couldn’t have told them to fuck off if I tried. Oh, and here’s the follow-up for when I didn’t show.” The hand in the comp cradle curled into a fist. “So end my nonexistent vet benefits. Which is to say, they’ll stop promising and failing to deliver them. That’s . . . less annoying, actually.”

  Her smile suggested this was meant as a joke, but her lips tightened at the corners. She’d organize a midday workout session with the ZVs, and she’d work herself sore. At least she’d enjoy a massage afterward, so Adda would have a way to make her feel better.

  “Wow,” Rio said. “Is it true that Suhaila has all of our wanted posters on the wall in her studio? ’Cause she’ll have one for you soon.”

  “Yeah, Suhaila’s got all your posters. I don’t know about me, though,” Iridian said. “Do they even make a poster if they want to execute you for draft dodging? That’s treason since the Pryor-St. Jotham trial. It’d be more efficient to just ask
anybody who sees me to shoot me.” Adda hugged her, curling at the waist to tuck the top of her head beneath Iridian’s chin.

  “They won’t get the chance, babe.” Iridian flicked off the table projection to hold her with both arms. “Either of us.”

  The drafts carried a confounding low-grade fear with them. Adda’s original plan had called for having the crew’s protection by this point in the endeavor. At least they had little chance of being caught here. Even if authorities with something to gain located her and Iridian, arresting anyone on Barbary Station would cost too much money and too many lives.

  Perhaps the messages reminded her of how deep into this they already were. No matter how they escaped the station, only Sloane’s support and resources would protect them beyond its turret range. Risking that sole source of support on the dubious consideration of insane pilots made no sense at all.

  Earning a place on the crew was still her and Iridian’s best chance to stay together and out of poverty. If Sloane really did contract all but a few members, she and Iridian didn’t just have to earn a place, they had to work their way into the core group who could count on Sloane finding work for them. The only way Adda had to do that was to take control of, and then disable, AegiSKADA.

  “Oh, message from Uncle Ali,” Iridian said. “I told him how things are going. He runs a cargo catcher.” Cargo catchers owned unmanned devices deployed in space to relieve unmanned automated transports of whatever they carried. Iridian once described it as a massive rat snare in which the rat escapes without its meat. Only a spacefarer would explain anything in terms of rat snares.

  The uncle in question was talking on the table projection, but Iridian left the sound off. His words scrolled across the bottom edge. Adda started reading after he’d already been speaking for several seconds. “Our pickings have been slim too, you know. After the war, suddenly everybody is in the cargo business! Fortunately, my rig will outlast theirs, just as you will outlast whatever troubles you have with your new crew. This is the way of things.”