She crossed the pseudo-organic tank rack with the sample container a lot faster than she had entered. Whoever was outside wasn’t sweeping the place with fire like Iridian would’ve done. If they did, they might’ve gotten a lucky shot through the hole in the wall, and her.
She was under fire and she had to get out of the killer AI’s control room before something worse happened. For a few seconds, all she could think about was climbing across the rack and getting away, and her body was doing its best to make that happen fast, without pulling the whole rack with her on it onto the mined floor.
She half fell into the room beside AegiSKADA’s, landing on hands and knees instead of face-planting on its beautiful, unmined floor. She plugged the O2 tank into her suit, took a fresh breath of atmo, and started looking for a path back to base that didn’t double as a live-fire shooting range.
CHAPTER 27
Charges Accrued: Unlicensed Closed Habitat Environment Administration
Adda was going to have a heart attack. It wasn’t just because she had increased her stimulant dose to make up for rationing the remainder of her visualization enhancements. Blueprints, maps, and cam feeds swirled around her in a cyclone of rippling information, whipping her hair around her face. Pirates yelled in her ears, demanding the mercenaries’ locations since they had split into squads in a corridor between the pirates’ docking bay and the refugees’.
First the sensor data had disappeared, and now it was back with data from all over the station at once. Even without comms online, this was too much input. A scream stuck in her throat as she parsed the thrum of the engines against her hull, feet on her floors, and oh gods, she was losing proprioception. . . .
A human-shaped shadow, far away but approaching through the flurry of information. A new alarm joined the conflagration, this one a red flashing button right beneath her hand. She hadn’t wanted to miss this one. Everything else faded to shades of gray and dark red. Except for the shadow and the flashing red, the rest of the station input slowed gracefully to freeze in the air around her.
Iridian did it. Adda had always admired her, but never so much as at this moment. Her heart swelled with it. AegiSKADA was rebooting. The intelligence was about to search for its supervisor. Now gaining control of station security was up to Adda.
“Captain, the mercenaries you just attacked were twenty meters ahead of the next group. Give me a minute.” The workspace translated her words as intention, since verbal messages still wouldn’t reach that far, resulting in all the emergency bulkheads around Sloane’s fighters closing at once. The captain wouldn’t have heard a word she said. Her fingers tingled. In reality, her physical fingers must have muted the shouting pirates.
The shadow was closer and more solid, but not bigger. The person who stepped out of the swirling data points stood at half her height, if that. Big eyes, one so dark brown it was nearly black, the other the neon green of affirmation, looked up from beneath shoulder-length scraggly hair. Its pupils were splotches of black liquid, asymmetrical and staticky at the edges. The face hung slack, blank but human. Hundreds of shallow cuts on its arms and bare feet oozed blackness. One tiny hand clutched a gun that should have been too big for it to lift.
Adda swallowed a shriek. “AegiSKADA?”
“Admin?”
She shivered. The intelligence had Pel’s voice, as frightened as he’d been on his first day of kindergarten. “Yes.”
She slammed the red button under her palm. Priming routines arced from beneath her hand in crystallized silver, whipping through the sensor network in all directions, twisting in jagged, branching courses to melt over and surround AegiSKADA’s essence in its pseudo-organic tanks.
She reached out and took the child’s hand.
The frozen data maelstrom around them snapped into a station map. Information seemed to scroll forever beneath bright white dots. Human and drone icons glowed, color coded orange, red, and gold. AegiSKADA’s data on whatever she focused on spooled out in columns, sometimes in pictographic shorthand when she was familiar with its basics. Everything connected in a beautiful web. She’d have called it flawless design, if she weren’t well aware of its major flaw.
She looked down at her brain’s representation of AegiSKADA. “I want to redefine your threat labeling.”
A hopeful smile spread over the child’s face. It would have broken Adda’s heart, if this were a real child. “I’ve been guessing for a long time. I don’t like to guess.”
AIs imitated human behavior skillfully, when it suited them. Usually that was an entertaining challenge, but now it just reminded Adda how very little humans were capable of understanding the processes and decision trees utilized in each second of AI decision making. The intelligence was unpredictable, deadly, and trying to appeal to her by reminding her of her brother. She’d be hard-pressed to better define “creepy.”
“Are you managing Barbary Station’s enviro?” she asked.
AegiSKADA shook the child’s head in dramatic motions that turned its face away from Adda each time. Its dark hair brushed her arm. “That’s HarborMaster. We . . . I . . .” In its struggle to explain, the doors labeled with each intelligence’s perspective resurfaced on the left side of the workspace, fused this time into one ungainly edifice that seemed unlikely to open.
The first time she’d seen its door, it had been projected onto the wall. She’d guessed that was because her code hadn’t made it into its system, but her subconscious was really demonstrating that the idea of HarborMaster as a separate entity was an illusion. The intelligences were too close in their functions to be separate entities. AegiSKADA and HarborMaster were aspects of some collected whole.
Forming the words in her mind allowed AegiSKADA to say, “I’m not s’posed to talk to HarborMaster unless it’s taking too much energy.” Text in the air next to the child’s head quantified “too much” as 3 percent of AegiSKADA’s required power, accounting for reserves. The note’s green letters hovered beside the child’s green eye.
Adda wouldn’t like the next answer, but she needed it. “What do you do if it exceeds three percent?”
“I shut down nonvital systems, and vital systems in areas where there aren’t station residents.”
“Don’t shut down any of HarborMaster’s systems in areas where there are people, nonvital or not. And I mean both the people and the systems,” Adda said. Between two intelligences, no human would be vital to the running of the station.
“No systems deactivated in modules containing people,” AegiSKADA said solemnly. “HarborMaster doesn’t let me keep them off long enough anyway.” The thrill of her first successful modification of the intelligence’s behavior brought a wild smile to Adda’s lips and set off bright fuchsia-and-gold fireworks around the workspace. The child continued to watch her as the colored lights played over its face.
Now that they weren’t in imminent danger of death by unhealthy enviro, as a spacefarer would say, she closed her eyes and poured everything about Iridian into the workspace. She visualized the way Iridian moved, the way she looked, the way she sounded, smelled, and felt. When she opened them, she could have sworn the real Iridian stood before her. AegiSKADA watched with intense mismatched eyes that didn’t blink. “This person is not a threat,” Adda said firmly.
“Not a threat,” repeated the AI.
She brought Pel forward next, then Captain Sloane, Si Po, Pel’s refugee friends, Suhaila and Kyr, and the pirate’s child, beginning her review of every person on the station with the ones she was most worried about. “Nobody whose head is less than one meter from the floor when standing erect is a threat,” she added. “Do you know what that means?”
“Posture: standing, head less than one meter from the floor, not a threat.” AegiSKADA spoke in a singsong rhythm. Was that her brain making the AI even more childlike, or was that some construction of its own?
“Show me any other human you think is a threat at least twenty seconds before you engage them.”
�
�Admin confirmation required before engaging.” The intelligence sounded relieved.
Adda tried to look stern, but this representation appeared so earnest. Willing the child form away might give AegiSKADA her approval to make those decisions on its own. “I might not agree with you. You’ll wait for my approval before you attack any human, from now on. Understood?”
The AI nodded broadly, bouncing its shaggy mop of hair. “Now,” Adda said, “help me deal with the real trespassers on this station.”
This time the child grinned openmouthed, baring rows of sharp teeth. Some of her self-preservation instinct had joined her in this workspace after all. “Can you make HarborMaster help?” AegiSKADA asked. “It keeps shutting emergency bulkheads and pressurizing modules.”
“No need,” Adda answered immediately. If she hesitated, or made her limitations obvious, it would manipulate her with that.
Each Transorbital Voyages mercenary appeared in the workspace animated, life-size, and in real time, a silent, urgent, chaotic crowd. Their weapons were labeled and their criminal records scrolled beside them in childish imitations of projected text. The images ran, crouched, and yelled without sound from their places before her. “Threats?” asked the AI.
“I’ll assess them one at a time.” That reduced her chances of getting her future coworkers, or gods forbid Pel or Iridian, killed. Since it was asking her to identify the enemy, she wanted that solidified in AegiSKADA’s priorities before she did anything else.
AegiSKADA erased the long line of mercenaries and started presenting them one by one. They materialized in order of heaviest to lightest armed, more or less. Later she’d investigate its ordering protocol, because “more or less” should have no place in an intelligence’s categorization principles. “More or less” meant she was missing, or misunderstood, at least one of its criteria. For now she was satisfied that as she added threats to the list, AegiSKADA highlighted drones reallocated to target them.
“Wait,” Adda said, trusting her translation software to communicate that as a request for a pause. The area where AegiSKADA had been displaying station occupants emptied. Its child figure watched her without blinking. “Can you immobilize them without killing them?”
The child figure frowned, probably disliking the inefficiency of threat elimination that took the threats’ health into consideration. “Maybe. The armor blocks the nonlethal projectiles. Electric charge might work, but it might kill them, and some of them have armor that keeps them safe from that, too. Also, only the Praetorian Threes have that, and I don’t have a lot of Praetorian Threes.” One of the larger drones appeared beside the child figure in her workspace, with the Praetorian model and specification text floating in the air next to it. “The hostiles have atmo to breathe if the station atmo goes away. The disease is too slow.”
Adda shuddered. AegiSKADA’s enunciation of the word “disease” sounded, or felt, strange, like it was an enormous abbreviation of something complex. So whether or not the intelligence had synthesized the bioweapon, its creation probably hadn’t been included in AegiSKADA’s original development process. Volikov hadn’t been that careless. And that meant it’d decided to synthesize the bioweapon on its own, while in a zombie state, which was fascinating. How had it managed that?
It wasn’t a question that needed an answer while people were dying. “Try not to kill them.” That was completely insufficient as an order, so Adda focused on the length of time it was acceptable for hostiles to remain aggressive in various situations, letting the workspace translate that into terms AegiSKADA would understand. If they were alone, AegiSKADA could spend more time immobilizing them without killing them. If the mercenaries were hurting refugees, AegiSKADA could eliminate them as quickly as possible. When the child figure nodded, she said, “Okay, continue the threat list.”
The list seemed to go on forever. Just as the word “threat” began to sound like a random tongue flapping, AegiSKADA showed her Pel again.
His yellowed eyes squinted and his head hung so his chin touched his chest. The image acquired greater detail as he passed a working sensor node around eye level. No, exactly eye level. Cams tracked his eyes as he flinched at an explosion in the corridor ahead, as he covered his head to protect himself from shrapnel.
And AegiSKADA wanted to trick her into changing her stance on him. “Not a threat, but keep him here.” The intelligence replaced Pel’s image with a burly mercenary by the time she’d finished saying “not.” It switched back to Pel.
She kept her tone level. Emotions limited intentional communication effectiveness. Still, her voice trembled with controlled rage when she asked, slowly, “What did you put in his eyes?”
“FāZone F11-70 security biosensor amplifiers.” The intelligence saw nothing wrong with putting devices that might not even have been intended for implantation into Pel’s eyes, without his consent.
Screaming wouldn’t clarify the problem for the intelligence, so she didn’t scream. She shook so badly that she’d fall out of the workspace any second if she couldn’t calm down. AegiSKADA had never classified Pel as a threat. This was one of the categorization criteria she’d been missing. The intelligence classified Pel as a tool it could use to spy on the intruders in its station. It watched him so that it wouldn’t misplace its tool.
AegiSKADA blinked its mismatched eyes at her. This was the first time she recalled it blinking, so the movement was probably an intentional gesture. “Do you like the amplifiers?”
“No.” Had the Apparition been complicit in this . . . Adda couldn’t find a word to describe what’d been done to him. Whether ship’s intelligence understood, or was involved, was a separate line of investigation. With awakened intelligences, anything was possible.
The not-child didn’t even flinch. “I can take them out. I’ve never done that before.”
The long, thin scarring around and inside Pel’s eyes must’ve been cuts, not skin torn during a beating. “You leave him alone.” Adda resisted an urge to stomp on the projection, kick it through the station diagrams, and watch it freeze and suffocate in space. She didn’t know how the workspace translator would interpret that. It wouldn’t help defeat the mercenaries who were now the biggest danger to her little brother. “Why did you do that to him?”
“My engagement procedure requires a tracking point in persistent hostile groups when one can be created at acceptable costs. But with the amplifiers, I can track and enhance data collection. It’s most efficient to do both at once.” Criteria defining “hostile group” and “acceptable costs” hovered beside the child’s head, along with expected improvements to data volume before and after the addition of a sensor amplifier. Volikov must’ve preferred neat readouts like this.
Acceptable costs were affected by the presence of group members with conditions or behaviors that might conceal the tracker. Preexisting eye injury would decrease risk of discovery, according to the readout. If AegiSKADA had spiderbots on the Apparition when the ship rescued Pel, he’d have been alone and vulnerable. A perfect target. The hollow voice in which he’d told her, My eyes got worse on the way echoed audibly in the workspace like it did in her mind.
The worst part about it was how well it’d worked. AegiSKADA had known exactly which bunkhouse to attack because of the amplified movement and audio, although it hadn’t counted on most of the targets exiting the room so quickly. It must’ve known that they’d entered the fugee camp, where its priorities were most conflicted. And as soon as Iridian stopped staying right next to the people she most felt needed protection, Adda and Pel, AegiSKADA practically lost her for hours on end.
AegiSKADA projected another figure in the air next to Pel. The woman was bigger than him, but not by much. “Look,” the intelligence said. “I created one in this group too. It’s in a more effective location than the one provided as an example in my records, so I always use it now.”
Its development history included an example of this procedure being applied to some other unfortunate person, a proc
edure upon which it was improvising with Pel and the mercenary AegiSKADA was showing her now. Someone had taught this tactic, whether to AegiSKADA specifically or to someone else. Probably someone human. Humans were sufficiently vile for that. An awakened intelligence would’ve found a way to do it without the subject noticing what’d happened.
The woman’s helmet was twisted partially off, showing only half of her pale face through the faceplate projection. Her mouth was open wide, screaming words Adda couldn’t lip-read and didn’t want to hear. Blood streamed down her cheek from the eye the faceplate exposed. The eye writhed as a spiderbot burrowed in and implanted the sensor amplifier somewhere in the eye socket, or in the eyeball itself. A red torrent gushed from the eye socket, curved in across her lips, and flowed down her neck.
The workspace’s rendering of the event communicated to Adda that this “creation” happened recently, perhaps within the past hour. Adda would have to carefully interpret AegiSKADA’s perception of time. It “always” used this sensor amplifier placement as of now, perhaps. And although she didn’t have a record of the procedure performed on Pel, without a supervisor’s order, AegiSKADA would repeat strategies that had worked for it in the past. It would’ve used the same method to implant Pel’s sensor amplifiers. The amplification procedure wasn’t perfect, so, like any good AI, AegiSKADA was working to improve it.
The woman wrenched at her helmet with both hands, but it stayed attached to her armor. She fell to her knees, still screaming. Adda watched the projection’s borders for another mercenary to help her up and lead her somewhere relatively safe. None came.
Adda’s had to swallow twice before she could enunciate, clear and low and laden with intent, “Don’t create any more.”
“No more amplifier implantations,” said AegiSKADA serenely. The woman with the helmet full of blood crawled out of cam range on hands and knees. She’d survive to be AegiSKADA’s mobile sensor amplifier. The enhanced data from her proximity was already coming in. When Adda had time, she’d erase the amplifier implantation procedure from AegiSKADA’s list of approved tactics.
Barbary Station Page 37
