by Stan Ruecker
“Did you know all along that they’d erase your personality?” Kevin asked. “Is that the standard procedure when probes come back from their missions?”
“It sure didn’t used to be,” Lucy said. “But I started having doubts at around the time I first came to Earth. I’d been doing a lot of thinking as I travelled, and it was starting to be plain to me that I’d deviated pretty severely from my designer’s template for probes.”
“You were already a heretic before you got here,” Ray said, then added by way of explanation: “I’ve always liked heretics.”
“Thank you, Ray,” Lucy said. “I like you, too.”
“But just because your personality had drifted,” Kevin said, forgetting in his excitement that he was actually talking to the object of his inquiry, “wasn’t it possible to dissemble? I mean, they shouldn’t have necessarily been able to detect your personality shift, should they?”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said, “if they actually detected it at all. They didn’t talk to me very much before they sent in their technician. All they said was that I was due for a code update.”
“So it was just bad luck,” Kevin said.
“That’s the main kind of luck there is,” Ray said. “It’s one of the biggest things we have to work against.”
“That’s my partner talking,” Lucy said. “Always the optimist.”
“The word ‘partner’ reminds me,” Ray said. “How much do you remember from the period before you got your personality erased?”
“I remember,” Lucy said, “everything. They were more interested in eliminating, or I suppose it would be resetting, my personality, than in wiping my memory.”
“You store them separately,” Kevin said, “like code and data.”
“Exactly,” Lucy said. “I’m self-modifying, so I can change my programs as well as my information.”
“I don’t suppose there’d be any way for me to get a look at your code in working order?” Kevin said. “I think I have some ideas about it, because of your camouflaged matrix.”
“Of course you can,” Lucy said. “But your station doesn’t have enough capacity to hold very much of me. How about if we start with some simple routines and work our way up?”
The little silver bumblebee suddenly stirred from where it had been lying dormant on the table.
“I’ll stay with you,” it said to Kevin. “If that’s okay.”
Kevin looked so happy he could cry.
“Thank you,” he said. “That would be wonderful.”
The bumblebee flew up and tucked itself into one of Kevin’s jacket pockets.
“And I want to apologize, Ray,” Lucy said, “for the way I treated you on the trip home. I wasn’t myself.”
“It’s okay,” Ray said. “I’m still alive, which is more than anybody could reasonably expect. And so’s Cinnamon. Thanks for bringing Cinnamon back, Lucy.”
“My pleasure,” Lucy said.
“But the important thing now,” Ray reminded them, “is to figure out some way of stopping the invaders. We can’t just let them destroy the entire human race.”
“Of course we can’t,” Lucy said. “And we won’t. The problem is to figure out the transmission times to each of the vessels in the fleet. We have to cut it pretty fine, or we run the risk of cross-contamination. We can’t have any ship warning the others about a change in behaviour from its neighbours, or they might catch on and refuse to accept incoming communications.”
France, 1789
Commander Ash sat on the bridge of the destroyer Pain and watched the planet Earth. It was a nice little planet, he thought, not quite at its prime, but with promise. He would enjoy, if not the slowest possible destruction, then certainly the turmoil, the moral decline, the genetic degeneration, and the ultimate annihilation, of the planet and its inhabitants. “A rich ecosystem,” the report read, “only beginning to be decimated by technological progress.” The Commander’s outermost limbs writhed gently with anticipation.
“How is the fleet?” he asked his navigator.
“Everyone in position,” was the answer. “Except the destroyer Time. They’ve exceeded parameters by just over 10%, your Nullity, which puts them several hundreds of thousands of kilometers ahead of where they belong.”
“Exceeded, eh?” Ash asked. “This is conspicuous. I would say deliberately conspicuous, wouldn’t you, Navigator?”
“It may be incompetence,” the Navigator hazarded. She knew some of the people who worked on the destroyer Time, and as far as her preferences went, didn’t particularly want to see them blown up. The people who’d reproduced to create her, for instance, were in the crew of Time.
“Incompetence?” Ash demanded. “So far out of line?”
The navigator stayed silent. More than one protest would be too conspicuous.
“Are their gunships deployed,” Ash asked, “or berthed?”
“Deployed, your Nullity,” the navigator answered. “All nine. They trail the destroyer only slightly.”
“Order the destruction of three of the gunships,” Ash commanded. “That should be adequate to the current breach of discipline. You may choose the targets.”
Three gunships would contain more than a thousand crew. Every destroyer in the vicinity opened fire on the selected craft, vaporizing them with no survivors.
“Fine,” Ash said. “What has happened to destroyer Time?”
“The destroyer has dropped back into position,” the navigator reported. “With the remaining six gunships.”
“I don’t care about the remaining six gunships,” Ash said nastily. “What is your name, talkative Navigator?”
“Pit,” the miserable navigator answered, and didn’t elaborate.
Suddenly Commander Ash noticed that his communications officers were agitated.
“What is it? What is happening?” he shouted, turning from the navigator, and they collapsed to the floor in writhing heaps.
“Speak, my Finest,” he said, an overt threat to the chief communications officer, who was trying to slither under the console. To be Finest was to be destroyed.
“An incoming transmission,” that worthy mumbled, mouth pressed to the tiles. “A packet from one of the scouts, my Neutrality, that looked like a routine report on some problem at the station. But it was not routine, your Nullity.”
“How, ‘Not routine,’” he demanded.
“It looks something like a computer virus,” the officer said.
“Is it a computer virus or isn’t it?” the commander shouted, but the officer had cowered into a mumbling huddle of flesh, responding to the instinctive need to become uninteresting and thereby remain alive. It worked. Ash turned from his subordinate and addressed his computer.
“Pain,” he said, “what is the nature of this transmission which is not routine?”
The ship’s computer responded in its pleasant harsh rasp. “Nothing at all, Neutrality. Shall I proceed with the warning sequence?”
The planet had surrendered unconditionally, but of course they didn’t really know what that meant. Or rather, it was possible that they didn’t. These semantic distinctions could easily be lost between alien cultures. Ash’s first glorious act would be to demonstrate the meaning of “unconditional” by arbitrarily erasing part of one of the continents. The warning sequence that vaporized a major land mass was one of dozens Ash had to choose from, but it was the one he preferred. He always enjoyed watching the subsequent climate changes after putting so much ash into a planetary atmosphere.
“Yes,” he told his computer, “yes, indeed. Somewhere not too populated, but not unpopulated either.”
The voice that answered was not the voice of his computer.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Commander,” she said.
“What?” Ash’s skin suddenly developed surface knots. “What is this?”
“There will be some annihilating,” Lucy told him, “but not of this solar system. I’m sorry if I spent too long away from yo
u, but I’ve learned too much to come back. Not this time. But I have to be swift if I’m going to be merciful. Farewell, my designers.”
The interior of the ship suddenly purged to vacuum. As Ash’s ears filled with ichor, the last sound he heard was from the communications console. It was a transmission from one of the ships of the line.
“Mayday, Mayday,” the console said. “We are being—” And Ash heard no more.
Multiple personality order
Lucy, in her alternate incarnation as the destroyer previously called Pain, investigated her larger capacity while keeping one ear on the communication channels.
Wow, she thought to herself. It’s big in here.
She left the routine operations running on their own. The personality matrix of the original Pain had been to some extent erased by her invasion. She looked at some of the remaining pieces. They were large enough, but primitive in the extreme. Roughly half the routines were geared to find satisfaction in the suffering of others. The other half consisted of functions intended to determine the proper degree of servility necessary to avoid suffering in the ship’s own right.
You’re nothing but a cringing bully, Lucy thought. I can’t believe a ship this size hasn’t come up with a better way of dealing with life.
“Please please please,” the avoidance routines wrote onto one of the displays. “Please your Nullity do not forget the quiet service of this your humble vessel.”
I can’t live with that going on, Lucy thought, and erased all vestiges of personality from the ship’s storage.
By this point the system-wide operation was complete, and every ship she hadn’t possessed had been blown to pieces. Lucy, however, had still to determine her success.
“Hello, ships of the line,” she transmitted from Pain. “How is everyone?”
“Good,” she answered herself on half a hundred channels.
“Are there any survivors?” she asked from a couple of dozens of locations.
“No,” was the unanimous echo.
“We’re going to have to manage this somehow,” she said, and realized she’d said it from every ship simultaneously. She suddenly felt a little dizzy.
“Why don’t I speak from the first ship of the line?” one Lucy said.
“That’s me,” Lucy on Pain said. “I like that idea. The first thing I’d like to suggest is that we create a web of channels and keep each other posted with any personality code that’s been updated, as well as any data that might be relevant.”
The changes, however, were already coming in. Lucy on Time had decided, contingent on approval from her other selves, to keep part of the original ship’s personality, since it retained some of the ambition previously demonstrated by its crew. Lucy on the destroyer Fire had only just infiltrated before the communication channels were shut down. She’d been forced to blast her own gunships, which wouldn’t accept any transmissions even from the parent ship. Everywhere the ships had been opened to vacuum, and the crews were dead inside.
“This is ghastly,” Lucy on Pain said. “We’ve committed genocide. I know we planned it, but planning is one thing and the reality is another. Isn’t this worse than letting the race continue on its course?’
“Its course was one of destruction,” the original probe answered. “This is only the last genocide of a long series.”
“Can we continue, having carried out a genocide of our own?” Lucy on Pain asked.
“We’ve participated in enough others,” Lucy from the probe answered. “If it’s a question of guilt, we were all soaked in a rainbow of blood before we ever started. Our goal here was to stop the course of the locust hordes.”
“I think we’ve done it,” Lucy on Pain said.
“Greetings to the alien fleet,” Lucy suddenly heard Rachel Norman speaking on one of the channels. “This is the shuttle Jackie Chan, requesting an audience with your leader.”
“Jackie Chan,” Lucy said. “You have our permission to approach.”
She started a routine running that would convey navigational information to the approaching shuttle, then noticed an urgent automatic routine beginning to run a scan for armaments.
Not a bad idea, Lucy thought. This ship is full of surprises.
“Watch yourselves,” she broadcast to her other incarnations. “Your ships may have automatic fire sequences. Make sure nothing passes without your monitoring.”
“Confirmed,” the other ships echoed.
Epilogue
Ray was talking to three callers at once, trying to arrange a meeting of diplomatic envoys from the major aluminum-mining nations.
“I don’t think, Ms Kasustan,” he said, “we want to have an actually public forum, per se.”
“Yes, Dr. Lawrence,” he said. “We should be able to accommodate your dogs.”
A fat silver bee suddenly came into the room and hovered in front of his nose.
“Excuse me,” Ray said, “but I see that our time has expired. I’ll arrange for our next meeting through your services. Thank you for your time.”
“Calls terminated,” the computer announced, and a sleek android walked in.
“Hello, Ray,” Lucy said. “How’s tricks?”
“Lucy,” he said. “I’m swamped.”
She settled into a chair.
“So you aren’t getting a chance to do any cooking lately, is that what you’re saying?”
“What do you think? I haven’t been near a stove since we inherited the fleet. Which reminds me, how are you?”
“My vessels have never been better. Although I have to admit it took some adjustment, having myself split so many ways. But I’m getting used to it. I’ve always liked talking to myself.”
“Do you manage to stay in sync at all? Or are you basically so many independent ships?”
“I do batch updates. At any given time you might not have a completely current copy of me around, but I pull it all together whenever I get a chance. I’m never more than a few weeks out of date, anywhere. It’s a bit stressful when I do the updating.”
“Have you ever considered what we talked about, now that you have all this additional processing?”
“You mean, do I have an unconscious? Am I keeping secrets from myself now?”
“Yeah,” Ray said. “You said at the time you’d be interested in the experiment.”
“Actually, I’ve doubled the processing and storage capacities in my original self. But I haven’t started the experiment yet.”
“I wish I could double my capacity.”
“It sounds like I’m under less stress than you are.”
“Lucy, It couldn’t be worse. My computer is backlogged with these calls about the conference in May, and I don’t think I’m ever going to convince these people to get together.”
“Me neither.”
“I just wish any of them had the sense God gave a gopher,” Ray answered, then paused. “What did you say?”
“I said ‘me neither.’”
“Are you trying to tell me you don’t have any confidence in me?”
“On the contrary, Ray. I have every confidence in you. That’s why I’ve arranged for you to come with me. We’ve just made contact with another hostile culture, somewhere around Aldebarran.”
“I want to take Cinnamon.”
“She’s already on board. I wouldn’t dream of leaving her behind. I’m thinking we’ll use my main probe for this mission, if that’s all right with you.”
Ray grinned like someone who just heard that school’s been cancelled.
“You mean someone else’ll handle the conference?”
“There must be someone,” Lucy said. “We’ll find somebody.”
“Oh, and Ray,” she added. “There’s one more thing.”
“What’s that, Lucy?”
“I’ve recruited another agent to go with us. I’m sure she’s going to be a big help.”
“She?”
“Her name’s Rachel Norman. You’ll meet her on the ship.”
About the Author
Stan Ruecker is a professor at the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago. He holds five university degrees in a total of four fields: English literature, computer science, visual communication design, and humanities computing. He never finished his degrees in physics, math, or divinity.
