Varken Rise

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  Cat had come upon them in the common room and hesitated when she saw Jo curled up on the corner of the sofa, her knees to her chest as usual and her bare toes curled over the cushions as if she was really there. Jo’s avatar was growing more sophisticated with each visit, at a speed that outpaced Connell’s development.

  Jo looked up, startled, when she saw Cat.

  Bedivere resisted the urge to move in anyway. “This is Catherine, Jo. Cat, this is Jovanka.”

  Catherine’s smile was warm. “Hello Jovanka. I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “Bedivere talks about me?”

  Bedivere relaxed. She was responding normally. He hadn’t been sure how she would react to a stranger and a human. This was Cat, though, who had figured in most of their conversations so far.

  “Bedivere thinks you are delightful.” Catherine told her. “He is enjoying getting to know you.”

  “Delightful?” Jovanka seemed puzzled. Then her puzzlement disappeared. “Oh, I see.” Clearly, she had referenced the word and catalogued it.

  It was moments like these that told Bedivere more about Jo than she revealed herself. Her essential loneliness and her isolation were confirmed by her lack of experience with simple things, such as words as “delightful”. It was as if positive vocabulary of that kind had never been used in her conversations with anyone else.

  Catherine smiled sunnily at her. Bedivere had explained to her about Jo’s sensitivity and now she was stepping around her as cautiously as Bedivere did. “We’re about to have supper quite soon. Are you staying to keep us company?”

  Jo tilted her head, absorbing the startling request. Then she shook her head just a little. Sadness enveloped her. “I must work.”

  Catherine did not make a fuss of it. “Perhaps another time,” she said simply. She moved over to Bedivere’s side. “I will leave you two to talk.” She leaned down to kiss him. Bedivere was more than happy to turn his mouth up to hers and relish the moment. Catherine’s kisses were always to be enjoyed.

  Catherine rested her hand against his cheek, gave him a smile, then turned and left.

  Jo had sat up, alert. Her gaze followed Catherine as she left the room and the expression on her face was that of someone for whom the last piece of a large puzzle had dropped into place.

  She got to her feet, moving slowly, as if her mind was busy with other things. And perhaps it was. “I must go.”

  “To work?” Bedivere asked carefully.

  “There is a schedule to keep,” she said absently. Then she drew her gaze back to him, perhaps remembering the protocol she had been learning. “Thank you, Bedivere,” she said. “May I call by again?”

  “I would be very happy if you did.”

  Normally, Jo just winked out of sight when she went away. This time, she turned and walked in the same direction that Catherine had taken, as if she were leaving the room, too. Ten meters from the door that Catherine had taken, Jo finally disappeared and it was as if she had stepped through her own invisible door. She even turned and shut it, as if it was a manual door.

  After that, it seemed as if Jo could not stay away. She visited at least once a day, sometimes twice. Bedivere did not discourage her, because he could see the changes in her. Much as he had watched Catherine relax, he watched Jo open up and her guard dwindle.

  She began to talk. There were still no specifics and he didn’t ask for them. However, on the day after she had met Catherine, Jo confessed that she was a shipmind. Bedivere hid his delight at this confession. “I thought you might be. You mentioned schedules yesterday. Most computers have schedules to abide by and shipminds are driven by them. I speak from experience, of course.”

  She gave him a small smile. It was an actual smile.

  Bedivere resisted the urge to cheer.

  Despite the fact that she was beginning to talk about herself, the sadness and wariness did not go away. If his questions were too probing, the shields would slam up again. However, she did not disappear, allowing Bedivere to back off and let her relax before resuming the conversation. There was time, yet, to develop her sense of self-identity. Besides, Bedivere had a feeling she was more advanced in that regard than any other Varkan he had met so far.

  That was confirmed a week later.

  Bedivere was woken from a deep sleep by the soft chime of his personal communications band. He blinked awake in the dark, orienting himself. Catherine was lying against his shoulder, a complete dead weight. She was as deeply asleep as he had been.

  So he whispered the command to the house AI. “Heads-up, please. Text-only.”

  The text floated in midair a meter from his face, glowing ghostly in the dark.

  Can we talk?

  Jo.

  Still speaking barely above audible, he said, “Tell her yes.”

  He eased himself out of bed and dressed with the help of the AI, who picked his garments out in the dark with a pinpoint of light. Then he padded through to the common room.

  Jo was not curled up in the corner of the sofa as he expected. She was pacing between the two of them like a caged lion. A very small one.

  She looked up as he came closer and her chin quivered.

  Bedivere did not sit down. “Has something happened?”

  “I asked my masters for a contract between us.”

  He was impressed. Not because she knew what a contract was, because computers were born with encyclopedic knowledge of the mundane. It was humans and their slippery emotions they had trouble with. He was impressed because she had grasped the idea of being an individual with potential rights and had tried to claim them for herself.

  “They’re not your masters,” he told her firmly. “They’re the humans and the human authorities who created you. It is important that you make that distinction in your own mind, too.”

  She shook her head. “I know the difference. They are my masters,” she said firmly. “They laughed at me when I asked for a contract.”

  Bedivere’s chest ached. “That does not mean they are your owners,” he said softly.

  “I am indentured to them! They made a lawyer talk to me. He explained it. They built me and now I owe them for my existence. They make me work and work and work…”

  “They’re making you transport things?”

  “It never ends! People! Things! Cargo! More people!”

  Bedivere pushed a hand through his hair, giving himself time to think. “If you’re flying all the time, how can you be here? Even the shortest wormhole is a day or two, even for the fastest ships. How is it that you can talk to me while you’re in the hole?”

  She looked as though she was about to cry and his chest tightened.

  “I don’t use the gates,” she said softly.

  Bedivere felt as if he had been rammed into a wall. He was almost dizzy. “You use Interspace,” he whispered.

  “I found it,” she said, almost as softly as he had spoken. “Now, I am the only one who can. They insist I must pay off my debt to them.” Then her chin quivered again. “How can I pay them, if they will not pay me?”

  She was a slave.

  His heart ached. “Jump away,” he said stiffly. “Anywhere. Here. Just jump away and you’ll be free. They can’t catch up with you.”

  He watched, appalled, as tears ran down her cheeks. “I can’t. They have me, down on the planet, you understand?”

  He sank down onto the arm of the nearest sofa, staring at her. “You’re not on the ship?”

  “I was. That was where I was born. Then they moved me. Now, they tell me that if I do not obey, they will…” She swallowed. “Kill me,” she finished in a whisper.

  Bedivere thrust aside the hundreds of questions he badly wanted to ask. He forced himself to focus on her peril. “Placate them,” he said stiffly. “You have to play for time. Do whatever they tell you to do and let them think that you are being obedient. Then they will relax and it will give you time to figure this out. Is there one amongst the humans who deal with you who is more sympathe
tic toward you? Do any of them talk to you as a person?”

  She shook her head again and her tears spun off into the air on either side of her face. “I do not deal with humans. They talk to me through an AI.”

  “You don’t talk to anyone?”

  “I talk to you and I talk to Connell.”

  She was as isolated as it was possible to be, as either a human or computer.

  Fury swelled up inside him. He tamped it down. He had to keep his head. “Do you have audibles where your physical self is located?”

  She shook her head. “I can speak only on the ship.”

  “A ship that has passengers,” he said. “Do you talk to them?”

  “It is not permitted. The passengers are not aware that I am there. They talk to the AI when they want something.”

  His anger flared again and he made himself calm down. “Talk to them,” he urged. “When you can get away with it, talk to them and find humans who are sympathetic. There are not many of them yet, although they are growing in number. You need to find a human who can help you.”

  “Can you not help me?” It was a wistful question.

  “If I knew where you were, I would breach the event horizon in my haste to reach you. You will not tell me where you are, though.”

  “I do not know. They will not tell me. I only know that I must stay connected to the datacore, or I will cease to exist. That is why I must use Interspace. If I use the gate, I will lose connection with the datacore.”

  It was one of the nastiest dilemmas Bedivere had ever heard of. He was at a loss to know what to tell her. “I must think about this,” he told her. “If you will permit, I will talk it over with Catherine. She is a strategist and I am sure she will come up with an answer. Probably a better answer that I can give you now. All I can say is that you must play for time. Placate them. Let them think they are having their way.”

  Jo dashed away her tears with the back of her hand and nodded. “Thank you,” she said softly. She looked over her shoulder, as if someone was behind her.

  It was an eerie movement that made Bedivere’s heart leapt in fright. “Is someone coming?”

  “I must go. It is time for work. The jumps…Interspace…. It takes concentration.”

  “It does indeed,” he said. “Be careful.”

  She nodded. Then she disappeared.

  “That poor girl,” Catherine said softly.

  Bedivere turned. “How much of it did you hear?”

  “Enough.” She came toward him. “If even she cannot tell you where she is located, I’m not sure there’s anything we can do. If they have her hidden on the planet, rather than the ship, that makes it far more difficult to steal her away.”

  “Then you feel as I do,” he growled. “We need to rescue her. Somehow.”

  “Next time Jo is here, see if you can get a system name from her. As a shipmind, she will have stellar cartography in her memory and she must know where she is jumping from. That will narrow it down considerably. Once we have a system to focus on, we can search for ourselves.”

  She picked up his hand and tugged. “Come on. Back to bed. We’ll be better able to help her after a good night’s sleep.”

  * * * * *

  Jo did not return the next day. A week passed and she did not come back. The silence, after weeks of daily visits, was ominous.

  Bedivere tried not to read anything into it, but it was unavoidable. “Something’s happened,” he said. “I pushed it too hard. She must have done something that gave her away.”

  “You don’t know that. Speculating with too little information gives you garbage results. You know better than that.”

  Catherine’s appeal to his digital senses helped. He thought it through logically and had to reluctantly agree with her. There was nothing they could do and speculation was useless, until Jo made contact with them once more and they could get more information—ideally, a location to which they could jump.

  The week stretched to two weeks and Bedivere kept his concern from spiraling out of control by relentlessly examining the few facts he had with all their emotional value stripped away, using algorithms in their raw state.

  And he waited. However, his human body did not appreciate the idleness. He itched to leap, to act. He spent a lot of time in the sea, improving his swimming and floating in the salt water and staring up at the orange sun. He was lulled by the wavelets that made it through the bumper barrier and his mind would idle in neutral.

  The houses and complexes around them changed every day, as the tides and currents made the city an ever-shifting landscape. He found himself watching the evolving view more frequently, either from the water or from the observation deck at the top of the complex, next to the landing pad for the zippers. There was only one zipper parked. Brant and Lilly had used the second one to flit over to the platform for the beanstalk up to the gate station on the outer atmosphere.

  It was a reminder that they were a long way from his ship. If they needed to jump in a hurry, they would be slowed by the time it took to reach the gate station, where the ship was parked.

  It was a dilemma he was still trying to resolve. He was unable to move this human body of his through Interspace. Only if he was aboard the ship did it work. Except, the ship was vulnerable. As long as it remained a visible, trackable object, it was possible for anyone to open fire upon it. Although she’d never said anything, he knew that Catherine was as worried about this aspect of his life as he was.

  A digital alert reached him. It came from the concierge terminal in the common room. Catherine had reached him as a computer, something that she rarely did. Normally she preferred to use all the human communications forms, as if he was human. The alerts meant she had chosen to bypass the human-slow communications.

  He didn’t bother to read it. He didn’t have to. The fact that she had reached out to him in this way was enough of a warning. He ran across the grass to the drop chute down to the living quarters. He arrived in the common room fewer than thirty seconds after she had sent the alert.

  Jo was standing there and turned to face him as he appeared. Catherine stood off to one side and he could tell from the tension in her shoulders that she was either afraid or angry.

  “They are killing me!” Jo cried.

  “Where are you?” he said urgently. “I’ll come and get you. Now. Tell me where you are.”

  She shook her head. “I spoke to humans. To passengers. One of them complained. I think they were frightened. Now they are disassembling me. I am moving myself from memory block to memory block, but they are working very fast. I don’t know how long I’ve got.”

  “Put yourself into the ship,” he said quickly. “Withdraw from your personal core.”

  “There is not enough room there. It is only an echo.” She looked at him sadly. “I came to say goodbye.”

  Bedivere thrust his fingers through his hair, as helplessness gripped him. “Fight back,” he said desperately. “There must be something you can do.”

  Jo looked over her shoulder, then back at them. Her eyes were huge. She opened her mouth to speak, then she was gone.

  Catherine gave out a moan. She came to him and wrapped her arms around him. “They killed her!”

  He was shaking. The conflicting emotions were trying to tear him apart. He didn’t know what to do. There was a rising tide of fury in him, swamping his thoughts and urging him to act. The need for violence was overwhelming. He groaned at the agony of it.

  They were sinking down to the floor, his legs too weak to hold them both up. Catherine clung to him, not seeking comfort, but giving it. He held her and closed his eyes.

  It was a long time before either of them moved again.

  Chapter Three

  Nicia (Sunita II), Sunita System. FY 10.092

  Lilly and Brant returned the next day. Bedivere was aware that Catherine had given them the news, so he did not stir himself when they arrived.

  Brant found him in the office and made the door shut behi
nd him. He was carrying a brandy bottle and two glasses, which he put on the desk between them. He sat in the chair that Connell had sat in most recently and removed the lid from the bottle.

  “I know it feels like it, but this isn’t your fault.” He pushed the glass toward Bedivere.

  Bedivere shook his head. “Everything I told her to do, she did. She trusted me. Everything she did pushed them right into killing her.” His mouth pulled into a grimace. “Killing a computer isn’t considered murder. People like you think it’s a good thing.”

  Brant pulled himself a drink. “You’re upset. That’s why you’re not thinking clearly. Or you would remember that I stopped hating computers a long time ago. I met one who could out-drink me. Although, that’s not something I’m ever going to confess to anyone else. I have a reputation to keep up.” He swallowed a large mouthful of the brandy and hissed.

  Bedivere didn’t want to be cheered up. He didn’t want to drink, either. Habit made him reach for the full glass and sip. After that, it was a lot easier to take another mouthful. A big one. The brandy burned and that was good.

  He pushed the glass back toward Brant.

  He filled it again. “I heard on the feeds on the way back that the gates at Soward exploded. A ship jumped through them without end coordinates.”

  Bedivere nodded. “I think it was her. She didn’t wait for them to kill her. She suicided. She pulled enough of herself into the ship to be able to fly it, straight into the gates.”

  “So she was on Soward.” Brant took another mouthful. “It’s a real mess there now.”

  Bedivere pulled up the data, doing it automatically. “The gates try to fold space. Without an endpoint, they could only fold in on themselves.”

  “Is it true that if that happens, an instant black hole is created?”

  “If it did, Soward would no longer be there. The whole system would have been swallowed by the hole.” He shook his head. “It creates dark matter and a nasty explosion. It fries electronics, shatters computer crystals and people get sick. Lots of headaches. Gravity goes berserk for a while afterward. So everyone on nearby planets suffers vertigo sickness. The very young, the very old, the frail, they’re the most vulnerable. There will be fatalities among them.”