For Want of a Nail

by Mary Robinette Kowal

  “Cordelia? What do you have to say about this?”

  The AI’s cameras swiveled to face the council. “I do not wish to discredit my wrangler, but I have no records of anything she has told you except the problem with my transmitter. The rest of her statements seem so fanciful I hardly know where to begin.”

  Ludoviko sat forward in his chair, eyes hard. “Would you like Uncle Georgo to respond?”

  The AI’s hesitation was so slight that if Rava hadn’t been watching for it, she would not have seen it. “No, I don’t think that is necessary.”

  “Can you tell us why?” Rava glanced at her aunts and uncles to see if they were noticing the same slow reaction times she was, apparent now as Cordelia adjusted her responses in accordance with the private law to keep Georgo safe.

  “Because until you dropped me, Georgo was a respected member of this council. Everyone here has spoken with him. The evidence is clear enough.”

  Aunt Fajra cleared her throat and pressed a toggle on her handy. The doors to the council room opened and an attendant brought Uncle Georgo in. His stride was erect and only the furtive glances gave him away at first. Then he saw Cordelia and his face turned petulant. “There you are! I couldn’t find you and I looked and looked.”

  Cordelia stilled, became a static image hovering over the writing desk. Rava could almost see the lines of code meeting and conflicting with each other. Keep his secret safe, yes, but how, when it was so clearly exposed? Her face turned to Rava, but the cameras stayed fixed on Uncle Georgo. “Well. It seems I am compromised. I have to ask what my wrangler plans to do about it.”

  Rava winced at the title, at the way it stripped their relationship to human and machine. “I have to do a rollback.”

  The cameras now swiveled to face her. “You said you found the code.”

  “I found the code that adds the law that you must protect Uncle Georgo. Not the one that overwrites your memories.” She nodded to her brother. “I had Ludoviko search as well and he also failed to find anything definitive.We think it’s modified in multiple places and the only way to be sure we’ve got it out is to rollback to a previous version.”

  “Two years.” Cordelia tossed her head. “Your family will lose two years of memories and records if you do that.”

  “Not if you help us reconcile your versions.” Rava picked at the cuticle of her thumb rather than meet the AI’s gaze.

  Cordelia wavered and again those lines of code, those damnable lines of code fought within her. “What happens to Georgo?”

  “It’s not a family decision.” Aunt Fajra straightened in her chair and looked at where Uncle Georgo stood, crooning by Cordelia. “You know what the laws are.”

  Cordelia’s mouth turned down. “Then I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

  “I think we’ve seen all we need.” Aunt Fajra waved her hand and with unceremonious dispatch, Cordelia and Uncle Georgo were both bundled out of the council chambers.

  As the door slid shut, Ludoviko cleared his throat and looked at Rava. She nodded to let him go ahead. “Okay. Here’s the thing. That Cordelia is a reinstall after we pulled out the code we found. Every time we try to clear her we get pretty much the same answer.We tried lying to her and saying Uncle Georgo was already gone, but she knows us too well and recognizes the lie. So we don’t know how she’d actually behave in that scenario. At the moment, she’s insisting she’ll only help if we don’t send Uncle Georgo to the recycler.”

  Shaking his head, Uncle Johano harrumphed. “It’s not a family decision. He should have been sent there the moment we sorted out what had happened. Keeping him like this is a travesty.”

  “And will get worse.” Rava shifted in her chair. “As his dementia progresses, Cordelia will have less and less control over him.We’re concerned about how far her injunction to ‘keep him alive’ will go. That’s why we’ve kept her from reconnecting to her long-term storage or to the ship.”

  “And your solution is to reboot her from a backup, wiping those two years of memory? Including all the birth records during those two years . . .” Aunt Fajra gathered the other family council members with her gaze. “That will require a consensus from the entire family.”

  “Yes,ma’am. We understand that.”

  “Actually. There’s one other option.” Ludoviko stretched out his legs, almost reclining in his chair. “The grands packed backups of everything. There’s another AI in storage. If we boot it from scratch, it would be able to access the database of memories without absorbing the emotional content that’s screwing up Cordelia.”

  “What?” Rava’s voice cracked as she spun in her chair to face him. “Why didn’t you say that earlier?”

  “Because it means killing Cordelia.” Ludoviko lifted his head and Rava was surprised to see his eyes glisten with tears. “As her wrangler, you can’t be party to it and I couldn’t chance you letting her know.”

  “But wouldn’t she— no. Of course not.” Since Cordelia didn’t have access to her long-term memory, she would have forgotten the existence of another AI. Rava’s stomach turned. “Did it occur to you that she might change her response if she knew we had that option?”

  “You mean, she might lie to us?” Ludoviko’s voice was surprisingly gentle.

  “But Cordelia isn’t a machine, she’s a person.”

  Ludoviko cocked his head to the side and left Rava feeling like a fool. Of course this reaction was exactly why he thought he was justified in not telling her about the backup AI.

  “You are correct. Cordelia is a person.” Aunt Fajra tapped the handy in front of her. “A dangerous, unbalanced person who can no longer do productive work.”

  “ But it’s not her fault.”

  Aunt Fajra looked up from her handy, eyes glistening. “Is Georgo’s dementia his fault?”

  Rava slumped in her seat and shook her head. “What if . . . what if we kept her disconnected from the ship?”

  Ludoviko shook his head. “And what, overwrite the same block of memory? Only remember a week at a time? Nice life you are offering her.”

  “At least she’d get to choose.”

  ***

  Cordelia’s cameras swiveled to face Rava as the door slid open. “He’s dead, isn’t he?

  Rava nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  The AI appeared to sigh, coded mannerisms to express grief expressing themselves in her projection. Her face and cameras turned away from Rava. “And me? When do you roll me back to the earlier version?”

  Rava sank into the seat by Cordelia’s chassis. The words she needed to say filled her throat, almost choking her. “They . . . I can offer you two choices. There’s another AI in the hold. The family voted to replace you.” She dug her fingernails into the raw skin around the cuticle of her thumb. “I can either shut you down or let you remain active, but unconnected.”

  “You mean without backup memory.”

  Rava nodded.

  Under the whirring of fans, she imagined she could hear code ticking forward as Cordelia processed thoughts faster than any human could. “For want of a nail . . .”

  “Sorry?”

  “It’s a proverb. ‘For want of a nail—” Cordelia broke off. Her eyes shifted up and to the left, as she searched for information that was not there. “I don’t remember the rest of it, but I suspect that’s ironic.” Hiccupping sobs of laughter broke out of her.

  Rava stood, hand outstretched as if she could comfort the AI in some way, but the image that showed such torment was only a hologram. She could only bear witness.

  The laughter stopped as suddenly as it had begun. “Shut me off.” Cordelia’s image vanished and the cameras went limp.

  Breathing shallowly to keep her own sobs at bay, Rava pulled the key from her pocket. The flat plastic card had holes punched in it and metallic lines tracing across the surface in a combination of physical and electronic codes.

  Counting through the steps of the procedure, Rava systematically shut down the systems that made Cordelia
live.

  One. Insert the key.

  She had known what Cordelia would choose. What else could she have opted for? Really. The slow etching away of self, with pieces written and over-written.

  Two. Fingerprint verification.

  Uncle Georgo had chosen to stay, though, and Cordelia might have followed his lead.

  Three. Confirm shut down.

  If only Rava hadn’t dropped the chassis. . . but the truth would have come out eventually.

  Four. Reconfirm shut down.

  She stared at the last screen. For want of a nail. . . Tomorrow she would visit the consignment shop and get some paper and a pen.

  Confirm shutdown.

  And then, with those, she would write her own memories of Cordelia.

  END

  Author's Note:

  I often find it interesting to see how completely a story can change during the course of working on it. "For Want of a Nail" began life as a wildly different story. I kept two of the characters, one scene, and the fact that they were in space. Nothing else remains of the original.

  In 2008, I attended a writing workshop run by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rusch. The guest instructor was Sheila Williams, from Asimov's Magazine. The last part of the workshop called for us to write a story from a prompt. The catch was that we had to write it overnight based on a prompt. My prompts were "black hole" and "rebellion." They also asked us to use all five senses on every page.

  The resulting story is a mess.

  It is so completely incomprehensible that Dean said he fell asleep while reading it. Twice.

  But... Sheila really liked the opening scene and the tactile sensations there. I'd based it on the challenges I run across when I'm fixing puppets. Access hatches are never large enough and it is impossible to see anything. I'd love to have the camera that I gave to Rava.

  The frustrations apparently came through clearly enough that Sheila actually asked me about the story a year later when I saw her at an event. You know, when an editor who reads as many stories as she does remembers a scene, you don't ignore that. So I pulled the story back out to see if there was anything worth saving.

  The story was still a mess. What I liked though was Cordelia and her relationship with her wrangler. I also really liked the idea of living in a closed ecosystem. One of the things I found unbelievable in my original story was a plot point where they were able to use the cable for one thing on another item. Having just lost the cable for my cell phone and been stymied by the proprietary nature of the blasted thing, I started to wonder what would happen if you lost a cable where you couldn't go buy a new one.

  That's where "For Want of a Nail" came from.

  What you're going to read now is "Unthread the Rude Eye" which is the very first draft of the story. I've left it unedited, which means you'll get to see the [brackets] I insert to remind myself to research things or fix things later.

  In this case, I fixed things by writing a different story.

  Unthread the Rude Eye

  With one hand, Rue adjusted the VR interface glasses where they bit into the bridge of her nose, while she kept her other hand buried in Cordelia's innards. There was barely room to get the flexible shaft of a mono-lens and her hand through the access hatch in the probe. With only a single camera attached to them, the interface glasses didn't give Rue depth perception as she tried to plug the transmitter cable back in. The probe had not been designed to need repair. At all. But if Rue couldn't get the transmitter plugged back in, then when it was time to mount Cordelia's chassis into the probe, the A.I. wouldn't be able to beam updates of herself back to the ship.

  That would be the same as a death sentence for the A.I., considering how close they were sending her to the event horizon. Cordelia was supposed to ride the ion-wind out, but damn, the possibilities for error were way too high.

  The square head of the cable slipped out of Rue's fingers. Again. "Monkey!" She slammed her heel against the ship's floor in frustration. "You know, remind me next time to build a bigger access hatch."

  "Maybe you should take a break." The AI's voice had more than a hint of amusement in it. "We could watch a movie. I've got The Chaos of Dereb loaded. It's got good explosions. "

  "Vile temptress!" Rue resisted the urge to pull the mono-lens out of the jack in her glasses and glare at Cordelia. "The smallest access hatch in the universe will not defeat me." She picked up the cable head and tried one more time. "I just want to know how the heck this came unplugged in the first place."

  "I've queried the ship for access logs of this room."

  For another moment, Rue focused on the cable before her brain caught up with what Cordelia had said. Access logs. As in, who had been into the room. She yanked the mono-lens out of the jack and the lenses went transparent. "Wait. You think someone did this?"

  In the corner of the cramped storage room, the AI's desktop interface sat on a folding steel cart. It showed the hologram of her current avatar, a middle-aged Victorian woman with graying hair pulled up in a bun. Twin cameras mounted to the interface whirred as they swiveled to face Rue. "The tolerances for the probe's connections are built to survive passing through the accretion disc and then close to the event horizon of Cy-1. I hardly think that the slight vibrations of transit caused it to wiggle free."

  "'Hardly think' as in an opinion or as in statistical probability ?"

  "Both." Cordelia arced an eyebrow. "Did you have a theory?"

  A knot twisted in Rue's stomach, because, really, she didn't have a clue. It shouldn't have happened. "Maybe an effect of the Skip drive?"

  "If Skip drives regularly caused things to unplug then--"

  "Yeah, yeah. I see that." Rue rested her head against the rounded side of the probe and closed her eyes. The titanium sphere was simple and immediately understandable. It was designed to hold the AI's chasis as she dropped toward the event horizon of Cy-1. At its back, a fin held a beta-carbonite sail, which, in theory, would deploy before she reached the horizon and let her sail out on the ion wind that black hole ejected. All the simulations showed that it would work, but it still carried a lot of risk.

  The cold metal soothed Rue's forehead with its smooth surface. She did not want to think about the possibilities that Cordelia raised, but as the A.I's wrangler, she wouldn't be able to avoid it long.

  Her fingers rolled the slick plastic head of the cable, building a picture in her mind of the white square and the flat gold cord stretching back from it. She slid it forward until it jarred against the socket. Rotating the head, Cordelia focused all her attention on the tiny clues of friction vibrating up her arm. This was a basic, easily understood problem. The larger issues of the Artificial Intelligence Movement were beyond her understanding.

  Clearly, Rue agreed with A.I.M. on some of the key issues of AI rights, or she wouldn't have chosen to be a wrangler, but in their push for machine rights, some members became over-protective.

  Take Cordelia. She wanted to be here.

  But AIM was convinced that the astronomy department had coerced Cordelia with programing to accept a suicide mission into the black hole. As if any wrangler worth her salt would go against the wishes of the AI in her care. Cordelia had designed the experiment and Rue supported the AI's choice, even if the mission worried the bejeebus out of her.

  Which was why the unplugged cable was so troubling. It screwed with Cordelia's chances of survival. Rue rotated the head a fraction more and felt that sweet moment of alignment. Pushing the head forward, the pins slid into their sockets easily, as if they were taunting her. It thunked into place. "Oh, yes. That's good."

  Almost simultaneously, Cordelia sighed in relief. "Thank you. It was disturbing to have lost touch with the probe."

  "I told you I would triumph ." Pulling her hand out, Rue only then became aware of the sharp ache in her forearm where a strut had been pressing. She rubbed the red imprint on her arm, trying to massage blood back into it. "How long before you hear back from the ship about the ac
cess logs?"

  Cordelia chewed on her lip, which was her coded body language for uncertainty. Not for the first time, Rue marveled at how complete her charge's illusion of physical form was. She'd asked a Metta model, early in her training, if the AI consciously sent those signals out or if it were unconscious the way an F&B's body language was. The Metta had laughed and said that it was exactly the same. Sometimes she was aware of it and sometimes she manipulated it so that other people would know she was thinking, but she wouldn't tell Rue which was which.

  "What are you hesitating about?" Rue stood, stretching her arms over her head to work the kinks out of her back. Her fingertips brushed the pitted steel ceiling. God, this was such a cramped ship.

  "Oh, I was only thinking that you must be tired and that we don't need to go over this right now." Cordelia's avatar glanced up at a corner, to the ship's camera. "Why don't you take a break. Just leave my interface here for now."

  The hum of the ship's ventilation told Rue that the life support systems were functioning, but the air seemed suddenly thick and rank. It caught in her throat as she inhaled. Cordelia was still looking at the ship's camera. That bit of body language was so not subtle. It practically screamed that someone was watching them.

  "Sure. Yeah. I haven't had lunch yet, so why don't I do that and we can do diagnostics after." Rue wiped her hand across her face, leaving the salt of sweat on her lips. She tapped the VR glasses as casually as she could. "Holler if you need anything."

  Sliding the door shut when she stepped into the hall, Rue double-checked to make sure the thing had locked. In the left corner of Rue's glasses, Cordelia faded into view, her Victorian matron's form at odds with the hard gray walls of the ship.

  As Cordelia spoke, the earpiece resting against Rue's skull transmitted the sound. "I am very likely being paranoid."

  "Given that the astronomy department has been getting death threats from AIM since the mission was announced, it seems likely that you aren't," Rue subvocalized the words and let the glasses pick them up. "How long ago did you ask the ship?"