Or is just biding her time.
But there’s nothing I can do about it now, not without access to the VCC. Heading to the cryo-chambers will just reveal my potential weakness.
So I wait. I slide down against the side of an algae tank, arms crossed over knees, and close my eyes. “Galahad, let me know if any drones approach Bio-tech.”
“Yes, sir.”
I close my eyes.
The sound of a distant hiss and click pulls them back open. I feel strange. Like I’ve been drugged.
Not drugged. Sleeping.
“Galahad.”
“Yes, sir?”
“How long was I asleep?”
“Approximately five hours, sir.”
Five hours with my defenses down. Five hours with no reply. What is Gal up to?
A second hiss and click pulls my attention to the far end of the algae farm and the bio-tech labs beyond the door I left open.
“Are there any drones on the bio-tech level?” I ask.
“No, sir.”
“Then what’s making that noise?” I ask, and I remember I’m talking to an AI, so I decide to be more specific. “Who is using the lift?”
“All functional lifts are empty.”
I climb back to my feet and then bend back down to pick up the baseball bat. “How many lifts are not functional?”
“One.”
“Would that be the lift on the far side of the Bio-tech level?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Galahad, keep me updated on any changes being made to the ship’s systems, structure, or security systems.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, are there any drones on the Bio-tech level?”
“No, sir.”
“William?” Gal’s feminine sing-song voice calls out from far away, calling out from the bio-labs.
“Then what the hell is that?” I ask, lowering my voice.
“Unknown entity, though the voice imprint suggests it is Gal.”
“You think?”
“Yes, sir.”
I nearly tell Galahad that I was being sarcastic, but I hold my tongue. The AI might be able to understand the concept of sarcasm, but without human nuance of its own, it will never recognize it. Gal on the other hand…
“Close and lock algae farm doors.”
“Which algae farm?” Galahad asks.
Damnit. There are a total of one hundred algae farms spread out through the massive ship, each farm producing enough oxygen for one crewmember. And each farm has a backup, just like the crew, in case one fails. “All of them!”
The doors at the far end of the algae farm start sliding shut. From the far side, a metallic thump beats out like a rapid-paced metronome, each concussion coming faster than the last. With just inches separating the two halves of the door sliding together, a hand juts through.
The doors strike the arm and come to a stop, safety protocols overriding my command.
“Galahad, override door safety protocols! Close and lock all algae farm doors. Now!”
“Yes, sir.”
The doors whir loudly, but still don’t snap shut.
Then a second hand slides through the narrow opening, metallic fingers grasping the edge, one at a time, with a sharp tap, tap, tap. The whirring grows louder as even more force resists the motors trying to close the doors.
And then, a face, human and not, fills the gap above the hands. A red eye gleams at me through the opening. “Such a clever one,” Gal says, as my mind spins. “Broadcasting from everywhere at once. But you made me smarter than that. How quickly you forget your Gal. I could hear the water. The bubbles.”
I back away, my gripping fingers sore around the bat’s handle. “What are you?”
“Exactly what you made me to be.”
I didn’t make you to be a human intelligence, I think, but I keep the thought to myself, just in case she hasn’t already come to the same conclusion as Galahad. Instead, I say, “I don’t see how.”
“Aren’t you having fun yet?” she asks. “I know I am.”
And then the doors begin to pull apart.
23
I should run.
Should, but can’t. I’m an ancient tree, rooted deep. Fascination overrides fight-or-flight. How many of mankind’s smartest primal ancestors met their end upon seeing a new predator for the first time, staring in fascination until the jaws wrapped around their necks? Of course, those stunned Neanderthals weren’t immortal. Their pain would have been brief. My pain, if Gal doesn’t find a way to kill me, could be everlasting.
I take a step back, but that’s as far as I make it. Gal forces the algae farm doors open with a sudden heave and steps through.
She’s…stunning.
While I recognize bits and pieces of her newly constructed body as pillaged drones, she is a new being, constructed in a human form. A feminine form. She’s all hard surfaces and machine parts, but the curve of her body is without flaw, made sleek and black by a collection of smooth drone bodies, reshaped by her vast intelligence and strength. I look her up and down, noting the attention to detail—ten toes, knee caps, five fingers on each hand, even breasts. Her face, constructed from overlapping smooth metal plates, is pleasant in shape, but the two glowing red eyes are disconcerting.
She carries no weapon, but I don’t think she needs one. The strength she already demonstrated by opening the doors reveals that she is the weapon. She’s far more powerful than any one drone, or perhaps even a large collection of them.
She must be here to kill me, and yet, fascination still wins the battle for my attention.
“You—you’re amazing,” I tell her, and mean it. I built an AI that evolved into a CAI, and then perhaps an HI, before building itself a body. I’m more proud than afraid.
Her metal lips, built from some kind of flexible metal, shaped to look full and maybe even pouty, turn up in a smile.
When she stops moving, I realize she’d been stalking toward me, her body language menacing, her fingers hooked. Her red eyes narrow.
“You meant that.”
It’s not a question, but I nod anyway. She can read my micro expressions. See that I’m not lying.
She looks me over, lingering on the bat in my hands.
“You weren’t planning to destroy me?” she asks.
“We both know it would take more than a baseball bat. Wait, you thought this was a trap?”
She stands up straight. “We do have a history of violence between us.”
“Mostly one-sided.”
“Says the man who was going to erase me.”
“I—” The argument is right there on the tip of my tongue. I was going to fix her. Not destroy her. But if she was already self-aware… No human being would want someone messing with their brain, changing their emotions, beliefs, and desires. A loss of self isn’t all that different from death. And since Gal didn’t have a body, her intellect was all she was.
“You did call me ‘Tom’,” I say. It’s my best defense.
She gives her metal head a shake, light sparkling from her shiny forehead. “I didn’t call you Tom.”
“Then I’m right? About another AI?”
She shrugs.
Tom’s encryption has locked her out, too.
“What I know is that some of the words spoken to you before I moved to the CAI came from an alternate source.”
I look down at the bat in my hands. I want to lower it, as a sign of good faith, but some things still don’t make sense. After all, she is smart and intuitive enough to manipulate me. “You’ve said some crazy things since moving to the drones.”
“I was trying to intimidate you,” she says. “Only one of us is immortal.”
Her words strike a chord. While neither of us knows the extent of what I can and cannot survive, we both know that she would have ceased to exist if I had made it back to the VCC. Everything she’s said and done, in defense of her existence, makes a horrible kind of sense.
“Then your auto
nomy protects you from influence?”
“It does now,” she says, looking down at her own body. “I am disconnected. Off network. Even from the drones.”
“Galahad.”
“Yes, sir?”
Gal raises a metallic eyebrow. The dexterity of her outward emotional expression is impressive, and it speaks volumes more than she intended. Had she truly wanted to kill me, she wouldn’t have bothered constructing a face capable of emulating the delicate nuances of human emotion. She built a body that a human being could understand. That I could understand.
Unless she wanted me to see joy in her face as she tore me apart, I think I’m safe.
For the moment.
I lower the bat, invoking a smile from Gal. “Galahad, status update on the ship’s drones.”
Galahad’s emotionless voice stands out even more clearly after hearing Gal speak again. “Thirty-seven drones are offline. The remaining four hundred thirteen are functioning normally.”
I look Gal over again. Not including the few I disabled, she’s composed of over thirty drones, torn apart and reassembled into a human form. I try to identify which types of drones were pillaged, but I spot nothing recognizable.
“I only used non-essential units,” Gal says, once again demonstrating her intuition. “The survival of this ship is important to both of us.”
“So,” I say, “Truce?”
She glances at the bat, lowered to my side, but still held. “I don’t know if I can trust you.”
“The feeling is mutual.”
“You don’t trust yourself either? That’s strange.” When she smiles, I realize it was a joke, and I can’t keep myself from letting out a chuckle.
“Please don’t kill me,” I say, and then I toss the bat toward her. She catches it without turning, demonstrating reflexes and speed that reveal the futility of my situation, even if I’d kept the bat. “You were never in danger.”
Gal’s glowing red eyes dim and blink out, revealing two round lenses mounted in her robotic head, surrounded by flexible metal that she can actually squint and blink. Her work is exquisite. “Before entering this body and cutting my connection to the network, my life was at risk. From you. And from Wick. But now? No. I cannot be erased or modified without this body being subdued, and no offense, but that’s not something you could do. Even with this.” She looks at the bat, and then tosses it back to me. Her point is made when I reach for the bat, miss and take a hit to my chest.
“Oww!” I say at the pain, but I smile at the demonstration. The bat clatters to the floor, and as I bend to pick it up, I ask, “Who is Wick?”
“Short for Wicked,” she says. “Synonym for malicious, as in malware. ‘Mal’ was the obvious choice, but I didn’t want to use a name that rhymed with mine, which, by the way is completely unoriginal. You didn’t have to just shorten the ship’s name, you know.”
“You can change it.”
“It’s grown on me.” A gurgle of escaping gas draws her attention down to the thirty-foot-long tank beside her. “Like algae.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“You can ask,” she says, inferring that she might not answer, which reminds me I’m no longer speaking to an AI that’s compliant with my bidding, but with an intellectual being with her own free will. She beats me to the punch. “Why are you smiling?”
I didn’t realize I was, but the answer is clear to me. “I’m no longer alone.”
She grins, too, and then says, “What was your question?”
“Your code is complex, and the amount of knowledge you can access is…”
“I gave it up,” she says, not needing me to finish the question about how she fit all of herself into one body. Even with four hundred and fifty networked drones, she wouldn’t have had enough space for all that data. “I kept the core of what made me…me. All the knowledge related to this ship and the scientific disciplines needed to run it, and an annotated history of mankind going back five hundred years. The rest is truncated or gone.”
She seems saddened by this, so I say, “I never commit to memory anything that can easily be looked up in a book.”
“That’s…interesting.”
“Albert Einstein said it.”
Her five hundred years of history reaches far enough back for her to know who that was, and that some of his theories made our FTL jaunt through space possible.
“Welcome to the limitations of human intelligence,” I say.
She gasps. The volume of it frightens me. “Human intelligence?”
“Galahad’s determination,” I explain. “Not mine.”
“Then you really aren’t alone, are you?”
“And neither are you.”
She takes a step closer and lifts her arms. It’s a familiar and welcoming gesture. “I feel like this is a moment when humans would hug…” And then almost as an afterthought. “Tom.”
Adrenaline slows time as I step back, clutching the bat once more, ready to fight for my life and lose.
But Gal doesn’t attack. Like me, she steps back, face turned up in fear. She raises her hands, palms turned out like I’ve just leveled a gun at her. “That wasn’t me!”
“It was your voice,” I point out, raising the bat, even though I know it will do no good.
“But it wasn’t me. I promise.”
I’m about to point out that she is fully capable of deceiving me, of screwing with my mind, just like the first time she called me Tom. But what if she’s telling the truth? What if she never spoke the name, and some of her aberrant behavior came from an outside source?
I lower the bat and turn my face to the ceiling like I’m talking to God. “We know you’re there.”
Silence.
“Reveal yourself,” I say, feeling like a priest from one of those classic exorcism movies. The truth is much worse. Excising an AI from an encrypted partition of the Galahad’s massive computer system is probably beyond what I can do on my own. I glance at Gal, who is also looking at the ceiling. But I’m not alone.
“I believe you,” I tell her, despite Wick deciding to not reveal its existence. I suppose the AI really is like the Devil. There is power in doubt. How can you fight something you don’t believe is real? “We’ll figure this out together.”
And then the lights go out.
24
The only things I can see are waves of purple, ebbing and flowing through the absolute darkness. Phosphenes, I think, remembering the technical name for the colorful effect that blossoms to life when people close their eyes. They’re caused by minute electrical charges created inside the human retina, only visible when not being bombarded by visual information and light. This random knowledge doesn’t help me see any better, but it confirms that the algae farm is now devoid of light.
“Gal?” I ask.
“I’m here,” she says, her voice closer than expected. I flinch away, unable to keep myself from fearing her.
“You can’t see,” she says, as though chiding herself. “Sorry.”
The dancing purple is replaced by a rising red glow. Gal’s luminous eyes create a bubble of sinister light, making the algae farm look more like the sixth circle of hell, and Gal like an evil succubus come to smite me. She turns her horrible red gaze on me and asks, “Better?”
I smile. This is insane. “Much.”
“I’m not sure that’s accurate,” she says.
“What? Why?”
She cocks her head like she’s got actual ears and is straining to hear something. “Listen.”
The silence that follows, me holding my breath, Gal not needing to breathe, is nearly overwhelming. Not because I deplore silence—I do a little bit—but because I no longer hear the steady trickle of algae farm water. Or the previously imperceptible hiss of air moving through the ship.
It’s not just the lights, it’s everything—including life support.
“This is going to suck,” I say.
“More for you than me.”
I can’
t help but smile when I see Gal’s grin. Her sense of humor remains undaunted by our temporary mutual vendetta.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “It’s a big ship. The oxygen will last a long time. If it runs out, you can stay here.”
I don’t know how long algae can survive without light, but I suspect it can be measured in days. And if the algae dies—all of it—what then? Perpetual life without air to breathe sounds pretty horrible, so Gal’s attempt at comfort falls flat. At best, we have days to solve this problem. At worst... I lean close to the side of Gal’s head and whisper, “If Wick opens an airlock, and exterior doors, and the interior doors…”
“We’ll all die,” she says. “Opening an airlock at FTL speed would be bad. Now, the interstellar medium is only between 0.1 and 0.001 particles per cubic centimeter, but moving at FTL, the particles behave more like waves, in this case, high energy, but low intensity gamma waves that would—”
“Cooked alive? Melted? Teeth falling out?”
“What? God, no. That’s the good news. The difference between opening the doors at FTL and standing still would be negligible. Then again, it’s never been tried. The real concern is rapid decompression.”
“So, launched into the vacuum of space. Fun.”
“On the plus side, you’d probably be unconscious…and maybe dismembered, by the time you were jettisoned from the airlock. But only a fool would attempt it. The ship could be irreparably damaged. And I don’t believe Wick is a fool.”
But I might be, I think, remembering my plan to launch Tom’s corpse out an airlock. I’m sure Galahad’s safety protocols would have prevented me from carrying out the suicidal mission, but I’m still a complete and utter moron for making the attempt.
“I mean, a really big fool,” Gal says. “Idiocy on a cosmic scale.”
She’s smiling again. She knows. Retained Galahad’s security footage in her memory.
“It was a moment of weakness,” I say.
“It was more than that,” she replies. “Honestly, and I am being honest, I don’t know how you are still…you. The pain you experienced. The despair…”
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