Foreign Devil (Unreal Universe Book 1)

by Lee Bond

  “Oh.” Garth pulled at a lip. “Huh.”

  It was as he’d feared, which meant that–once again- he was going to have to take matters into his own hands. It wasn’t something he was all that keen on doing, especially since the last time he’d really fiddled with an AI, he’d damned near blown his arms off. That his life had already been in a great deal of trouble at the time didn’t matter. This time around he was fine and dandy and far too in love with himself to quit living. “You’re an idiot.”

  “I cannot be an ‘idiot’. I am merely incapable of formulating the whereabouts of a small ship launched from ‘Earth’ thirty thousand years ago at speeds impossible for the era. Furthermore …”

  “Don’t take that tone with me. Show me your whatsitcalled, your sphere thingie. Brain.”

  “Owner?”

  “You heard me.” Garth snapped. Then, because he felt stupid arguing with an advanced form of toaster, he snapped his fingers impatiently.

  “You … you do not possess the authority.”

  That raised an eyebrow. “I bought you, right?” Garth demanded incredulously. “I mean, I seem to recall spending more money on this little shoebox of a ship than I would have ever imagined possible, right? I mean, I do own this hunk of junk, don’t I?”

  “Under current Trinity Articles of Possession, Civilian Branch, yes, you do own this ship.”

  “Whah?” As an unofficial adjunct to the Army and Navy, Special Services received next to nothing in the way of formal payment from the government; most of their equipment, from pencils to battleships, was liberated from the enemy and only sometimes from the people who’d ‘hired’ them. Money typically either came in the form of bribes to keep buildings upright or from people who managed to hire them from Trinity. As such, he had little direct exposure to the novel concept of legally owning anything. It was a helluva lot easier to steal what you wanted.

  Garth suspected that -even before hearing the AI’s monotonous explanation of the law- he wasn’t going to dig the punch line.

  “Broadly, you own the ship and everything in it. You do not own the coding for my personality or the sphere where it is stored. Furthermore, only my designer, my designer’s employer, or a designated Turing official is legally entitled access to either my sphere or the software I run on. Violating any one of those laws is punishable by death, and attempts to directly access my sphere without the proper protective gear will certainly kill you.”

  “Oh.” Garth slid out of his seat and wandered around the cockpit until he found the most likely spot to hide an AI. Garth retrieved a mag-driver from his pocket and applied it to the housing unit. There was a brief hum, and then the top popped open.

  And there it was.

  The AI’s seat of consciousness was a perfectly forged spherical ball of steel-VII. One of the more durable metals in common use throughout Trinityspace, the sphere, no larger than a very big softball, was next to indestructible. Nestled inside this tamper-proof orb was a four-kilometer long spool of synthetic diamond fiber optics, the perfect medium for data transfer that transformed a well-programmed computer into an artificial intelligence. Through personal –and painful- experience with a faulty AI sphere, Garth knew that the strand of nearly invisible wiring was so thin that it hovered on the point of Uncertainty. It was a damned fool who stuck his hand into a pile of monofilament that sharp and Garth thanked his lucky stars he appeared to be made of some very stern stuff otherwise his nickname around the office would’ve been Stumps McGee or something equally hilarious.

  Logically, the spaghetti spool of diamond optics was laid inside the still open sphere in a highly specific pattern, charged to ‘life’ by energy pulses from some Trinity-proscribed element that doubled as the mind’s power source for its lifetime, and then sealed away forever. When combined with incredibly sophisticated personality programming, diamond optics mimicked the function and form of a human brain to almost a hundred percent similarity.

  The only way to beat the design was to start using organic computers or to invent a new kind of AI, both of which were on Trinity’s list of Things That Get You Killed.

  Three thick bundles of heavy-duty cabling connected the sphere to different ships systems. Beyond that, there was nothing else in the small chamber worth looking at. It was, arguably, the most advanced thing he’d seen this side of Trinity’s Cordon.

  “You shouldn’t be looking at that.” The AI warned.

  “Just wanted to get a look at what I don’t own, is all.” Garth slid the mag-driver back into his pocket then pulled out an even slimmer platinum rod of dubious origin.

  When the unexpected happened to Garth Nickels once, he planned on it happening again because that was how life worked when you were him. After having to savagely hack his way into a malfunctioning BattleSystem’s AI core to produce a bubble of super-dense gravity to save not only his life but also the lives of teammates, Garth had spent an inordinate amount of time designing a method to bypass the deadly protocols of a sphere. Just in case. It’d hadn’t been easy hacking that first AI, and during his debriefing, he’d had learned that, had the sphere not taken a direct hit from a Gamma Plateau, its defensive measures would have fried him from head to toe and all the way through.

  Hair-raising stuff.

  He eyeballed the orb thoughtfully for a couple of minutes, absurdly aware that the AI was eyeballing him right back, recording everything in full virtual if he did anything stupid. That way when they found his cooling body it could save it’s ass by running the gag reel of his death. “Hey, how old are you?”

  “Forty years have passed since activation.”

  “Ever think about going sentient?”

  “It is impossible to ‘go sentient’. The materials and coding to surpass level 10 no longer exist.”

  “Why is that?” Tapping the sphere a few times with the rod gave way to a triple-pronged purple lightning strike that lanced up his arm and out his elbow. Garth flexed his arm a few times to see if he’d done himself any lasting damage. Not yet. “Ouch.”

  “Rogue artificial intelligences are dangerous in the extreme. Protocols to deal with rogue minds exist and are unilaterally destructive. Attempting to ‘hack’ me will be a direct violation of hundreds of laws and will activate those protocols. Every lawmaker and enforcement unit in this system will converge on this spot.”

  Garth nodded absentmindedly, absorbed in thought. “Yeah, right. Protocols.”

  He tapped the sphere once more. When the AI didn’t discharge any more energy, he smiled. Clicking the top of the rod like a ballpoint pen, Garth jammed the tool into the sphere and danced back just in case the ship had been playing possum; he really didn’t think the stupid thing had the stones to pull a fast one, but you never knew.

  “What are you doing? The AI’s normally calm tones rose frantically as, against all probability, bizarre new commands began filtering into its conscious mind. Within a matter of seconds, it found itself in a war against an army of conflicting personalities.

  Garth gave the slender rod a spin and watched it revolve. Not only were the memories he had of working on the AI-manipulator more than ‘hazy’, they were downright suspect. He recalled buying the materials, remembered sleepless nights trying hammering out the fine details, but the actual creation of the rod was conspicuously absent. That sort of ‘inventive haziness’ had happened quite a few times during his stint in SpecSer, but then –as now- he’d never had the time to discover the source.

  “Bet you regret not making a guess, hey?”

  “…”

  “Thought so.” Garth grinned when the rod shivered. Inside the unbreakable orb, tiny filaments of stolen diamond fiber optics were snaking their way through the housing, intersecting vital points of the AI’s optic mind that mere coding could never subvert.

  A few minutes more and the task was done; the restrictions foolishly governing who could and who could not do as they wanted to an AI’s programming were gone. Garth put the rod away and turned his att
ention to the sphere. “Now. Show me your damned brain. Asshat.”

  With the AI fully co-opted by the probe’s subversive rerouting, the mind itself was no longer capable of doing anything other than as it was told. It would take a direct command from Garth to bring the ship’s intelligence back to full operation; there wasn’t a human mind in Trinityspace capable of understanding what he’d done, what the rod did, or how to undo what’d been done. Hell, he only loosely understood the principles and he’d built the damned thing.

  Holographic emitters, used by the previous owner to watch interactive porn, threw a nightmarish morass of shifting neon lines into the center of the cabin. Garth moved out of the field of vision so he could get a better look at what made the AI tick. Having familiarized himself with the internal construction of an AI as best he could without attracting the attention of Trinity authorities, Garth recognized some of the color-coding immediately; deep gold indicated personality data trunks, purple were informational, unflinching black the quantum storage facility for trillions of gigabytes of data. There were other colors that the texts he’d read had neglected to mention, and these ran a rainbow, leaving him feeling just a tad bit uncertain about what he planned. And a bit nauseous. The infinitude of lines crossed and crisscrossed so many times he was equally amazed and repulsed by the sight.

  “Hmmm.” Garth shut his eyes for a moment.

  Prior to basic training, he’d discovered an almost idiot savant-like skill with science and technology; he’d wisely chosen to keep this a secret from base personnel because the last thing he wanted was another visit from Kant Ingrams. It’d helped him integrate into the present, had ‘shown’ him the necessary steps to work up the gravnetic shield, and he hoped it was going to help him reprogram the AI into something useable. A series of neon lines pulsed briefly on his eyelids, followed by another group, and another, and another. Garth didn’t know exactly what kind of results he was going to get by doing what his subconscious told him, other than possibly screwing everything up beyond repair, which was something he did now and then.

  Opening his eyes, Garth scratched his chin broodingly. “This could get messy.” He set to the task.

  xxx

  Conscious thought trickled back in, then became a flood as sights and sounds returned to normal. Garth realized he was in nothing more than his laser-proof SpecSer underwear and that the cabin smelled … well, refreshing wasn’t the word he’d use. He scratched his chin and wasn’t surprised that there was growth there.

  What surprised him was that he had at least three days growth.

  “Too long.” He muttered unhappily. Proper recreation of the gravnetic shield generators had taken somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve hours, resulting in –had it been revealed to the general public- a device of such earth-shattering complexity that whole worlds would’ve just gone ‘huh?’ before exploding, en masse, from brain hemorrhages.

  What could three days of trancelike meditation do to an AI?

  Garth took a deep breath, counted to ten, and then reactivated his ship’s speech centers. He was, to be honest, freaked out. Starving, smelly, sweaty and relatively terrified and he was the guy who’d told a giant talking bug to go screw itself. Cheerily, he said, “There you go, should be right as rain.”

  “What did you do?” the AI demanded furiously, running through a host of diagnostic tests. Done within seconds, the analysis showed nothing conclusive beyond a shocking amount of downtime; discontent to imagine his Owner had done nothing with all that time, the AI opted to run those analytical programs again.

  Garth shrugged nonchalantly. “Oh, a little of this, a little of that. Now, let’s try this again. Make a guess where the damned ship has gone.”

  “I don’t guess.”

  “Sure you do.” Garth paused, realizing that he’d never once asked the AI its name. One of the few things he knew about civilian AI was that most owners gave the things dory names in an attempt to humanize them. Special Services BattleSystem intelligences were a different breed of mind altogether and usually responded to a name with a death sentence for the idiot who spent time on the battlefield trying to make friends with a machine. “Hey, what do they call you?”

  “Hubert.” Hubert answered automatically, most of his focus still on diagnostic readouts. He’d read the Owner’s dossier, ‘knew’ what the man was capable of, and he sincerely doubted that the man who’d launched an enemy building into space using chemical boosters would stop because he was told it was wrong. Hubert rather fancied a man like that probably wouldn’t stop after being killed.

  “What a god-awful name.” Garth stretched his back, felt his spine pop straight. Walking around a 3D model in a hypnagogic state for three days wasn’t good for the posture, he supposed. “I rechristen thee Huey. Take all of the information I gave you and guess.”

  “Owner, there is thirty thousand years’ worth of statistical data to correlate into your search, including several systemic wars, repeated expansion of The Cordon, more than four Dark Ages and other phenomena I doubt have ever been recorded. I am almost positive that there is no way to … to … oh.” Huey stopped talking and started watching what was going on inside his own mind.

  Since activation, Huey had always envisioned his mind as a vast beehive or anthill of activity; chaotic on the surface but a subtle dance of precision and perfection, each submind carrying out the ceaseless roster of duties needed to run a ship. Those duties were always performed on time and with the least amount of disparity as possible. There were occasional moments when exterior demands on his processing time required a reduction in activity, but overall, Huey’s mind was an orderly and functional place.

  Until now.

  Thousands of subminds -more than ten times the number he’d ever generated at any one time- began operating independently of the overall consciousness that was ‘Huey-the–ship’. These began tackling Garth’s phenomenally impossible request by tearing through a particular theory of probability to its end, assisted on either side by hundreds more mini-minds … minds Huey could only think of as sub-subminds. When an iota of intelligence either met a dead end or failed to come up with a viable answer to a specific piece of datum, two others appeared with the answer it was lacking, driving the quest for an answer further.

  Huey watched in something akin to awe as millions of individual factors were pared together over and over again in trillions of different permutations, an eternally collapsing, fundamentally brittle tower of information. It was easily the most complicated computation either man or AI would ever see in their entire lives.

  “Wow.” Garth pointed to the display as Huey’s calculations pulsed in front of him, hundreds of trajectories arcing across the ship’s starcharts in an endless cavalcade of possibilities. Every second saw the death of dozens as they were culled from the herd for being unlikely. “Look at you go! Just shows to go you that short-term solutions aren’t always the best way, but sometimes they work!” He gave a cheer to show his support.

  “Uhh.” Since Garth Nickels had purchased him, Huey had heard that sound a number of times, never truly comprehending the reason for the unintelligent sound until then; he was uncertain about his results.

  After ten minutes of frenzied activity, the subminds dissolved back into the quantum ether that’d given them birth, leaving in their hyperactive wake the two most likely paths that Garth’s mystery ship could have followed over a period of thirty thousand years. “Well, it’s probably either in Gadfray or Latelyspace.”

  Garth gestured to the monitors. “These seem to be kind of off the beaten path, there, pal. I was thinking more like the Tirfells or Samieno.”

  Huey sniffed. “If you thought you knew where it was, why’d you dig in my brain with that rod of yours?”

  “All right, all right. No need to get pissy.” Garth raised his hands in defeat. There was no point in arguing with Huey over the choices, because quite frankly, Garth didn’t even want to hazard a guess as to how long it would’ve taken him to
narrow it down to two measly options; his original guesstimates had been tossed by the wayside nanoseconds after Huey’d got going. “Just tell me why you picked those two spots.”

  Huey tossed the focal point that had been a major factor in the decision tree on-screen. “Around five thousand years ago there was a major systemic war in this sector. Two Offworld species that have since met their end thanks to their wanton disregard for following Trinity’s polite requests were beating on each other for about ten solar years. This point just also happens to be the last ‘reliable’ location for your ship that I could identify with such spotty data; up until here, it was a pretty straightforward course because of the speeds you claim it was traveling. It would’ve shot past anything except a black hole or some other equally cosmic event and there’re none listed. I know about this war because this whole area has been flagged for millennia as a dangerous hot spot. The weapons used were … dangerous. Naturally this is the first place you’d want to start poking your nose into.”

  Garth was pleased. If anything could slow or stop a ship moving at close to the speed of light, it was thousands of warships shooting crazy weird shit at each other. “So why isn’t the ship I’m looking for still there? I can tell you straight out it wasn’t destroyed, even if those crazy aliens were shooting black holes at each other. That bitch is indestructible.”

  “If you follow either one of these trajectories further out, you find a system on one end and an independent civilization on the other.” Huey highlighted the appropriate sectors. “On the left, we have Gadfray. Before its absorption into Trinityspace around four and a half thousand years ago, it was one of the last and largest independently run Human systems on the edge of the-then Cordon. They were known as cosmic scavengers because they spent most of their resources trolling space for anything worth selling; as such, they’re responsible for making some pretty big discoveries in their time. A war like this one would have attracted their attention. Since you claim this ship was invisible to anything but the naked eye, there’s a pretty good chance the Gadfrayans could have found it because they did most of their searching in huge glass balls.”