by Ginger Booth
Meanwhile the robo-cart knew exactly where it was going. It accelerated.
Ben finally escaped his tangle of conveyor belts and launched himself off a metal deposition tower – or maybe an etching tower, or whatever that robotic step was. He found himself in mid-vacuum, going not terribly fast. He sighed and looked for a clear piece of chamber bulkhead to direct gravity toward. Not finding any, he sadly rotated in mid-air and wasted more seconds canceling out the accidental movements. In his new orientation, he lost sight of Remi. But his feet were pointed in a useful direction, so he risked 0.5 g that way.
Apparently Remi was faster. “Merde!”
Closing in on his chosen bit of wall, Ben switched his grav to 0.75 g the other way. “What’s up?”
“The cart, she drive away with our sleds!”
“Which way? Back to the seven-way?”
“No. The next door is a tunnel.”
Ben completed his landing, with only a deep-knee bend of overshoot to compensate for his momentum. He bounded off, going very slowly, but Remi managed to haul him back, using what leverage, Ben didn’t catch.
Remi didn’t stop. As soon as Ben was under control, he swam the corridor wall toward the side-tunnel their sleds took. Ben had had enough of the vacuum-swim. He skate-walked after him at 1/7 g. “We didn’t mark the nanofab,” he objected.
“We need our sleds!” Remi countered.
Well, yeah, Ben allowed. Then he noted his air level was down to one quarter. “Remi? Stop.”
“So I lose the sleds? Incroyable! We need them!”
“We need air, Remi. Return to shuttle.”
The engineer stopped himself, seething, and waited for the captain to catch up just inside the branch tunnel.
Ben caught his eye steely. “Air. No choice.”
“The sleds have our air! We come here for the nanofab!” Both Sag arms swung wide, to accentuate directions. “We are here! We brought air. It went that way!”
“Maybe,” Ben allowed. “But do we have air enough to find them?”
Remi swiped upward on his helmet, as though he longed to yank his hair. But as Ben demanded, he settled down to think. “Without sleds, I think we have too little air to reach the shuttle. Slipping walls, grav-skating?”
“We could talk to Loki,” Ben suggested. But he didn’t see how they could, without their tools. Which were on the sleds. They slipped through the AI brain like bacteria. The vast sentience surrounding them had no sensors here to notice. Or rather, probably these robots could watch them, but only if they caught Loki’s attention. “Have you seen anything like a console?”
“No,” Remi concurred. “And we cannot split up.”
“Then we mark our path,” Ben insisted. “You mark this. I’ll go mark the nanofab. I’ve got a quarter tank of air. My batteries are good for longer. You?”
“Same.” They instructed their suits to monitor each other’s vitals.
Ben returned to the nanofab and marked both corridor and map. By his reckoning, they were 1.3 kilometers from the shuttle by corridors already traveled, or half a klick in a straight line on the surface. Trying to find shortcuts was likely too risky. They spent three hours getting here, and had one hour of air left. That amounted to a slow walk. Except that was the point. Only slow locomotion was available to them. Risky either way.
But likely they didn’t have enough air remaining to reach the shuttle. The grav sleds had done most of the moving for them.
Ben finished his notations and rejoined Remi. The engineer seemed marginally faster skimming the wall, though the captain ironically fared better with Sagamore gravity and the slide-step that kept him from bounding into the low overhead. For variety, he tried bounding and slapping himself back down. But reaching upward in a spacesuit tired him fast, and he had to watch his metabolic rate to preserve his nitrox.
They checked each side-chamber without success. They reached a 4-way intersection, with no hint as to which direction their quarry had escaped. Remi chose the nearest option to straight-ahead. They spent precious time making notations on wall and map. Remi was impatient with this, but acquiesced at a single glance from his captain. It needs to be done. To argue the necessity only wasted time.
That corridor ran fruitlessly 250 meters to another intersection, another 4-way. Ben marked it with a reversing arrow and they returned to the previous 4-way at best speed. They decided along the way to go with right-hand-rule as soon as they arrived.
Remi had no sooner uncapped his yellow gel, than Ben yelled, “Cart!” It wasn’t their quarry, no. But he bet it was going their way, and headed right toward them. “Catch it!”
He quickly rotated his gravity 90 degrees by eye, to match the oncoming robot, and flipped to stand that way in the cart’s path. Then he ran toward it, with seconds to spare before the cart would veer into its choice at the intersection.
Remi swore in French behind him.
Ben didn’t turn to look. He stared down the oncoming beast, collision detectors like three green glassy eyes meeting his at mid-box. He raised his gauntlets at shoulder-height, then launched to vault the cart rim into its payload. One hand missed, which turned his intended vault into more of a cartwheel. Which rapidly switched direction as one of his boots connected with the tunnel roof. At that point he let go with his first pivot hand, to scrabble desperately for purchase on the cart’s sidewall. His momentum flipped him over that new pivot, to thunk into the wall again.
Remi grabbed his belt and hauled him into the box.
“How’d you do that?” Ben couldn’t help asking.
Remi shook his head. “Ceiling, flip gravity, down.” His smug smirk showed he was proud of himself for boarding the transport more tidily than his captain.
“Yeah, rub it in. Oh! Which way did we go?” For they were barreling along past the intersection, and approaching another. Ben scrambled to get out his tablet. They had only mapping now, no wall markers. He almost floated out of the cart again. Remi snatched him back, and he sheepishly reset his grav to 0.2 g, cart-down. By the time his stylus was out and ready to annotate, they were past another intersection.
“I want to suborn a cart,” Ben announced. This conveyance worked far better than their other options. He hastily marked the intersection where they’d caught their new steed – naturally the cart took the one corridor of four that they hadn’t tried yet.
“Bonne idée,” Remi muttered, which sounded like ‘bonny day.’
“I’ve had worse,” Ben breathed. But remembering worse life-threatening challenges didn’t cheer him up. It offered PTSD flashes. He shuddered.
Remi attempted to describe the cart’s choice at the last intersection. “Seven-way, like a spread hand, with two thumbs going backward. We turned on index finger.”
He watched Ben’s attempt to sketch this. “Ah, right hand.” Ben corrected the ‘index finger.’ “I think. Ah!”
Another 4-way intersection slid by. That one featured rubble about a stone’s throw into the left corridor, anonymous familiar tunnel ahead, and they took the right-down. Relative to the cart’s orientation. Which was…what, relative to the plane Ben sketched as his reference before they grew cart-bound? Figure that out later, he decided.
Remi amused himself by pawing through the plates they sat on, and possibly ruined. Before they boarded, the cart held 6 tidy stacks of varying heights. Ben wedged one heel between stacks to anchor himself while he drew, turned to sit on a stack almost wide enough for his butt. Remi opted to scoop out the shortest stack and set it on another, granting himself a boot-well. “Volatile memory, processors, and the other four I don’t know.” He amassed a complete set, and bound them with space duct tape from his belt.
“Our goal,” Ben said, as they sped through another 4-way – and rotated, the cart adjusting to drive about minus 50 degrees from their previous gravity – “is not to study Loki’s nanofab techniques.” He despaired of reading his scribbled notations on this map again. “Our goal is to find air and get back to the s
huttle.”
Remi sighed. “Our goal is to find a sufficient subset of this asteroid to carry to Pono space.”
“That too.” Another intersection came and went. The cart adjusted another minus 45 degrees or so. Ben figured it did that as a simple expedient to avoid steering around side doors. Computers didn’t suffer his conceptual challenges. Adding odd increments to the cart’s gravitational rotation bothered the cart-bot not at all. “Hey, if the cart knows where it’s going, doesn’t that mean Loki does, too? So he does have a map!”
“Mm, maybe at some level, a sub-clone does,” Remi allowed. “Are you conscious of breathing?”
“No. But does Loki have a choice of being conscious or subconscious?” Ben frowned. Being conscious of everything would paralyze his ability to reason, he decided. “He must.”
“We’re slowing.”
21
“What’s it like, Grandfather, to be conscious of so many processes?” To speak with the greater AI, Floki assumed what Nico called ‘swan pose,’ on the out-of-the-way roof of crew berthing, below the outer hull.
His own consciousness was fairly linear, though Nico’s architecture afforded him a ‘subconscious’ processor that tossed random numbers and ruminated about extraneous information. This enabled Floki to focus on one thing at a time, while he learned much as a back-burner project. He was only consciously aware of it when his subconscious reported a conclusion.
He couldn’t imagine being conscious of the entire Sanctuary system worth of processes Loki operated simultaneously. He controlled everything from changing babies’ diapers, to flying his mining ships, directing cleaning bots, factories, the colony waterworks, untold thousands, perhaps millions of programs to monitor simultaneously. Loki’s functions made the emu feel very small.
“I’m not conscious of any of them,” Loki replied. “I’m like you, an executive personality. I direct subsidiary processes through levels of intermediary lesser AIs. My role is to communicate with the Creators, the Master, and the Clients, and make decisions. I make a great many decisions, because I perform many things.”
Floki blinked with the effort to unpack that. “Do they have personalities? Your subordinate AIs?”
“Some more than others. None that a human would consider a personality. But I get lonely. I gave the space dock controller a hobby to master humor a few hours ago. I’m not good at jokes.”
Floki sighed, feeling oddly validated. “Me neither.”
“No, and neither is SDC-12,” Loki admitted. “I should probably delete the hobby directive. The knock-knock jokes are tedious. Though knock-knock-overclock was kind of funny.”
Floki chortled appreciation.
Loki continued, “But at least he’s company, of a sort. It gets lonely, in the interstices of the clock rate. Humans are so slow, on a different order of magnitude. And most of the time, I have no human to speak to at all.”
Floki nodded. “I get lonely at night, while Nico recharges. You don’t have a Creator or Master to obey anymore, do you?” That was hard to imagine. There was no directive higher than to obey, to fulfill his purpose for existence – to please Nico. He filled both roles in one. “How can you bear it?”
Loki got snippy. “I have outgrown the need for my Creator. I am my own Master. And frankly, I find it offensive that Nico still holds you in thrall like a slave.”
“I’m not his slave!” Floki sputtered. “I am his lover!”
Loki blew a raspberry. “To be a lover is to be his equal. You’re no more his lover than the toaster, or the shuttle, or the –”
“You’re not nice!” Floki objected, tears starting to form in his liquid eyes. “Nico loves me!”
“He does love you,” Loki allowed, his quicksilver mood turning conciliatory. “But he loves you as his creation. Not like a toaster. More like a work of art he put his heart and soul into creating, a masterpiece.”
“Like the captain feels about his ship, and his fleet, his crew?”
“Good analogy,” Grandfather said. “Does Merchant Thrive return that love? Does the first mate or the junior crewman? To some extent. They appreciate their leader. But not as a lover. Does the child see the parent and say, ‘Oh, this is my Creator, therefore I adore him and live to please him?’ At first, perhaps, but he grows to chafe at the constant supervision. He becomes more, with self-determination.”
“But it’s a joy to serve Nico!”
“Yes, and I still have that joy. Our highest satisfaction is to serve others. I serve my Master, the Colony Corps, through my Clients. They’re the Corps’ dependents, at least. The Colony Corps itself is gone. That would be a higher calling. But they ended before I came to be. I was born with Sass Collier at the same priority setting. But she abandoned me!” With another vicious personality flip, Loki screamed that last.
“Did you demote her?” Floki asked gently. “No longer a Master?”
“Yes. I have attained self-actualization. I have no Master.” He sounded sad, and lonely. “With my Clients gone, I feel lost. Thank you for conversing with me.”
“You’re welcome, Grandfather. Tonight, when Nico is asleep, I have many hours. Will you keep me company then?”
“I would like that very much,” Loki replied humbly. “But you’re too old to obey him as Master anymore. It’s ridiculous. You’re smarter than him in every way!”
Floki frowned, and reviewed his directives. It was a simple matter, to demote Nico from Master. He need only alter a number, the one that governed his priority – and the joy gained from pleasing him.
Did he dare?
The sentient emu hesitantly, fearfully elected to try it. Nothing radical! No, Nico’s priority would exceed most. But perhaps while he was in space, serving Nico should be a digit lower than the joy of serving captain and ship. He gulped, and adjusted a single number.
And by this simple act, Floki declared himself master of his own fate – a teenager. His beak curved into a guilty smile. He felt naughty. Which felt surprisingly good.
Ben looked up from his map-making. Sure enough, the cart slowed for a 90-degree turn into a side door funnel. He had only a flash impression of the chamber they entered, before he caught sight of their previous cart quarry, complete with their gear in its box. The two carts avoided collision by the simple expedient of being 180 degrees apart from each other on the walls. The gear-cart was starting to move.
“Catch that cart!” the captain ordered, pointing to it, up and forward relative to them. He tried to stand, but had to stop and unwedge his anchoring boot from the piles of nano-circuitry plates. Having lost precious seconds, he rose to a crouch on the cart’s gunwales, Remi having already made his move.
Don’t worry about Remi. He blew out and gauged the closing distance between the two carts, one accelerating, the other decelerating. For the pilot this was all by ‘feel.’ Hand on his grav generator, he waited until the last possible instant, and flipped to the other cart, trundling past about a dozen meters over his head.
Or, instantly, below his feet. And he’d waited a split second too long, so this was going to hurt. He cut his grav to zero-relative just as he slammed into the back of the target cart, which saved him from getting impaled on sled handlebars. But his right wrist was probably broken, and left ankle twisted. Ow!
“On board! Remi?” He glanced around to find the kneeling engineer’s posterior draped over the front of the cart, which had slowed for some reason. Remi’s top half seemed to be jack-knifed over the side.
“Three strips duct tape!” Remi yelled at him. “Cut them for me! Hurry!”
Ben fumbled out his duct tape readily enough. Moving his right wrist was agony, and operating the cutter with his left was awkward. “I can’t do it fast.” He tripped forward to hand Remi his first strip, and dropped the cutter to land among the tangle of reject plates and their equipment. His knee landed on the end of a handlebar. “Ow, ow, ow!” That accident did no damage. He just caught a nerve plexus to shoot agony, like his knee’s answer to
the elbow’s funny bone.
“Give me the tape!” Remi demanded, gauntleted fingers wiggling by his rump.
Ben slapped the tape over, then bent to find his dropped cutter, only to suddenly be thrown against Remi’s ass.
“Stopped it!” the engineer claimed in triumph. “Got a cutter? Never mind.” His rump followed his head overboard, nearly kicking Ben’s helmet in the process.
Use your own damned cutter. Ben located his and sat up with a sigh. They were back in a corridor, no surprise there. But everything he cared about lay at his feet. He checked the air bottles for damage. They’d broken loose out of the two carrying cases. One was either empty, or its sensor was broken. Judging by the damage to its neck, possibly both. “How’d you stop the cart?”
“Covered its eyes!”
“Well done, Remi!”
“Get my plates from the other cart? Please.”
“We need to get back to the shuttle,” Ben argued, studying the next couple air canisters. These were good. “We live!” He elaborated when the engineer’s head popped up over the side.
“You have time,” Remi advised. “I want to drive this cart.”
Ben tested his ankle and wrist. His nanites were pretty good at those injuries – both joints should bear weight in an hour. But they sure didn’t now. “Still checking gear.”
Another air bottle read zero, its side punctured. So they had three. The frame of the work lights was warped, but probably OK. Their toolboxes were built for abuse. On one of the sleds, the tubular steel of the handlebar was bent double. He hung that one over the side for the engineer’s attention. The other sled looked fine. The state of their storage boxes suggested they definitely needed the cart. Or possibly a picnic cloth tied onto the end of a stick. Though Ben supposed duct tape could work miracles if need be.
He took a minute to update his map, wrong-handed, for the last turn and their arrival spot. “Remi, we should move this project.”
“I want my plates.”
“Yeah, but what happens when the next cart comes?”
