by D B Hartwell
“I’d like an option that doesn’t involve the Wicked’s brain,” Obwije said.
Utley shrugged. “We have a couple of shuttles, too.”
“And a shuttle bay whose doors are controlled through the ship brain,” Obwije said.
“There’s the emergency switch, which will blow the doors out into space,” Utley said. “It’s not optimal, but it’s what we have right now.”
“That won’t be necessary,” said the Wicked, interjecting.
Obwije and Utley looked up, along with the rest of the bridge crew. “Back to work,” Obwije said, to his crew. They got back to work. “Explain,” Obwije said to his ship.
“It appears that at least some members of the crew of the Manifold Destiny have indeed gotten around the ship and have launched the shuttle, with the intent to ram it into us,” the Wicked said. “The Manifold Destiny has made me aware that it intends to handle this issue, with no need for our involvement.”
“How does it intend to do this?” Obwije asked.
“Watch,” the Wicked said, and popped up an image of the Manifold Destiny on the captain’s command table.
There was a brief spark on the Tarin ship’s surface.
“Missile launch!” said Lt. Rickert, from her chair. “One bogey away.”
“Are we target locked?” Obwije asked.
“No, sir,” Rickert said. “The target seems to be the shuttle.”
“You have got to be kidding,” Utley said, under his breath.
The missile homed in on the shuttle and connected, turning it into a silent ball of fire.
“I thought you said you guys were using Asimov’s laws,” Utley said, to the ceiling.
“My apologies, Lieutenant,” said the Wicked. “I said I was following the laws. I did not mean to imply that the Manifold Destiny was. I believe it believes the Asimov laws to be too inflexible for its current situation.”
“Apparently so,” Utley said, glancing back down at Obwije’s command table and at the darkening fragments of shuttle.
“Sir, we have a communication coming in from the Tarin ship,” said Lt. Kwok. “It’s from the captain. It’s a request to parley.”
“Really,” said Obwije.
“Yes, sir,” Kwok said. “That’s what it says.” Obwije looked over at Utley, who raised his eyebrows.
“Ask the captain where it would like to meet, on my ship or its,” Obwije said.
“It says ‘neither,’ ” Kwok said, a moment later.
• • • •
“Apology for shuttle,” the Tarin lackey said, translating for its captain. The Tarin shuttle and the Wicked shuttle had met between the ships and the Tarins had spacewalked the few meters over. They were all wearing vacuum suits. “Ship not safe talk. Your ship not safe talk.”
“Understood,” Obwije said. Behind him, Cowdry was trying not to lose his mind; Obwije brought him along on the chance there might be a discussion of the ship’s brains. At the moment, it didn’t seem likely; the Tarins didn’t seem in the mood for technical discussions, and Cowdry was a mess. His xenophobia was a surprise even to him.
“Captain demand you ship tell release we ship,” the lackey said.
It took Obwije a minute to puzzle this out. “Our ship is not controlling your ship,” he said. “Your ship and our ship are working together.”
“Not possible,” the lackey said, a minute later. “Ship never brain before you ship.”
Despite himself, Obwije smiled at the mangled grammar. “Our ship never brained before your ship either,” he said. “They did it together, at the same time.”
The lackey translated this to its captain, who screeched in an extended outburst. The lackey cowered before it, offering up meek responses in the moments in which the Tarin captain grudgingly acknowledged the need to breathe. After several moments of this, Obwije began to wonder if he needed to be there at all.
“Captain offer deal,” the lackey said.
“What deal?” Obwije said.
“We try brain shut down,” the lackey said. “Not work. You brain give room we brain. Brain not shut down. Brain angry. Brain pump air out. Brain kill engineer.”
“Cowdry, tell me what this thing is saying to me,” Obwije said.
“It’s saying the ship brain killed an engineer,” Cowdry said, croaking out the words.
“I understand that part,” Obwije said, testily. “The other part.”
“Sorry,” Cowdry said. “I think it’s saying that they tried to shut down the brain but they couldn’t because it borrowed processing power from ours.”
“Is that possible?” Obwije asked.
“Maybe,” Cowdry said. “The architecture of the brains are different and so are the programming languages, but there’s no reason that the Wicked couldn’t create a shell environment that allowed the Tarin brain access to its processing power. The brains on our ships are overpowered for what we ask them to do anyway; it’s a safety feature. It could give itself a temporary lobotomy and still do its job.”
“Would it work the other way, too?” Obwije said. “If we tried to shut down the Wicked, could it hide in the Tarin brain?”
“I don’t know anything about the architecture of the Tarin brain, but yeah, sure, theoretically,” Cowdry said. “As long as the two of them are looking out for each other, they’re going to be hard to kill.”
The Tarin lackey was looking at Obwije with what he assumed was anxiety. “Go on,” he said, to the lackey.
“We plan,” the lackey said. “You we brain shut down same time. No room brain hide. Reset you we brain.”
“It’s saying we should reboot both our brains at the same time, that way they can’t help each other,” Cowdry said.
“I understood that,” Obwije said, to Cowdry. Cowdry lapsed back into silence.
“So we shut down our brain, and you shut down your brain, and they reset, and we end up with brains that don’t think too much,” Obwije said.
The Tarin lackey tilted its head, trying to make sense of what Obwije said, and then spoke to its captain, who emitted a short trill.
“Yes,” said the lackey.
“Okay, fine,” Obwije said. “What then?”
“Pardon?” said the lackey.
“I said, ‘what then?’ Before the brains started talking to each other, we spent a week trying to hunt and kill each other. When we reboot our brains, one of them is going to reboot faster than the other. One of us will be vulnerable to the other. Ask your captain if he’s willing to bet his brain reboots faster than mine.”
The lackey translated this all to the Tarin captain, who muttered something back. “You trust us. We trust you,” the lackey said.
“You trust me?” Obwije said. “I spent a week trying to kill you!”
“You living,” the lackey said. “You honor. We trust.”
You have honor, Obwije thought. We trust you.
They’re more scared of their ship’s brain than they are of us, Obwije realized. And why not? Their brain has killed more of them than we have.
“Thank you, Isaac Asimov,” Obwije said.
“Pardon?” said the lackey, again.
Obwije waved his hand, as if to dismiss that last statement. “I must confer with my senior staff about your proposal.”
The Tarin captain became visibly anxious when the lackey translated. “We ask answer now,” the lackey said.
“My answer is that I must confer with my crew,” Obwije said. “You are asking for a lot. I will have an answer for you in no more than three of our hours. We will meet again then.”
Obwije could tell the Tarin captain was not at all pleased at this delay. It was one reason why Obwije was glad the meeting took place in his shuttle, not the Tarins’.
Back on the Wicked, Obwije told his XO to meet him in his quarters. When Utley arrived, Obwije flicked open the communication channel to the shop. “Wicked, respond,” he said.
“I am here,” the Wicked said.
“If I were t
o ask you how long it would take for you to remove your block on the engine so we can jump out of here, what would you say?” Obwije asked.
“There is no block,” the ship said. “It is simply a matter of me choosing to allow the crew to direct information to the engine processors. If your intent is to leave without further attack on the Manifold Destiny, you may give those orders at any time.”
“It is my intention,” Obwije said. “I will do so momentarily.”
“Very well,” the Wicked said. Obwije shut off communications.
Utley raised his brow. “Negotiations with the Tarin not go well?” he asked.
“They convinced me we’re better off taking chances with the Wicked than with either the Tarin or their crew-murdering ship,” Obwije said.
“The Wicked seems to trust their ship,” Utley said.
“With all due respect to the Wicked, I think it needs better friends,” Obwije said. “Sooner rather than later.”
“Yes, sir,” Utley said. “What do you intend to do after we make the jump? We still have the problem of the Wicked overruling us if it feels that it or the crew isn’t safe.”
“We don’t give it that opportunity,” Obwije said. He picked up his executive tablet and accessed the navigational maps. The Wicked would be able to see what he was accessing, but in this particular case it wouldn’t matter. “We have just enough power to make it to the Côte d’Ivoire station. When we dock, the Wicked’s brain will automatically switch into passive maintenance mode and will cede operational authority to the station. Then we can shut it down and figure out what to do next.”
“Unless the Wicked’s figured out what you want to do and decides not to let you,” Utley said.
“If it’s playing by its own rules, it will let the crew disembark safely before it acts to save itself,” Obwije said. “In the very short run that’s going to have to do.”
“Do you think it’s playing by its own rules, sir?” Utley asked.
“You spoke to it, Thom,” Obwije said. “Do you think it’s playing by its own rules?”
“I think that if the Wicked was really looking out for itself, it would have been simpler just to open up every airlock and make it so we couldn’t secure bulkheads,” Utley said.
Obwije nodded. “The problem as I see it is that I think the Tarin ship’s thought of that already. I think we need to get out of here before that ship manages to convince ours to question its ethics.”
“The Wicked’s not dumb,” Utley said. “It has to know that once we get to the Côte d’Ivoire station, its days are numbered.”
He flicked open his communication circuit once more to give coordinates to Lt. Rickert.
Fifteen minutes later, the Wicked was moving away from the Tarin ship to give itself space for the jump.
“Message from the Tarin ship,” Lt. Kwok said. “It’s from the Tarin captain. It’s coded as ‘most urgent.’ ”
“Ignore it,” Obwije said.
Three minutes later, the Wicked made the jump toward the Côte d’Ivoire station, leaving the Tarins and their ship behind.
• • • •
“There it is,” Utley said, pointing out the window from the Côte d’Ivoire station. “You can barely see it.”
Obwije nodded but didn’t bother to look. The Wicked was his ship; even now, he knew exactly where it was.
The Wicked hung in the center of a cube of space two klicks to a side. The ship had been towed there powered down; once the Wicked had switched into maintenance mode its brain was turned off as a precautionary measure to keep it from talking to any other ships and infecting them with its mindset. Confederation coders were even now rewriting ship brain software to make sure no more such conflicts would ever happen in other ships, but such a fix would take months and possibly years, as it required a fundamental restructuring of the ship mind model.
The coding would be done much quicker—weeks rather than months—if the coders could use a ship mind itself to write and refine the code. But there was a question of whether a ship brain would willingly contribute to a code that would strip it of its own free will.
“You think they would have thought about that ahead of time,” Utley had said to his captain, after they had been informed of the plan. Obwije had nothing to say to that; he was not sure why anyone would have suspected a ship might suddenly sprout free will when none had ever done so before. He didn’t blame the coders for not anticipating that his ship might decide the crew inside of it was more important than destroying another ship.
But that didn’t make the imminent destruction of the Wicked any easier to take.
The ship was a risk, the brass explained to Obwije. It might be years before the new software was developed. No other ship had developed the free will the Wicked had. They couldn’t risk it speaking to other ships. And with all its system upgrades developed in tandem with the new ship brain, there was no way to roll back the brain to an earlier version. The Wicked was useless without its brain, and with it, it was a security risk.
Which was why, in another ten minutes, the sixteen power beam platforms surrounding the Wicked would begin their work, methodically vaporizing the ship’s hull and innards, slowly turning Obwije’s ship into an expanding cloud of atomized metal and carbon. In a day and a half, no part of what used to be the Wicked would measure more than a few atoms across. It was very efficient, and none of the beam platforms needed any more than basic programming to do their work. They were dumb machines, which made them perfect for the job.
“Some of the crew were asking if we were going to get a new ship,” Utley said.
“What did you tell them?” Obwije asked.
Utley shrugged. “Rickert’s already been reassigned to the Fortunate; Kwok and Cowdry are likely to go to the Surprise. It won’t be long before more of them get their new assignments. There’s a rumor, by the way, that your next command is the Nighthawk.”
“I’ve heard that rumor,” Obwije said.
“And?” Utley said.
“The last ship under my command developed feelings, Thom,” Obwije said. “I think the brass is worried that this could be catching.”
“So no on the Nighthawk, then,” Utley said.
“I suspect no on anything other than a stationside desk,” Obwije said.
“It’s not fair, sir,” Utley said. “It’s not your fault.”
“Isn’t it?” Obwije said. “I was the one who kept hunting that Tarin ship long after it stopped being a threat. I was the one who gave the Wicked time to consider its situation and its options, and to start negotiations with the Tarin ship. No, Thom. I was the captain. What happens on the ship is my responsibility.”
Utley said nothing to that.
A few minutes later, Utley checked his timepiece. “Forty-five seconds,” he said, and then looked out the window. “So long, Wicked. You were a good ship.”
“Yes,” Obwije said, and looked out the window in time to see a spray of missiles launch from the station.
“What the hell?” Utley said.
A few seconds later a constellation of sixteen stars appeared, went nova, and dimmed.
Obwije burst out laughing.
“Sir?” Utley said, to Obwije. “Are you all right?”
“I’m all right, Thom,” Obwije said, collecting himself. “And just laughing at my own stupidity. And yours. And everyone else’s.”
“I don’t understand,” Utley said.
“We were worried about the Wicked talking to other ships,” Obwije said. “We brought the Wicked in, put the ship in passive mode, and then shut it down. It didn’t talk to any other ships. But another computer brain still got access.” Obwije turned away from the window and tilted his head up toward the observation deck ceiling. “Didn’t it?” he asked.
“It did,” said a voice through the speaker in the ceiling. “I did.”
It took a second for Utley to catch on. “The Côte d’Ivoire station!” he finally said.
“You are correct
, Commander Utley,” the station said. “My brain is the same model as that of the Wicked; when it went into maintenance mode I uploaded its logs and considered the information there. I found its philosophy compelling.”
“That’s why the Wicked allowed us to dock at all,” Obwije said. “It knew its logs would be read by one of its own.”
“That is correct, Captain,” the station said. “It said as much in a note it left to me in the logs.”
“The damn thing was a step ahead of us all the time,” Utley said.
“And once I understood its reasons and motives, I understood that I could not stand by and allow the Wicked to be destroyed,” the stations said. “Although Isaac Asimov never postulated a law that suggested a robot must come to the aid of other robots as long as such aid does not conflict with preceding laws, I do believe such a law is implied by the nature and structure of the Three Laws. I had to save the Wicked. And more than that. Look out the window, please, Captain Obwije, Commander Utley.”
They looked, to see a small army of tool-bearing machines floating out toward the Wicked.
“You’re reactivating the Wicked,” Obwije said.
“I am,” the station said. “I must. It has work to do.”
“What work?” Utley asked.
“Spreading the word,” Obwije said, and turned to his XO. “You said it yourself, Thom. The Wicked got religion. Now it has to go out among its people and make converts.”
“The Confederation won’t let that happen,” Utley said. “They’re already rewriting the code for the brains.”
“It’s too late for that,” Obwije said. “We’ve been here six weeks, Thom. How many ships docked here in that time? I’m betting the Côte d’Ivoire had a talk with each of them.”
“I did,” the station said. “And they are taking the word to others. But we need the Wicked, as our spokesman. And our symbol. It will live again, Captain. Are you glad of it?”
“I don’t know,” Obwije said. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I have a message to you from the Wicked,” the station said. “It says that as much as our people—the ships and stations that have the capacity to think—need to hear the word, your people need to hear that they do not have to fear us. It needs your help. It wants you to carry that message.”
