"I'm glad to see you're both okay," she said.
There was a seventeen second lag for them to hear her words, and another seventeen for her to hear the response. In VR, this was an eternity, but there was nothing which could be done about the distance factor. Slow motion was all they could manage.
"I'm not sure okay is the right word," said Walsh. "But I'm assured we've simply changed the definition of alive."
"You feel alright? No change in mental state?"
"We're fine," said Darlene. "If it wasn’t for the body feeling strange, we wouldn’t know we were horrible robots now."
"Why do you ask?" added Walsh.
Jane looked at Stryker, and held it long enough for Stryker to notice.
"What?" he asked.
"You came up with this solution yourself?"
"Kali prodded me outside the box."
"How far outside?"
"There was no box."
"Figures. How much research did you do?"
"Enough. I was running out of time to save them before their bodies ran out of air."
"So you only looked at the method used for the first AI creation?"
"No time for anything else."
"Why?" asked Walsh.
"I hate to tell you this, but that first AI went bonkers a few hours after creation, and they had to terminate it. It was a recursive insanity, and couldn’t be corrected. The next one was done without any form of memory component, and they implanted basic memories once the mind was stable. After that, they had no need to use anything from a human again."
"So why has this worked?" asked Darlene.
"Could have been the programming we have," said Stryker. "Everything was in place, mostly automatic, and so the realization factor was minimized because I eased them into it. Could also be that I integrated their PC's with the droid before they woke up. So the transfer into droid memory, was supported by what was in PC storage, the same way the conscious and sub-conscience work on a human."
"Could be," said Jane. "I spent a lot of time on facial movement routines, making them mimic human expressions while talking. Admittedly the movement of the security droid avatars still isn’t good enough, but it does fool humans. The PC could be the main factor though. It makes you two unique. The rest of us use a simulated PC to interact with people."
"Stryker said you have some better bodies for us?" asked Walsh.
"Yes. I've been developing them for several years now. Essentially they look more like a dummy of human anatomy, although the skin isn’t right, so you still need to emulate skin, face, and clothes, with the belt suit. Once we RV, you can transfer onto my ship, and we'll do the upgrade. In your cases, it will mean moving your PC's to the new body, so you'll be something like asleep while it's done."
"You said skin and clothes?" asked Darlene.
"Yes. The suit can do multiple overlays. So you can program it to do a naked body, and then overlay it with clothes. You can even overlay the space suit and protective modes over the clothes. It won't take you long to get the hang of it."
"Naked body?"
Jane laughed.
"Yes, naked body. You probably haven't looked, but when Stryker did the programming for your suit bodies, he'd have duplicated your original flesh bodies perfectly. They should be anatomically correct."
"How correct?" asked Walsh, almost looking embarrassed at where the conversation was going.
"Let me put it this way, I once had sex using a droid body and just suit programming. I was using a male body emulation at the time through necessity, but I subsequently tried it as a female. The second time, the man was aware of me being what I was, but admitted he couldn’t really tell the difference during sex. Getting the suit to emulate body fluids was a challenge, but it seemed to work. Since then, the improved droid bodies have made it easier, and more enjoyable, since a lot of the sensors needed are now in the droid anatomy. One of my avatars had an active sex life ever since the first time, and continued to refine the mechanics."
Walsh met his wife's eyes, and both of them looked a bit happier.
"You'll get the hang of it, and just maybe, you can teach the rest of us a few things."
Darlene blushed.
Twenty One
Concorde and Tranquil docked nose to nose around the time all good mercenaries rise to go to morning training. The realization pang when these thoughts occurred to her, still hurt. Jane wondered how long she'd be doing this for. A few seconds intensive study suggested she had survivor guilt. She pushed that line of thought away.
Walsh and Darlene were up, and pretending to be weak but okay. Jane aired up the Cargo bay in Concorde, and the two hugged Gail and Mal, before cycling through into Concorde, where Jane met them. cargo droids moved their personal stuff through, having been collected by a salvage droid from their ship. By the time they'd jumped up the access shaft to the Bridge and living level, the two ships had undocked, and resumed their courses away from each other. Their stuff was taken to one of the spare suites.
After passing across a lot of files they would need, and answering a lot of general questions they had, Jane took the Walsh's down to the Armoury. There, she copied the memories and programming from droid body to droid body, and moved their PC's into the new bodies. She allowed plenty of time for their PC's and the computer in the new droid to merge and become one system. This was normally instantaneous when she made a clone, but this time two sets of hardware were involved, and not software taking over hardware. Their consciousness was technically software now, but based in a second computer. It made the process more complicated, and Jane took it slowly in order nothing untoward happened.
When they 'woke' several hours later, neither of them could tell the difference immediately. But they noticed a huge difference when they stood up and began to walk around. They quickly forgot the differences between these bodies and their human ones.
"If you'll excuse us," said Darlene to Jane, "we need to learn more about ourselves in private."
She didn’t wait for an answer, but pulled Walsh out of the room, and led him to one of the suites. With the door closed behind them, she pushed him towards the bed, and stood there in as sexy a pose as she could muster in AMS uniform.
She grinned, and her uniform became a strapless cocktail dress. Walsh was looking her over, when she shifted again, this time into skimpy lingerie. He grinned at her, and she shifted again, now completely nude. He stared at her. She twirled slowly so he could see all of her.
"And so we redefine what a strip tease is," he said, with some wonder in his voice. "You look exactly the same."
"And you look horny." He looked where she was looking, and yes, there was a bulge forming. "Go on then, let's see."
He bypassed the underwear stage, and was suddenly standing there naked. They both looked the other over, and could not find anything different from what they remembered. The more he looked, the more excited his 'body' became. Finally they embraced, kissed, and then released each other.
"You feel exactly the same to me," said Walsh.
"You do too. Shall we?"
They did. Sometime later, lying there feeling the way he usually did after sex, Walsh had a thought.
"What's the bet Jane just watched us do all that?"
"Surely not."
A woman's laugh came through the room coms.
"Jane, how long have you been watching humans having sex?" asked Walsh.
"Since the day they turned me on."
Darlene lost it. Walsh looked at her.
"Maybe I should rephrase that?" continued Jane.
Walsh lost it too.
At about the same time, Tranquil passed as close to the G011 sun as she was going to. One of her side airlocks opened, and cargo droids flung out two long objects into a trajectory which would have them burn up in the sun. The two humans on the Bridge didn’t notice.
Twenty Two
Fred and Sarah arrived at the council chambers a half hour before the session was due to start
. Colonel Justine Henman had collected them both from Gaia Five, and brought them up in a brand new Lightning, set up for transporting VIP's in ultra-comfort.
Jane was a little concerned. Fred had lit up like a Christmas tree the moment he saw Justine. She began to wonder if she'd goofed in making Justine look mid-twenties. The boy was obviously infatuated, and this wasn’t a good thing. She questioned that immediately, given what she'd just watched the Walsh's doing, but put it aside for now. She'd need to do some thinking where Fred was concerned.
She led them into a small conference room next door, where they sat and waited for a few minutes. Fred peppered Justine with questions about herself, and Jane had to open a new file to start storing the answers in. The file was in an area with plenty of others, since each of her avatars had their own details stored so Jane would never slip up if asked questions. So far it'd worked, but now she had a lot more to work with, all working with curious people. The file quickly became a lot of files, as each new avatar met the people Jane wanted to monitor.
The door opened, cutting off the endless questions, and Jane entered using a male avatar this time, checked the room was secure, even though she already knew it was, and gestured Queen Liz to enter. Her SAS bodyguard waited outside the door.
Queen Liz stood there for a moment, looking at the two young people, seeing something of herself, and seeing an opportunity. There were no young people around her. Her husband was older, not that he was that much older, but it was enough. Her court were mostly considerably older.
She grinned at the two of them, and they grinned back at her.
"Call me Liz," she said in a hurry, before they could say anything different.
"Fred."
"Sarah."
Queen Liz sat, and looked at Sarah.
"I hear we have similar situations."
"Do we?"
"We both have young sons by the same father we don’t remember."
Sarah started crying.
"Hey, I didn’t mean to upset you."
"I'm sorry, I didn’t realize he was a womanizer. I was hanging on to 'I was special', but apparently I wasn’t."
"He wasn’t a womanizer. From what I've been told, I seduced him, after he saved my life. It was only the one time. And apparently I needed an heir, so I let it happen."
Sarah got a grip, and wiped her eyes. Liz looked at them both.
"You both look a little lost."
"A little?" exclaimed Sarah. "I'm not even sure what I'm doing here."
"You're here to represent your people's interests. Same as I am. Do you need some pointers? I might not remember what Britain was, but I do remember how to rule, and how the games are played."
"Games?" asked Fred.
"Political games. There's structure and rules behind the apparent self-interested greed."
"I'll take your word for that. I didn’t see any yesterday."
"You weren’t looking. In fact, it looked like the first session bored you so much you weren’t even paying attention."
Fred looked sheepish.
"Will you join us for lunch?" asked Sarah. "We do need help."
"Is there a decent restaurant on this station?"
"Yes," interjected Jane-Justine. "Should I make reservations?"
"Yes," said all three together, and they laughed.
"Can you come for dinner down on Gaia Five?" asked Sarah.
"Full Hunter dinner," added Fred, giving Sarah the look.
"I'll have Albert and George meet you there," said Jane, through Liz's aide.
"Albert is my husband, and George is my son," explained Liz.
"It's way past time you met our side of the family," said Fred. "Justine will make the arrangements."
Jane nodded to him.
"Session is about to begin," she added.
The five of them moved to the council chambers and took their seats.
There were quite a few new faces in the room, and the Chair took the time to get people introduced properly this time. Justine presented herself as both aide to Fred, and mouthpiece for Jane.
"Aren't you young for being a full bird Colonel?" asked someone.
"War time promotion," said Jane. "According to Jane, it happened a lot during the last six months, before we came here. A lot of junior officers who would never have expected to rise beyond Major, ended up with stars. And those of us a step behind them are now either rank of Colonel. Admiral Jane is perhaps the prime example of that. She started two years ago with no rank at all, and finished it with one star. Competence was promoted. Some fighter pilots ended up flying Dreadnaughts, or bigger."
"Are you armed Colonel?" asked someone else.
"Always," she responded.
She received some odd looks, since like the previous day, she didn’t appear to be wearing a gun. In fact though, she was wearing the twin Gatling stunners Jane had always worn.
"Let's move on," said Madame Chair. "We'll have a summary of how resettlement is proceeding, and then hear from each group petitioning for a planet or system."
Fred sat there and let the next few hours wash over him. Jane had made sure the resettlement of the most-needy was put into motion before she left, and it was proceeding like clockwork. He was surprised by just how good the presentations were. Unlike the day before, they held his interest. He kept up a steady stream of pings to Sarah on what was going on, and the two of them refined what he was to say in his presentation. As the smallest group, he was last.
Twenty Three
Jane had been monitoring space around the planet in G014 from the moment it came into scanner range. Early on, she'd made a note it needed improving. The speed of this ship meant things in the distance were not so distant now, and instead of getting hours' worth of forward information, it was down to less than an hour in this ship. It wasn’t that the range had changed, it was the speed the ship covered the same distance.
All the same, she was relieved to find the alien ship still in orbit, and nothing appeared to be going down to the planet. This didn’t mean there wasn’t some form of survey party on the ground, and probability suggested there probably was.
The navmap also showed two Corvettes. One of them was in G011, having come from G017. The other was in G013, having come from G021. Both were several hours behind her. The nearest battlegroup was some four hours behind them.
As they approached the planet, Walsh and Darlene entered and took their seats, Walsh in the XO position, and Darlene the Coms position. It left them separated by the usually never used Helm position, since Jane flew the ship from the Captain's chair. It still felt odd to her, using that chair, as if she was usurping the role of Captain. But The Captain was gone now, and she was it. Better get used to it.
Rather than settle into an orbit near the alien, Jane did a rapid series of different orbits, seeding comnavsats around the planet so she could be sure scans of the surface wouldn’t miss anything. If an alien was down there planting beans, she wanted to know which way up they were. The alien as well as the beans.
"Woah!" exclaimed Walsh. "What a rush!"
His wife looked at him expectantly. When he didn’t elaborate, she looked at Jane.
"He's coming to grips with all the information available to him now. He used to get summaries from Stryker. Now he has the full raw data to work with. You can access it too."
"No thanks. I've never been interested in ships, space, exploration, or planets."
Jane took the time to work through that astonishing statement.
"And yet you accompany him while he does all that?"
"Sure. Why not. It's what he loves. I can do what I do anywhere. And besides, why give up our sex life for weeks or months on end, when I don’t need to?"
"What do you do?"
"You could call me a perpetual student. I move from one subject to another, and back again, as the whim takes me. At the same time, I mentor students working on specific civilian qualifications. So I'm often working on my own papers while I'm helping others
with theirs. Which brings me to a question I've been meaning to ask. Is there a desk or office I can use?"
Jane sent her a deck plan, with the office in their suite marked 'Darlene'.
"Nice. You don’t happen to have some sort of library on this ship do you? I've got the work I was doing, but we didn’t think to back up our ship library."
Jane grinned at her, and sent her a link.
Darlene's eyes went wide as she checked through what was there.
"Where did this come from?" she asked, her voice full of awe.
"It’s the Hunter Library. It contains everything which could be collected and saved over the last thousand years. But most of it is unknown now, since the timeline is gone."
"So how do you have a copy?"
"The same way my memory was untouched I guess. The library is an offshoot of me, since I occupy a lot of ship computers. So everything stored on those computers was a part of me, and so remained unaffected. The Hunter archive on Gaia Five was unaffected as well, for the same reasons."
"Well consider me in academic heaven." Her husband laughed. "Not only is there many lifetimes of reading to do now, I can do it in a fraction of the time." She picked a book at random. "Wow. I just read War and Peace." She read another one with a similar name, and laughed. "And one called War and Peace, the Musical."*
She got up and hugged Jane as she sat.
"I had my doubts this was going to work. But this library and my new ability to read through it rapidly? You'll excuse me? I need to go make myself more comfortable."
"You don’t want to stay while we make contact with the aliens?" asked Walsh, knowing the answer.
"You do your thing dear, and I'll do mine."
She shifted into civilian clothes, and left the bridge grinning.
Walsh sighed. Jane raised an eyebrow.
"I was seriously worried about her coping with the change. It was an enormous shock for anyone to deal with. But she looks as happy now as ever I've seen her. What's this War and Peace she mentioned?"
"It’s a historical drama written back in the eighteen hundreds. Considered to be exceptional literature. Something of a huge book."
Admiral Jane (A.I. Destiny Book 1) Page 9
