System Failure

by Joe Zieja

  “I’m not ‘acting like’ anything, Rogers,” she said. “I’m just saying I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  Rogers blinked. “I have never, at any point in all of this, claimed that I had any idea what I am doing. In fact, I distinctly remember standing in the middle of the bridge and declaring to everyone around me, several times, that I do not know what I am doing.”

  A tense couple of days after the pirate negotiations had devolved into a frat party, Rogers had finally extricated all of his crew from the local drunk tanks. Mailn, after sobering up for a day, had asked to talk to him. Now that she was talking to him, however, Rogers wished she was back in the drunk tank.

  “What are we going to be doing while they’re out there fighting?” Mailn asked.

  “Hell if I know. Right now we’re on standby, waiting for orders from Holdt. The Viking is supposed to be setting up schedules for shore leave for the rest of the marines, and I’ll have someone do the same for the rest of the fleet. There’s no reason for everyone just to sit around on high alert until we get new orders.”

  Mailn, who had started pacing back and forth, rounded on Rogers.

  “So Sjana is just going to go out there and fight our battles for us while we sit here and sip cocktails on the beach?”

  Rogers hesitated. “I mean, that doesn’t sound exactly bad, does it?”

  Seeing that this, perhaps, was not the time for jokes, Rogers got up from his desk and walked around it so that he could speak to Mailn face-to-face. This was pretty easy, since Rogers was kind of short and so was she. Despite Rogers’ lack of desire to explore feelings and deep, personal problems at the moment, he knew he owed Mailn a lot. He also knew that there wasn’t anything he could do about it at the moment. The situation was bigger than any one person, or one marriage, or even one military unit. It was almost weird how big it was getting; Rogers was starting to feel very small.

  “Cynthia, I can’t just make the fleet assemble and go do something for the sake of doing something. I have a lot of lives to consider here, not just yours and your wife’s.”

  Even as the words left his mouth, they felt weird, like he was chewing someone else’s gum. But, he realized, it was the reality of things. He really did have thousands of lives under his command, and eventually Holdt was going to tell him to send them someplace to fight. An uncomfortable hatred for the Jupiterians bubbled up underneath the surface of his emotions. This was their fault. The droids, the subsequent near-invasion of the Thelicosans, his rapid promotion from civilian to acting admiral. All of it was because of them.

  “Rogers, are you listening to me?” Mailn asked.

  Rogers shook his head, which he always thought was a very cliché thing to do when coming out of deep thoughts, and cleared his throat.

  “No,” he said.

  She glared at him.

  “I’m just being honest,” Rogers said. “If I had lied and said yes, you would have done that stupid schoolteacher thing and asked me to repeat the last thing I said to you, and we’d still be where we are right now.”

  Mailn sighed. “I swear . . .”

  “Look,” Rogers said, putting a hand on her shoulder. She slapped him away. “You’ve given me good advice in the past. You even taught me how to duck, which may be the only physically demanding thing I’ve ever been competent at. So let me give you some advice in return. Let it go.”

  Her face contorted into disbelief and shock, and it looked as though she was about to punch him in the face. He knew this because he was developing an uncanny ability to predict when women were about to do this to him. She was about to do this to him. Rogers stepped back.

  “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t taught you how to duck at all,” she said. “I’m glad you think this is just something that I can let go. I’ll go ahead and just forget about all of this and continue saluting you and calling you sir—”

  “You never do either of those things.”

  “—and letting King Rogers the Hero be the expert of everything—”

  “Not a single accurate word in that sentence except my name.”

  “—and I’ll just wait for my wife to die alone out in space while we sit here and do nothing.”

  Rogers sighed, sitting back on the surface of his desk. Breaking eye contact with Mailn, he stared at a spot on the floor and thought for a long moment. Was there, in fact, something that he could do for her, or for Sjana? Likely not. The pirates would have to rely on their own strength and motivation to win their skirmishes and break the blockades. Rogers didn’t know the overall battle plan for them—in fact, he was pretty sure nobody did—and he couldn’t request reinforcements or try to find another way around all of this. It was the best plan. Surely Mailn saw that?

  He was missing something, he realized, and he’d said it at the very beginning of the conversation. Mailn had known what was going to happen when she took them to meet the pirates in the first place. Rogers knew her; she wasn’t stupid. There was no way she didn’t foresee the outcome. Maybe Mailn wasn’t actually looking for him to do anything at all except listen to her for a little while.

  Looking up at Mailn, he gave her a small smile. “Anything else?”

  The sergeant seemed a little taken aback by the question. She fumbled for her words, clenched her fists a few times, and in general looked like she wanted to spit or set the building on fire. Finally her whole body relaxed.

  “I’m going back to the Flagship,” Mailn said, turning around to walk away without preamble. “Unlike a certain captain I know, I have better things to do with my time than screw around planetside and make stupid jokes while the world burns.”

  “Which captain is that?” Rogers asked. “They sound like someone I’d like to have a drink with.”

  Mailn gave him the finger behind her head.

  “See?” Rogers shouted after her. “Not a salute!”

  M Pathetic

  It was a testament to the maturity of his moral compass that Deet understood, with some levels of vagueness, that droid fu was a dangerous, spectacular skill not to be used except in the most dire of circumstances.

  Then again, the moral compass he was so proud of appeared to be experiencing some magnetic interference. For one, Deet didn’t understand why they would call it a moral compass instead of a map. From what he understood of morality, there wasn’t always one right answer that might be considered a parallel to true north. For another thing, maps showed that there were an almost infinite number of ways to get to the same destination, and no two paths were alike. That seemed a lot more like morality to Deet.

  Right now he was trying to see any of the infinite paths that allowed him to turn the human in front of him into paste and still be considered an upstanding member of the 331st. It seemed mutually exclusive, but Deet was confident he could find a way.

  “I’m sorry,” the security guard said. “I just can’t go around letting every droid I see walk into the secure area, no matter what you say your boss’s name is. You require a security clearance and the need-to-know credentials before I can let you in.”

  “I do need to know,” Deet said. “I need to know very badly. And I’m not ‘every droid.’ In fact, I think I’m the only droid.”

  This was true, of course. By some miracle of policy, Rogers had been able to keep Deet activated while every other droid was being systematically dismantled and inspected by every artificial intelligence technician on the planet. With the information Deet had supplied about their operating system—specifically the part about being expressly designed to kill every human in a ten-mile radius of their position—everyone had decided that it would be safer to leave them deactivated until they could completely redesign their OS.

  Which, of course, meant forever, because the only organization smart enough to do that level of design work was Snaggardir’s.

  “No,” the guard said again. Deet beeped.

  All around him, the plethora of military activity really gave the impression that there was somethi
ng very serious going on. Deet had seen the business of humans bouncing around the command deck of the Flagship, but that had clearly been an attempt to appear busy rather than moving toward actual objectives. There had been a lot of saluting and “yes, ma’am”-ing, but not a significant amount of work. Commander Belgrave had described it as people “justifying their existence,” but Deet wasn’t quite sure he understood that yet. He was still coming to terms with the idea of his own existence. He could work on justifying it later.

  Regardless, there was nothing around him to indicate that any of these people were engaging in meaningless work to impress other members of their species. The men and women moving in and out of the secure area looked haggard and worried. Nearly everyone was studying The Art of War II: Now In Space, which Deet was sure was not the correct way to go about this war. He had also learned, however, that humans had some kind of design flaw that forced them to repeat past performances and hope for different futures. Despite how many times they were told they needed to learn a new way to fight, they spent their time studying the old way instead, because nobody was ready to teach them a new way to fight.

  To their credit, Deet thought, it was clear they weren’t just looking busy. They were busy. Doing the completely wrong things, of course, but they were busy.

  That left Deet stuck. After combing through millions and millions of data points using publicly accessible and sensitive-but-unclassified information, Deet had practically exhausted the sources of information available to him. The data servers on Merida Prime, specifically the ones in Admiral Holdt’s office, had been of greater value than the wider net—anything was better than a jammed 331st data server—but it still wasn’t enough for Deet to build a big picture.

  What picture was that? Deet wasn’t so sure. And not knowing was starting to really bother him. He knew all kinds of minutiae about Snaggardir’s corporate filings, tax evasion lawsuits, and even some things about its personnel, but so far he’d been totally unable to unearth, or even infer, information about their artificial intelligence program. Dr. Mattic was a complete mystery.

  Some of the information he’d uncovered would help the war effort, undoubtedly, but it still wasn’t what he was looking for. In a way that Deet wasn’t sure he could analyze, there seemed to be a deep divide in his circuits about his responsibility to Rogers and the crew, and his curiosity about his origins.

  Like humans, though, he was rapidly learning to ignore that complicated moral conundrum. Much like he was trying to figure out how to ignore the moral conundrum of it being illegal to protocol 162 the military police security guard preventing him from gaining entry into the classified vault of Meridan Naval Headquarters.

  Now here he was, trying to talk, rather than kill—he was still nearly certain that would be wrong—his way into a secure area where highly classified intelligence information was stored, discussed, analyzed, and then promptly ignored by anyone who made high-level decisions.

  “Look,” Deet said, which he never really understood. If you weren’t pointing at anything, why did everyone always tell other people to “look” before saying something poignant? “The info is just sitting there. Nobody is going to actually use it. Why not let me in there to have a peek? I’m very important to the war effort.”

  The security guard seemed unimpressed. “If you were that important to the war effort, they would have given you a clearance.”

  “What do I have to do to get a clearance?”

  “Well, you need to fill out a complicated security form, MNF-21, and—”

  “Done,” Deet said, bringing up the form and auto-completing it with as much fake information as he could. He didn’t want to compromise the fact that Merida technically still classified him as “disposed,” which allowed him some level of anonymity. “I can transfer it to your datapad immediately if you give me your contact code.”

  The security guard actually laughed, though Deet didn’t see anything funny about being both brilliant and efficient. But wait . . . could Deet really be considered brilliant?

  No, Deet thought. No time for that now. But wait . . . was he really thinking?

  [EXPLETIVE] focus, D-24!

  He knew he was serious when he used his full name with himself.

  “There’s a lot more to it than just a form. You have to do a background check.”

  “That shouldn’t take long,” Deet said. “I have no background.”

  “Other than being built by the people we’re fighting?” the security guard quipped. “I’m not stupid.”

  “Well, what else do I have to do?” Deet asked. His logic circuits were possibly beginning to get hot. Was this rage?

  “Be a human.” The guard shifted his rather large disruptor rifle to his other shoulder. He was definitely compensating for something by carrying that, Deet thought. It was probably the fact that his human arms were much less effective at killing people.

  “That seems racist,” Deet said.

  “You don’t have a race,” the security guard said, leaning back in his chair. For a security guard who was, ostensibly, guarding highly sensitive information, he didn’t seem very alert. In fact, none of this seemed very secure at all. It was just one guy in a chair standing in a shack outside of a fenced-in area. “In any case, all of this is way above my pay grade anyway. You have to get a clearance, go get it validated, go get read into all our special programs, submit a bunch of forms, then go get a badge with your picture on it that goes beep when you put it against the magnetic strip here.” The guard pointed to a small box next to the gate. “No beep, no entry.”

  Deet beeped.

  “Nice try,” the security guard said.

  “What if I told you that my analysis of the information stored in this facility was crucial to the war effort?”

  “I’d probably refer back to the beginning of this conversation where you just sort of came up and asked me if you could ‘come in and have a look.’ ”

  “[EXCREMENT ],” Deet said. He was getting better with lying—for him, it was mostly about giving half-truths that were open to interpretation—but he hadn’t yet mastered the idea of lying with forethought. Constructing a long string of untruths to fulfill an objective was still a very difficult thing for his logic circuits to handle.

  Deet allowed a moment or two to pass without saying anything or moving. In his experience, prolonged and unexpected periods of silence made humans feel awkward. It also made them feel like they needed to fill the silence with something, which often made them say or do stupid things. He realized after a few seconds that hoping the guard would spontaneously open the door just to be rid of him was a little far-fetched. Was there something more human-like he could do in this situation that might help him achieve his goals? What would Belgrave advise?

  “So,” Deet said.

  The guard gave him a blank look.

  “How do you feel?” Deet asked.

  “What the hell are you on about?” the guard said. “I don’t have time to play married couple over here right now. I’m supposed to be manning this security post and making sure people without clearances, like you, don’t get in.”

  Deet nodded, something he often forgot to do when acknowledging a human’s speech.

  “And how does that make you feel?” Deet asked.

  “Didn’t I just say I don’t have time to talk about my emotions right now? I’m busy. You know, sitting here. Doing nothing with my life, and watching people walk up to that little box. Hearing beeps over and over again and saluting officers.”

  Deet nodded, slower this time. “That sounds really hard.”

  “It is hard!” the guard said. He put his disruptor rifle on the table beside him. “People think it’s easy to just sit here all day and nod at people. My chiropractor slaps me every time I go into her office!” Leaning forward, the guard put his face in his hands. “It’s like nobody cares at all.”

  Amazing, Deet thought. This empathy [EXCREMENT] really works!

  “So can I
go inside now that we’ve clearly established emotional rapport?”

  The security guard, who may or may not have been crying, looked up and cocked his head at Deet.

  “No. You don’t have a clearance.”

  Deet threw his arms in the air, which, though completely unnecessary, was very satisfying. He understood why Rogers did it all the time.

  “Well [EXPLETIVE] your [MATERNAL FORNICATING] [POLITICAL FIGURE].”

  Deet walked off quickly, a motion he had come to understand as “storming,” which bizarrely involved no precipitation at all.

  “I thought you cared how I felt!” the guard shouted after him.

  Ignoring the security guard, Deet went back to where the public transportation system let people off and examined the situation. A large, ominous fence stretched around the perimeter of a small collection of buildings, each of them protected by their own layer of security. The guard with whom Deet had been conversing was watching over the entrance to the compound, but each of the doors looked reinforced. The amount of beeps coming out of the area, and the way that humans kept awkwardly bending over to touch their chests to the wall, indicated that there were more card readers on the doors inside the compound.

  Deet had observed a lot of human activity in the short time after his activation, so he thought he had a fairly good sense of what he could do in this situation. In almost all instances, when interpersonal relationships failed, there was only one option.

  Deet was going to have to blow up the compound.

  No, wait. That wasn’t going to solve anything. If he was going to be able to plug into the network terminals and start accessing classified information, he was going to have to keep them intact. That was just common sense. The fact that he had even considered blowing everything up was indicative of how humans were really beginning to influence his processing.

  Pausing for a moment, he contemplated this. Did the fact that he had just considered doing something very stupid make him more human? He would have to ask Belgrave. Ignoring evidence and persisting in stupid courses of action did seem to be a defining human trait.