System Failure

by Joe Zieja

  What was Deet supposed to do in this situation? He couldn’t just ruin everything he’d worked for. He’d put his dongle in so many network terminals. Petabytes of research on Dr. Mattic, Snaggardir’s, the artificial intelligence program. Laws of robotic ethics. Everything. Deet’s programming made it very difficult for him to do things that didn’t have a point. If he signed his life back over to Merida, it seemed as though all of this would have been pointless.

  “Belgrave,” Deet said. “I am conflicted.”

  “Oh?” Belgrave said as he flew the ship in a gigantic combat engagement. “Do tell.”

  “Well, I believe I may be on the verge of killing thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people in order to further my own goals of delving into my consciousness and my creation.” Deet held up a hand to stop Belgrave from interrupting, and Belgrave’s mouth closed. “I know. I know it seems a totally logical and worthy cause, into which I have poured countless processing cycles. It would be utterly absurd to waste that time just to increase the odds of victory in this battle.”

  “That wasn’t—” Belgrave said.

  “And yet,” Deet continued, looking out the window like he thought he was supposed to do when contemplating something relatively serious. “My extensive research into morality indicates that this sort of exchange is considered bad. But of course . . . I want those other things, and I don’t really know most of the tens of thousands.”

  “Well, it’s just that—”

  “There is a nonzero chance that even if Jupiter wins this war, I will still be able to achieve my own objective.” Deet thought for a moment. “As a matter of fact, the chances might be much higher if they did indeed emerge victorious . . .”

  Deet trailed off—something he knew you were supposed to do sometimes, particularly when a subject required further thought. This subject did not, exactly. It was kind of a closed matter.

  “I see. And how does that make you feel?” Belgrave asked.

  Deet attempted to answer, but couldn’t. The question didn’t make any sense to him. What did it matter how he felt? Maybe Rogers was right; he couldn’t feel anything at all. Yet every time Deet attempted to answer Belgrave’s question, he couldn’t. Something was wrong. Like a logic loop that refused to terminate. What was going on?

  “Bad,” Deet said finally, the word crackling as it came out. “I feel bad.”

  Belgrave opened his hands, fingers spread. “Empathy.”

  A new world opened to Deet. Branches of Boolean logic expanded in his databases in a way that scarily reminded him of a computer virus. He couldn’t stop it. He didn’t want to stop it. It wrapped its way around his operating system, changing things that he didn’t think could be changed.

  But most telling of all—the thing that let Deet know he’d really come upon something strange, different, and spectacular—Deet knew that what Belgrave had just described to him was, in no way, empathy.

  “Get me Corporal Suresh in Supply,” Deet called to Brelle.

  “Um, opening a channel, sir. Metal guy.”

  “Suresh,” Deet said once the line was open. “I just sent you some paperwork that you need to process immediately.”

  “What’s this?”

  “This is a copy of MNF-166: New Inventory Acquisition Form. I am alpha-numeric designation D-24, and I am the acting commander of the Joint Force. All ships: execute the following orders on my command.”

  On Efforts to Not Die

  Rogers felt a mixture of lost, claustrophobic, and really fat. It turned out that crawling was as exhausting as it was uncomfortable, and beads of sweat rolled down his face, making soft pitter-patter noises on the metallic surface of the vent, like a light rain on a tin roof. He could feel his hot breath coming back at him from the enclosed space, and it didn’t smell the best. It’s not like he didn’t brush his teeth, or anything, but it had been a long day, and the ham and cheese sandwich from Infinite Sandwich Hour wasn’t helping.

  “Damn it, where am I?” Rogers muttered, struggling to look through the vents to see the maps on the walls. Without a datapad, he had no little “you are here” arrow to tell him at least what room he was crawling above. He’d slung the disruptor rifle over his back again, not anticipating making any more amazing, once-in-a-lifetime shots, but it kept getting caught on the top of the vent. Every part of this was annoying.

  He could see the map of the station, sure, but his location didn’t update in real time, forcing him to guess where he was based on what he could see through the occasional opening. Rogers felt like he’d been crawling for hours, but given his crawling ability, it’s possible he hadn’t even left the Retro Room yet. Sounds of fighting still reached his ears, but they were muffled, and it was difficult to tell what direction they came from.

  Then, suddenly, it wasn’t very difficult to tell what direction they were coming from, because they were coming from directly below him. A peek through a very narrow grate showed him a small platoon of Jupiterian soldiers charging forward, guns blazing. One of them took a shot to the chest and collapsed in a heap on the floor, and the others were out of his view in the next second.

  Unless there was a rogue element of Jupiterians staging a counter-uprising uprising—a concept that was very confusing to even think about—that meant that either Tunger or the other half of his team was on the other end of that firefight.

  He heard a pair of guttural yells that he immediately recognized as the war cries of both Keffoule and the Viking, and a few more shots, followed by a crunching noise. Then silence. Rogers held his breath, waiting.

  The three women came into view, and he nearly melted through the grate in relief. He opened his mouth to shout to them, but the alert message that had been playing on the PA system for the last few minutes started up again, making it impossible to hear himself think, never mind talk to anyone from the inside of a ventilation system.

  “All Jupiterian forces, to your battle stations! All Jupiterian forces to your battle stations! The enemy fleet has entered the sector.”

  “They have battle stations?” Keffoule asked. “Who has battle stations anymore?”

  “Of course they have battle stations,” the Viking said. “How the hell are you supposed to go to battle without any battle stations?”

  “Exactly!” Rogers yelled.

  They all looked up at him.

  “Oh, hey, guys. Yeah. It’s me. I’m crawling through the ventilation system. Long story. Mind giving me a hand here?”

  The Viking raised her rifle and shot the grate, sending sparks flying all around the inside of the vent. One of them landed in Rogers’ beard, causing a moment of complete panic and also a really terrible smell.

  “Hey!” Rogers cried. “It’s me!”

  “I know it’s you,” the Viking said. She shot at him again.

  A moment later, the grate dropped off the ventilation shaft, and a groaning noise accompanied the entire section of metal flopping toward the floor. Rogers made very distinguished, brave, yet high-pitched noises as he was unceremoniously regurgitated back onto the surface of Snaggardir’s corporate headquarters station.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” the Viking answered. She offered him a hand, which he took, and yanked him back into a standing position as though shaking out a wrinkled sheet.

  “You’re missing someone,” Mailn said.

  “Yeah,” Rogers said, not meeting her eyes. “Tunger did something really stupid for someone even more stupid, and I’m not sure if we’re going to see him again.” He took a deep breath. “I think the best thing for us to do is to get off this station as soon as possible. We can talk about all of that later.”

  “What about Szinder?” the Viking asked. She motioned her shoulder forward and looked down the sights of her rifle as she led them through the hallway. “Did you see him?”

  Rogers laughed. “See him? I killed him!”

  She stopped, looking sideways at him. “You did not.”

  “Don’t believe it,
” Mailn said.

  “Highly unlikely,” Keffoule said.

  “I did too kill him,” Rogers said, pouting. “I pointed my rifle through the grate of the air vent and I shot him in the middle of a sentence. I saved Tunger’s life.”

  “But you just implied that Tunger was dead,” Keffoule said. “Are we talking about Schrödinger’s Tunger here? Because to be very honest I didn’t think you were at an intellectual level to discuss that sort of—”

  “Holy crap, you guys, can we just focus on getting out of here?”

  In response, Keffoule shot a Jupiterian security officer who had come running around the corner all by himself. For all their organization, the Jupiterians didn’t seem any more skilled at fighting wars than the rest of the galaxy.

  “We don’t need to get out of here,” Mailn said as they began walking again. “We need to find the rest of the Jupiterian leadership.”

  “What?” Rogers said. “Why the hell do we need to do that? One of guys with the keys is dead, and the Galaxy Eater device has been completely incapacitated thanks to my ingenuity. We’ve done our job and it’s time for us to get back to the fleet.”

  Keffoule casually delivered a spinning back kick to the faces of a pair of Jupiterian militiamen who came out of a door without looking. “Didn’t you hear me over the datapad? The Jupiterians have figured out a way out of the Fortuna Stultus galaxy. At least, we think so. If we allow them to retreat we could be looking at another Galaxy Eater incident in half a century.”

  “She’s right,” Mailn said, as she put the butt of her rifle into the exposed abdomen of some guy who was trying to sell them a timeshare. “We have an opportunity to end this. It’s our duty.”

  “Our duty,” Keffoule agreed.

  “Ha,” Rogers said. “Both of you said duty.” When nobody else laughed, he cleared his throat. “So what do you propose we do? Start interviewing everyone that we don’t kill or incapacitate until we find Sal and his crew?”

  “That was the plan,” the Viking said as she killed or incapacitated someone. “You have any better ideas?”

  Rogers thought for a moment as he did absolutely nothing to help their fighting effort.

  “Actually,” he said, “you’re not going to believe this, but I think I do. I need to talk to a droid.”

  • • •

  Commanders Zaz and Rholos paced across the bridge, shouting commands into their headsets with droid-like rapidity. The battle outside had escalated into a full-on “furball”—a word that the pilot Flash had acquainted Deet with only moments earlier—and what had once been the home of the largest conglomeration in the galaxy had turned into the scene of the fight for humanity’s survival. Deet had the distinct feeling that, despite everyone attempting to keep up appearances, almost nobody knew what they were doing.

  But Deet knew what he was doing. Not only did he now feel like he could basically emote his way through war, he’d been watching R. Wilson Rogers, the most experienced fleet commander in the galaxy.

  “Everyone panic!” Deet said. “I want absolutely everyone in this fleet to run back and forth with their arms in the air. You!” He pointed at the communications tech, S1C Brelle. “I want you to set something—anything—on fire and roll it down the hallway.”

  Brelle responded by sitting down and trying to pretend that she hadn’t heard anything. In truth, it seemed like nobody was listening to his commands at all. Well, except for the rest of the fleet, now that he’d transmitted and authorized them.

  “I’m not entirely sure this strategy will be the one that leads the fleet to victory,” Belgrave said. The helmsman sat in his chair, lounging as though there wasn’t a war going on outside, munching on a piece of imported Thelicosan toast. Rogers had gotten everyone hooked on it.

  “Based on my observations, some form of this has worked literally every single time,” Deet countered.

  Belgrave shrugged and took another bite of toast. Looking at the crumbs falling all over the man’s uniform, Deet wondered if he would ever be able to taste anything. Perhaps it was something he could work on once he left the Flagship and joined up with the rest of his family.

  Family. He kept calling them that, but he didn’t even really know them. What was this going to be like?

  “Woo-hoo!” came a voice over the radio. Flash, who had endangered nearly everyone in every attack run he’d participated in, buzzed past the bridge in his third Ravager. The previous two had been destroyed while Flash had attempted to do barrel rolls while still inside the launch bay.

  “Battle is that way, Flash,” Deet said.

  “The battle is wherever I am, nerd-o-tron!” Flash called, and shot a missile at absolutely nobody.

  “How’s it going over there?” Rogers asked over the radio.

  “Oh, just [EXPLETIVE] fine,” Deet said. “Pretty sure we’re winning. And just so you know, there are about six dozen transport ships leaving the station you’re on, heading for the edge of the sector. Also, I’m basically human now.”

  “Whatever,” Rogers said. “Deet, is it possible for you to hack into the system and see if you can identify the passenger manifests on any of those ships? We’re looking for Sal Snaggardir.”

  “Oh, sure. Let me just put my military genius and deep, deep feelings to the side here and let the giant space battle fight itself for a few minutes while I run inventory.”

  “Yes or no, Deet?”

  “Yes, [REAR ORIFICE]. Stand by.”

  Deet plugged in, sent out some signals, routed them through the systems of the other droids on the Rancor and other ships in their portion of the fleet, and was into Snaggardir’s main headquarters building within a few moments.

  “Well?” Rogers asked.

  Deet beeped. “Is Sal Snaggardir a common name?”

  “I’m pretty sure there’s only one in the galaxy,” Rogers said. “Why?”

  “Well, that’s very interesting, because there is a Sal Snaggardir manifested on every single ship aboard the main station of the headquarters complex. Enjoy!”

  • • •

  “Crap,” Rogers said. He sucked a breath through his teeth, thinking. “Okay, new plan. We’re not going to the hangar.”

  He put Mailn’s datapad, which she’d given him, into his holster and switched his disruptor rifle to his good hand. His shoulders automatically set themselves back; his gait widened. He felt powerful, deadly. He could shoot things, and they would die.

  “This way,” Rogers said, turning down a short hallway that ended in a large, unguarded door. “We’re going to the brig.”

  “You know,” Mailn said. “Far be it from me to judge, but if there was an effective place for the commander of a fleet to cower in fear until the battle was over, it would be the brig.”

  Rogers looked at her. “A man tries to jump out the trash chute one time.”

  Mailn shrugged.

  “We’re not going for us. We’re going for . . . someone else.”

  “Who, exactly?” Mailn asked.

  “The big boss’s secretary,” Rogers said. “I think I heard Szinder say her name was Hiri. I knew every damn detail about Klein’s life when I was his exec. She might know which ship is actually the one we’re looking for.”

  They opened the door to the brig, which really surprised the three Jupiterian guards standing at the check-in desk. They were further surprised when, as they tried to draw their weapons and/or press the alarm buttons, three women blasted them across the room. A bizarre silence followed. Rogers had attempted to join in, but only afterward realized that his rifle’s safety had been engaged.

  Either nobody else noticed or nobody else cared, so Rogers blew at the end of the rifle’s barrel and slung it back over his shoulder. He walked around to the other side of the check-in desk and started tapping at the terminals to see if he could bring up any information on the current guest list for the Snaggardir’s brig.

  Keffoule, the Viking, and Mailn all proceeded to wordlessly secure the area while Rog
ers tried to access and search the database. One of the personnel who had been guarding the reception desk—if a jail could have been said to have a reception—had left his ID card in the reader located on the computer terminal. If Rogers remembered his security training correctly, this was tantamount to handing victory to the enemy. In fact, he could remember one of Ralph’s posters saying something like TAKE YOUR ID OUT OR THE ENEMY WINS. Rogers kind of missed Ralph; he hoped he was doing well in his completely inaccessible hole in the middle of the Flagship.

  It became immediately apparent that Rogers was wrong in his assessment of the vacancy status of the Snaggardir’s brig. It was packed. In fact, nearly every cell was occupied—some with more than one person, even though the room description clearly said it contained only one bed.

  “What the hell is this?” Rogers muttered to himself.

  “What’s going on?” the Viking asked, sidling up beside him. He could smell her sweat.

  “Hi,” he said, forgetting what he was doing.

  She stared at him blankly.

  “Oh, right,” Rogers said, coughing. “The fate of humanity.” He pointed at the screen. “I couldn’t really tell from the map, but this place is huge. Look at all of these rooms.” He gestured at the computer screen, which was now showing a higher-resolution display of the detention facility. It extended for nearly a half mile, with conveyor-belt walkways connecting several expanding hallways. “What does Snaggardir’s want with a detention block the size of a corporate office? And why is every cell full?”

  Keffoule, who had just finished incapacitating a trio of security personnel who apparently hadn’t gotten the message that it would have been better just to lie down on the floor and cry, stepped behind him as well.

  “Perhaps the Jupiterian revolution wasn’t as widely accepted as we were led to believe,” Keffoule said. “And, based on the construction date of this facility, I might guess that Sal Snaggardir always thought there’d be some dissent. He was prepared.”

  Rogers looked at her sideways. “Since when do you know so much about human nature? I wasn’t convinced you were human.”