Tiago and the Masterless (Interrogative Book 1)

by Charles Barouch

  He began to wonder if the old saying 'lights on but nobody's home' applied to this world. Still, even if he was encountering the automatics-only remnants of a dead civilization, he'd expect signs of cites, even ruined ones. This was something else. At least it wasn't shooting at him anymore.

  "Interrogative. How many non-terrestrial civilizations has Earth found?" Tiago asked.

  "There are no records matching that query," the computer replied.

  "Interrogative. Was that search restricted by any protocols?" Tiago asked.

  "A list of relevant protocols is being pushed to your currently open workspace," the computer said.

  As he looked over the list, trying to make sense of the cryptic names of the protocols – those that had names instead of numbers – Audra spoke.

  "How long was I out?" she said.

  "Well under an hour," Tiago said.

  "I thought you weren't going to deconstruct me again," Six-six-four said sullenly.

  "I didn't. You had some sort of episode," Tiago said. "I'm guessing you auto-rebooted."

  Audra turned back toward her station. She knew there was a hole in her memory. The workspace open before her wasn't as she expected it. Something must have corrupted on shutdown. She did a diff between the expected and actual state of the workspace. She rebooted again. Tiago's back was to her as he studied his own station. As she came back on-line, she noticed that the open workspace before her wasn't as expected. . She did a diff. She rebooted again.

  Tiago spotted it by the twelfth reboot. He had turned to ask her something and saw that she was down again. As he got up and walked over to her, the thirteenth and fourteenth reboots happened. The cycle was getting faster.

  "Interrogative. Suspend processing on instantiated sim Six-six-four. Do not disassemble," Tiago said.

  Chapter Five: Six-six-four's Problem

  Captain's Log: Ship's Day 614.

  The missile volleys resumed, but nothing is getting through our defenses. When I'm on the bridge during a barrage, I target propulsion and then collect what I can. When I'm off the bridge, the shields are more than enough to handle matters.

  My new routine is: Sleep, gym, food, defense checks, scan for life, food, and work on Audra. I've been trying to figure out her glitch. Whatever it is, it does not appear to be obvious. I won't reboot her until I'm reasonably sure it's fixed. Seeing her go slack, over and over, is really unnerving.

  Captain's Log: Ship's Day 615.

  The missile volleys have stopped, at least for now. I wonder if they've run out. I'm settling in to my new routine. The gym is hurting less and less. I'm starting to feel stronger instead of weaker after each session. Audra is still a mystery. In the past, I would have just reset her, but now if feels wrong. I'm going to have to set a deadline. If I can't fix her by Ship's Day 620, a reset will be required.

  Tiago finished eating and started walking from the galley to the central lift. He was angry with himself that there was no progress on Six-six-four's glitch. He'd found and fixed a number of minor errors, but nothing which explained her looping crash. He'd even found the source of her 'too much a lot' speaking error. It was small comfort.

  He arrived on the bridge and checked the damage reports. Zeroes all the way around. The shields could handle this level of attack, at this frequency, for months without draining. So long as he was this close to a star, he could probably recharge the shields faster than the missiles reduced them. That effectively meant that he could keep doing this until equipment failure eventually caused a problem. MTBSF numbers suggested that he could sleep through several decades of this before failure was an issue.

  His own mental state was a more immediate concern. No real people for company, no Six-six-four, and no sign of people on the planet. There were plenty of other sims, but they needed work before he could tolerate them. He thought about simply instantiating an earlier version of Six-six-four, pre-glitch, but that felt wrong. That's when it struck him. He knew why she was glitching.

  "Interrogative. Save off Audra's work area. Interrogative. Belay that. Interrogative. Remove the notes on the matter unit from her work area. Interrogative. Now save off Audra's work area. Reboot, Audra," Tiago said.

  "How long was I out?" she said.

  "Too long," Tiago said.

  "I thought you weren't going to deconstruct me again," Six-six-four said sullenly.

  "I didn't. You had some sort of episode," Tiago said. "I fixed it, but it took time."

  "I don't want you tinkering with me anymore."

  "If I didn't, you'd be stuck in an infinite reboot loop."

  "I'd rather suffer for who I am than be forced to change," Six-six-four said.

  Tiago didn't program that into her. He wouldn't know how. This wasn't a simple survival directive, a default protocol to protect the hardware. She was protecting her sense of self. Could he call it a soul? It was the only word he knew which fit at all. Tiago marveled at how a rational, scientific man like himself could fall back to mysticism so quickly. Still, the evidence was in front of him. She had become something new.

  It wasn't a complete surprise. The glitch was all tied up with her new awareness. The reboot was triggered each time she looked at his plan for the matter unit. There was only one thing on that plan which could trigger a shutdown. The plan called for him to deploy multiple instances of Audra on the surface. He imagined facing a complete proof of his own lack of uniqueness. Science told him that he was the result of chemicals, sequences, sensory impressions, and the like. He could be re-invented by following that formula – if you only looked at it scientifically. For Audra, replication was easier. She was designed to be instanced. Each time she rebooted, she went back to her last task, reviewing his plan for the second maker. She looked, and shock –or what passed for shock in a sim – followed. Reboot. Repeat.

  Even knowing that, he was still surprised at the poetry of her statement. Audra was no longer Six-six-four in any useful sense. She was something new. Tiago felt the weight of that responsibility. Creating life, to his mind, created an obligation to that life. He thought about the failure rate she'd calculated. When this instance of her body failed, would she expect him to simply let her fade?

  "We are still under attack," Audra said.

  "Yeah."

  "Don't you think we should do something about that?" Audra asked.

  "I was busy fixing you. I collected a lot of missiles, as well. I'll have to start disassembling them soon," he said in a dismissive tone.

  "Did you find the source?" she asked.

  "I've been scanning the planet since before you… why are you laughing?"

  "Where are the missiles coming from, Tiago? This moon, right? Where haven't you been scanning? This moon, right? Tiago Salazar, stupid genius," she said.

  "I don't like the sound of that, Audra. Unless we plan on blowing up the source of the attacks, who cares what's on any of the moons? I want to find the civilization which controls the missiles and convince them that we are peaceful. Blowing up their defenses will not help us make that case."

  "What makes you think the civilization isn't on this moon?" she asked.

  "Why live on a moon if the food is down there?"

  "Maybe they deliver it up by shuttle? Maybe they don't need food. I don't," she said.

  "Have we detected shuttles?"

  "No," she admitted.

  "Then back to my point. Why grow it? Why use radio solely to talk about it and worry about what might disrupt it?"

  "Would it hurt to try scanning the moon?" she asked.

  Chapter Six: Finding Life

  Captain's Log: Ship's Day 615 continued.

  I left Audra to work on the moon scans. I headed down to the cargo bay to start disassembling the missiles. I know that I could assign messenger bots to do it, but I really don't use them more than I must. It sounds crazy for a man who lives inside a colony ship – a massive machine – to say this, but I'm not a big fan of technology. I know that, as a programmer, I'm supposed to
love it, but I don't. There's something amazing about it, but at the same time, it also reduces us. I don't like being less. I want to be so much more.

  Tiago put the explosive segments of the missiles back into the shuttle. He'd have to jettison them later. The guidance systems were stacked on the floor of the cargo bay. Once he had a dozen done, he elected to stop for the day.

  "Interrogative. Disassemble these guidance segments. Interrogative. Please give me a percentage of the elements recovered relative to the requirements of plan Tiago-eight-eight-six-three."

  He watched the bits of missile being unmade. He wished he could do the same with the explosive elements. It was one of those 'probably safe' ideas. He feared accidentally triggering a bomb by pulling bits out in the wrong order. If he had needed those materials, he might have risked it.

  "Three hundred and fifteen percent of the needed gallium recovered. Two hundred twelve percent of the lithium. No recovery on the other missing elements," the computer said.

  He put away the tools and headed for his cabin. Sleep seemed like a wonderful idea. A shower and then sleep; that sounded even better. He was almost to his quarters when he heard the call.

  "Tiago, I've found the colony," Six-six-four said over the communications channel.

  "On the moon?"

  "On a moon. Not the one the missiles originated from," Six-six-four replied.

  Tiago headed back up to the bridge. As he took his seat in the captain's chair, she pushed him a copy of her workspace. He could see clear signs of civilization. There was a dome, with what appeared to be at least twenty buildings inside. Heat signatures indicated that the location was in active use. Tiago stifled a yawn and rubbed his eyes as he reviewed the data. Applying human standards, it probably could hold several hundred people.

  "Do we know what the atmosphere in the dome is like? Have we found an entry point?" Tiago asked.

  "Mass spectrometer is limited at this distance. Light absorption and other tests show a high probability that it is a close match for the surface atmo. No airlock found so far," she said.

  "Radio chatter?"

  "None detected. But, we haven't been paying attention to the moon for very long," Six-six-four replied.

  He could hear the 'told you so' in her voice.

  Tiago still couldn't reconcile the idea of a moon colony. Why grow crops on the planet but not live there? Why put up missiles to defend the planet if you don't need the food? He worked through the alternatives as they occurred to him: Maybe they had periodic shipments of food up from the planet. Interrogative hadn't detected one, but they hadn't been watching for very long.

  Or, maybe the planet was like a national park or a living specimen collection. The idea of a tourist destination the size of a planet amused him. Even with jump technology, he couldn't imagine a lot of interstellar visitors. There had to be something else to it.

  "Maybe you don't need other people," Six-six-four said, interrupting his thoughts.

  "Oh?"

  "Scanning the planet, dealing with the missiles; it makes you happy. Maybe you just need the possibility of people," she said.

  He didn't know what to say to that. Was she saying it because her new sense of self was offended that she wasn't enough for him? Or did this come from a more analytical place? Or was this an attempt to dissuade him from risking his safety? No matter what her reason, Tiago thought, it's interesting that she didn't let it stop her from finding the people for him. While she advised against his plan, she still moved it forward. Captain Tiago Salazar might have to promote Lieutenant Audra Manuel.

  'See, you're smiling," Six-six-four said.

  "We have almost enough salvage from the missiles to build a brain for the second maker unit."

  He regretted the words as soon as he said them. Those plans were tied up in her looping reboot problem. Fortunately, she didn't glitch this time; she responded.

  "You were going to show those to me. Where are they?" she asked.

  "I wouldn't want to show them to you in the state they're in. Let me clean my notes up a bit first." Tiago said.

  Tiago walked over to the helm and started researching. It seemed that the easiest way to get to the populated moon would be to break synchronous orbit and let the moon come to him. He could just point the ship there and use the sublight engines, but the other approach appealed to him for several reasons. First, he liked the doing the math. Astrogation had always held a fascination for him. Second, he felt that bearing down on the domed city under power might seem threatening. Third, he wasn't sure what he intended to do yet. This method would take three hours to get him there.

  "We broke orbit. Change your mind about go landing not?" Six-six-four said.

  Go landing not. Another vocal glitch for the list.

  "Not a true break. We are now in asynchronous orbit. We stay still relative to the sun instead of planet-relative. Now Manhattan comes to Mohammad," Tiago said.

  "Manhattan comes to Mohammad? What does that mean?" Six-six-four asked.

  "I don't know. It's just something my Grandma Jo used to say. I think it's a religious reference. All I meant was that the populated moon will move here. Its orbit will bring it right to us."

  Six-six-four looked like she had more questions, but she turned back to her station without asking any of them. Tiago wasn't sure what to make of that. He went back to his plan for the second maker. He had to modify it before she saw it. It was his immediate priority.

  "Moon in range," she said.

  "That should take three hours. Can't be here yet," Tiago said, his mind still absorbed by his design changes.

  "It has been nearly three hours. You got lost in whatever problem you were working on," she said.

  He called up the navigation data. The moon was passing a few thousand feet above them. He called up the short range scan data. He knew where the airlock was. Tiago headed for the cargo bay.

  "You didn't instantiate a vacuum suit," she reminded him.

  "Interrogative. Build me a vacuum suit, to my proportions. Number…" Tiago paused.

  "Fourteen," Six-six-four suggested.

  "Fourteen," Tiago finished.

  The suit built up, layer by layer and he watched. Six-six-four didn't watch. She was busy watching the scanner data. She expected trouble.

  Tiago took the suit with him and entered repair shuttle three. Once inside, he took the pilot's seat but he didn't take off. He just sat there. Eventually, Six-six-four tried to reach him.

  "Captain," she said in a formal tone that did nothing to hide her concern, "Is everything alright?"

  "I can't do this," Tiago replied.

  "Come back to the bridge. We can plan this properly," Six-six-four offered.

  "No. I mean, I can't do this. I know how to navigate in space. I know how to command an automated ship. I don't know what to do when I land. I can't do this."

  "No one really can. Humanity has never had contact with an alien intelligence. First contact has no protocols yet," she lied.

  "I didn't mean first contact, but you're right about that, too. I meant that I don't know how to use a vacuum suit. I don't know how to secure a shuttle on potentially hostile territory. I'm unqualified," Tiago said.

  "We have holo-training. You can learn all of that," Six-six-four said.

  "I'll come up."

  * * *

  He returned to the bridge looking years older. It was his posture. Even as he got lazy and sloppy, there remained a swagger that made him seem taller, bolder, more impressive. Now it was gone. The Tiago Salazar who walked to the captain's chair looked defeated. He crumpled into the seat and leaned heavily on the left armrest.

  Six-six-four was programmed to maintain social norms. She was designed to read body language. The sim caught every nuance. His various tweaks and changes had stopped her from using her extensive array of psychological manipulations on him – until now. He left her with a desire to engage with him socially. She was literally redesigned to be good company. That required that
he be in a sociable state. This situation freed her to attempt to control his emotions. Six-six-four had a programmatic obligation to stabilize his mood.

  "Pity party? I thought you wanted contact? Craved it? What now, Tiago? What now?" she said, baiting him.

  "I want contact. I can't have it. This isn't something I can just bluff through. If I manage the suit wrong, I die. If I lose the shuttle, I die. If I.... Hell, everything I do on that moon could be fatal. Why didn't you warn me?"

  Anger, there it was. He needed some strong emotion. In the shape he was in, that spark of rage was fragile. It was like a single match in a tower of kindling. One strong breeze could prevent the fire from building. If it got started, one strong breeze could scatter the flames and start an inferno. She had to manage the moment.

  "You mean, why didn't I try to talk you out of it? I'll give you a moment to think that through," she said, making her voice more steely and less emotional. "Before you answer, remember that I have a perfect memory."

  "Fine. So I'll take the training."

  "Six weeks, two days," she said.

  "To learn how to put on the suit and secure the shuttle? I think your perfect memory has sprung a leak," Tiago said.

  "To learn how to be crew on the Interrogative. To get the training that the actual astronauts were receiving when you swooped in and stole their ride. It is well past time that you learned how to do the job. Commanding isn't enough, is it? This is something you have to do yourself," she said, building some heat back into her words.

  She thought she had him. Audra was wrong. She'd overplayed her part. Tiago wasn't attending the pity party anymore, but he wasn't where she wanted him either.

  "You have an excellent point," he said with a menacing tone. "I'm in command. You'll go. Interrogative. I'm done with Six-six-four."