The Silver Liner: Takes Flight!

by Daniel Sullivan

  “If you are reading this, then you know that this file is encrypted. If you break the encryption, you will soon know what I am. This information must be kept from falling into the hands of unauthorized users. Before you proceed, know that this file is protected by security measures that will damage the systems of unauthorized users.”

  After that, it asked for a password. Great. I could get my brain fried if I goof this. Guess Fujita gets a new ship if that happens. Here goes. He was about to apply the code-breaker program, but he decided to try something else. He used the password that his wife had used. He remembered that she had used the same password for everything in order to remember it. It was an alphanumeric code with a few odd characters that, when translated into English, was “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” the song he and Selene had danced to at their wedding. To his great surprise and relief, it came up, ‘Password accepted,’ and the file opened. Now that’s weird, he thought. With that hurdle cleared, he began reading a very large data file recording who and what this woman was, finding the content both amazing and disturbing.

  Hayashi and Fiona had finished examining the woman and with shipboard scanners, all that they could determine was that she appeared to be a synthetic woman with a computerized brain. They both stared at each other in disbelief. Neither of them had a clue that anything this sophisticated even existed. Both doctors knew about the Escort-7 sex-bots, but those were easy to detect and they scanned as androids. The scanners had initially cleared this woman as human, seeming to contradict Mun’s initial observation. Nevertheless, it had become very clear that this woman was much, much more than they could have imagined.

  Kendrick entered the medical bay rather excitedly at that point. “She’s a gynoid,” the captain announced.

  Fiona nodded in agreement, as she looked over the now nude gynoid. “Not just a gynoid. She is a fully functioning synthetic human being. This is no sex-bot, Kendrick. Everything, and I do mean everything, appears to be real. I was sure her skin was real at first; Even the equipment here initially cleared her as a non-breathing human female with an inorganic mass inside of her head.” Doctor Kinsale gestured towards the scanning equipment. “More detailed scans revealed the mass to be a CPU and her skin, musculature, skeletal structure, nervous system and sensory organs to be fully synthetic. Everything that another human being would interact with is so perfectly replicated as to be virtually indistinguishable from a real person. Even her voice is produced with a diaphragm forcing air past vocal cords and it appears that her mouth is used for actual formation of words. She looks as if she is equipped to … please a man as well, if you get my drift.”

  “Sir, the implications of an android of this nature are, quite frankly, alarming,” added Doctor Yori.

  “Far more than you know,” replied Kendrick. “I’ve gone through her data files. They—whoever ‘they’ are, used the first gen Escort-7 model as a starting point, but as Fiona so eloquently stated, our girl’s no Escort-7.”

  “Then … what is she?” Doctor Yori asked the question very hesitantly.

  “She’s an infiltration/espionage/assassination unit. And she ain’t the only one, or the most deadly.”

  “You mean there are more of these … things?” Doctor Yori Hayashi’s contralto voice shot up to mezzo-soprano when she said this, a look of near panic on her face at the thought.

  “Yup,” replied Royce. “Our gal’s AI is based on the AI program of this ship.”

  The Japanese doctor shook her head, clearly troubled. “How … how is that possible?”

  “My wife wrote the program specifically for this ship,” Kendrick explained. “But they didn’t approve the funding for the ship. The AI program, however, did get approval—that was the only way that they were able to recover the developmental costs for the ship. Software apparently went into the military, sex-bot companies and who-knows-what else. Guess she’s the Bond girl.”

  They looked at one another, then at the gynoid, reeling from the implications.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “I used my wife’s master password to access the data. I can probably repair Selene’s AI with her, so we may be able to get back to full speed.”

  “You can do that?” Fiona sounded puzzled, though positive.

  “I copied her O.S. onto this chip in the back o’ my head,” he explained. “I can plug in the chip and install the O.S. in Selene. That should repair at least a good portion of the damage done by the virus. That’s assuming the ship’s computer is still good. Otherwise, we’ll have to try runnin’ it from her CPU, but that‘ll need repair too.”

  “How do you know?” asked Fiona.

  He held up the device that had impaled the gynoid’s skull. “Because her recorder said so. This thing was jammed into one of her chip sockets. It inserted a virus into her system. Apparently, it’s designed to rapidly erase and then burn out the CPU. She was able to transport her data to the chip and then burn the connection to protect it. She also tried to sever pathways to prevent this thing from burnin’ out her CPU, but she’s not sure if it worked. At the very least, I need to get in there an’ repair the sockets and some connections. I got all the technical data I need to do it on her chip, so I should be good to go.”

  Dr. Yori looked thoughtful for a moment. “I wonder why she was erased and dumped. I also wonder how they pulled it off. That tool had to be manually inserted and whoever did it just tore the cover off and jammed it in.”

  “According to the log, another, more advanced gynoid shot her with an ion pulse to immobilize her, jammed it in and then pushed her into the airlock,” replied Kendrick as he sat the gynoid upright. The synthetic girl sagged forward limply, just as an unconscious person would. Kendrick removed the socket capsule from her skull. Sure enough, the connections at the base of the capsule were melted. Kendrick smiled. “Hard to believe, but I actually have a spare one o’ these.”

  “Why?” Fiona asked with a tone of mild disapproval.

  “Cybernetics. Flying the ship. Spare parts for myself; ring any bells?”

  “Oh… sorry,” Fiona quickly apologized. “I thought maybe you had …”

  “That I had Escort-7 parts aboard?” Kendrick shook his head. “No; then I’d have made the same observation Mun did. I’ve never actually seen one; gettin’ real girls ain’t exactly a problem for me.”

  Fiona blushed, knowing that he was quite right about that.

  Kendrick carefully clipped the cables and removed the socket, then gently laid her back down on the table. “I may be able to have her up and runnin’ within a few days—sooner if I can manage it. Her OS is the same as the Selene’s. If her CPU’s still intact, we may be able to restore full functionality.”

  “I thought you said that all of her data was on that chip,” said Yori.

  “So far, only a record of what happened to her and of her missions is on the chip,” he corrected. “It’s weird. It’s almost like she stored memories that were important to her. There are some files that are encrypted beyond my ability to decode. We just need to decode the message and we may be back at Mach 30. Without the AI, I can’t safely go any faster than about Mach 5.”

  Kendrick was about to leave the Med-Bay when Fiona suddenly hugged him. She held onto him very tightly. Kendrick slowly put his arms around her and held her, unsure of why she was suddenly so emotional.

  “I know this has to be hard for you,” she began. “If you need me … or if you get her back … and need space …”

  “Fiona, my wife is gone,” he said, lifting her chin. “This gynoid really threw me for a loop, not because of what she looks like, but because of the exploitation of my wife that she represents.”

  “If you need me, Ken …”

  “I know, Fi, and that means a lot to me. This is gonna be hard enough as it is, so having you … it really helps.”

  She pressed her face into the leather jacket of his cyber-suit, the scent of the leather somehow made her feel more reassured.

  Kendrick set up a shif
t schedule for the bridge so that everyone would get a break and sent it to each member of the bridge crew, saying that he would take the next round, as Nozaki and the crew of the Fujin had been at their stations for several hours now. Still having a good amount of his late wife’s clothing, even after giving some to Fiona, Kendrick put one of his wife’s night gowns on the gynoid to give her at least some dignity.

  The captain then brought the gynoid up to the bridge. As he rode in the lift with her, he marveled at how much she even felt like his late wife. He had tried to remain true to her memory and aside from occasional dalliances and one attempt at serious dating that had gone nowhere; Kendrick had literally spent all of the time he would normally have spent on a relationship having a relationship with Selene’s AI.

  Now, that AI was crippled, possibly beyond repair. Kendrick was a fair hand with gadgets and not bad with computers, but repair of an AI was mostly beyond his capability. He held out hope that gynoid would be the key to saving his stricken ship. The bridge doors opened and the crew looked very surprised to see him carrying her.

  “At ease. You’ve all been fantastic, so go ahead an’ take a rest. I’ll plug in an’ see what I can do with the AI in this little lady. She may hold the means to repairing Selene’s AI.”

  “That is fortuitous!” Nozaki smiled broadly at the news.

  “Don’t get too excited yet,” Kendrick cautioned. “So far, it’s just a theory. Now to make it practice.”

  Once Mun vacated the gunner’s station, Kendrick took her to the empty seat. He laid her face down, lowering the back of the chair so that it was flat. This would put her head in a good place for him to do the work on her data port. The captain then plugged into Selene. May as well work while I wait, he thought. The bridge crew saluted him and filed off the bridge, leaving Kendrick to unravel the mystery of the beautiful gynoid.

  The Enigma cruised quietly as Captain Lorgen reviewed the status report, smiling. It had seemed that the past few days had been fruitless, as Enigma scoured the area for the Selene, in direct violation of Tracht’s orders. It had taken them longer than the hour he hoped, but his communications officer had made it worth the while. It seemed that Selene’s transponder was still broadcasting the embedded signal, and Mister Levin had picked it up. They now had a fix on Royce.

  It turned out that Royce had veered way off course in escaping, and was presently parked. The rock and roll captain would not be at Mars anytime soon. The ship was likely crippled without full automation, while Enigma had the most advanced tracking and stealth systems in existence. Enigma could not match Selene’s speed, but flying blind, Selene’s speed was effectively reduced to that which was within the bounds of full manual operations. Anything much over Mach 5 was likely out of the question, even for the immensely talented Royce, while Enigma could fly reliably at Mach 15.

  “I have a fix on them Sir. Two days at most,” declared his navigator.

  “Full speed ahead,” replied Lorgen. “Extrapolate his course, Mister Myers. I want to put us ahead of him; I have a little surprise that I’ve been saving for … just such an emergency.”

  “Yes, Sir,” replied Myers.

  Kendrick was disheartened to discover that the ship’s computers and servers were damaged to such an extent that the only option was to utilize the gynoid’s CPU. He had replaced the gynoid’s damaged chip socket with a spare of his own, and fitted it to her skull. He had even made a replacement cover, though it was not coated with the synthetic skin that covered the rest of her body. The gynoid was now ready for him to plug in and diagnose. Kendrick paused for a moment and considered that a virus in her CPU could potentially damage his own brain.

  He decided to place a buffer in between. The Captain then plugged her into the ship and designated her as an external drive. Kendrick ‘opened’ her virtually through his connection to Selene. He found that largely, her CPU’s programming was corrupted, though he found a function to reset her parameters to their original settings. Kendrick hoped that would do it, also hoping that he could decipher the coded beacon that was still going off. Initiating the reset, the sequence began. It took about a half an hour, but it was soon set to the original parameters. He then copied the files from the chip to the C.P.U. The AI’s O.S. began installing. Kendrick minimized the install program, removed the flask from his pocket and took a deep draught of the whiskey therein.

  “This‘ll take a while,” he said aloud.

  Heather floated into the bridge and found Kendrick with an unfamiliar woman. The woman was laid on a chair folded flat and belted in, and was plugged into the ship’s console.

  “Sir,” she said hesitantly.

  Kendrick turned and gave her a half salute/half wave, then motioned her to enter. “Come on in, Heather.”

  “If this is a bad time, Sir,” she began, but he shook his head.

  “She’s a gynoid, Heather; we found her floating in space. She may be able to get us up an’ runnin’ at full capacity again.”

  “Gynoid?”

  “Female android,” Kendirkc clarified. “Anyway, I think she can get us back to full speed.”

  “Sir, that’s what I wanted to discuss. The power couplings from the engines to the main reactor are severely damaged.”

  Kendrick set aside his charts and minimized all background programs. “How’d that happen?”

  “Most likely, it was the work of the virus,” she replied. “It was probably overloading the system but you stopped it, so were still going.”

  “That what did in the Fujin … I mean before Lorgen torpedoed her?”

  “Not a chance. You don’t get that kind of a catastrophic outcome from fried couplings; you just lose all power to the engines. Selene’s haven’t catastrophically failed, but continued strain and the damage already done have damaged the coupling enough that I had to take the engines offline. Being fired on didn’t help. Unless we have spares, we’re dead in the water.”

  “I ain’t an idiot; I have a spare. Never anticipated having all of them go at once and I’ve used the others recently. Couplings are on my shopping list for Mars. So I guess you’re tellin’ me we got only one engine?”

  “Yes, Sir,” she replied. “If we’re lucky, we may be able to get one nice burn outta all three, but we’ll have to take the engines offline immediately afterward.”

  “All right,” he said. “Repair the center engine’s coupling. Let me know when we’re ready to move again.”

  “Aye, Sir,” Heather replied with a salute, before floating out.

  Kendrick returned the salute, and then sat back down. This could potentially extend the trip a lot longer. He had not said anything about it yet, but they were going to have to ration the food if the trip were much longer than four months. Water was not a problem, thankfully a byproduct of the chemical processes that powered the engines. The ship recycled and filtered all of the water that was used. They could take two hour-long hot showers a couple of times a day if they wanted to, but food would be a problem.

  He put the thought out of his mind for now and got back to trying to restore the ship’s systems. The files from the chip were now fully installed on her CPU, so next, he tried to locate the beacon. It must not be tied directly into her CPU, he thought, or my resetting it would have turned it off. He shifted back to Selene, who was still receiving the beacon’s signal.

  “Record that signal,” the captain said aloud.

  “Signal recorded, Captain Royce,” came Selene’s voice, still synthetic.

  “Now decipher it an’ get me coordinates,” he said.

  “Affirmative, Captain Royce,” she replied.

  He hoped that she still had the capacity to do so. Kendrick went back to the gynoid. Something was happening in her CPU now that the chip’s files had been copied. With the virus gone, she was running checks. Kendrick heard the audible sound of air being taken in; she was breathing. He opened a status window and looked at what was happening. She was raising her temperature, breathing and preparing to circu
late internal fluids. She has a heart, Kendrick thought. Absently, he found himself stroking her hair. It feels real, he thought as he realized that he was doing so.

  “Signal recorded and deciphered, Captain Royce,” announced Selene over speaker.

  Something was odd, though. He heard the voice in… stereo? And though the speakers had announced it in the synthetic, cold voice, he distinctly heard a woman’s voice. He saw the gynoid inhale, then she spoke on her own in the warm, pleasant voice that had once been Selene’s. This time not over the speakers, but vocally.

  “Vocal test completed successfully.”

  Kendrick noticed that she was now warm to the touch. He looked at the diagnostic window. Her body temperature was now almost ninety degrees. He felt a pulse. Color came to her face and hands. Her hands began to clench and unclench rhythmically. Then, she began rotating her hands. He noticed that she was moving her feet.

  “Beacon located,” the gynoid said. “Beacon coordinates noted. Beacon deactivated.” The beacon ceased to transmit. “Backup CPU located; new data found. Downloading files now.”

  Backup CPU? She has two? The status window was flashing rapidly as the data downloaded. He realized that she was downloading the files … from Selene. Selene was the backup CPU the gynoid was referring to. He was about to interrupt the process, but the gynoid spoke again.

  “Wireless connection found.”

  Kendrick almost never used the wireless when piloting, only to monitor the ship when he was not at the helm. He could pilot wireless, but he found that he got better response from the hard wire.

  “Wireless connection activated,” she announced. “Wireless connection established successfully. Establishing connection with ship’s functions. Connection established.”

  With that, the monitors, sensor array and navigation systems all came online. It had worked: her AI was able to bring up the ship’s functions, but it was not as he had planned. Rather than her AI being copied to Selene, Selene was subordinated to her and was now being run by her. She reached up and unplugged the cable.