Pel walked them through the station, loudly announcing facts and introducing them to everybody they passed. Even though he just gave their first names, combining that with the traveling cam malfunction could draw unhelpful connections for station security. “What are you doing?” Adda whispered at him after the third distracted scientist he interrupted.
Pel shrugged, sharp and quick and unlike his usual laid-back affability. “That’s how I’ve been here this whole time. Nobody’s been, like, surprised, right? That’s what I’m supposed to do. Keep it normal until we get to the ship.”
That did seem like an effective part of keeping his cover, she supposed. Every rushed introduction had been met with eye-rolling normalcy. The introductions also gave her the opportunity to search each person for exterior connectors to neural implants, and for the common symptoms of AI influence: distant stares, paranoia, and dissociation. The station personnel they’d met so far looked fine.
From Adda’s other side, Iridian asked Pel, “Do you actually like these people?”
“Kind of,” Pel said defensively. “There’s something to like in almost everybody.”
“There’s something to dislike in everybody too,” Iridian said. “Besides, you’re not fucking them over. Oxia is.”
“Hey!” said the Oxia pilot.
“Less talking would be ideal,” Captain Sloane said sternly.
“Well, due respect and all, but can you not talk about Oxia Corporation like that? They’ve done a lot for the universe, and—”
Adda startled away from a fast movement and the sharp snap of Sloane’s flapping coat. When she got a good look at the situation, Captain Sloane had the Oxia pilot pinned against the wall with a hand on his throat. The pilot’s skin was turning white around the captain’s fingers, and his eyes were wide and panicked. “Shut up until you’re needed,” Sloane snarled. When the captain released Verney and stalked away in the direction Pel had been walking, the Oxia pilot’s heels thudded back to the floor. They all walked faster to match Sloane’s pace.
So this is what the captain’s like without Tritheist, Iridian said over their implanted comms. Interesting.
What is? Adda asked, referencing the difference as well as the item of interest.
I used to think Tritheist’s barking and growling was all him, Iridian subvocalized. Her dark red lips moved slightly, but she otherwise concealed their conversation. It was a shame that documenting how well their practice had paid off would spoil the secret. Now I’m wondering if Captain Sloane encourages it. Sloane gets to keep cool while Tritheist looks like an ass-melon. Good arrangement, if you’re the cool one.
Adda did not keep her cool about the ass-melon crack. Pel looked at her with something like shock and pride, giggling down the hall and drawing the curious stares of serious scientists and engineers.
Adda’s comp buzzed so hard it shook her hand. She held on to Pel’s elbow, letting him guide her while she skimmed through a long list of alerts on her comp.
“Problem?” Sloane murmured on her other side.
“Several.” Adda skimmed the list a second time, then glared at the Oxia pilot. “Did you just send your credentials to the prototype?”
He raised his hands defensively, gaze darting between Sloane and Adda. “Hey, whoa, it was going to need them eventually! What’s the problem?”
“It doesn’t recognize them because I haven’t told it to.” And inaudibly to all but Iridian, Adda said, Putting the intelligence in maintenance mode would make the pilot transition harder now, not easier. We’re going to have to keep it unsupervised until Verney’s credentials are accepted.
“Ah, fuck,” Iridian said aloud, soon enough after Adda’s first assessment that everyone could attribute the reaction to that.
“Keep to the plan for now,” said Captain Sloane.
“We’ll need to move faster.” Adda used her grip on Pel’s arm to march him toward the docking bay she’d located on her station map. Spacefarers marked some station maps with ticks showing a distance from station north, but Adda had written a routine to translate that into something that made sense to her. She could adapt to spacefarer culture sometime when lives didn’t depend on getting to the right place quickly. “Pel, did you plug in that datacask I sent with you?”
She hated to ask about something so obvious, but one of the main reasons she’d sent him to the station before everyone else was to prime her access route to the prototype ship’s intelligence, and he hadn’t confirmed that he’d done it. Iridian and Captain Sloane could plant or even build an EMP generator, but making inroads with intelligences took time. She’d be dealing with two new ones here: the prototype ship’s copilot, and the station management intelligence.
“Yeah, first thing, so I didn’t forget,” said Pel.
Iridian said something positive about the workaround for his distractibility while Adda spoofed sensor conditions that would constitute an environmental emergency if they were real. Alarms blared and a prerecorded message erupted from speakers somewhere in the hallways. “Emergency. This is not a drill. Proceed to your designated docking bay for immediate evacuation.” The agendered voice delivered the docking bay numbers in a drastically different tone from the rest of the announcement. It betrayed the system’s age, which also gave it the vulnerabilities that allowed Adda to take control of some of the station subsystems.
Now that all the station personnel were heading for the exits, she could get into a workspace and find out what the prototype ship’s intelligence was doing with the Oxia pilot’s information. “Please don’t contact the prototype until I say it’s ready, all right? Let everybody get out of its docking bay. Pel, is the workspace generator still installed in the lab next door?”
“Yeah.” Pel gave her a confused look. “It’s too big to move without one of us seeing it go by.”
A crowd of people running while attempting to put on jumpsuits over lab clothes and thermoses ran past. Sloane’s crew put their backs to the wall to give them space. None of the station personnel invited the crew to join them, although they did give them confused looks. They’d have at least forty-eight hours of breathable air in their jumpsuits. The ITA had a ship within thirty hours of the station, if not closer. Adda’s information was as up-to-date as she could make it. The station personnel would be all right.
From several meters behind her, Verney inhaled like he’d taken a short nap while leaning against the wall. “Jesus, are they all going to be floating around outside? Might hit something.” The Oxia pilot’s voice was quieter and more distant than she’d have expected from someone talking to people this far ahead of him.
Adda opened her mouth to say yes. Captain Sloane said, “Quiet” before she could.
The permanent workspace generator in the lab near the prototype’s docking bay had a padded table one could climb onto and slide into the generator on a track, and a high-quality visualization setup which Adda didn’t have time to admire. She lay on the table and pressed a sharpsheet onto her tongue. “Iri, could you check the settings?”
Iridian woke the console out of sleep mode and frowned at the projected readout. “What’s it supposed to be set for?”
“Just make sure nobody’s profile is loaded, and that the connection shows the prototype intelligence’s designation.” Somebody else’s customizations would interfere with the ones Adda was going to make once she got into the workspace. The sharpsheet was lighting her brain on fire, in a good way.
“Yeah, looks ready for you.” Iridian smiled at her over the console, although her dark brows furrowed with worry. “Need a push?”
A short railing with grip texture affixed to the main body of the generator gave Adda sufficient leverage to pull herself into the generator’s visualization coil. “No. Closing up.” The front flap of the generator whispered over her ankles, then fell into position, blocking out the lab’s light and sound. Iridian would be outside watching her back.
In the workspace, a gray fog drew away from her. She stood
in a cold, quiet morning, surrounded by stones the color of rusting iron. Towering rock formations arched inward around her in frozen, sharpened waves. Fog hid the taloned tips of the taller waves. Her virtual art gallery tours had certainly added variety to her workspaces.
At the end of a long trough between the still waves, fog silhouetted a humanoid figure. Its arm, held straight out in front of it, met the arms of someone else, who seemed much more solid and . . . recognizable.
Over their implant connection, Adda subvocalized to Iridian: Where is the pilot?
The silhouetted figures turned toward Adda. “I sent the signal,” Adda said. “We need to talk.”
A copy of the first silhouetted figure, now a shadow without the fog to cover it, appeared closer to her, but still well out of arm’s reach. “You sent the signal.”
“Yes,” Adda told the prototype’s AI copilot. In documentation about this intelligence, the development team had called it Ermine. “We need you to come with us. Accept that man’s pilot credentials and we’ll start lift-off procedures.”
Ermine’s silhouetted head shook slowly. “He says there is no ‘we.’ ”
Adda stared. An intelligence would generally describe someone’s intention to leave a group in more of a summary than a direct quote. Worse, this one spoke like it understood what it was saying. “Stop talking to him.” Iridian hadn’t replied with Verney’s location, which meant he wasn’t with the rest of Sloane’s crew. He had to be at a console somewhere, or inside the prototype ship itself, to communicate directly with the prototype’s copilot intelligence.
The silhouetted head cocked to one side. “Why?”
“He’s your pilot. You talk to the pilot through the interface software.” That safeguard should’ve been built into all shipboard intelligences.
“He isn’t my pilot.” Ermine shifted position, somehow making itself larger in the process, the edges of itself hardening without being defined.
Adda focused on where a human’s eyes would be. “I told you to accept his credentials.” She forced herself into a calming breathing pattern. One of the first things intelligences learned about humans was that emotion made them vulnerable to confusion and manipulation. “Why didn’t you accept them?”
“Station intelligence has identified a need for additional background investigation,” said Ermine. “I am waiting.”
Its refusal to accept the credentials was within protocol. The prototype intelligence was taking advantage of Verney’s incautious approach to do something that it couldn’t do without him. Whatever it was, it wasn’t part of Adda’s operational plan.
CHAPTER 16
All known works, feeds, and records of Harmony Wong, “Mother of modern artificial intelligence development.”—3.8 gigabytes
Babe, I can’t find Verney, Iridian said in the best subvocalization she could manage while running through a strange hab looking for a lost idiot pilot. He was in the docking bay with the others a minute ago. Nobody saw him leave, but he’s not in there now. Captain Sloane’s ready to kill him and fly the ship without him. The captain would’ve needed pilot’s implants to do that, but the sentiment was definitely there.
Verney’s in the prototype ship, Adda whispered in her ear. Stay out of it.
Iridian stopped in the hallway between the docking bay and the rest of Jōju Station. The fuck is he doing in there? she asked Adda.
The intelligence invited him, in some way he couldn’t ignore, Adda replied. Maybe through his piloting implants. I’m trying to get him approved to fly the prototype. That will put the copilot intelligence under his supervision.
Can you get him out of there first? Iridian demanded. “Gods-damned manipulative AI . . .” She’d said that out loud, so the implanted mic would filter it out without sending it to Adda. Her comp might have transmitted it over the op channel instead.
Adda was still in the workspace, and who knew what she and the ship’s AI were up to in there. Iridian ran back to the docking bay. She had no intention of leaving a person alone in a ship run by an out-of-control AI, even if the person worked for Oxia. Barbary Station had been an excellent illustration of the damage an unsupervised AI could do, and that was before they’d brought the Apparition’s copilot, an awakened AI, into the situation.
“He’s on the ship,” Iridian shouted as soon as she got back into the bay.
According to Adda’s plan, they all should’ve boarded the prototype ship together and hooked up to the Mayhem to redistribute crew later. It should now be obvious to everyone that something was going sideways. Captain Sloane and Pel were on their way to the elevator that, on most stations, led to an observation and control room near the docking bay, but they stopped walking to look at Iridian.
Captain Sloane frowned. “Pel, come with me. I’ll need your credentials to get into the control systems for the bay. Iridian, see if you can manually open the prototype’s passthrough from here while I’m activating safety overrides. One of these may work.”
“Yes, Captain.” Iridian clenched her teeth and stalked toward the ship, listening for the whine and rumble of its engine starting. It was too easy to imagine those big domes on its sides as eyes watching her. She’d be on the ship’s cams anyway, so it really did “see” her, but that was more disturbing if she imagined eyes.
A whiff of burned flesh made her wrinkle her nose, a memory from the last time she watched someone stand too near a departing ship. This time is different, she told herself. The steady tramp of her boots as she crossed the bay helped her find a rhythm to slow her breathing. Jōju Station’s AI was supervised, even if its supervisor was currently floating in a jumpsuit in stationspace with the rest of the station personnel. The docking bay door would stay shut while she was in it, and the prototype’s AI wasn’t awakened. It barely even had room to lift itself off the pad, and it didn’t have the capacity to want to.
While she’d been digging herself out of memories, she’d entered the death zone if the ship launched. She kept moving toward it. “You stay on the gods-damned pad,” she muttered at the prototype.
Approaching it didn’t cause the door to open or the engines to fire up. Neither did pressing her palm to the manual release. The scanner flashed under her hand. It’d open for somebody with the right ID. She was imagining the heat she felt through her palm, or at least she hoped she was.
“Verney? If you can hear me, open up.” She listened for movement inside. All she heard was her own breathing. “The AI is lying to you. That’s what they do, lie to you so you’ll do things they can’t.” After another few seconds of nothing from inside the ship, she tried a different argument. “We’re already behind on Adda’s schedule thanks to you. If you fucking steal this ship from Captain Sloane there’ll be trouble between us, and you don’t want that. Hell, do you think Oxia wants that?”
A door inside the ship slid open and closed. It sounded more like an interior cabin door than one of the two heavy passthrough doors, so Verney was moving farther into the ship. “Pel, did your ID do anything?” she asked on the op channel.
“Nothing’s worked so far, but Captain Sloane’s still trying stuff,” Pel said over the op channel. “I thought Adda said this ship had a zombie AI.”
“It does. Like I keep saying, all AIs are dangerous, especially without a human holding the leash. Can you get station personnel in here?” Iridian asked Pel. “Some of them have to have clearance to open this.”
“Maybe. I’ll try,” Pel said. “I don’t know how to get them back on station with just jumpsuits, though. They aren’t supposed to reenter station grav.”
“They might be able to do something from outside.” Iridian peered at the door’s mechanism. There were only so many ways to build a passthrough door.
“What if they don’t want to help?” Pel asked.
“Then we’ll convince them to help,” Captain Sloane said in a tone that made Iridian swallow hard and refocus on the exterior passthrough door.
Iridian pressed something that
looked like a release lever at the base of the door. A five by five centimeter panel popped open to reveal the kind of implant connecter bridge consoles used, which didn’t help. Passthroughs had to be standardized to work with one another, and with habs across the solar system. The prototype’s exterior door looked just like every other passenger passthrough Iridian had seen. This was more Tritheist’s and Sloane’s area of expertise than hers.
The exterior passthrough door cycled open and Iridian snapped her shield out in front of her. The interior passthrough door stayed closed.
“Did that open it?” Captain Sloane asked over the op channel.
“The exterior door’s open.” Iridian lowered her shield. “Interior’s still shut.”
“Ah,” Captain Sloane said. “I’ll try something else.”
Come on, babe, we can’t get the prototype open, Iridian subvocalized. Are you doing something about that?
After another few seconds of silence, Adda whispered, Shit.
Iridian winced. Adda was usually so good at subvocalizing only what she meant to. If she were making mistakes, then the prototype AI had to be putting up a fight in her workspace. She was already tracking the Apparition, Jōju Station’s management AI, and who knew what other factors and metrics. If one of those AIs wanted to influence her, it couldn’t ask for better circumstances.
“Pel, get back into the bay,” Iridian said over the op channel. “This place isn’t like Barbary. As long as somebody’s in here, the ship can’t take off, and I want to check on Adda.”
Iridian took a few steps toward the room with the workspace generator and stopped just inside the door, watching the interior docking bay doors for Pel. Babe, what the hell is going on in there? Are you talking to the prototype’s AI?
“Yeah, okay,” Pel shouted across the bay. “I went in by the other door, but I’m here!”
Iridian spotted him and waved. “Stay here, yeah? Don’t leave until I get back.”
Mutiny at Vesta Page 24
