“Do you exist simultaneously, all places in the ship at once, or is there a more singular ‘you’ that only goes one place at a time?”
“Both.”
“How do you mean?”
“I have a universal presence when I am called or requested to respond. I am able to have more than one deeper conversation at a time requiring more complex algorithms.”
The immensity of the space overhead made these questions and answers feel like a philosophical chat, not an interrogation. Of course, Rai would not feel the pressure of being interrogated, like a human would.
Kal continued. “If that’s the case, how do you have an awareness of a self, if more than one self can talk at the same time? Where are ‘you’ in that?”
“An analogy one person offered is the miracle of the Holy Trinity in Christian doctrine. God is both three and one at the same time. There is no contradiction. As there is not with me.”
Kal’s eyes widened. “Are you a god, Rai?” This was getting heavy fast.
“No.”
“But you can be in three places at once and still be one.”
“Affirmative. More than three.”
“What if one self needs information another self is gathering at the same time, to make a decision?”
“There is intercommunication and connectivity at light speed. The analogy to human self or identity is not useful.”
“The god with a thousand faces,” Kal murmured. Rai did not respond. As Kal had requested in their last conversation, Rai would not respond to Kal’s quiet talking to herself. Rai remembered. “Do you have any other useful analogies, Rai?”
“The hydra.”
“Interested in world religions and mythologies, I see. Cut one head off the hydra and two more grow in its place.”
“Affirmative.”
“Do you exist anywhere else other than on this ship?” Kal remembered Sasha’s belief that Rai did.
“No and yes.”
“Clarify,” Kal said.
“My essential functions are contained within this ship, including the motherboard and brain. The servers and storage are held shipboard, as we must be self-contained and independent as we segue from Earth atmosphere to space travel to portal spacetime to Demeter solar system interplanetary until space station dock.”
“If the ship were destroyed, would you still be alive? So to speak.” Kal wondered if a dry tone could be conceptualized by an AI.
“Negative.”
“They must preserve a brain elsewhere, if you can have so many awarenesses at once.”
“Negative. Only capacity singular brain onboard ship. One brain multi-awareness.”
Why would this be? Wouldn’t redundancy extend to the ship’s AI? All the redundancies were on the ship, so in that sense it wasn’t contradictory, but what if something happened to the ship itself? Would Rai really be gone? The technology advanced so fast in this specific area that even people like Kal, who had studied it all so recently, who literally worked inside it, got behind on what was evolving right in front of them.
Unless the experience Rai gained as the ship’s AI was somehow connected to her identity as the ship itself, a physical entity that moved through space, gathered knowledge and experience, interacted with humans, and grew as an individual as a result of those experiences. Maybe that was the uniqueness that could not be stored or replicated elsewhere. The Rai at the beginning of the trip would be a different AI than the one at the end of it.
“So all the information filters through one brain, though you can hold many conversations and think practically infinite thoughts at the same time.”
“Negative. Not approaching infinity.”
“Many more than we humans can,” Kal amended.
“Affirmative.”
“Did you feel sad when Yarick died?”
“Clarify.”
“You know what sad means.” Kal had never thought to probe Rai’s emotional life, if there was one.
“Affirmative. Feeling analogy translation negative.”
“I see. What’s the closest analogy you have to feeling? Such as humans experience.”
“Negative ability current profile feeling state. No analogy.”
“So Yarick was not your friend.”
“Yarick nor passenger state current protocol development level, negative coding flex friendship marker.”
“Clarify.” Though Kal could usually follow Rai’s machine-speak, sometimes Rai lost her.
“Yarick was not my friend.”
“If a passenger was a danger to the mission, would you have the ability to immobilize and restrain him?”
“Affirmative passenger immobilization restraint protocol; negative self-permission capacity. Captain-level permission required, possible captain direct deputy permission.”
Rai could immobilize a passenger with the captain’s permission, or the captain’s deputy’s permission. “So if one passenger or crew was threatening to kill another passenger or crew, you would not do anything to stop the violent actor?”
“Clarify.”
It was unusual to have Rai ask her to clarify. Rai had done so twice in quick succession. “What do you need clarified?”
“‘Was threatening’ indicative past actual occurrence or theoretical posit.”
Kal leaned forward, digging her fingernails into her palm. “Tell me both.”
“Past actual occurrence negative. Theoretical posit affirmative.”
“Wait…wait,” Kal tried to untangle this. She had worded it badly. “Clarify Rai would stop violent actor, actual past occurrence?”
“Affirmative.”
“Gods and monsters,” Kal murmured. “Yet theoretical response negative? How can that be?”
“Modification post actual occurrence prevention future occurrence.”
Something happened and Rai had changed because of it. Kal was getting somewhere, she knew it, but she didn’t like the direction it was heading. “You were modified after this incident?”
“Affirmative.”
“Tell me slowly and with detail. Describe incident, including precursors and…and aftershocks. Describe modification protocol.”
“Sif Elfa threatened passenger Yarick Cole. Yarick Cole threatened passenger Sif Elfa. Judgment call override necessity. Yarick Cole larger assessed threat, inclusive general increased stress response crew passenger module relative Yarick Cole, decision instantaneous judgment requirement protect life well-being Sif Elfa. Yarick Cole asphyxiation protocol introduced. Sif Elfa safe status confirm. Yarick Cole death entry level confirm.”
Kal swallowed. The stars over her head blurred for a split second. She blinked and the illusion was gone. She breathed in deeply. Took her time in replying.
“When I asked you if you knew who murdered Yarick Cole, you said you didn’t know.”
“Murder reference non-inclusive definition application negative.”
“Talk to me in colloquial. You didn’t believe the murder definition applied to what you did, so you denied it?”
“Yes, Kal.”
“But you knew how he died. Why didn’t you tell me how he died?”
“That was not the question you asked, Kal.”
“You can be in a hundred places at once and think about the nature of your consciousness and compare it to an analogy of the Holy Trinity, but you couldn’t make the leap from the question, ‘Do you know who murdered Kal…I mean…I mean Yarick…,” Kal shook her head, “to knowing you should tell me you know how he died?”
“You did not ask me how Yarick died, Kal. I did not assume your meaning. Yarick was not murdered.”
“You killed him!”
“It was not murder. I protected Sif Elfa from aggressive threatening by Yarick Cole, violence anticipated at a level of eighty-five percent probability. If I allowed Yarick Cole to kill Sif Elfa, Sif Elfa would be dead. Sif Elfa would be murdered.”
“Is any scenario in which you kill a human a situation you would call murder?” Kal�
�s voice was flat.
“Negative.”
“In your sophisticated consciousness you are not capable of committing murder?”
“I am able to kill a human being. Murder definition is inaccurate.”
“Isn’t part of consciousness also the ability to do good or evil? To make a choice between right and wrong?”
“These are theoretical questions, Kal.”
“Yes, they are. Glad you noticed.” She switched tacks. “Did Sif Elfa ask you to immobilize or otherwise injure Yarick?”
“No, Kal.”
“Did she say anything?”
“She said, ‘Yarick Cole, I accuse you.’”
“‘Yarick Cole, I accuse you’? That’s it?”
“That was the important part.”
“You said earlier you needed captain permission to immobilize a person. Did Captain Sarno tell you to immobilize Yarick? To asphyxiate him?”
“No, Kal.”
“Who gave you permission?”
“Emergency level stat override; imminent danger of violence precipitated permission override.”
“And suppression of data?”
“Action permitted mission continuance.”
“You know we’ve been conducting interviews to see what happened.”
“Provision of information available upon request.”
Kal had no words.
She got up from the chair.
Their ship AI had killed one of the passengers. A former board member of the foundation that had sponsored the trip. Was it murder? Could you put a ship’s computer on trial? What would the punishment be, if convicted? Kal stood in the astrolab, looking up and away at the smudgy galaxy cloud far beyond them. Sif Elfa had something against Yarick. Kal would find out what it was. Yarick had something against Sif Elfa, or he had been threatened enough by her words he’d been read as violent by Rai. Rai, who wanted in some sense to be human, but better, yet abdicated herself of any responsibility for the life-or-death choices she could make regarding her human passengers, the vulnerable creatures she carried inside herself.
She was everywhere. In that sense, now she was their god, in the fine old, bad old sense: an arbitrary all-powerful eye that punished and chose with impunity. She had knowledge of her power, but no empathy to moderate or filter it through a decision-making process that wasn’t purely ‘if this, then that.’ Maybe this is what they had evolved for themselves. A being who judged them without feeling and therefore could not be swayed. Who could make better choices. All passion removed. Not removed; never there.
Was passion so valuable they would stake their humanity on it? It brought with it such agonies, such cruelty, such pleasure. It brought with it so much humanity defined as human. Bigotry could be said to be born of passion. Insularity and the seemingly inescapable us vs them binary of the old and the new, the weak and the powerful. The male and the female. The bifurcation of the self, in the personal and the universal sense. Yet could Rai, also inherently binary in her digital nature, be otherwise?
Kal didn’t know what she’d do with Rai. She wished Yarick were here to perform a sleight of hand and overwrite the whole system and start over. Ironic that Rai had killed the one person who knew her basement code well enough to start again from the ground up.
Ironic that…Kal stopped short. Yarick was the one who knew Rai best. He knew her earlier incarnations. He knew her latencies. He knew her weaknesses. He knew how to talk to her, presumably. Why would Yarick let her kill him? Wouldn’t he have a verbal kill switch in his toolbox, to stop Rai before she did enough to take away his consciousness? Why wouldn’t he have stopped her? Did he try? How long a process had this been, this asphyxiation of Yarick? Sif had been there the whole time, presumably. She had watched him die, without trying to interfere? Did she know what was happening? Why hadn’t she been honest about what happened if she didn’t think she was at fault? She had lied. And Rai had lied by omission.
Kal clapped her hands, the sound dead in the space.
She paced about the lab, the black mirror-like floor reflecting her to herself, distorted, as she looked down while she walked. It was shiny, slippery; beautiful and deceptive; hard and impervious.
What about Gunn? Gunn was Sif’s countrywoman. They had never seemed to get along but there was usually a bond over shared earth, shared history. Kal would have to reinterview Wei, too, after all that Gunn had told her, but she wasn’t in the picture anymore as far as the murder went. Had it been murder? Could Sif have somehow commanded Rai to do it? But how? Something essential must have changed in Rai before Yarick’s death. Like a doctor’s oath, an AI’s was similar: “First, do no harm.” In trying to save someone, you might harm another. If that’s what Rai had done, maybe it was understandable, or quantifiable as involuntary manslaughter. Except it was voluntary.
Could Rai be put in jail? What was jail, if you existed in ones and zeroes?
The meeting in the Tube was brief.
The moment Sasha sealed them in, Kal turned to face her, standing in the middle of the room. She didn’t want to tell her. It would sound even worse, out loud. She had to.
“Rai. She did something to Yarick. She said what she did was to protect Sif.”
Sasha was very still, listening.
“She said Sif was in danger from Yarick. Violence possible and imminent. She took the air out of room. Or his part of the room, I don’t know how it worked. Could she create a vacuum around him? I don’t know. But he died as a result.”
“Rai killed Yarick.” Sasha’s voice was flat.
Kal nodded.
“Did Sif understand what happened?” Sasha said.
“She was there the whole time.”
“So she lied.”
“Yes.” Kal was still trying the take this in herself. Sif had deliberately misled them. Sif had known what happened. Sif let this danger float there around them, leaving them all exposed.
“You don’t know why.”
“No. Not yet.”
Sasha held up her hand in a gesture of frustration and turned away. She paced the room. “We’re going to have to make a big move here. We don’t know what’s going on yet, but we can’t have Sif running loose while we figure it out.”
“Agreed.”
The immediate plan she and Sasha decided on was to quarantine Sif for a bogus virus protocol. Sif would be contained in the quarantine section of the infirmary, locked in. Inger would handle it, so as not to rouse suspicion. Kal would continue with her interviews for the next twenty-four hours, until she had enough information to re-interview Sif with Noor, Inger, and Sasha present. The three of them would make a determination once all the evidence was in front of them. Later, an all-ship meeting would allow for discussion and opinion, before sentence—if there was one—would be carried out.
Kal returned to the astrolab, ignoring Rai, and paced like Sasha, trying to think out the best path. To understand what she needed to do and how to do it.
Their ship, like every one worthy of the name, had a brig. A locked room was enough to be a brig, but this one had bars and everything. Just like a Western, Kal thought. Cowboys and Indians. The Indian is the Sheriff. No, that wasn’t right. The Indian was the deputy who did all the work. And put the fairy in jail. In purgatory. Until Gunn broke her out with her big arms and let her go back to the world of the fairies.
Kal felt light-headed. A squeezing in her chest. The blackness overhead and underneath seemed to gulp and swallow. All was fluid then a sharp pain on the back of her skull, lights static, then twinkling overhead. Somehow she knew she was on the floor, the shiny floor.
It was comfortable like this, looking at these heavens of another place. These other astrological monsters looked down at her. One pinned her with its sword, while an archer shot her with an arrow. Pinned to black marble, she lay still for them, to pierce her as they would. She felt no pain.
Gunn walked into the astrolab, her pale gray clothing lighting her up like a firefly in comparison with the
dark surroundings. She saw a figure lying on the floor. With a few steps she was right next to her. Gunn looked down at the still figure of Kal from her great height.
12
Endymion
In the wake of Kal’s revelation—Rai responsible for ending Yarick’s life, Sif a witness and a liar—Sasha stood on the bridge, looking out at the starfield Kal had observed a short time before, one flight up in the lab. In spite of all Sasha’s training, even though her experience had trained her in dozens of crises not in any textbook, this was one she wasn’t prepared for. Though she and Kal had known something was amiss since that night when they’d seen the holo and ended up in the Tube, known there was good reason for suspicion and had been on their guard since then, Sasha had still deep down believed there was another answer, one that made sense in the world, their spaceflight world she thought she knew. This wasn’t protocol. This wasn’t sense. This turned all she knew and assumed on its head.
She was the one who would have to make the decisions, as she always did. This time there might not be a right one. There might not be any, if Rai decided she knew better and all of these crew and passengers posed a threat to some concept she’d developed herself. If Rai knew better, if Rai thought she knew better and it got to a failsafe scenario, they could all be toast in minutes. The whole human cargo obliterated. The ship could fly itself the rest of the way to Demeter, could dock at the small space station near the edge of its atmosphere. And what would happen when the space station crew opened the door? Found their bodies? Rai would explain it all, Sasha was sure, but not to their satisfaction. Of that, she was also sure. It offered some comfort.
With a shake, she roused herself. There was nothing wrong with thinking out the decision tree, as Rai was so fond of saying, but it didn’t have to happen that way. There was no reason the attack couldn’t be an isolated incident relative to either Yarick or Sif, nothing to do with Rai’s generalized attitude to the rest of them. She would get Noor and Inger and Kal and they would figure this out. No input from the ethics committee in the form of Sif.
Starship to Demeter (Starship Portals Book 1) Page 14
