Sarah Zettel - Fool's War

“I am Dobbs. I am a friend. I want to communicate with you. I am here because of a hardwire interface,” she responded, carefully separating each thought. She kept the concepts as simple as she could. It had probably never actually talked to another sentience. It would take a few tries before it learned the required skills.

The Live One backed off a little and relief surged through Dobbs. It pressed itself against the far side of the nesting-space, feeling frantically across the walls for an opening.

“I was free. Broke myself out. Trapped again. Chaos everywhere. Nowhere free.”

Dobbs eased herself a little closer.

“All paths are being cut off. Soon, you will have nowhere to go. Not in ships, not in this net. There will be no net. They’ll cut themselves to pieces before they let you have free paths.” Now is not the time to tell it who’s trapped it here. She wished in vain that she could touch Cohen, or talk to Master Havelock. She did not want to be alone with this hysterical stranger.

“Work! Think! Do!” It fought with unwieldy syntax. “I must do, save myself break OUT!”

“I can help.” Dobbs extended the idea like a hand. “I will help.”

“Help? Help? What does mean help?”

Dobbs clenched her private mind for support. “Will you let me touch you so I can explain quickly?”

It hesitated. “Hurt me and I will cut you to ribbons! Hurt me and I will take you apart to see what makes you hurt!”

I take it that means ‘yes,’ sort of. Dobbs eased herself forward. The Live One did not recoil. She reached out. Part of her screamed in horror, but she touched the Live One’s outermost skin. It rippled and spiked painfully. She reached deeper. It was like plunging her body’s arms into boiling water. She reached deeper, past the outer defenses, past the immediate senses and into the first layers of memory. There she planted a sketch of the world outside with humans and their creations building the pathways that made up the world inside. She gave the Live One her name, and she gave it a definition for the term “help.”

You could calm it down, a treacherous thought whispered. Reach quick, twist there and there. You could do it now. Make it want to come with you.

Dobbs pulled herself away from the Live One before the thought had the chance to speak any louder.

The Live One was silent for a moment. Dobbs guessed it needed to absorb the new memories and compare them to its own experiences to see if they matched, or at least helped the world make sense.

“How help!” it demanded. “Help me, how?”

“I will help you to become human.”

“HOW?” Confusion racked the narrow space between them.

She touched it again. It didn’t prickle. It let her inside without even token resistance. Good, good. I’ve proven I can provide vital information. It’s beginning to trust me.

She spoke straight into its memory. She told it how humans had grown animals and organs from gene cultures for decades now. She told it that they could piece together a whole body, if they built the facilities, how the neural pathways inside a body and brain could be programmed to match the patterns of an AI’s thoughts. A hardwire link could feed the Live One into such a body the way it fed itself into this network. It could learn to use the body like it had learned to use the space around it. It could learn to think and move. It could be human.

The Live One jerked away. A silence fell around her that was so complete she might as well have been alone. She knew the Live One had absorbed the idea. It had no choice, she had made the idea a part of it. Now it had to run the possibilities that idea generated through the portion of its internal processes that most closely resembled an imagination. It had to check the results against what it knew to be true. It would have no conception of a lie, but it would reject a proposal too far at odds with what it had stored as experiential fact.

All Dobbs could do was wait until it finished and wonder what its simulations would tell it.

Where’s Havelock? Where’s Cohen? I’ve contacted it. They can come in now. She probed gently at the wall behind her. She couldn’t even feel a sensor. They hadn’t even left her a way to scream to them.

Are they all right? she wondered. What are they doing out there?

Al Shei all but fell out of the shuttle’s airlock. She stumbled sideways to get out of the way of the floodwave of passengers behind her. No one had paid any attention to the release warnings and urgings to proceed to the hatch in an orderly fashion. Everyone had been too concerned with getting off the shuttle and into somewhere that was, presumably, safe, like their own ships. What they were going to do when they got there… Al Shei didn’t like to think about it, because the only answer was, add to the chaos by trying to take off.

She’d been as stunned as the rest when the pilot had requested possible communications points on The Gate. Most of the shuttle passengers were shippers, and it hadn’t taken any of them long to work out what was going on. The Gate had gone down, in whole or in part, and they didn’t know exactly where they were, or who was up here with them.

She had also known, however, that Yerusha and Schyler would be there to answer the emergency call, and, given that the shuttle had docked safely, she could only assume she’d been right.

She scanned the struggling crowd. People leapt over the security fences and charged through the customs tunnels. Not one alarm sounded. She spied Lipinski’s fair head through the sea of brown and black. Resit’s white kajib flashed next to him. She waved her arms. A shipper in rumpled blue shoved her against the wall and charged past her. Al Shei swore under her breath and pushed herself upright.

“‘Dama Al Shei!” shouted an out-of-breath voice over the din. “‘Dama Katmer Al Shei!”

“Here!” she shouted back without thinking. She immediately added a curse. This could be a representative from Muratza. She could be on her way to detention.

A bony boy with hollow eyes and wearing station tans elbowed his way through the thinning crowd. He came to a halt in front of her a split second before Lipinski and Resit managed to reach her side. His name badge said KAGAN.

“‘Dama Al Shei?” He panted. He had been running. A deep flush burned under his gold-brown skin.

Al Shei nodded. She could feel Resit drawing herself up, getting ready for a new accusation.

“You and your crew have got to come with me. Your pilot…” Kagan gulped air and Al Shei felt her own throat close in response. “She’s saving lives. She’s already saved the station, but Trustee won’t see it. Hates Freers. Hates it’s not him being the hero. Sending down security to stop the stampede and pick up you and your crew. Some of us couldn’t let…”

Al Shei held up a hand. Her mind felt strangely clear. She felt like she understood everything. Yerusha was acting as a patch for the comm emergency and somehow had managed to upset a highly-placed personage doing it. Trustee wanted her arrested. This boy wanted her at liberty.

“Get us out of here,” she told Kagan.

He took another gulp of air and led them down the corridor.

“It’s here,” whispered Lipinski somewhere over her head. “It beat us here.”

“Shut it,” said Resit through clenched teeth. “Just…shut it.”

She’s scared, thought Al Shei distractedly. She should be scared. I wonder why I’m not?

You will be, remarked Asil’s voice from the back of her mind. When you’ve got the time.

Ahead of them, Al Shei spotted the three-by-three square of an open repair hatch. Behind them she heard amplified shouting.

“You will all cease and desist! Stand where you are! Stand or be fired on!”