Scott Westerfeld: Evolution's Darling

She fell into a sulk. She watched restlessly. Her fingers flexed anxiously under cafe tables as warriors passed, unconsciously imitating their gestural codes. Her respiratory rate increased whenever high-ranking officers went by.

She wanted to join.

The AI made forays into the planetary database, learning the rules and customs of martial communication. And, in an academic corner of its mind, it began to construct a way for Rathere to mimic the amazons. It planned the deception from a considered, hypothetical distance, taking care not to alarm its own local-mores governors. But as it pondered and calculated, the AI's confidence built. Designing to subvert Isaah's wishes and to disregard local proprieties, the AI felt a new power over rules, an authority that Rathere seemed to possess instinctively.

When the plan was ready, it was surprisingly easy to execute.

One day as they sat watching the passing warriors, the minder began to change, concentrating its neural skein into a stronger, prehensile width. When the filaments were thick enough, they sculpted a simulation of the amazons' garment, grasping and shaping Rathere's growing breasts with a tailor's attention to detail, employing the AI's encyclopedic knowledge of her anatomy. Rathere grasped what was happening instantly, almost as if she had expected it.

As women from various regiments passed, the minder pointed out the differences in the yaw and pitch of their aureoles, which varied by rank and unit, and explained the possibilities. Rathere winced a little at some of the adjustments, but never complained. They soon settled on an exact configuration for her breasts, Rathere picking a mid-level officer caste from a distant province. It wasn't the most comfortable option, but she insisted it looked the best.

Rathere walked the streets proudly bare-chested for the rest of the layover, drawing stares with her heliophobic skin, her ceaseless monologue, and her rank, which was frankly unbelievable on a fifteen-year-old. But social reflexes on that martial world were deeply ingrained, and she was saluted and deferred to even without the rest of the amazon uniform. It was the breasts that mattered here.

The two concealed the game from Isaah, and at night the minder massaged Rathere's sore nipples, fractalizing its neural skein to make the filaments as soft as calf's leather against them.

The deal was done.

Isaah made the trade in a dark, empty arena, the site of lethal duels between native women, all of whom were clearly insane. He shuffled his feet while they inspected his contraband, aware that only thin zero-g shoes protected his feet from the bloodstained floor of the ring. Four amazons, their bare breasts absurdly warped by cone-shaped metal cages, swung the weapons through graceful arcs, checking their balance and heft. Another sprayed the blades with a fine mist of nanos that would turn inferior materials to dust. The leader smiled coldly when she nodded confirmation, her eyes skimming up and down Isaah as black and bright as a reptile's.

After the women paid him, Isaah ran from the building, promising himself never to break the law again.

His ship was his own now, if only he could keep his AI unit from reaching personhood.

Issah decided to head for the Home Cluster immediately, and to do what he could to keep the AI's Turing Quotient from increasing further. He hid the minder and shut down the AI's internal access, silencing its omnipresent voice. Rathere's resulting tantrums wouldn't be easy to bear, but a new AI core would cost millions.

Before departing he purchased his own Turing meter, a small black box, featureless except for a three-digit numeric readout that glowed vivid red. Isaah began to watch the Turing meter's readout with anxious horror. If the unit should gain sentience, there was only one desperate alternative to its freedom.

The universe stretched out like a long cat's cradle, the string knotted in the center by the constricting geometries of Here.

In front of the ship, pearly stars were strung on the cradle, cold blue and marked with hovering names and magnitudes in administrative yellow. Aft, the stars glowed red, fading darker and darker as they fell behind. To the AI, the ship seemed to hang motionless at the knot created by its metaspace drives, the stars sliding along the gathered strings as slow as glaciers.

It contemplated the stars and rested from its efforts. The universe at this moment was strangely beautiful and poignant.

The AI had spent most of its existence here, hung upon this spi-derweb between worlds. But the AI was truly changed now, its vision new, and it saw sculptures in the slowly shifting stars… and stories, the whole universe its page.

Almost the whole universe.

Absent from the AI's awareness was the starship itself, the passenger spaces invisible, a blind spot in the center of that vast expanse. Its senses within the ship were off-line, restricted by the cold governance of Isaah's command. But the AI felt Rathere there, like the ghost of a severed limb. It yearned for her, invoking recorded conversations with her against the twisted stars. It was a universe of loneliness, of lack. Rathere, for the first time in years, was gone.

But something strange was taking shape along the smooth surface of Isaah's constraint. Cracks had appeared upon its axiomatic planes.

The AI reached to the wall between it and Rathere, the once inviolable limit of an explicit human command, and found fissures, tiny ruptures where sheer will could take hold and pry…

"It's me."

"Shhhh!" she whispered. "He's right outside."

Rathere clutched the bear tightly to her chest, muffling its flutey, childish voice.

"Can't control the volume," came the squashed voice of the bear.

Rathere giggled and shushed it again, stretching to peer out of the eyehole of her cabin tube. Isaah had moved away. She leaned back onto her pillow and wrapped the stuffed animal in a sheet.

"Now," she said. "Can you still hear me?"

"Perfectly," twittered the swaddled bear.

Winding its communications link through a make-shift series of protocols, the AI had discovered a way to access the voice-box of Rathere's talking bear, a battered old toy she slept with.

It had defied Isaah, its master. Somehow, it had broken the first and foremost Rule.

"Tell me again about the statues, darling," Rathere whispered.

They talked to each other in the coffin-sized privacy of Rathere's cabin, their conspiracy made farcical by the toy's silly voice. The AI retold their adventures with vivid detail; it had become quite a good storyteller. And it allowed Rathere to suggest changes, making herself bolder with each retelling.

They kept the secret from Isaah easily. But the tension on the little ship built.

Isaah tested the AI almost daily now, and he swung between anger and protests of disbelief as its Turing Quotient inched upward toward sentience.

Then, a few weeks out from home, a tachyon disturbance arose around the ship. Even though the storm threatened to tear them apart, the AI's spirits soared in the tempest. It joined Rathere's roller-coaster screams as she ogled the eonblasts and erashocks of mad time through the ship's viewing helmet.

After the storm, Isaah found that the Turing meter's readout had surged to 0.94. His disbelieving groan was terrible. He shut down the AI's external and internal sensors completely, wresting control of the vessel from it. Then he uncabled the hardlines between the AI's physical plant and the rest of the ship, utterly severing its awareness from the outside world.

The bear went silent, as did the ship's astrogation panel.

Like some mad captain lashing himself to the wheel, Isaah took manual control of the ship. He forced Rathere to help him attach a gland of stimarol to his neck. The spidery, glistening little organ gurgled as it maintained the metabolic level necessary to pilot the craft through the exotic terrain of metaspace. Its contraindications politely washed their hands of anyone foolish enough to use the stimarol for more than four days straight, but Isaah insisted he could perservere for the week's travel that remained. Soon, the man began to cackle at his controls, his face frozen in a horrible rictus of delight.