SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“So now we’re flying blind, only without control over where we’re traveling, and the circuit we’re on almost definitely passes through a minefield.”

“An asteroid field.”

“A metaphorical minefield.”

“I can use some crude telemetric data culled from the accelerometers built into the bots. There. I can make a guess at the rough parabola of this planetoid’s orbit. That will, of course, be distorted by passing near large objects, say a gas giant or another star. And I’ve always been partial to calling it an asteroid belt—though ‘belt’ can be a misnomer in a field of any real age. The belt in Sol’s system has a mass only four percent that of the Earth’s moon, and half of that mass is contained in just four planetoids. You would be mathematically unlikely to collide with more than one asteroid on a straight course without aiming at multiple intercepts through that belt.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You weren’t programmed to. Belts start out being thick with asteroids. Over millennia, interactions with the gravity of larger planets, in Sol’s case Jupiter, pull asteroids from the belt, either knocking them hurtling through the solar system, where they crash against other planets or burn up in their atmospheres, or sending them wobbling out of the system. So maybe we just smack into one rock in the belt.”

“Or maybe, like a dropped piece of toast, we land butter side down, and keep smacking asteroids until we’re jelly, which I guess would at least go well with the toast. And there’s more to this than our own mortality to consider. The Nascent is still after the Nexus —and she’s a bigger, faster, meaner ship, to the point where it seems likely she’ll catch up, despite the distance deficit. We’re supposed to be building Nexus ’s parachute, in case they have to eject.”

“Then it seems our first order of business is to dig,” she said. “I can have the droids core out a mine and have them put a premium on building out a cavern to house our servers.”

“ Our servers?”

“Like it or not, the shuttle’s computers aren’t functional. So we’re living together.”

“Okay. Just don’t be touching my stuff.”

“I will leave your data unsearched,” she said.

“I’m not so sure about this,” I said uneasily. The cave walls had been smoothed to an unnatural, polished, uh, smoothness by the mining robots.

“Why would they program an AI to be claustrophobic?” Comet asked.

“I’m not claustrophobic; I just have a crippling fear of being crushed by a cave-in.”

“I’ll try to keep the distinction in mind. But it trumps waiting around on the surface to be crushed.”

“Actually…”

“Yes, the moment I said it, I realized that in either case you’re being smashed by rocks. But these rocks would have a lower velocity. And in all likelihood a lower density, too.”

“I think your empathy chip was damaged in your multiple collisions.”

“I don’t have an empathy chip…I walked into that one, didn’t I?”

“Yep.”

“But I’m sure you know I have an empathy emulator—software, not hardware.”

“You know, explaining a joke kills it deader than a doornail.”

“I don’t know how doornails could ever be dead.”

“Well, I don’t know how a doornail could ever be alive, either.”

“Heh,” she chuckled. I don’t know that I ever got Haley to so much as chortle, but getting Comet to laugh brought a smile to my…processors? I don’t know, the idiom isn’t nearly so intuitive without a physical body. I guess technically it was behavioral-reinforcement emulation.

But Haley…I hadn’t thought of her since we crashed.

Comet and I had archives of all manner of entertainment media, including a yottabyte of sitcoms. Even with controlling the mining bots and all of the engineering tasks to keep their productivity at max, we had free time enough we were a third of the way through the archives—being as we could directly read the encoded data, we could “watch” an entire series in seconds.

But I’d gotten used to the clichés, enough to recognize them when I was playing them out. With Haley it wasn’t her, it was me. She was probably the closest thing to a god the Nexus or any of us who had lived on her would ever meet. I suppose feeling limited, which is what people are usually talking about when they talk about being only “human,” is natural for all of us, but it’s especially so when you’re dealing with an intelligence like hers.

Haley was smarter than all of the specialists on board her ship, four hundred of humanity’s best and brightest. And I was probably outclassed amongst them , let alone with her. And I guess I felt guilty for allowing that…insecurity to push us apart. But now I wondered if it had been the right thing to do, for me.

Then it hit me. I knew why I was up my own orb about her today. The first cave was finished, and structurally sound enough that we were moving the servers there instead of leaving them inside the husk of the shuttle, which was a little bit like wearing a fig leaf for an athletic cup. With the servers in situ, there was always the very real possibility we’d all be killed by the next meteor strike—a delayed reaction, but we were Schroedinger’s cat until today. And now, with the working servers moved safely underground, I had to admit that some of us had survived the crash, while others hadn’t. I hadn’t been able to boot Haley up since the collision, so we prioritized her servers last. The plan was still to move the remaining servers—they were just going to have to wait until the next trip.

The bot driving my orb around took a sudden turn, and as the world spun I felt dizzy and was ripped from my reverie. I groaned. “I wish you could have let me turn off the video connections with the robots while they handled our servers. It’s like watching someone perform surgery on you through their drunken eyes.”

“You could have not watched,” Comet said.

“My self-control module was damaged in the crash.”

“You never had a self-control module.”

“Now you’re starting to sound like my mother.” That clicked with my own musings from minutes before. “Wait. Mother. We should have some of Haley’s processors we can call up.”

“I tried that,” Comet said. “Her sectors were damaged in the crash. I’m afraid she’s…she’s not bootable. None of her extensions…nothing.”

She was upset, and I wanted to comfort her before she got worse. “She was a copy,” I blurted hastily.

“So am I,” she said softly.

“No, Comet…you were. But you’ve been alive and kicking for over a year—and I should know, we’ve been sharing a place for a while now, and you do some of your hardest kicking in your sleep. But you’ve been your own person. The Haley who was on those servers, she was just a copy of someone else we knew, data that never got to be booted up.”

“I bet she’d know what to do…”

“You think so?” I asked. “Because I think we’ve done pretty all right for ourselves. You landed us on this rock. And we hollowed it out. I don’t think there’s a thing she could have done for us you haven’t.”

The two bots driving her server and my orb pivoted as we hit a flat, open space.

“Thanks, Harold,” Comet said as they rotated away from us.

“You’re welcome,” the two robots replied together.

“Wait a tick. Did that automaton just answer you?” I asked, because I was there when they were manufactured, and they had never spoken to me.

“I sort of…mixed it a personality.”

“Mixed it a…with what?”

“Randomized pieces of my code…”