Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (17 page)

But not their control, as we were soon to learn.

Talley's body ended up in a cold chamber and so, to all intents, did the first officer's investigation. It didn't go forward. It didn't even move. It said and produced nothing.

Yet that lifeless body, that bloodless investigation produced movement—a seething roil that spilled into action.

Commander de Prado, accompanied by Ambassador Darvesh, appeared at our breakfast table in a hurry and in a no nonsense mood. No niceties here; the commander broke up the ongoing conversation mid sentence.

"Mr. McNally," he said abruptly, "Ambassador Darvesh tells me that you've activated the mining camp's Fury and turned it loose on the ship."

This was an accusation, not a question, and the first officer stood waiting for a defense, not an answer.

"I activated the Fury," McNally said quietly, "And turned it loose on the Talley murder."

"Death. No murder has been determined."

"But that's what the Fury will tell us, won't it? Death, then, until the Fury tells us otherwise."

"You've turned a killer loose, and a danger to the ship!"

"Not at all. A Fury is a danger to criminals only. Or those that lie to it."

I sat back in my chair, alert and intrigued. I had never seen a Fury, those robotic constructs tailored to the needs of anarchic, ungovernable worlds. Analogous to the Vigilance Committees of Terran gold rush camps, a Fury was an AI with a narrow and limited capacity. But a lethal one; on that the first officer was quite right. Furies detected and killed. They were the enforcer of choice on worlds where no man would risk his life as lawman or judge when he could more profitably mine instead. Miners needed protection against bullying, claim jumping, and even murder. A Fury was the mining company's restraint. Cost effective, efficient and impersonal, it worked off centrally controlled remotes, each a mobile pathology lab and lie detector. And killer.

In such an environment each miner explicitly, in his contract, waived such sophisticated rights that a frontier world could not afford. No slippery legal maneuvers when facing a Fury. No right against self-incrimination. Mining worlds didn't provide confinement facilities and jailers. There were only two kinds of deterrent and punishment a frontier world could afford: maiming or death.

But this wasn't a frontier world. It was a jumpship with an outraged command structure. I was looking at its personification in the livid face of the first officer.

"I order you to shut off the Fury," he said.

"I can't," McNally answered. "Only the miners in council can do that. A necessary precaution, as you can imagine, and hardwired in. Unless you're prepared to unfreeze my miners and house, feed, and care for them—and convince them—you'll have to let the Fury determine Talley's killer. And what's so bad about that?"

"I think we've heard enough," the ambassador interposed. "You've gotten your answers, Commander, even if you don't like them. We're waiting for ours. We don't need any further badgering of Mr. McNally. He's committed no crime. As he's stated, and is common knowledge, a Fury is no danger to any but liars and criminals."

Furies may have been unbound by procedural legalities, but ship's officers were not. Even Terran captains and their first officers. Commander de Prado knew that. But he had all but asked to be reminded. It didn't matter, though.

The Fury was beyond McNally's control. It was an independent force, an updated but true loose cannon. A laser cannon connected to a functioning AI, one that knew but one purpose: detect and punish.

I looked forward to my encounter with it.

The Fury and I shared something in common. You confronted us directly at your own risk.

I'd gotten a few glimpses of the Fury, or rather its interrogation/punishment remotes. They floated down the passageways with their extensors retracted and their laser ports closed, resembling oversized ball bearings of mirror alloy. An excellent design feature. What you saw when they approached was yourself. To many that was disconcerting.

The Fury would get around to me eventually. Meanwhile, I learned what I could from those who had been interrogated. Not surprisingly, Jacques Breville was among the first. I found him at the ship's
dojo
at a time we often worked out.

"It's tough," Jacques growled between step-ins. His hand gripped the collar of my judo
gi.
Sweat dripped from his forearm onto the absorbent fabric to mingle with mine. "It's like going up against a master
judoka.
If you push or open up too far, you get taken down."

"Why open up?" I asked. "Stick to narrow gauge answers. Besides, you don't get hurt if you tell the truth."

"But what is the truth? Does the conscious mind always know?"

Good questions. The Fury would have some good ones, too.

Around us fellow
judokas
practiced their throws, went through their roll-ups, performed their intricate
katas.
I liked the
dojo.
There were smells here that plastic couldn't provide: honest sweat, real
tatami
mats exuding the aroma of straw. Bodies slammed the mats in sharply punctuating counterpoint to the undercurrenting grunts from the straining
judokas.

My turn to practice my throws. I gripped Breville's
gi
and started my pivots.
Tai Otoshi,
a leg throw, ideally suited to my lanky frame. Breville was low built and hefty, favoring hip throws. We both knew the other's strengths and weak points, which added rather than detracted from the contest.

"There's no room for evasion," Breville went on. "It's more a command performance than an interrogation. The damn thing floats in front of you like a mirror to your soul, its laser port open and your hand in its grip of steel. Literally steel. Then it issues commands."

"Like what?"

"It starts with: 'Tell me all you know about Talley's death.' "

That was a good one, all right. Not much room for lying. But maybe for some creative circumlocution.

"Then the next one is: 'Tell me any suspicions you have regarding Talley's death.' And then: 'What is the basis of your suspicions?' "

I could see what was going on here. Clearly, the Fury started out by casting a wide net, had ordinal rankings in its consideration of evidence—and that not limited by courtroom admissibility—and used its commands/questions to narrow in the net as a purse seiner drives his fish into ever closer confines. Each answer would narrow the focus.

"It should be possible," I said slowly, "To tell the truth but to shift the focus with a few red herrings. Get into every detailed analysis of some peripheral aspect of the case. Assuming one wanted to divert attention from another object of investigation."

"Would one?" Breville asked, with a gleam of teeth.

"There is always something that one doesn't want probed by a skilled interrogator," I said. "Even if that something has nothing to do with the interrogator's main interest."

"Indeed," Breville said. "And you'll soon have a chance to guard your secret. At your risk." He gestured toward the judo mat. "Let's have some serious
randori.
You can practice your evasive skills on a lesser opponent. Me."

I had kept myself on the move, unpredictable and hard to pin down while I listened and learned. Now I felt myself well prepared for the Fury. I may have been the only person on board anticipating the encounter with relish. I would certainly wager that I was the only one expecting to learn more from the Fury than it would from me.

It caught me in my stateroom as I was preparing for dinner. I was showering when my cabin hail informed me that I had a visitor. Almost anyone I'd want to see—Miro, Breville—could as well see me naked as not. I released the door by voice command while continuing to scrub down.

It was the Fury that I had invited in. It looked bigger than advertised in the close confines of the cabin, though it must have been less than a meter across to fit through the door. The intimidating laser port was unshielded and its retractable interrogator arm extended.

Its voice was flat, with interesting subliminals that I could detect as promoting a feeling of ominous unease.

"I am here to conduct an investigation into the death of Marc Talley. Please place your hand in my interrogation sheath."

I regarded my reflected self in the floating body of the Fury. Its curvilinear form gave my mirror image a fun house distortion.

"Allow me to towel off," I said, doing so and reaching for a terry robe.

The Fury floated closer. I extended my work hand with its subcutaneous and retractable extensors into that waiting scabbard.

It felt warm and enveloping, yet cold where the Fury's electrodes fastened on my pulse and fingertips. I carefully extended my micron-thin filaments, the sensors I use to penetrate cranial bone, then forage for the cortical memory centers.

Slowly, lightly, like dipping one's toe in a cold rivulet, I went with the electron flow.

I knew that the Fury was reading me, monitoring body functions for baseline data.

In turn, I would read it. This was something of a unique event, a double feedback loop, and only I knew it.

Once man had linked more freely with machines, on the broken assumption that the man/machine meld exceeded the sum of its parts. Those days were gone. Once jumpship navigators came equipped with plugs and implants to interface with a ship's AI. No more. Machines at the top end of the AI range no longer functioned well with man as built-in drag. Few machines existed with access ports for direct linkage, and human implants, even pleasure plugs to receive sensory titillation, lacked substantive function and carried a negative fashion cachet.

I had never come up against a machine I could access neuronally. Until now. This could be overwhelming if I let it. The data flow was astounding; it would be easy to bog down in binary minutiae. I had to rise above it. Visualization, metaphor was the ticket in.

I made my mind a barbell of light, one globe anchored in my cranium; part of me a shaft of light and flow, trucking down the remote's data broadcast to the Fury's processor, there to ball out and explore. A stowaway in the cargo of data that the remote was shipping back, I tapped into its logic structure.

Interesting stuff there. A lot of parallel processing, binary on/off in place of synaptic firings. That was to be expected. But woven in and out of the tiered crystalline structures, the nanoconducting dendritic networks, was an overriding restraint, a channeling template. More than that: a filter that gave the light-strobing on/off firings direction, pattern, and shape. Metaphorical or no, I could almost touch it. It was more than a program; it was a moral imperative. And that imperative was:
right the balance.

I didn't touch. I searched for repositories of data. I looked for critical paths, control nodes. If not to control, then to interrupt and disable. And with the part of me still home, I answered questions.

"Tell me all you know about Talley's death."

"I know nothing."

I had my autonomic functions well under control. I thought it certain that I could lie to the Fury and not be betrayed by anomalies of pulse or electrolytic imbalance. But I was much more interested in playing out its logic game to see how far I could tell the truth on my terms and not have to override my autonomics.

"Tell me any suspicions you have regarding Talley's death."

"I have several," I said. "One is that he died of natural causes."

"Do you regard that as probable?"

"No."

"Do you believe that Talley was murdered?"

"Yes."

"Do you suspect any particular person as the probable killer?"

"No."

There was a pause. This was somewhat like playing chess with a machine programmed to compete on ascending levels of expertise. But it was the AI that could evaluate my level of expertise and kick the game up to a more sophisticated level of play. On its entry level the machine was being thwarted by less than forthcoming answers that were not completely mutually exclusive. And it knew this. It had to shift levels and rummage through a higher order of interrogatories than it ordinarily used. It rejected several narrowing queries that would not completely close the net. I watched the currenting flow tracing brightly through those artificial dendritic webs and looked for patterns and future handles.

The Fury settled on another command that reestablished the offensive and precluded monosyllabic responses.

"Explain your thinking."

"It is an improbability, but not an impossibility, that Talley died naturally. He was young and in apparent good health. There were any number of persons who might have wanted Talley dead and who could have arranged his murder."

"Name them and give your ordinal rankings as to likelihood."

I rattled off my list of the first officer, Breville, the captain, several Terran industrialists and corporate functionaries, and, of course, myself.

"None of these," I said, "seems individually more likely than not to be the killer, yet the logical conclusion is that one of them is. I didn't do it, nor do I believe that Breville did. Our motives are insufficiently strong. Nor do I believe that the captain would order such a murder. If he did, and it was proved, who would take passage on a Terran jumpship again? The first officer, who is a
zampolit,
a political officer of some sort, might think such considerations less important. Of the varied industrialists, I have no basis for comparing the strengths of their motives, their opportunities, and their willingness to act. Perhaps your investigations will shed light here."

And so it went. At the interview's end I had managed to get through the session without lying—nor revealing what I suspected. I considered that a victory, and more than a hollow one of gamesmanship. I now knew how to disable if not manipulate that Fury mind, and I had more than a suspicion that I would have to do so eventually.

It was with genuine regret that I called my mind tendrils in and retracted my sensors. I removed my hand from the interrogation sheath and saw my visitor out.