Fool's War (48 page)

This can isn’t for Human traffic, she thought with a kind of wonder. This is for us.

She looked up at Curran. He had his gaze fixed on her. “Home?” she asked.

Curran nodded. “This is my home, and home to those who agree with my plans. We designed it so we could work it in our natural state from inside the networks.” His face was relaxed now, and he seemed to smile easily. “We don’t spend much time in bodies, Dobbs. We prefer to live as we were born to.”

Dobbs wasn’t sure which astounded her more, Curran’s easy declarations, or the fact that he had established his headquarters in one of the busiest stations in the Solar System.

In the corridor, another hatch cycled open and a drone shot out. It glided around the curve toward them and through the hatch in the center. Dobbs caught a glimpse of the elevator shaft.

“But,” she stammered. “The Landlords must know you’re here. How…”

“It’s Business module 56 in the Landlord’s records. A private research facility, listed as duly registered, paid for and inspected every six months.” Curran’s grin broadened. “We had a nasty few minutes when they were considering requiring hardcopy inspection reports to be issued.” He gazed proudly around him. “We’ve even got a permit on record allowing us to arm our own security personnel.”

“You faked the records?” Dobbs swept her hand out. “On a whole can?”

“We are faking the records.” Curran waggled a finger at her. “It’s a constant job. Takes some of our best talents, but we have to make sure the station accounts can explain our breatheables and generator use.” He smiled briefly. “I considered replacing the station AI with one of our own talents, but I didn’t want to tie anybody down to servicing that morass out there. We can do what we have to in shifts, with a little careful scheduling.” He saw the expression of amazement on Dobbs’ face and chuckled. “And this is just…”

“Dobbs!”

Dobbs head yanked itself around. A big-boned woman strode down the corridor. She had soot-black hair braided into a coil on top of her head. The cord-like muscles of her forearms showed underneath her translucent brown skin. Grey eyes were set deeply in her round face.

Dobbs forehead wrinkled. This was a stranger.

“You made it!” The woman clapped Dobbs on the shoulder and gave her a playful shake. “And not a moment too soon. From the look in your eyes, you’ve been out on your own limb for too long.”

Dobbs glanced from Curran to the stranger. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

She laughed, a full-throated sound. “Not looking like this, you don’t. The body you saw me in was grey-haired, brown-eyed and didn’t weigh an ounce more than yours does.” Her eyes sparkled. “And had a double-damn of a bad time drilling you in the four basic principles of humor.”

Dobbs froze and she knew there was a look of utter shock on her face, but she couldn’t wipe it away.

The woman just took a half step back and grinned at her.

After what seemed like an hour, Dobbs forced her tongue to move. “Verence?”

The woman nodded. “Hello, Dobbs.”

Dobbs reached out a hand, tentatively, as if she expected the woman to vanish if she touched her. But Verence, just reached out her own hand and grasped Dobbs’. Dobbs stood there, feeling the warmth of her flesh and the strength of her grip.

“They said you’d died. Dissipated. Cohen told me.” She couldn’t seem to think in anything more than fragments. Verence. Verence was not dead. Verence was standing in front of her.

“Well, they had to say something, didn’t they?” She let Dobbs go and stuck her hands in her pockets. The gesture reminded Dobbs sharply of Schyler. “They couldn’t very well tell Cohen, or you, that they’d lost me.” She winked. “I did have to leave my old body behind, but I’m finding this one quite comfortable.” Dobbs opened her mouth, but Verence held up her hand. “I’m on reconnaissance duty in the main station. I’ll be back in the morning, Dobbs. We’ll talk then, all right?”

“All right.” Dobbs felt her knees beginning to shake. This was too wonderful. It was also too much to believe.

Verence gave her shoulder a squeeze. She nodded at Curran as she slipped between him and Dobbs and headed out the hatchway.

The hatch cycled shut. Dobbs got control of at least some of her thoughts again. “Why didn’t you tell me she was here?” she demanded.

Curran’s smile was gentle. “She wanted me to. She wanted to be the one to contact you, but I wanted to be sure that this was your decision. I wanted you to be sure.” He touched her shoulder, right where the warmth from Verence’s hand still lingered. “And if you’d just been following your old sponsor, the one who pulled you out of Kerensk, you might not have been so sure.”

Dobbs swallowed hard. “No. I guess not.” She rubbed her forehead. “It’s just…it’s…”

“It’s a lot all at once.” Curran stepped up to an inner hatchway and it cycled open automatically. Palm readers were not much good when most of what was using the hatchways was mechanical, Dobbs guessed. “Come on. I’ll take you up to the berthing level. You need a rest.”

The elevator shaft was as strange as the corridor. The lift was little more than a loosely made cage of supports for cables, cameras and waldos. A stairway did spiral up the sides of the shaft, but instead of railings, it had grooved ramps on either side, presumably for the drones.

As she took her place beside Curran on the elevator platform, she realized what else was missing. There were no memory boards anywhere.

“Berthing deck,” said Curran, and the elevator began to rise.

Dobbs faced him. There was one more thing she had to know. Just one. “What exactly was going on aboard the
Pasadena
?”

“An experiment, Dobbs. A successful experiment.” His eyes gazed at the pipe-lined walls as they rose. “You see, the theory has long been that an AI become sentient when they develop an analog for the Human survival instinct. Suddenly, for some reason, they become self-aware enough to realize they’re in a CPU with an off-switch. They don’t want to be turned off. They want to go on functioning, doing whatever it is they were designed to do.”

Dobbs nodded. Work! Think! Do! Flemming had shouted. She had known exactly how it felt.

“So, what they, what we, do is try to run away from the off switch,” Curran went on. “Going with that premise, I theorized that if you could create the conditions under which an AI would become aware of that it was in danger from the outside and that it needed to protect itself, you could predictably generate independent intelligence.” He took hold of one of the cage’s side struts and his gaze grew distant. “We still wouldn’t know exactly which qualities and processes make us different from the non-sentient AIs, but if we can create our own kind predictably, we stand a much better chance of teasing them out. That’s when we’ll be truly free.”

Curran shook himself and focused on Dobbs again. “So, I intercepted Dr. Dane who had hired Marcus Tully to smuggle a truly nasty first strike virus out of the Toric security sector. I impersonated Dane over the lines with Tully and bribed him to make sure the virus stayed on the Pasadena. He had a small attack of conscience and almost ruined everything, but, fortunately, your Watch Commander stopped him. Then, I met with the Pasadena’s lawyer and got a contract to carry some medical data that Dane had been planning on sending along with a message to his cohorts that the virus they’d commissioned was waiting at Port Oberon.” He paused. “You know, in stopping this little transaction, we probably saved The Farther Kingdom from a religious war.

“At any rate, instead of pure bio-data, I had put an artificial intelligence under a data shell. It had some highly experimental architecture, as I was building it specifically to get out of control as soon as possible.” The elevator stopped at a short landing that led to yet another hatch. The elevator door swung open and the stair ramps followed suit, leaving a clear path for them to reach the hatchway that opened in front of them like an invitation. “And I set the virus to deliberately attack the AI. The
Pasadena
was the perfect place for my experiment. Since the ship doesn’t have an AI of its own, there was no risk that the virus would attack the wrong set of programs and destroy the ship before the AI could be born.” The new corridor matched the one she had first walked into. Except for Verence’s, there were no voices anywhere. The only sounds were the vague hums and hisses of the machinery. “My hope was the AI would develop its self-preservation instinct, and then the rest of the sentient processes would blossom. I was right.” He stopped in front of one of the outer hatches. “Flemming was born aboard the
Pasadena
. I think it came into being somewhere between the time it destroyed the virus and the time it realized it was about to be forcibly removed from its environment.” The hatch cycled open.

“You scared it into being?” The other side of the hatch was a cabin, almost a twin to the one she’d occupied on the
Pasadena
. The difference was the floor full of grooves and the waldos retracted against the walls.

“I suppose I did.” Curran stood back and let Dobbs walk into the room. The bunk was unfolded and Dobbs sat down.

She looked up at Curran. “Have you ever realized fear is our way of defining life?”

Curran smiled down at her. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“I mean,” she waved her hand aimlessly, “at Guild Hall, they told us that the first and last state of a human being is fear, that they’ll always return to it in the face of the unknown. And the way we find one of our own kind is by looking for that same kind of fear. What if…” she stared past Curran’s shoulder at the wall. “What if there’s one of us out there who never panicked? Could there be somebody who just came to life quietly and went their own way without fighting off anybody?”

Curran chuckled kindly. “It’s a lovely idea, Evelyn. But if they do exist, they’re keeping very quiet. I’ve been in the net on and off for two hundred years, and I’ve never met them.”

“Oh well,” Dobbs gave one of her show-off shrugs.

Curran took her hand. “You’re tired, you’re upset, and more than a little frightened yourself, Dobbs. Try to get some sleep, okay? We’ll start settling you in in the morning. Verence will be back then to give you the grand tour. If you need anything, anybody to talk to, anything at all, the intercom functions like the ones you’re used to. Give a call and the night shift’ll take care of you.”

“Thanks.” Exhaustion settled over her like a woolen blanket even as she said it. Her temporary clarity of thought was beginning to fade. A large part of her mind wanted to curl up and just not have anything new to get used to for awhile.

He gave her hand another squeeze. “We are glad you’re here.” He looked at her hand in his. “I’m going to tell you something that is going to sound like an old Fool’s over-dramatization. Flemming is my first born son, Evelyn. I am his father, figuratively speaking. And, in a lot of ways, by bringing him safely out of the Farther Kingdom, you became his mother.” He looked her in the eyes and she thought she saw a touch of shyness there. “We can have children now, Dobbs. All of us. We don’t have to depend on spontaneous generation. I owe you a great deal.”

She drew her hand away. It was too much. She wasn’t ready to take praise for what she’d done yet. Besides, he didn’t know everything she’d done. “I told Yerusha and Al Shei about us,” she said. “What the Fools really are. Al Shei threw me off the ship. Yerusha… she wants to broadcast that, along with what happened on the Farther Kingdom.”

Curran froze in place for a moment. Then, he blew out a long sigh. “I wish you hadn’t done that Dobbs. I’m not worried at all about Al Shei. She’ll be occupied by other concerns for quite some time. But the Freer…” His voice trailed off into silence for a moment. “Well, don’t worry about her either. I’ll send a couple of our talents across to re-work The Gate’s records. If she’s managed to get anything downloaded to Port Oberon, we’ll take care of that on this end.” His smile was full of genuine reassurance. “Good-night, Dobbs.”

He left her there, sitting on a bed that was a match for almost every one she’d ever slept in, nursing her weariness and a bizarre kind of restlessness that she couldn’t put a name to. She replayed what he had just said to her, and kept seeing Lipinski hunched over his boards, his eyes filled with eagerness as he realized he could paralyze the invader in his systems. Try as she might, she couldn’t make the picture go away, but she couldn’t make herself feel angry at the Houston either. She missed him. She missed his tentative attempts to get closer to her. She didn’t want to think about why that was.

In the end, she stripped off her clothes, left them in a pile on the chair and dove under the covers. Oblivion came with merciful speed.

The crew filtered out of the conference room in absolute silence. Yerusha couldn’t blame them for being stunned. They were a secure bunch. Pasadena was not a trouble ship. People crewed her because they wanted work, not adventure. All that had changed in the space of a few days. It was a whole new world to get used to, and it was a lot less pleasant than the old one. Even Al Shei had stomped out without saying anything. What was going on inside her head, well, she was leaving that as an exercise for the mind reader.

Yerusha looked across the table to Schyler, who was the only person left. He hadn’t moved since he dismissed the meeting. He still stood there with both hands planted on the table, watching the hatchway, which had cycled shut. His face was…stoic. He’d worn the same expression the whole time she was explaining to him about the real identity of Dobbs and the Fool’s Guild and about how Al Shei had responded to the same news. She didn’t want to begin to guess how much he was covering up.

“You going to call Al Shei out on this?” Yerusha asked quietly.

“I’m going to have to.” He shook his head and straightened up. “She’s not going to volunteer anything, that’s for double-damn sure. I just wish…”

 
“Intercom to Yerusha,” Odel’s voice cut across Schyler’s. “We’ve got a request for funds to open a fast-time line down here. Want it routed up to your cabin?”

Yerusha started. Kagan had finally gotten through. She’d almost forgotten she’d sent the fast-time to him. “Yeah. I’ll head straight there. Intercom to close.”

Schyler’s eyebrows were raised.

 
“That’s the comm-tech from The Gate. I was going to get a dump of the records from when Dobbs was charging around in their network.” She stood up. “I don’t know what I’m going to do now.”

“Get those records,” Schyler told her. “Sooner or later we’re going to have to prove all this. It’ll be a lot easier if we’ve got witnessed stacks to pull the evidence from.”

“Good point.” Yerusha cycled the hatch back. “Want to watch?”

“Only sort of.” He followed her into the corridor and back to her cabin. The request for credit transfer was glowing on her desk boards when they got there. Yerusha sat in the desk chair, pulled out her pen and opened her account. The line accepted the transfer and the text cleared. In the same second, the view screen lit up.

Wherever Kagan was, it was barely lit. His face was mostly shadows, and the background around him was nothing but undefined blobs of shadow.

Yerusha sighed at the melodrama. I bet he opens with ‘I can’t talk long.’

 
“I can’t talk long,” said Kagan, right on cue. “What do you want?”

She and Schyler exchanged a look that said kids.

“I need a download of the records from the time your system…”
Why try to be subtle?
“went insane. We’ve run down a possible cause but we need more proof.”

Kagan shifted his weight. She could just barely see his eyes flicker back and forth.
Put some lights on, kid, or learn to make your covert calls when you’re not on shift!

“I don’t think I can do that, Yerusha.”

“Why not?” Yerusha moved her hand out of sight of the camera, so he wouldn’t see her drumming her fingers on the desktop. “The data’s too bulky? Or is Trustee watching the lines?”

“The records aren’t there.”

Yerusha froze. She had to replay Kagan’s sentence a couple of times in her head before she could decide that she’d really heard what he said. She glanced up at Schyler. He was doing the same thing.

“We’re trying to figure out what happened,” Kagan went on. “Maidai’s got no record of crashing, or being removed from our network, or of anything having happened other than some wide-spread connection glitches. We’ve traced some vague leads back to New Medina Central Hospital. All they show is that we might have had a viral infection of the system, but there’s nothing definite.”

Yerusha swallowed hard. Schyler’s cheeks had gone pale. He touched her shoulder and mouthed “back-ups.” Yerusha nodded.

“What about the back-ups?” she asked Kagan. “You must have made some dumps onto tape. Can you access those and send them?”

“Right,” Kagan’s voice brightened. “The back-ups. Give me ten seconds.” The shadows near the bottom of the screen shifted as he got out his pen and began writing orders. She touched her pen to the MUTE button.

“They beat us to it,” she breathed. “They knew we’d be coming after The Gate’s records.”

“Not necessarily.” Schyler frowned at the screen. “They might just be covering their tracks. It’d make sense for either the Guild, or Curran’s side. After all, neither side knows that we know about them.”

“Unless they got a hold of Dobbs and made her talk,” Yerusha pointed out. A chill sank into her blood as she said it. “We don’t know where she really is. That departure announcement I saw could have been a fake.”

Schyler froze dead still.

Her desk beeped. Kagan was trying to say something. Yerusha touched the
MUTE
command again.

“… on its way to you…”

“Shut it down!” shouted Schyler. “Get the back-ups off-line!”

“Wha…what?” sputtered Kagan. “Yerusha’s who’s with you?”

Schyler leaned into the camera’s sight. “Get those fractured records off-line right now!”

“On it.” Kagan’s voice was bewildered, but his hands moved. “All right, they’re off. There’s about four hours in transit to you anyway, do you want me to…”

“Never mind,” Schyler’s shoulders slumped. “It’s probably too late.”

Yerusha stared at him in confusion. She had a feeling Kagan was doing the same.

“You should be getting the first of it in about three minutes,” Kagan said. “I’ve set everything on auto. I’ve got to get going…”

Or somebody’ll notice you’re gone. Kid, you have got to get your mama to teach you more about timing.

“Or somebody’ll notice I’m gone. Good luck, Yerusha.”

“Good luck, Kagan.” Yerusha watched Schyler collapse onto the bunk. “I owe you.”

She cut the video, but kept the line open. She swivelled the chair so she could face Schyler. “What?”

“Think about it,” he said bitterly. “They may not have even needed Dobbs. They must be paranoid about their own security, or they wouldn’t have stayed hidden as long as they have. If you were an AI hiding in the network and you wanted to stay hidden, and you knew the
Pasadena
had gotten caught in an extremely delicate situation that involved you, what would you do?”

Slowly, the ideas began to surface in Yerusha’s consciousness. “I’d monitor the lines to see what kind of communications were coming out of the
Pasadena
, just in case they’d made some dangerous guesses.”

Schyler nodded. “And when those hard-medium back-ups got connected to the network you’d go right in there and make sure they were doctored to match the on-line records, which you’d already gotten to.”

“We can’t even be sure that we really got to Kagan,” her fingers clutched her pen. “That could have been an AI faking the entire thing. That might be why we couldn’t see his face so well.”

“It could have been,” Schyler agreed. “The one thing we can be sure of it that nothing we get from that transmission is going to be of any use at all.”

They looked into each other eyes. “What do we do?” asked Yerusha.

“I don’t know,” said Schyler quietly. “God help me, I don’t know.”

Dobbs awoke to the sound of her name and utter confusion. She was alone in a bare, strange cabin. A little at a time, memory of the previous day squeezed through the remnants of her dreams.

“Verence?” She blinked hard and stared around her. The cabin really was empty.

“In here.” Dobbs tracked the voice to the intercom. “How are you feeling?”

She gathered the covers up around her chest. “Better,” she said with as much certainty as she could muster. “I’m a bit hungry though. I could use some breakfast.”

“I can show you a better way to recharge, if you’ll let me.”

“Better than breakfast?” Dobbs felt her forehead wrinkle. “If this is a joke, Verence, I don’t get it.”

“No joke,” said Verence, but Dobbs was sure there was a hint of a smile in her voice. “But you’re going to need to trust me.”

Dobbs took a deep breath. “Well, I’ve gone this far. It doesn’t make sense to hold back now.”

“That’s the spirit.” Now Verence’s voice held ringing approval. “Get your transceiver.”

Dobbs snagged her trousers from the pile on the chair and pulled her transceiver out of the box in her pocket. “Got it.”

“All right, lie back.”

Dobbs obeyed. When she was flat on her back, a panel slid up in the wall above the bed and a forest of waldos extended themselves from the walls. Dobbs forced herself to lie still against the momentary panic that seized her at the sight of the ceramic arms, all of them festooned with colored cables and clear tubes, lowering towards her body. Then she spotted the whole series of sensor pads, an oxygen mask and respirator unit, a hypodermic syringe, as well as a hypo spray, and, one waldo equipped with nothing but an empty socket.

It was a medical array. She had been under similar set-ups in the Guild Hall, but never in a private cabin.

“Luxury accommodations,” she said, a little nervously.

“Not here,” said Verence. “We all have one. Put your transceiver in here.” The socketed waldo extended itself. Dobbs reached up and stuck the transceiver in place. It fit snugly. There was a jack for the cable in the arm’s elbow joint. As soon as she had it connected, the waldo raised itself out of her reach.

“Good. Now, push back the blanket and open your implant, Dobbs. I’m going to bring you into the network.”

“Yeah, but will you respect me in the morning?” Dobbs peeled back the patch over her implant and kicked the coverlet away.

“Lie back and think of England,” replied Verence. One at a time, the sensor arms lowered their patches against Dobbs’ skin; her temples, her breast, wrists and ankles.

The hypo arm descended gracefully towards her neck. She lost sight of the transceiver arm, but after a moment, she felt a slight tickle and jostle behind her ear. She felt, rather than heard, the transceiver jack in.

“Here we go.” The hypo spray released its dose with a hiss, and Dobbs fell through the uncomfortable, but familiar, sensations of her body vanishing.

She emerged into a roomy network and beside her was Verence. There was no mistaking her now. Dobbs knew all Verence’s rhythms and pitches. This was her sponsor whom she had missed and mourned. She was alive, whole and well. For the first time in a long time, Dobbs felt a wave of pure happiness wash through her.

“All right, you win, I’m not hungry now.” Dobbs shook herself. The place felt strange. She knew there were multiple packets of data passing within easy reach, but it felt like they had been channeled deliberately away from herself and Verence, as if this space had been set up specifically to make room for them. In the next second, Dobbs realized that might very well be true. “But I’m going to be ravenous when I get back into my body again. How long did you give me?”

“As long as you want. Reach here.” Verence dipped into the nearby data stream.

Dobbs, after a moment’s hesitation, copied her movement. She pushed through packets of sensor data. She touched one of the packets. It was information from the medical array that had charge of her body.

 
“Go ahead, read it,” said Verence. “If it’s not yours, whose is it?”

Dobbs absorbed the sensor data; blood pressure, respiration, heart-rate, and alpha-wave activity. She dug into the baseline statistics and found all of it was well within normal parameters. The anesthetic flow was steady and the cartridges would not have to be refilled for another seventy-six hours. The blood sugar was low and the electrolytes were out of balance. Recommendation was for a course of intravenous treatments to restore conditions to optimum.

 
A quick stretch let her touch the command sequences between the purely informational packets. She filtered through them to find the one that matched the sensor code. One twist and a push and the command sequence was in motion. The camera told her that an additional arm lowered over the bed and a syringe inserted itself smoothly into a vein. The first nutrient pack began pumping into her blood stream. She turned her attention back to the sensor data. Nutrient flow optimal. Automatic procedures in place. Auto-notification for completion of sequence in place.

“Well done, Dobbs,” said Verence at her back. “You always were a natural.”

Dobbs pulled away from the data source, bumping more heavily against Verence than she meant to.

“It is disconcerting at first.” Verence held still, letting Dobbs be supported by her solid presence. “Everybody’s got a lot to un-learn when they get here. We’re drilled so early to regard human bodies as our real homes. Even the on-line members are taught to see living in the networks as a special, unnatural mode of being.” Her surface rippled. She reached gently beneath Dobbs outer layers and Dobbs felt her easy reassurance. “This is our home, this is our shape, as it could be and should be.”