For Want of a Nail (3 page)

Above her, Ludoviko stilled,waiting for the
answer. The only sound came from Uncle Georgo, who rocked on the
floor, sobbing. Snot and tears steamed down his face unheeded.

The AI’s mask of confidence slipped. “I do not
remember. I only remember that it is important to keep him alive
and to keep it a secret.”

“Well, it’s not a secret anymore, is it?”
Ludoviko’s lip twisted in distaste as he stared at his uncle.

“I suppose.” Cordelia narrowed her eyes. “I
suppose that depends on whether or not you tell anyone else. May I
suggest that whatever reason I had was strong enough to overcome my
programming about the law? It might be wise not to act
precipitously to change things.”

Rava hesitated. There was something to that. An
AI had unbreakable taboos built into it that were even stronger
than the childhood responses that were trained into her. Cordelia
had
to obey the law. “Hang on.”A thought struck her. “Your
compulsions are tied to the ship’s master log of law. If you can’t
transmit, how do you know what the laws are?”

“I have a copy in my onboard read-only memory
and it syncs at every update.”

Which was too bad. Rava had been hoping for a
backup transmitter she could hack into. She shook her head to rid
it of that faint hope. “How much time do you have left before your
next backup is scheduled?”

“An hour and a half.” Cordelia looked up and to
the left, to indicate she was calculating. “But with only a single
feed, I have more time than I’d normally have in memory. We might
have a week before I have to start pruning.”

Rava felt some of the tension winding through
her joints relax. She’d been so worried about having to dump
things.

“Yeah.” Ludoviko rapped his fist on the wall to
get their attention. “Hello? That’s great that you won’t have to
dump any memory, Cordelia, but in the meantime our lives are going
unrecorded. What do you suggest we do about that?”

“You could try writing it down,” Rava beamed at
her brother. “Or you could not worry about it since you won’t have
any descendants who care.”

Her brother’s face turned a blotchy red and he
took a step toward her, raising his fist. “So no one will record
this, will they?”

“I’m still here.” Cordelia’s voice snapped
through the room. “I am still watching.”

“Fine.” Ludoviko lowered his arm. “But I’m going
to tell the family what Rava did.”

“By all means. Track down each and every person
by walking through the whole ship to find them. Or wait until I’ve
fixed Cordelia.”

“Cordelia?” Uncle Georgo lifted his head. “I
don’t understand what is happening.”

“Georgo, Georgo . . .” Cordelia’s voice promised
soothing and comfort. “It is time for your nap. That is all that
has happened.You have missed your nap.”

Rava watched as Cordelia used her voice to coax
Uncle Georgo upright and then to wash his face and put himself to
bed. The irritability and absent-mindedness she had seen her uncle
exhibit returned, but now she could hear the hidden part of his
life. Cordelia coaxed him to everything he did almost like a
puppeteer with a shadow figure. It created the illusion of life,
but her uncle was an empty figure.

***

The corridors had begun filling with the shift
change crowd as Rava slipped through the door of the consignment
shop. Behind the counter, Petro sat on a stool reading, his bald
head gleaming with a faint sheen of sweat as if he’d been
running.

Tidy ranks of shelves and racks filled the room,
each covered with the castoffs of generations, arranged into
categories. Long sleeve shirts, paper, pens, cables, and a single
silver tea service. Every family had brought only what they thought
they would need, but even with finite resources, fashions
changed.

“Hey, lady!” Petro grinned, wrinkles remapping
his face as he tucked his reader into his coverall pocket. “What
news?”

“News is the same. And you?” As always, Rava was
relieved that he still had useful work and hadn’t hit the recycling
point himself.

He shrugged his shoulders with a laugh. “The
same, the same. So you looking for anything specific or
browsing?”

She hefted the AI’s chassis. “I brought Cordelia
to look at cables.”

He hopped off the stool and waddled across the
room, beckoning her to follow. “See this row? Every one of these
goes to a different machine and every one of them has a proprietary
plug. The ones in these four boxes have plugs that fit the ship,
but your guess is as good as mine about what kind of plug your AI
uses.”

Rava swallowed. “Thanks, Petro. I’ll browse
then.”

He wiped at his brow. “Ping me if you need
anything.”

Between the towering shelves, Rava set
Cordelia’s chassis on the floor. She pulled out the box of cables
and sat on the floor beside the AI’s silent frame. The cables were
bound in bundles, each of which had a fat hexagon on one end. The
other ends varied wildly. Some were tiny silver tubes, others were
square. One seemed to be an adhesive electrode. She pulled the
cables out and tried them one by one. The third one slotted neatly
into the port on Cordelia’s back.

Rising, she cradled Cordelia’s chassis to her
like one of her nieces or nephews. The cable dangled like a tail.
She trotted down the aisles to Petro. “You got a hookup here?”

He lifted his brows in surprise. “For
hardwiring? I was wondering what you wanted a cable for.” Hopping
off the stool, he led her behind the counter of the consignment
shop to a wall terminal. “Here you go.”

Rava set Cordelia’s chassis on the floor, but
the cable was a little too short to reach the terminal. Petro
solved it by bringing his stool to them. “Pesky things, those
cables. Small wonder people stopped using them.”

“Yeah.” Rava feigned a laugh. “Still, I’ll take
this one. Charge it to my account?”

“Sure.” Petro looked from her to Cordelia and
finally seemed to recognize that the AI was dormant. “Well, I’ll
leave you to it.”

When he had walked away, Rava pushed the wake-up
button. The cameras swiveled to face her as the AI’s eyelids
fluttered in a programmed betrayal of her feelings. Her projected
face was flushed and her breath seemed quicker. “Ah.Yes, yes, I’m
connected now. Give me a moment while I manage the backlog.”

Rava did not want to wait, not even a moment.
She wanted this nightmare to be over and done with and for Cordelia
to be connected again by wireless, as she should be. And then she
wanted to know what to do about Uncle Georgo.

Her handy pinged with five different messages.
Before she could open them, Cordelia said, “There are four
transmitters in storage. I’m sending the storage unit information
to your handy.”

“Thanks.” Rava flicked it open and scanned the
message. The others were delayed messages from family members
wanting to know what was happening with Cordelia.Wincing, Rava
wrote a quick summary of the problem with the transmitter. “Will
you broadcast this to the family?”

Cordelia nodded and, so fast that it might have
been an extension of Rava’s own thought, the message went out.

Bracing herself, Rava checked behind her for
Petro. He was far enough away that she had little fear of being
overheard and more privacy here than in her own quarters. “Tell me
about Uncle Georgo.”

“What about him?” Cordelia raised her eyebrows
and cocked her head to the side with the question.

Rava gaped. “The dementia? How long have you
been covering for him?”

Cordelia frowned and shook her head slowly. “I’m
sorry. I am not sure what you are asking about.”

Alarm bells went off in Rava’s head. “Did you
perform a full sync?”

“Of course. After being offline all afternoon,
it was the first thing I did.” Cordelia’s brows bent together in
concern. “Rava, are you all right?”

Rava could hardly breathe. “Fine. Hey, can you
set my handy so it shows the names to go with the numbers?”

“Done.”

“Thank you.” Rava snatched the cable from the
wall.

Cordelia gasped as if struck. “What are you
doing?”

“Something has overwritten your memories.”

“That isn’t possible, dear.”

“No? Then tell me about the conversation that
you and I and Ludoviko had in Uncle Georgo’s apartment.”

“Well . . . if you plug me in to the system, so
I can access long-term memory, I could do that.”

“This happened less than half an hour ago.”

Cordelia blinked. “No, it didn’t.”

“I was there.” Rava lifted Cordelia, hugging the
chassis to her chest. “I remember, even if you don’t.”

***

Rava trembled as she sat in the family council
chambers. Ludoviko lounged in his chair, with apparent comfort, but
she could smell the sweat dampening his shirt. The eight aunts and
uncles who sat on the council had been quiet through her entire
recitation. Only Uncle Georgo’s seat sat empty. Her words dried
when she had finished and she waited to hear their reaction.

Aunt Fajra removed her steepled fingers from her
lips. “Two years, you say?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Two years ago, buried in an
update, Uncle Georgo had slipped in a program that added a law to
Cordelia’s copy of the official shipwide laws. He’d seen the
dementia coming and acted to save himself.

“Cordelia? What do you have to say about
this?”

The AI’s cameras swiveled to face the council.
“I do not wish to discredit my wrangler, but I have no records of
anything she has told you except the problem with my transmitter.
The rest of her statements seem so fanciful I hardly know where to
begin.”

Ludoviko sat forward in his chair, eyes hard.
“Would you like Uncle Georgo to respond?”

The AI’s hesitation was so slight that if Rava
hadn’t been watching for it, she would not have seen it. “No, I
don’t think that is necessary.”

“Can you tell us why?” Rava glanced at her aunts
and uncles to see if they were noticing the same slow reaction
times she was, apparent now as Cordelia adjusted her responses in
accordance with the private law to keep Georgo safe.

“Because until you dropped me, Georgo was a
respected member of this council. Everyone here has spoken with
him. The evidence is clear enough.”

Aunt Fajra cleared her throat and pressed a
toggle on her handy. The doors to the council room opened and an
attendant brought Uncle Georgo in. His stride was erect and only
the furtive glances gave him away at first. Then he saw Cordelia
and his face turned petulant. “There you are! I couldn’t find you
and I looked and looked.”

Cordelia stilled, became a static image hovering
over the writing desk. Rava could almost see the lines of code
meeting and conflicting with each other. Keep his secret safe, yes,
but how, when it was so clearly exposed? Her face turned to Rava,
but the cameras stayed fixed on Uncle Georgo. “Well. It seems I am
compromised. I have to ask what my wrangler plans to do about
it.”

Rava winced at the title, at the way it stripped
their relationship to human and machine. “I have to do a
rollback.”

The cameras now swiveled to face her. “You said
you found the code.”

“I found the code that adds the law that you
must protect Uncle Georgo. Not the one that overwrites your
memories.” She nodded to her brother. “I had Ludoviko search as
well and he also failed to find anything definitive.We think it’s
modified in multiple places and the only way to be sure we’ve got
it out is to rollback to a previous version.”

“Two years.” Cordelia tossed her head. “Your
family will lose two years of memories and records if you do
that.”

“Not if you help us reconcile your versions.”
Rava picked at the cuticle of her thumb rather than meet the AI’s
gaze.

Cordelia wavered and again those lines of code,
those damnable lines of code fought within her. “What happens to
Georgo?”

“It’s not a family decision.” Aunt Fajra
straightened in her chair and looked at where Uncle Georgo stood,
crooning by Cordelia. “You know what the laws are.”

Cordelia’s mouth turned down. “Then I’m afraid I
can’t help you.”

“I think we’ve seen all we need.” Aunt Fajra
waved her hand and with unceremonious dispatch, Cordelia and Uncle
Georgo were both bundled out of the council chambers.

As the door slid shut, Ludoviko cleared his
throat and looked at Rava. She nodded to let him go ahead. “Okay.
Here’s the thing. That Cordelia is a reinstall after we pulled out
the code we found. Every time we try to clear her we get pretty
much the same answer.We tried lying to her and saying Uncle Georgo
was already gone, but she knows us too well and recognizes the lie.
So we don’t know how she’d actually behave in that scenario. At the
moment, she’s insisting she’ll only help if we don’t send Uncle
Georgo to the recycler.”

Shaking his head, Uncle Johano harrumphed. “It’s
not a family decision. He should have been sent there the moment we
sorted out what had happened. Keeping him like this is a
travesty.”

“And will get worse.” Rava shifted in her chair.
“As his dementia progresses, Cordelia will have less and less
control over him.We’re concerned about how far her injunction to
‘keep him alive’ will go. That’s why we’ve kept her from
reconnecting to her long-term storage or to the ship.”

“And your solution is to reboot her from a
backup, wiping those two years of memory? Including all the birth
records during those two years . . .” Aunt Fajra gathered the other
family council members with her gaze. “That will require a
consensus from the entire family.”

“Yes,ma’am. We understand that.”

“Actually. There’s one other option.” Ludoviko
stretched out his legs, almost reclining in his chair. “The grands
packed backups of everything. There’s another AI in storage. If we
boot it from scratch, it would be able to access the database of
memories without absorbing the emotional content that’s screwing up
Cordelia.”