Fool's War (26 page)

The stars shone down clear white from the sky, muted only by the quarter moon that turned the domes and spires silver. It was beautiful. A sight she would not see at home. Al Shei had time to wish she could stand still and look at it. Instead, she whistled down the tram and swung herself aboard. This was another fully automated module. A city map up front listed streets and addresses in three different alphabets. Al Shei lit up Lipinski’s hotel and took a seat between a merchant robed in green with his shop box on his lap, and a woman cloaked and veiled in solid black.

The tram crawled through the streets. Al Shei found herself eyeing the road in its headlights nervously. The thing was practically an AI itself. It had to be to avoid completely unpredictable obstacles, like animals, cars and pedestrians. But how much of its operation depended on in-put from the central communications facility? It had to know about blockage, or route changes, or repair requirements from somewhere. If the central net went down, would it collapse in the middle of the street? Or would it just go out of control and run into one of those unpredictable obstacles?

Al Shei shivered and tried to pull her thoughts away from useless fears. She had only partial success. Even conjuring up Asil’s warm image didn’t help. She just saw him looking at her gravely from across the coffee table and saying, “Beloved, we might just be in for it this time.”

Finally, the tram stopped in front of Lipinski’s guest house. Al Shei climbed out gratefully. She’d had too much time to sit and think on the ride.

The guest house was a long, low building set up to resemble a series of town houses. It was a very non-traditional structure and stuck out like a sore thumb in a street of tall apartment buildings. In the yellow courtyard light, Al Shei found the registry and check-in console. She pulled out her pen and wrote her name and Lipinski’s on the board. She waited while the system located him and asked if he was willing to see her. Apparently he was, because the board blanked out the names and replaced them with his room number 419.

Al Shei hurried past the long row of doors. A shaft of light spilled out into the street and a familiar profile leaned out the door. When she reached him, Lipinski stood back and let her in.

“What’s happened?” he asked as he hesitated by the door. He shouldn’t close it and they both knew it. It was sinful conduct for her, but right now what she had to say couldn’t be overheard by anyone. Sending up a short prayer for forgiveness, she closed the door for him. Lipinski swallowed audibly.

The room was small and lightly furnished, but heavily carpeted. A mural wall was lit up with what looked like a communications map of the city. There were notes scrawled across it that must have been Lipinski’s. His booted feet didn’t make any noise as he crossed the room and slid into a chair behind the writing table. Al Shei sat on the divan near the low coffee table and forced her hands to lie still on her knees.

“Houston, if there was an AI loose in New Medina, could we do anything about it?”

Lipinski bowed his head. “What changed your mind?”

“Resit, and Uysal. They back up your theory.” She was glad she had not tried to say that while standing. Somehow, saying it out loud made it even more true. “So, I’m asking, is there anything we can do about it?”

Lipinski rested his elbows on the table and ran both hands through his hair. He held his hands clasped behind his neck as if forcing himself to keep his head bowed towards the table.

“I don’t know.” He released himself and straightened up. “The trouble is finding the damn thing. Live AIs move down any line that’ll hold them, into any place that’s got room. They’ll absorb the data that’s in there and spit it out again. They can take up two or three storage units at a time, as long as there are links between them, and move again as soon as they’ve munched down your diagnostic, or your virus.” He drummed his fingers soundlessly on the table-top. “And you’ve got a planet to search, and you don’t even know what it
looks
like.”

He was staring at the mural wall but Al Shei knew he wasn’t seeing it. He was seeing Kerensk and feeling the cold seep through the comm center walls while he and his masters tried to figure out what they should do next. For the first time, Al Shei realized he couldn’t have been more than fifteen when his world died.

Slowly, his expression changed. His eyes widened and his mouth relaxed. His fingers stilled and his hand flattened against the table top.

“Except this time, we do know.” His focus snapped back to the present and the place in front of him. “We’ve got the goddamned thing recorded! We know
exactly
what it looks like!” He was on his feet, pacing and talking to the walls.

“We down-loaded the fractured thing into the hospital. We’ve got a recording of the transaction tucked safe aboard the
Pasadena
. We replay it and write a search program to match the data. We can tag it. We can track it.” His voice was alight with hope and wonder. “And if we find it, we can kill it, before it takes the colony down.”

“Can you do it from here?” Al Shei asked eagerly.

Lipinski shook his head. “The lines are already starting to act up. If it’s out there, it might see any recording we download from
Pasadena
. So that’s not safe. Besides,” he added slowly, “this might take awhile. There’s no guarantee things won’t start falling apart before we can get to that thing.”

Al Shei sucked in a hissing breath through her teeth. “All right. Get your stuff together. I’ll check you out and get us space on the shuttle.” She was halfway to the door before he said,

“You’d better cancel leave.”

“I’d already thought of that.”

She left him there and made her way back to the check-in console, settled Lipinski’s account for him and re-registered the room as vacant.

A low rumbling cut through the air. She glanced up, looking for thunderheads. The rumbling came again. Her knees shook. She tried to still them, but couldn’t. All around her came the sound of rattling and clinking. Startled, unintelligible voices called out of the darkness. The trembling travelled up her sternum to her heart and the muscles in her neck.

Earthquake
, thought Al Shei wildly.

Then it stopped. Her heart pounded hard and her knees shook from weakness this time. She looked up and down and all around her, as if she expected to see the world changed somehow.

Slowly, her knees steadied, but her heart didn’t, because she was remembering Uysal in the crowded coffee house, how he looked out across the desert city and told her about the lava that had been diverted underneath it to help create the climate’s warmth. She remembered what an engineering feat she’d thought that must be.

And how much of it is controlled by computer? And what will happen to it if those computers are no longer in command?

She felt sweat prickle her under her veil and wished Lipinski would hurry. Unhooking her leave bracelet, she laid her thumb across the command bar and wrote in the recall code. She found the free-access socket in the console and jacked the bracelet in. The console would take the bracelet’s signal and boost it up to the satellite network. As long as the satellites were working, the
Pasadena
crew would get the signal. Leave cancelled. Return to the ship immediately.

She just hoped the lines would stay up long enough to let them make their way to a shuttle and get back to The Gate. She knew the public lines were monitored, and that Justice Muratza could easily be notified of her cancellation order. He would want to know why she was pulling her people off planet. He would want her to stop it.

She also knew that if the worst had been allowed to happen it was her responsibility. She would face that, but she would not leave her crew in the middle of it.

“Dobbs? Come on, Dobbs. Answer me. Answer me!”

The voice was filled with urgency. Dobbs knew she had a voice to, but she couldn’t remember where it was.

Here, and here. You are like this. Be like this.

Memory filled her. Memory of her own shape, and of what had just happened. Anger and left-over fear ran through her and she struggled to pull herself into a more familiar form. Someone helped her thread her features and senses back onto the strands of borrowed memory running through her.

Her thoughts and willpower found their way down to her voice. “I’ll be all right. I’ll be all right.”

A pair of presences drew back and Dobbs dragged herself off the solid side of the path. She reached out just a little to steady herself and she knew Cohen and Guild Master Havelock waited next to her.

“How long have I been down?” she croaked.

“Long enough,” said Cohen, gently. “There wasn’t much left of you when we got here.”

“There was enough,” cut in Havelock gruffly. “As long as you didn’t fall back into your body.”

Dobbs shivered. If her patterns were too broken and too scattered, she wouldn’t be able to reintegrate with her own synapses. She could be left blind, or incapacitated, or simply insane.

She drew herself tightly together and felt her tattered self protest. “I will be fine.”

“Good.” Havelock’s approval rang strong in that single word. “The Live One’s retreated to The Gate. We need to get after it immediately.”

Dobbs drew tight in an instant. “No.” She tried to sound resolute, but she didn’t have the strength. “This is my responsibility. I frightened it, I lost it, and I almost got myself killed. I’m not going to let…”

“You’re not going to let anyone else get hurt, particularly your friend Master Cohen,” Havelock finished for her. “Admirable, but you’re not in a position to ‘let’ anything happen. Master Cohen and I are going to work in The Gate network and do what we can to pen the Live One in one storage area. It’s still your job to try to calm it down. If you can’t do that…” Havelock didn’t finish. “You will do that.”

“Yes, Guild Master.” Dobbs felt a fleeting touch from Cohen. He was almost as unnerved as she was.

“Then let us proceed.” Havelock brushed past them, following the line toward the nearest transmitter that could still send them to The Gate.

Side-by-side, Dobbs and Cohen followed their Guild Master.

The Gate didn’t have a coffee shop, but it did have a galley. Not much of one, Yerusha acknowledged as she gazed around the blister compartment. The floor space was taken up with long tables mounted with coffee urns and flanked by benches. A couple of short tables had been placed near the hull and mounted with view screens and memory boards, but that was it. A dozen or so of the station crew sat at the tables, talking in lowered voices or hunching over game modules. The food was a help-yourself system. Once you transferred the credit for your meal, the rows of keeper-boxes would open under your touch and you could load your own box and fill your bulb.

Yerusha collected what looked like an indifferent stew and something that was trying hard to pass as wild rice. It all smelled of heat, meat and very little else. She sighed and sat down at one of the smaller tables. Why was it groundhuggers could only cook on their native worlds? Move them out of the atmosphere and whatever skill they had was left at home. They didn’t even realize that if you had to fake up something, it was a bad idea to try to make it look like something garden-grown.

There weren’t any starbirds or gerbils in The Gate crew, she’d found out. All the personnel were rotated out every six months. The Farther Kingdom didn’t want to risk their crew becoming more loyal to the station and to each other than to the world below.

Groundhuggers, she thought with automatic disdain. After a moment, she realized she had been scanning the benches, and the corridor. She dropped her gaze to the table. She’d been looking for Schyler, who’d said he might come out this far and have lunch with her.

Don’t start, Jemina-Jewel, she told herself. If you let yourself start getting lonely, there’s no telling what you’ll end up doing. It’s only two years. You can do this.

Despite her resolutions, she swallowed a spoonful of stew and immediately missed the Sundars. She wondered if they had had time to do their shopping before leave got cancelled. She wondered what had happened to make the Ninja Woman cancel leave in the first place. Schyler wasn’t telling her anything, just be back aboard within three hours and ready to work. She’d have a full report as soon as he had confirmation of…whatever.

She took out her pen and jacked it into the socket for the view screen and swallowed another spoonful of stew. Because she was registered as a crewmember of a ship renting its berth at the station, the terminal responded.

“Business or entertainment?” inquired the sociable, contralto voice that had guided her through the docking procedures.

Yerusha lowered her spoon slowly. “You’re the station AI.”

“My name is Maidai, ‘Dama. How can I help you?”

Yerusha felt a small smile cross her features. She’d heard about The Gate AI before she’d even headed out this way. Not only was The Gate’s traffic control all guided by this voice, so was most of its maintenance and supply distribution. Maidai kept the station running cheaply, efficiently, and, impartially.

Suddenly the stew didn’t seem quite so disappointing. Maidai might not have caught a soul yet, but it was still a familiar kind of person. “You can talk to me for a little bit, if it won’t interfere with your work.”

Someone had managed to program in a laugh. “Not unless you want to talk about a major statistical analysis or a structural configuration simulation.”

Yerusha chuckled. Very good. “No, just a little casual conversation.”

“As far as I am able,” replied Maidai. “You will have to begin so that I can route through the proper responses.”

All right, not that good, but it’s better than having to pay attention to the stew
. She took a helping of “wild rice” and tried to think of a good opening. “How long have you worked for The Gate?”

“I helped build the station.” There was no ring of pride in the voice, and there should have been. Yerusha found herself wishing she could find Maidai’s programmer and have a long talk with them. “I was sent up in the first modules from The Farther Kingdom and helped direct the station assembly.”

Yerusha took a drink of coffee that, compared to the Sundar’s, might as well have been hot water. “Designated neutral supervisor, that kind of thing?”

There was a pause. “Yes. That kind of thing.”

“Ah.” There was another pause, and it kept on going while Maidai waited for Yerusha to think of something to say.

Mildly comfortable rebellion stirred inside her. “Maidai, ask me a question.”

“What sort of question?”

Yerusha shrugged reflexively. “Any sort of question. You do have interrogative features, don’t you?”

“Lots of them.” The AI paused, sorting out the necessary word string. “But those are only on call during specific situational parameters. I have no routine for the current parameters.”

Yerusha set her bulb down. Same old problem. All AIs could learn. That was one of the qualities that made them artificial intelligence instead of just computers. Most of them, though, only learned when they had been instructed to learn, usually during a set list of tasks. They all remembered and recorded, but without a pre-defined set of circumstances, those recordings were not accessed.

Attempts had been made to create AIs that could learn all the time, but in those cases a “thought” that was relative to outside circumstances became a matter of chance, or chaos theory, and as soon as the architects started trying to match thought to circumstance, the old “when to learn” problem bent itself back into shape. She’d been to discussion groups where people talked about this being the true barrier to independent thought. If an AI environment could not experience the outside world spontaneously, how could it ever house a human soul?

With a twinge, she remembered the nights she’d sat up with Foster trying to solve that problem. She’d thought, maybe arrogantly, a couple of times that she’d almost had it. It was a moot point now. Exiles, even former exiles, were not eligible for the adoption lottery. She’d had her chance and it had been blown right out from under her.

She drank the last of the watery coffee and tried to drink down her bitterness with it.

“How’d you get to be named Maidai?” Yerusha asked, poking her fork into her “rice” again.

“I was told it was someone’s joke,” Maidai responded amiably. “M’aidez means ‘help me’ in French and used to be an intern…” Maidai’s voice faded away.

Yerusha’s hand froze with her fork halfway to her mouth. “Maidai?”

The voice that responded was canned. Obviously some kind of back up recording. “No response available.” Then, in the next minute, Maidai’s voice came back, “…ational distress signal because…”

Very carefully, Yerusha set the fork down into the food box. “Maidai, you’ve had a process interruption, what caused it?”

Another pause. This time, Yerusha found herself holding her breath.

“Process interruption not recorded,” said Maidai. There was no expression in her voice. “There is unaccounted processing time…” Another pause. “You do not have the authorization to interrogate me about central processes.”

Fractured, twisted, buckled…
“Who does have the authorization?”

A list of names and contact codes wrote themselves across the memory board. She picked out the first one; a Process Architect ‘Ster Gabriel Trustee, and underlined the contact code with her pen.

Nothing happened.

Yerusha felt the blood drain out of her cheeks. She tried again, and again, nothing happened.

“Maidai,” she said softly. “Are you still there?”

“No response available.”

A split second later, the long, high-pitch wail of an emergency alarm cut through the galley. The buzz of conversation silenced at once and all heads jerked up, waiting for the announcement to follow.

Nothing happened.

No response available.
It was the reflex to never leave anything loose lying around that shut her food box and pitched it into the trash bin as she stood up.

“All hands, duty stations!” barked out somebody.

Really good idea.
Yerusha forced herself to hang back until the crew had cleared the galley. She had to hand it to them, they moved with purpose and without panic. Then again, none of them knew what could be going on yet. A sick, suspicious part of her was wondering if this cut-price station had a back-up communication system, or if the designers had said, “Why would we need it? The station is under the supervision of an advance-trained, neural-net AI. This is a self-diagnosing system that could not crash all at once, not without raising the alarm to the process architectures.”

Except that it just happened.

Out in the corridor, Yerusha took a second to be sure of her balance, and broke into a run.

She wasn’t the only one. Station crew in their tan overalls were sprinting down the corridor. Yerusha dodged them. Some were carrying rolls of cable and comm packs, which confirmed her earlier suspicions about the lack of a back-up.

Trying to get a comm system set up on the fly. Good luck.

She guessed the ones with the comm-packs were systems crew and picked the corridor they were pouring out of. A glance at the signs as she raced past told her she’d picked correctly. Another couple of corners and she found herself in the middle of the morass Gate’s central comm chamber had become.

Crew milled everywhere, stabbing at boards trying to get answers, shouting orders, rolling out fiber optics to try to link up mute comm packs. The air already felt thick with sweat and fear.

Yerusha skidded to a halt in front of a sandy-haired woman hunched over an open repair hatch.

“Gabriel Trustee!” she bawled over the din.

The woman jerked her chin towards a short-haired, copper-skinned man bellowing orders in the middle of the room.

Yerusha shouldered her way over to him.

“…and grab Yates and Sulmani on the way! We’ve got to check the…”

“You’ve got to get the AI out of the network!” Yerusha planted herself in his line of sight.

His mouth closed with an audible click as his bark brown eyes focused on her. “What the spill and who the spill are you?”

“Fellow Jemina Yerusha, pilot aboard the mail packet
Pasadena
,” she shot back. “You’ve got a virus in your system that’s going to go straight for your AI’s throat if you don’t get it out of there.”

“Gabriel!” somebody hollered. “We’ve got the first life-support glitch in berth seven!”

“Evacuate and seal it down!” Gabriel shouted back. “Start getting people into suits! Get a runner to Esta. We need all free docking bays covered with crew suited and ready to work the clamps by hand. We got ships that’ll need a place to hang, and we don’t know what’s going next!”

“I’ll tell you what’s going next!” Yerusha grabbed his arm. “Your AI! It might already be gone!”