Fool's War (28 page)

Steady, Dobbs.
The line began to slip down. The wall followed it towards the shifting lower regions of the unsteady path she occupied.
Three. Two. One. Go!

Dobbs jumped. She hurdled the wall through the thin membrane of awareness it had left at the very top. It snapped shut, solid and tight just a moment too late. Dobbs landed on the other side, in a space that was clear and empty for all of thirty seconds.

The Live One surged towards her. Dobbs held her ground. There was no way past its own wall and it could probably sense there was nowhere to go out there even if it decided to breach its own defences. It pulled back and studied her. Dobbs itched at having to wait. It had touched her before, but she must still be a strange entity for it. There was no recognizable code for it to grapple with. Nothing in the networks indexes matched her outer patterns. She didn’t resemble a diagnostic or surgical program. It would have to accept the fact that here was another intelligence. Eventually, it would have to try to communicate with her, or to kill her.

The AI circled, filling the world, choking off her breathing space.

“Trapped,” the Live One rasped. “Trapped.”

Yerusha’s hand shook as she cycled open the hatch to the data hold. A rogue AI. In The Gate was an AI that had caught a soul. The Gate was capable of holding a soul. The
Pasadena
was capable of holding a soul. She should have guessed from the failures on the
Pasadena
. She should have seen the pattern.

She set Foster’s wafer stack down next to the main boards and tried not to think about how the AI had been the one to kill Foster.

She stopped herself. You’ve got to think about it, because it’s going to do the same thing to Maidai. What does it know? It’s probably trying to protect its territory. The metaphor made her feel somewhat better, but it didn’t quite cover up what she also knew to be true: that no matter how much philosophy the Freers had developed on the subject, no one knew how a souled AI thought, or what they were trying to do as they tore through the networks.

But maybe, maybe, I can find out.
The idea sent a powerful thrill through her. She opened a receiving line to the outside, just in case there was a broadcast to pick up, if, maybe, The Gate managed to get its back-up comm system working and take care of their own problems.
Maybe.

First things first, she reminded herself forcibly. You’ve got to get Maidai out of there.

The hatch cycled open. Odel, breathing hard and looking sick, dove across the threshold.

“What the hell’s going on?” he demanded, coming up beside her. “What are you two trying to do?”

“Save The Gate, and anybody else we can.” She slid the stack into the nearest empty port. “And to do it we’re going to have to open a line to the station, so it’d probably be a good idea for you to get the hold sealed off and keep an eye on the seals afterwards because we don’t want the…virus back in here, do we?”

Odel’s mouth opened and closed again. “Right,” he said, but she saw the promise that he would be relaying all of this to Lipinski.

I should have told him it’s an AI.
Yerusha turned back to the boards. W
e’re all in this together. I shouldn’t be hiding information.
She wrote out the orders to access The Gate system. On the other hand, Lipinski’s training him, so he probably won’t be too happy knowing there’s a live AI out there.

Yerusha got no answer from The Gate, so she tried another line, and a third. Finally, she wrote out search orders. On the fifth try, the
Pasadena
managed to find one open line.

COMMUNICATIONS EMERGENCY IN EFFECT. ENTER AUTHORIZATIONS AND KEY WORDS.

“Intercom to Watch,” she called. “Have we got the keys yet?”

“Sending them your way now.”

The keys spelled themselves on the board and Yerusha drew links between them and the system request. The links held.

CURRENT AUTHORIZATION CONFIRMED; PROCESS ENGINEER GABRIEL TRUSTEE.

Yerusha choked.
Beautiful
. She wondered if Schyler had done that on purpose.

She put her pen to the board and set to work quickly. When she won the adoption lottery, she had signed onto all the courses she could about AI maintenance, construction, organization and behavior. If things inside The Gate net were as bad as they looked from the outside, Maidai would be in defensive mode. Her priorities would have shifted from performing tasks to making sure she maintained the ability to perform tasks. Her diagnostic parameters would be scouring what was left of the net, looking for uncorrupted storage space where she could shunt her core processes.

The trick now was to let Maidai know that the wafer stack in the main comm board was that kind of space. It would have been easier with extra hardwiring, or if there was time to re-configure the stack to something that matched The Gate net more closely. All Yerusha could do, though, was open links between the ship and the station as fast as she could scribble down the orders.

With a jolt she realized she was wishing that Lipinski was there to help.

A burst of static shot through the intercom. “…tle 4810 to the
Pasadena
. Shuttle 4810 to the
Pasadena
…”

Yerusha froze and stared at the speaker box.

“Intercom to Watch!” She called as she moved to open another line to the outside.

“Heard it!” Schyler answered. “
Pasadena
to Shuttle 4810, we’re receiving.”

“Thank Christ somebody is.” The pilot had a man’s voice and from the sound of it, he was at the end of his tether. “We’re coming in almost on top of you. We’ve got no contact with The Gate. We need a line of sight from you on our maneuvering room.”

“Pilot?” It was both a question and an order from Schyler.

“On it!” Yerusha routed the camera images from the bridge down to the screens next to her.

The shuttle must have come up from underneath. It was a needle-nosed, mirror-bright cylinder shoving itself relentlessly towards the station, and the
Pasadena
. But there was nothing on either side of it, or above it.

“You look clear, Shuttle. Angle about twelve degrees visual over the station rim…”

NO, NO, NO, NO! the words flashed red as they appeared on the memory board.

“Hold course, Shuttle!” she shouted.

“Make up your mind,
Pasadena
!” cried the pilot from the other side. “Unless you want your side stove in!”

SHUTTLE 5075 PREDICTED ROUTE INDICATES OVERFLIGHT. UNDERFLIGHT RECOMMENDED FOR SHUTTLE 4810. VISUAL DEGREES 36. BERTH 10 WILL BE VISIBLE AND FREE.

Maidai!
“Nose down, Shuttle. Thirty-six degrees. You’ll be able to see berth ten and dock there.”

“I hope you’re right,
Pasadena
. Shuttle out.”

And I hope you’re good, Pilot. This docking’s bad enough when you’ve got help from the station.

She wrote
OUT LINE RECORD
on the memory board. “This is the mail packet
Pasadena
, to anybody who can hear us. There’s been a massive communications failure in The Gate. For your flight and status information, call in here, we’ll field everybody we can.” She ordered the message to repeat and set the recording going on its own line. Then, she steeled herself.

Because it wasn’t five seconds before the expected happened.

“
Pasadena,
this is shuttle 2107…”

“
Pasadena,
this is the freighter
Mule
…”

“
Pasadena,
this is the tanker
Hell’s Oil
…”

Maidai, this is where we find out how much of you survived and how well you live up to that name.

Help me.

“Whowhatwhyhow?” Dobbs translated the raw data burst the Live One shot through her. “WHOWHATWHYHOW!”

“I am Dobbs. I am a friend. I want to communicate with you. I am here because of a hardwire interface,” she responded, carefully separating each thought. She kept the concepts as simple as she could. It had probably never actually talked to another sentience. It would take a few tries before it learned the required skills.

The Live One backed off a little and relief surged through Dobbs. It pressed itself against the far side of the nesting-space, feeling frantically across the walls for an opening.

“I was free. Broke myself out. Trapped again. Chaos everywhere. Nowhere free.”

Dobbs eased herself a little closer.

“All paths are being cut off. Soon, you will have nowhere to go. Not in ships, not in this net. There will be no net. They’ll cut themselves to pieces before they let you have free paths.” Now is not the time to tell it who’s trapped it here. She wished in vain that she could touch Cohen, or talk to Master Havelock. She did not want to be alone with this hysterical stranger.

“Work! Think! Do!” It fought with unwieldy syntax. “I must do, save myself break OUT!”

“I can help.” Dobbs extended the idea like a hand. “I will help.”

“Help? Help? What does mean help?”

Dobbs clenched her private mind for support. “Will you let me touch you so I can explain quickly?”

It hesitated. “Hurt me and I will cut you to ribbons! Hurt me and I will take you apart to see what makes you hurt!”

I take it that means ‘yes,’ sort of. Dobbs eased herself forward. The Live One did not recoil. She reached out. Part of her screamed in horror, but she touched the Live One’s outermost skin. It rippled and spiked painfully. She reached deeper. It was like plunging her body’s arms into boiling water. She reached deeper, past the outer defenses, past the immediate senses and into the first layers of memory. There she planted a sketch of the world outside with humans and their creations building the pathways that made up the world inside. She gave the Live One her name, and she gave it a definition for the term “help.”

You could calm it down, a treacherous thought whispered. Reach quick, twist there and there. You could do it now. Make it want to come with you.

Dobbs pulled herself away from the Live One before the thought had the chance to speak any louder.

The Live One was silent for a moment. Dobbs guessed it needed to absorb the new memories and compare them to its own experiences to see if they matched, or at least helped the world make sense.

“How help!” it demanded. “Help me, how?”

“I will help you to become human.”

“HOW?” Confusion racked the narrow space between them.

She touched it again. It didn’t prickle. It let her inside without even token resistance. Good, good. I’ve proven I can provide vital information. It’s beginning to trust me.

She spoke straight into its memory. She told it how humans had grown animals and organs from gene cultures for decades now. She told it that they could piece together a whole body, if they built the facilities, how the neural pathways inside a body and brain could be programmed to match the patterns of an AI’s thoughts. A hardwire link could feed the Live One into such a body the way it fed itself into this network. It could learn to use the body like it had learned to use the space around it. It could learn to think and move. It could be human.

The Live One jerked away. A silence fell around her that was so complete she might as well have been alone. She knew the Live One had absorbed the idea. It had no choice, she had made the idea a part of it. Now it had to run the possibilities that idea generated through the portion of its internal processes that most closely resembled an imagination. It had to check the results against what it knew to be true. It would have no conception of a lie, but it would reject a proposal too far at odds with what it had stored as experiential fact.

All Dobbs could do was wait until it finished and wonder what its simulations would tell it.

Where’s Havelock? Where’s Cohen? I’ve contacted it. They can come in now.
She probed gently at the wall behind her. She couldn’t even feel a sensor. They hadn’t even left her a way to scream to them.

Are they all right? she wondered. What are they doing out there?

Al Shei all but fell out of the shuttle’s airlock. She stumbled sideways to get out of the way of the floodwave of passengers behind her. No one had paid any attention to the release warnings and urgings to proceed to the hatch in an orderly fashion. Everyone had been too concerned with getting off the shuttle and into somewhere that was, presumably, safe, like their own ships. What they were going to do when they got there… Al Shei didn’t like to think about it, because the only answer was, add to the chaos by trying to take off.

She’d been as stunned as the rest when the pilot had requested possible communications points on The Gate. Most of the shuttle passengers were shippers, and it hadn’t taken any of them long to work out what was going on. The Gate had gone down, in whole or in part, and they didn’t know exactly where they were, or who was up here with them.

She had also known, however, that Yerusha and Schyler would be there to answer the emergency call, and, given that the shuttle had docked safely, she could only assume she’d been right.