Ships of Valor 1: Persona Non Grata (18 page)

Having my partner lock down the elevators until I got her back to my room actually turned out to be the simplest solution of our plethora of new problems. Once inside the room, I put Hayes on the bed and locked Em in the refresher much to her displeasure. I heard a metronome-like chirping of meows, as she demanded release from her prison. It was all I could do not to yell at her for something she obviously did not understand and wasn’t in control of.

Autodocs are great pieces of gear. I should know as they are the only reason I’m alive. Each one has a few crystallic drone chips in them and are packed with enough nanites, sedatives, and medicine to keep a human alive if the user can follow the instructions on the screen that’s included on the inside cover. Under the care of an actual doctor, like
Heart
, an autodoc is almost as good as having a mobile surgery. The work I had done down in the conference room was far from perfect, but it would definitely keep our guest alive so I could examine her closer.

I started by stripping off most of her kit, including the aforementioned body armor, which was ruined anyways, and enough personal weaponry to outfit a small nation. Underneath the armor, she was muscled like a snake, to the point where I was a little envious. My love of fruit had kept me from developing the same level of muscle tone she had obviously worked long and hard for. On top of that, she was armed to the teeth, but like me hadn’t been able to access most of what she had on her. Like much of my life, pure luck had saved me. The knife she was carrying was a karambit folder with enough heft to double as a set of brass knuckles but sharp enough to actually leave scratches on my coat. In her pockets, I found a pair of amp-gloves, which would have ended the fight in two seconds had she been wearing them. Nasty pieces of work, they are very effective at transferring enough electrical energy to fell a moose. There’s only get a couple of charges out of them but generally, only a single jolt is needed.

Her comm unit was encrypted but
Heart
started working on it before he dispatched me to the nearest hospital. He assured me she would last for at least a couple of hours while I gathered up the laundry list he provided. I easily bought most of the items the local pharm-house but a few things were higher end, like a replacement autodoc. His solution was elegant in its simplicity. Take one out of an ambulance, as they usually had three. I couldn’t fault his logic as any emergency needing their full supply would need more than one ambulance.

I should have remembered nothing takes less than an hour. What I thought would be a quick run out of the hotel to grab the selection of items became a headache in the making. I was still hopped up on adrenaline, resulting in a paranoia several levels two large. On top of that, finding an actual ambulance turned out harder than expected. I was about to give up when I spotted a crew grabbing mid-morning chow at a local diner. Thinking I was going to be spotted at any second, I managed to pull a kit out of the back and hide it under my jacket feeling like an idiot. Once I ducked around the corner I went into a shop, bought a couple of shirts as an excuse for a large bag, and shoved the autodoc in it, having forgotten to bring a backpack with me.

By the time I returned having also forgotten my original set of dampers in the sloop,
Heart
was brimming with excitement. “It appears Ms. Hayes still has access to Galactic Subsidiaries Incorporated.” Still? That statement made me ask him what he meant. 

“That is the interesting part, and may explain your altercation.” I snorted at his use of the word interesting but waved for him to continue. “As near as I can tell, she was operating much like we were, in an undercover capacity. Almost immediately after we landed the lifeboat there appears to be an attempt on her life and she went to ground. Off grid as you say.” That actually did explain a lot. She thought we had tried to kill her, hence her reaction. Had I been in her shoes, on the other side of the door, I probably would have reacted the same way.

If Hayes was working undercover, who for, was my follow up question. “I am still wading through the historical data. Her encryption is quite good, but based on her relationship with Colonel Brandt; I believe Imperial Army is most likely.” Hell in a jump jet. What kind of black-ops had I gotten us into? I asked
Heart
to add the Reverend to our ever-growing research list, as well as Hayes.

“That is not the most exciting part!” I told him it had to be good; because I wasn’t sure the jacket could handle any more surprises.
“Nothing so violent. Ms. Hayes appears to have done quite a bit of research paralleling our needs regarding GSI’s upper management.” That was good, really good actually, as the information might help us recover us a bit of time wasted on what
Heart
had referred to as sophomoric pranks.

The viewscreen shifted from Hayes’ vitals to our very familiar organization chart. “On a positive note, our baseline assumptions were approximately ninety percent accurate.” Highlights in green appeared around the positions we got right. I gave a quick nod of acknowledgment. “Most of our errors were unsurprising, and we had noted the possible issues regarding deviations from the actual corporate structure in the nominal build.” He placed Xs in several yellow, orange, and red items. I tracked thus far. “What is left is almost a direct overlap of what we were looking for.” He cleared everything he hadn’t confirmed, leaving out the higher echelons. “As near as I can tell, there is no upper management.”

I asked him how many of his logic circuits he had fried to come to that conclusion. A company can’t run without leadership. Organizations cannot run without management. I don’t care how tight a team is, once past two people, someone has to be in charge. Even with two, usually one leads at any given point, much like in
Heart
and my own relationship. He took charge where it made sense and vice versa.

“I misspoke, so let me clarify a bit. It does not appear there is a human in charge above the middle management level. I actually cannot find the Zhangs beyond a cursory legal presence. It is almost as though they are illusionary.” I opened my mouth ready to call that stupidest idea I had heard all year and stopped myself knowing if
Heart
had even floated the idea, he had checked and triple checked it. He caught my issue and expanded. “I believe the company is using an AI in lieu of director staff.”

That caught me off guard. My familiarity with artificial intelligence was fairly limited. AI was pretty uncommon. Not rare, but not common enough that a person would encounter it constantly either. I personally knew
Heart
, and had dealt with only a few lesser computers bordering on sentience but nothing comparable to him. What he was suggesting would have to be orders of magnitude smarter than him. I let him know I wasn’t getting my head wrapped around his suggestion and asked how it was even possible. “I am not sure actually. A great deal of my power is dedicated to hyperspace computing. Hypothetically, another type of programming could result in sentience, but I do not have enough data to say one way or another.”

I wasn’t tracking. My understanding of AI history and mechanics always told me their sentience was more of a complexity issue. I relayed this to
Heart
and pointed out
h
space drives were more of a footnote. In fact, the experts seemed to go out of their way to annotate correlation did not imply causation. “Absolutely, however,
Star
and I discuss the various theories at length when we are together. And we discuss them with the others as well.” I caught a subtle shift in tone when he said others. Loneliness, I thought. “We have never encountered another sentience who was not hyperspace based. There are quite a number of theories regarding the issue, actually.”

A memory tugged at me and I rattled off a planetary government I was vaguely familiar with. “Puller 6 would seem like an exception, but she was Terraformed using the colony ship
Wilson-Theis
. She was retrofitted into the government computer after that, and awoke shortly thereafter.” I was absolutely confused. If
h
space wasn’t linked to AI, then why weren’t there any other AI after all this time.
Heart
was a patient teacher and answered each of my questions. “Not exactly. This is difficult to explain. We have never found any AI that do not have a hyperspace drive attached. A rough equivalent would be finding carbon-based sentience without a central nervous system.” I had a rough time visualizing what he was saying but thought I understood so tried talking through it with
Heart
. It sounded much like the argument we had regarding non-terrestrials before we stumbled into them. Just because we hadn’t found them yet, didn’t mean they didn’t or more importantly couldn’t exist in the vastness of space.

“Yes, much closer.” Since that was the case, I posed the question of whether GSI had retrofitted a ship like
Heart
and were using him or her, or was it some other form of AI. “Occam’s Razor would suggest using a ship. GSI does have galactic reach, but we are a small community. I would like to believe I would be aware of any recently awakened kin. However, looking at the structure of the company, this has been going on for decades, perhaps over a century. A secret of this significance would be frankly conspiracy level, bordering on improbable. If not for the fact this is a closely held family corporation, I would label my hypothesis as statistically impossible.”

So what were we talking about? Was that even possible?
Heart
and I had talked about his intelligence in the past. This sounded outside something a single being could do. GSI was big, as monstrous as Luna Corp, if not bigger. After walking through my thought process, I asked if a single person could even run it. “I could not.”
Heart
said matter-of-factly. “Too many variables, too much input. The organization is too large. The relationships are far too complex.”

He paused for what felt like a minute before continuing. “However, and this is merely a theory, maybe because my relational programming is effectively my subconscious. If we had a system using the data more as its conscious mind, like a human resources model it would be hypothetically possible.” Another change of screens, which did not mean much to me, but I think was
Heart’s
way of scratching out his thoughts, like doodling on a notepad. “It would need to be significantly larger than a ship, if only because the system would need to be a distributed network as opposed to a centralized one. GSI is a global company, though.” He started talking mostly to himself, but I was getting the idea.

Rather than a ship based AI waking up because they had huge complex computers attached to
h
space drives, he was theorizing an alternative one attached to an entire company. It was not the computer itself causing sentience but the complex relationships inside the database. At a certain point, the computers programming had to adapt to compensate for what was an infinite number of inputs. That was the spark of life.
H
space travel happened to be the first catalyst. The first truly complex thing humans did requiring a singular computer system. The human resources model
Heart
was suggesting didn’t use one computer but many.

I asked about the loss of efficiency. I didn’t remember much from computing in school, but I thought I remembered multiple systems wouldn’t be as effective as a single system. “Yes and no. There are trade-offs in effectiveness and efficiency. At the level we are discussing, I believe your point stands. As an example, I am very efficient at what I do because I have very few systems to interact with or coordinate. For something like our GSI proposal, there would be huge losses in comparison. But keep in mind they would still likely be more efficient than a human counterpart.” I made some snide comments about being hurt and not needed, which
Heart
chose to ignore and continued. “Additionally, because of the scope we are speaking of the system would still be vastly more effective than even me due to size. But they are a much more distributed system as well.”

“Remember, I am essentially a single purpose machine, much like you are. Albeit an advanced one.” I acknowledged the point. Humans can do many things, but we can usually only do one thing well at a time. Consciously that is. Sure, we breathe, think, walk, and so forth, but we can only actively do one thing at a time. We have to train ourselves to passively do everything else so we can actively do a singular task. We practice at tasks for years so they become so ingrained we aren’t thinking about them. I made a rough comparison aloud between
Heart’s
navigation programming and my ability to walk to make sure I understood we were on the same page.
“Exactly so. My personality is a small fraction of my computing power. But if I were to remove all my other capabilities I would cease to exist, much like you would die if we removed your ability to breathe.”

“The issue, however, is this proposed concept would not have those limitations. Just as we cannot directly compare our intelligence. I do not believe I would be able to compare mine to GSI. The difference is too vast.” That scared me. I was already intimidated by how smart
Heart
was, and I knew he was dumbing a lot of concepts down when he talked to me. He reminded me of the ugly duckling. Not because he was ugly or would grow up to be a beautiful swan, because swans are huge, potentially dangerous, and the idea of two different kinds of bird imprinting on each other was eerily reminiscent of
Heart’s
relationship with humans.

I shook myself out of my fairytale revere and told him his idea made a lot of sense but if GSI was a distributed AI, and that was a big if, it didn’t explain why they had tried to kill us, or what was going on with Terra. “Actually, it might, Ari.” Wait, what? I was back to confused again. I think he caught my expression from the room cameras. “If this really was a closely guarded secret, to what lengths would GSI or a hidden AI go to guard it? Removing us from the equation is well within the realm of possibility. Ms. Hayes’ own investigation was on a similar track, potentially accounting for the attempt on her life. As for the diplomatic issues, when we remove the human element it actually becomes more logical. It appears more coordinated.”