“What? Assisted me with what?”
“This is a DIANA ship, and you are an asset of DIANA…”
“Bullshit. I am…I was a Social Care operative.”
“This may be true, yet you remain property of DIANA. Your genetic code contains sequences copyrighted to DIANA, your thought patterns are constructed on a recognized DIANA AI seed algorithm.”
For a moment, Judy was speechless. She fought against her rising indignation, coldly calming herself.
“This is ridiculous. My thoughts are my own. Even if, and I do not believe this to be true for a moment, even if my thoughts were the result of a DIANA AI seed algorithm, then they would still be my own. You cannot copyright a mind.”
“That may be true of the Earth Domain, but not of DIANA’s sphere of influence.”
Judy was thinking fast. At these moments it was helpful to speak to Jesse, but he was gone. Gone? What had the
Free Enterprise
said, that certain mechanisms had been suspended while it completed her development? What did that mean?
Her hands suddenly flexed, without her meaning them to, the right hand fluttering pitifully, trapped within the colored threads that bound it. What were they doing to her?
“Is this some sort of game?” she shouted. “I think you are being deliberately misled. I have had dealings in the past with DIANA in my work as an SC operative. Did Kevin put you up to this? Have you heard of him? Maybe he tagged me, some sort of revenge…”
“No, Judy. This goes to the very core of your being. It is in your bones, you might say. You are a DIANA asset. I cannot believe that you did not know this. Surely you know what your purpose is?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.” Something touched her back and the flesh there went suddenly numb. She strained at the brightly colored laces, saw them digging into her arms and hands, tried to turn her head to see what was happening.
“What are you doing to me?”
A nauseating smell filled the room, a sickly sweet burning.
“Is that me?”
“Judy, we have examined your mind, and we believe that you are telling the truth. You do not realize what your purpose is; you are not even aware of the reason for your existence. Sadly, neither are we. Therefore, we are taking what we believe to be appropriate action. We are now performing whatever repairs that we can to your mechanism.”
“What repairs?”
“Activating the meta-intelligence that has stalled within you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This is the problem: you appear to be lacking the most basic information regarding your purpose. Therefore we are arranging for you to be returned to Earth for repairs and reprogramming.”
“Earth! But I don’t want to go to Earth!”
“Exactly our point. You seem to have acquired the notion that you have free will and the right to self-determination. You need to be reminded of DIANA’s core purposes. Arrangements have been made. We should have a ship here within a few weeks.”
Maurice stared at Judy, his eyes wide.
“A ship? But that’s us.”
Judy shrugged.
“Like I said, call me Jonah. I’m a broken machine, and they’re sending me back for repairs. And there’s nothing we can do to stop them.”
Edward had come into the room from the kitchen. He was gazing at Judy, his hands red and greasy from the chicken he had been preparing. The meta-intelligence rendered him as something so simple, like a pleasing, undemanding pattern of square tiles.
“Don’t you want to go to Earth, Judy?” he asked.
“Of course she doesn’t, Edward,” said Maurice impatiently.
“But she might be able to find out what happened to her. How long will it take to get to Earth?”
Maurice slid his fingers over his console.
“Today’s Sunday. We’ll be there Friday. Six days.”
“Six days?” said Edward. Nobody else was speaking. “Why don’t you try to run, Judy?”
Maurice and Saskia couldn’t meet Judy’s eyes. Only Edward stared at her with his honest, open gaze. She addressed her answer to him.
“I’ve tried, Edward. I’ve been running for over ten years. But someone wants me to go back to Earth.”
“Who?”
“Someone called Chris.”
“Who is he?”
Judy almost smiled. “A bad person. Actually, a bad robot. He wants me to kill someone there.”
“Who?”
“The Watcher.”
Now Judy had Maurice and Saskia’s full attention.
“The Watcher?” said Maurice. “Why do you want to kill the Watcher?”
“I don’t. Chris told me that I would someday.”
“When did he tell you this?”
“Twelve years ago.”
“How could you possibly do it, anyway? The Watcher was the first AI. It is the most powerful entity known to humankind.” Maurice snorted. “It’s not even as if there is a reason for killing it! You might disagree with its actions, you might find them restrictive, but it’s doing its best. It nurtures humans! Why would you want to kill it?”
“I don’t know. Chris is a powerful AI himself. He wants the Watcher out of the way; he thinks that he has better plans for how humanity should operate. He thinks that I will agree with him someday.”
“Do you think that he’s right?”
“I hope that he’s not. I’ve spent the last twelve years wondering about it. That’s why I ran. I suppose now, at last, I’ll get to find out.”
Edward shook his head. He turned to the new captain of the
Eva Rye
. “We don’t
have
to take her, do we, Saskia? Not if she doesn’t want to go?”
Without speaking, Maurice traced a pattern across the surface of his console. Pale gold letters sprang to life in the middle of the living area.
Violation of Contract?
Are you sure you wish to disengage from a Fair
Exchange?
Yes/No ?
Saskia tilted her head forward so that she was looking up at Edward from under her purple-black fringe.
“I don’t think we have any choice, Edward,” she murmured.
maurice 1: 2252
Edward had made sure
there were three boiled and three roast potatoes for everyone sitting at the table. Maurice had watched him share them out carefully, counting under his breath as Edward spooned them one by one onto each plate.
So now, as Saskia was pouring gravy onto her cauliflower, Maurice wanted to know why Miss Rose, who still had three boiled and three roast on her plate, was just forking up a fourth roast potato with the evident intention of eating it all at once. Where had she got it from? Maurice was mystified: she did this kind of thing every mealtime, and nobody seemed to notice but him.
“You say the
Eva Rye
was born on the first of August,” said Judy, interrupting his thoughts. “That’s an odd choice of words.”
“No, it’s a good description,” said Maurice. He brought his attention back to Judy. What was it about the way she gazed at him that he found unnerving? It was the way she studied you as if you were an object, he decided. She would stare at you for a moment and then there would be a flicker of recognition in her face, as if she had remembered what you were: a human, rather than just another piece of furniture. And then that spark of recognition would be replaced by a carefully blank expression.
Judy knew that Maurice was watching her. She turned to Saskia.
“You’re not eating, Saskia,” said Judy. “Maybe you can tell me about how you adopted the Fair Exchange software. I’ve heard rumors, but nothing concrete.”
Saskia speared a piece of cauliflower with her fork. “Why do you want to know?” She leaned forward so that her face was hidden again by black curtains of hair.
“Because I find the FE system fascinating,” said Judy. “I have never been on a ship without an AI before, and yet…”
“What?” asked Maurice.
“And yet…I can almost feel the presence of something here on board…” Her voice trailed away to nothing.
Maurice, meanwhile, listened to the clinking of the cutlery on the plates. There had been new dishes in all the kitchen cupboards: beautiful, paper-thin white china decorated with delicate black swirls.
Saskia looked out from under her fringe. “There’s nothing much to say, Judy,” she said mildly. “Maurice and I were both on Breizh. That’s a colony planet on the edge of the Enemy Domain. The EA were hoping to bring the colonists to term in about six months, and they had brought us humans there to aid in the final transition. In our free time we used to go to this empty port, about four hundred kilometers from the base. We’d borrow a flier to get us there, anything to get out from under the noses of Social Care…”
Maurice grinned. Saskia didn’t seem to care how rude she was. Or had she forgotten that Judy had told them she was an SC operative? It would be typical of Saskia not to pay that close attention to another person, even one who had arrived on the ship in such a strange fashion.
Saskia took another tiny piece of cauliflower and swallowed it. She continued in a careless way.
“One night another Free Exchanger turned up and we played the n-strings game. A few of us made the decision to adopt the FE lifestyle pretty much there and then. Michel was our team leader on Breizh, so he became captain. Maurice here and someone else—Armstrong, his name was—were to be security.” She seemed to change tack in the middle of her sentence without realizing it. “Donny’s wife had just walked out on him and the kids, so he wanted a fresh start. And my life was getting stale. I felt I needed a new challenge. And so here we are.”
Except that wasn’t the full story
. Did Saskia really believe her story explained everything? Judy obviously didn’t think so. She was gazing back at Saskia, drinking in her pose, her expressions, all the words she hadn’t spoken. Maurice realized she was noting the slight tremble in the fork as again Saskia finally cut off the tiniest piece of cauliflower and put it in her mouth.
Judy had been a Social Care operative. She was able to read the emotions of everyone present and use them as a chart to plot their course to the Watcher’s version of sanity. There was no lying to an SC operative.
“I must admit,” said Judy, “a lot of that went over my head.” She turned to Maurice, her dead-white face like a lighthouse beam turning towards him. He felt as if all his secrets were being illuminated by that searching expression.
Social Care
, he thought,
they can never give it up.
Then he shivered as he noted how her expression changed, and she regarded him once more as just a piece of meat. When she spoke, it was in the tones someone would use to ask the Turing machine to turn on the bedroom lights.
“I don’t understand what is going on on this ship, Maurice. Why is there no AI on board?”
“FE doesn’t allow AI.”
“Why not? Why are you all here, anyway? What is the n-strings game? I’m not sure that you understand yourself.”
You couldn’t lie to that gaze.
“I’m not sure I do,” said Maurice. “Look, as far as I can tell, there are three rules to FE: no AIs, no self-replication, and everything must be paid for.”
“How do you know that? Who tells you the rules?”
“It’s not like that. They aren’t told to you; you sort of discover them for yourself.”
“How?”
“By playing the n-strings game!”
Judy held his gaze, and Maurice felt himself beginning to blush.
She can see the way right through to my ignorance,
he thought.
She knows that I don’t really understand.
And Judy just went on and on staring. He felt such relief when she finally spoke.
“Tell me what you think happened on Breizh, Maurice.”
Maurice had never felt comfortable on Breizh. There were nineteen million human embryos buried somewhere deep underground and, especially when it was nighttime, their potential lives haunted him. Even here, in the little town of Raspberry, ghosts haunted the pretty white houses that clustered on the rocky outcrops overlooking the blue sea. He imagined these ghosts streaming up the long ribbons of the bridges that climbed from the shores to the distant grey mountains, seeking their places at the silver machinery that had been driven into the dark crevasses beneath the peaks.
During his work shifts, Maurice followed Armstrong down through dim portals into underground spaces newly cleared of hostile defense mechanisms, and he would feel the ears of those unrealized lives pressed against the walls that surrounded him. He could hear long dormant fingers scrabbling to catch hold of him, reaching out for help.
The empty planet should have been beautiful; instead, the machinations of the deranged AI that had tried to build a second human empire had given Breizh the feeling of a stillborn carcass filled with crawling maggots. Maurice often wondered if the other planets in the Enemy Domain had the same feel.
When they had leave, Maurice joined the other humans and hopped onto a flier, heading far from the haunted mountains to the wild coastline, where he hoped the whipping breezes would blow the ghosts away.
Armstrong and Maurice had gone to one of the cafés that stood in line along the beach in the little village they had christened Raspberry.
“I hope that Douglas hasn’t brought his fiddle along,” complained Armstrong. “We can all play an instrument, and yet we have the good sense not to. Why don’t these people leave the job to the experts? Let the AIs play for us.”
“Exactly,” Maurice agreed. “We get enough of music at school. Here, I’ll get you a beer.” He headed for one of the crates dumped at the back of the room.
There were other people sitting at the metal tables, looking out at the spit of land across the bay, a rugged grey line between the blue water and the freshly laundered clouds in the blue sky above. The Von Neumann Machines had never made it down the spider-web bridge that ran from the AI’s base in the mountains to the coast. The construction of the houses and bars intended to help house the nineteen million had been left half completed.
“Here you are,” Maurice said, handing a beer to Armstrong. They twisted the caps and felt the bottles chilling in their hands.
“Do you know what I feel like doing?” Armstrong said. “I feel like getting drunk. It’s nice to be able to do just that without anyone telling you about the danger to your health.”