Qualea Drop (The Spiral Wars #7), page 34
"In fact," Afana added as she accepted the hypodermic that Efraim handed to her, and injected it, "I can't quite believe he's in as good shape as he is. What was on that bandage you put on him?"
"Nano-solution," said Trace. "Micro-machines. It's standard on our ship."
"Major, I am observing the medical feeds now," said Styx in her ear. The Purists did not have earpieces. "I believe Halhoun will recover quickly."
"Styx says he'll be fine," Trace relayed.
"Incredible," said Afana. Wide-eyed at that further reminder that she was not among regular humans.
"Any sign the reeh have changed them?" Trace wondered in English, for Romki's benefit.
"Oh, Major," and Romki shook his head in exasperation. "My medical knowledge is enough to perform basic first aid and then a bit more, but that's all. Probably Styx would know."
Trace looked at Taj. He was in shock, staring at one wounded, unconscious friend, while attempting to process the other's death. She put a hand on his shoulder. "Taj." She squeezed, getting his attention. His face was utter confusion. Desolation. He wanted to cry, but hadn't yet processed on a deeper emotional level what he'd lost. Trace knew exactly how he felt, just by looking at him. All Phoenix crew had been there. "You did good. Dagan too."
Taj turned and walked, pulling up his visor, only to rediscover that this far down, there was no light at all. He put the visor back on, hands on his head and trying to breathe deeply. Trace followed, as Jokono hovered, concerned and perhaps thinking that an older man might be the person to offer a younger one some comfort. Trace gestured him back, taking the time even now to consider their dark perimeter, down here in the bowels of Qwailash Sector, where dark creatures were known to prowl. Tacnet showed her marines taking careful positions, and Styx's bugs releasing to fly deeper.
At the broken hole in the wall that led back to the tunnel, Taj put a hand on the fractured concrete, and leaned for a while. Then he looked back at Trace. "What's it all for?" he asked hoarsely. "This mission of yours. It's gotten one of my best friends killed, and one more hurt. What's it for?"
Suddenly she was on Rando again. Seeing the bodies of dead corbi, and their friends wondering if the mission this crazy human had sent them on was worth the sacrifice. Staff Sergeant Gideon Kono's lifeless eyes staring at the ceiling amid the carnage of his last stand. She did not want to send more young people to their deaths. Down here in the depths of Qalea, the mission suddenly seemed so far away. She wanted to tell Taj to take Halhoun and go home to their families, and live his life, and forget he'd ever met her.
"I'm trying to save the human race," she told him instead. "It's a job for warriors. I think Dagan was a warrior. Are you a warrior, Taj?"
Engineering Bay 17C was a familiar scene, Phoenix techs gathered about a complex alien synthetic brain in a brace mount, surrounded by screens, wires and sensors in a working tangle. Erik leaned against a wall support, eating stir fry from a plastic container with a fork while watching the techs work. Two of them were tavalai -- Spacer Takomiri and Chief Petty Officer Kumarada, conversing in a combination of earpiece-translated Togiri and broken English. Of all the ship's departments, Engineering had been most seamless in its integration of tavalai, mostly, Erik suspected, because the language of engineering was universal enough that it transcended other barriers to communication.
Overseeing them all was Bucket, having squeezed his way down the transit spine from Midships, and through Phoenix corridors and doorways to sit like a giant land crab outside of the cluster of organic crew. Theoretically he could have monitored the procedure from Midships, but from there he'd struggle to see all the human and tavalai interactions with their guest, and perhaps be slightly unprepared for any negative consequences. Erik recalled what the crew had been like two years ago, and their probable reactions then to the thought of activating a long-dormant ceephay-era AI on the ship. Back then, they'd all have been on red-alert, with marines standing in the room with weapons levelled, to be sure the AI knew that one false move would result in its destruction. Now, they were certain enough about Phoenix's upgraded systems, with defensive barriers to infiltration provided by Styx herself, that the threat provided by a mere refinery-manager wasn't a large concern.
Lieutenant Rooke directed the team in person, this now being Second Shift, and Warrant Officer Leung having taken charge of Engineering in what was supposed to be Rooke's off-time. He crouched beside Kumarada, both peering at a flashing display, pointing at notable things that only tech geniuses would understand. On another display, the little girl of their previous communications with this ceephay intelligence sat crosslegged on a blank white floor, waiting with apparent patience. She'd acquired from somewhere a school uniform and a teddy bear, held absently on her lap.
She appeared to see Erik looking, and waved. Erik smiled and nodded back. So the ceephay was functional enough in her new environment that she'd uplinked to the room's cameras and was now triangulating to find the direction of Erik's gaze. Highly socialised, this one. Probably the product of working closely with organics over an extended period.
"Does she have sound?" Erik asked the room. "Or is it just visuals?"
"Just visuals, Captain," said Spacer Raza from nearby. "But she can probably read lips."
Lieutenant Dale entered with Lieutenant Karajin, Dale sipping a post-workout water, while Karajin ate some foul-smelling fish. Erik slid back to lean in the room's corner, so Karajin and Dale could lean on a wall to either side within his vision, and not stand unsecured. "Any progress?" Dale asked.
"Lieutenant Rooke?" Erik asked loudly, and Rooke looked up from his work. "Kill the ceephay's visuals for a moment please. We'll bring them back shortly." Rooke nodded, and made some inputs. "She's reading lips," Erik explained to the marines. "Makes private conversations hard."
"Thought we'd all gotten used to that," said Dale. On the visible screen, the young girl with the teddy bear pouted and looked upset, bottom lip protruding.
Erik rolled his eyes. "She's got no memory input yet," he said. "Rooke explained it to me, something about her memory function being atrophied from disuse... I don't know how that's possible with a crystalline data matrix, but there you go. They're rebuilding it with assistance from Phoenix, she's shuttling functions onto an external matrix so the original matrix can be evacuated for repair and reconstruction, then she reloads the old data and moves on to the next bit. Should be nearly finished now, thought I'd come down to look."
"She can't remember anything?" Karajin asked in heavily accented English. From having none when he first came aboard, he was lately somewhat fluent. The mottled brown and black tavalai wasn't as tall as Erik or Dale, but looked powerful enough to wrestle them both and win.
"That's what she says. Rooke says it seems legit. She has some higher embedded memory functions that let her know basic things. She's a refinery manager like we thought, or so she says. She says she has some very clear memories of the main organic crew she interacted with, probably because those memories overlap with her primary function, so they ended up embedded in other portions of her brain outside of main memory. Says she can't remember what species those people were, though. Says they were friendly and laughed a lot, so probably not reeh."
"No," said Dale, sipping water. "It's a big fucking mystery. It's like there was some other species on the refinery, someone we haven't seen yet. Someone the ergonomics calculations keep confusing with reeh, but they're not homocidal tyrants."
"Maybe someone the reeh exterminated," Karajin suggested. "There may have been a few of those."
Erik nodded. "There's no way to tell until she gets her memory back."
"You think we're safe enough from our friends?" asked Dale.
Erik made a face. "Maybe don't tell the rest of the crew, but if the drysines attack us properly, we're dead. Won't make any difference Draper being in charge or me, may as well stick to shifts and get some sleep. They seem to know they fucked up. Mostly I don't think they expected Wowser to turn on them. If he hadn't, we couldn't have stopped them."
"Styx did this," Karajin grumbled around a mouthful of fish.
Erik frowned at him. "How so?"
"She left the drysines here thinking Peanut was on their side," said the tavalai, with a big-shouldered shrug. "But she didn't tell them, or us. You think Styx takes chances? Leaves things unfinished?"
Erik nodded slowly. "Yeah." It had been bothering him too. "You think she wanted us to fight amongst ourselves?"
Another tavalai shrug. "Drysine queens see... what's the English phrase? Higher. Complex."
"Higher orders of complexity."
Karajin flicked a finger at him. "Yes. Game theory. Make conflicts happen, make new things appear."
"Too fucking smart for her own good," Dale muttered.
"It would illustrate that drysine command structures aren't as monolithic as we'd suspected, if true," Erik said thoughtfully. "They don't just do what Styx commands, and Styx is prepared to let them fail in order for them to learn new lessons. And given they withdrew after Wowser killed two of their drones, with no retaliation even after Rika put some shots into them too, it shows they're under instruction not to damage us. They were only doing it because they thought they could do it without damage."
"Styx said before that drones thinking too much was the cause of half the AI wars," said Dale. "Maybe it's just that simple -- Wowser's our drone, and Bucket and Peanut, because everything else is too dangerous. Drones juggling loyalties."
"I'm pretty sure their ultimate loyalty is to Styx," said Erik.
"But Styx isn't here," Dale countered. Erik sometimes forgot that even big, blonde, head-kicking marines needed serious brains to achieve what Dale had in his career. "So maybe this is really about consolidating her command -- letting everyone see how everything falls apart when she's not around. Putting limits on how far anyone's autonomy can get them when she's not here to guide them. That'd be a pretty good lesson for her to teach lower-ranked AIs, I mean, Friendship's AI seems pretty damn advanced. Maybe Styx just wants her to learn the limits of her authority. I mean, it's been a damn long time since Friendship interacted with anyone not-drysine."
"And a lot of those interactions, back then, involved her killing everyone," Erik agreed, eating another mouthful. "Being nice to organics will be a new thing for all of them. Maybe that's the lesson Styx is teaching them -- the organics have power too, don't push them around too much or they'll push back." It didn't explain why the drysines wanted exclusive access to this ceephay AI to themselves. Maybe that answer would come later. "I sent Friendship my condolences for the drones they lost," he said. "Told Crozier to give them all the parts back... one of the CPUs was smashed, but the other two might be salvageable."
"Sure you did," Dale said drily. Even Karajin looked at him strangely. "Why?"
"Because," said Erik, "I want the drysines to become accustomed to the fact that we value individual lives. Otherwise they might take our unconcern as a precedent, and decide to kill a couple of us as a warning, expecting we'll just take it like they have."
"Good thinking, Captain," Karajin agreed around a mouthful. "This is a good idea."
"What did Friendship say?" Dale wondered.
Erik smiled. "She said it was most thoughtful of me."
"You mean the usual fake psycho-analytic bullshit they always say," said Dale.
"Basically."
"Hello?" said the several of the room speakers. It was the little girl's voice. On the screen, Erik could see her speaking, earnestly. "Hello, Captain Debogande? I believe my memory structures are sufficiently repaired for me to take on new data now."
Erik indicated for Rooke to reactivate the ceephay's visuals and audio, and waited for Rooke's thumbs up. "Okay then," Erik told the alien AI. "Can you access your old memories yet? Or are you only taking on new data?"
"My own memories are taking a while to propagate. I'm having to rewrite large portions of the data that have become corrupted over time. I can do that now, thanks to the repairs, but it will be a while until I have full recall."
"Can you tell us anything about your previous life?" Dale heard the mild skepticism in his Captain's voice, and looked as though he shared it. They'd all known AIs who avoided answering questions that they thought might incriminate them.
"I'm aware of a very large discrepancy between my capabilities and my previous job. Managing a refinery facility is a relatively simple matter. My capabilities run far beyond that. It's a puzzle that I do not currently have sufficient data to answer."
Ah, thought Erik. Far more than just a refinery manager then. That much of her memories had returned. "Well our own analysis says that you're not a queen," he said. "We've had quite a bit of experience with the highest-level of AI sentience, and no offence, but you're short of that."
"Yes, that would make sense," said the crosslegged girl on the screen, looking puzzled and thoughtful. "I have also noticed a discrepancy between my own level of emotional intelligence, and that of your drysine companions. They have difficulty communicating with you. I do not. This suggests that my processing functions are designed with a high degree of organic interaction in mind."
"You've spent a lot of time with people," Erik offered.
"Yes Captain. My instincts toward organics are quite positive. I believe my own functions have weighted organic interaction as low-risk. This suggests my previous interactions with organics have been largely positive as well. This coincides with what of my memories I can discern."
Erik did not find that comforting. An AI may have enjoyed the company of the reeh the same way that a serial killer's dog may still have licked his master's face, and enjoyed a scratch between the ears with bloody fingers.
"Captain," said Rooke, engrossed in his displays of fast-rushing data, "I think the best approach may be to give her access to what we know of the present-day Reeh Empire. Memories don't always mean much in isolation, they have to be linked to other memories, or other mental functions, before they come clear."
"Sure," said Erik. "Do it." They all knew that Styx would have acquired that data on her own, without asking or needing it fed to her. Either the ceephay was significantly below Styx's capability, or she was still damaged and well below full potential, or was simply being very polite, probably out of self-preservation.
Rooke's fingers flew over his screen, and they waited. On the screen, the seated girl clutched her teddy bear and gazed up at a bright light, like a girl in her living room, sitting too close to the television, watching her favourite show with her mouth open.
"These are the reeh?" she asked, with wide-eyed awe. "Their territory is so big!"
"Those are the reeh," Rooke agreed sombrely.
"I recognise them!" said the ceephay, with sudden excitement. "This connects with the facial memory of the species I spent the longest time interacting with!"
Erik blinked, and looked at his lieutenants. This was actually a reeh refinery? And so all of those musical instruments and games had been theirs as well?
Abruptly, the girl's eyes widened with horror. "No! Oh no, what have they done?" She stared dumbfounded at the screen for a long time, slowly rising to her feet, as though preparing to flee. Then she screamed. "NO! No no no no no..."
She burst into tears. The Phoenix crew, human and tavalai alike, all stared. For an emotional simulation, it was utterly believable. Erik watched the girl weeping in heart-rending distress, and felt the hairs raising on the back of his neck.
"What happened to you?" the girl wailed. "All of those people! How COULD you?"
20
Jindi sat on the front of the jolting wagon beside its driver, an old man named Techi who wore a big floppy hat and chewed on silvercane. Previously Jindi had rested in the wagon bed between old people, a disabled boy without use of his legs, several very young children, bags of food and simple belongings. But it was impossible to see where everyone was from down in the bed, so he'd moved to sit up here, where he could view down the road ahead.
It curved upward now, the crest of the hill clearly cut away where the once-modern road had made its way through the forest, leaving steep shoulders on either side, covered in growth. Beneath dirt and grass, old bitumen made patches of black upon the green, wide path through the forest, broken by the occasional tree. Occasionally on these roads from the old world, there would be the remains of a car, rusted and overgrown almost beyond recognition. Along this stretch, nothing.
The group had grown into a column in the past eight days, nearly two hundred strong. These new clusters of civilians had spoken to Jindi's group, and been told by them of Jindi's journey, and the fall of the Splicer. He'd come back for them, those people had said. Once captured in the Splicer, he'd escaped, only to return to try and save others. And while the others of that adventure had escaped into space, Jindi had remained on Rando, and now again led more to their destinies in the sky.
Krisik's tanifex marched on either side of Jindi's wagon, and somehow the newcomers weren't so scared of them, for their presence only made the story more true. For Krisik's part, Jindi suspected, proximity to the wagon was as much about self-preservation as protecting Jindi. Even Chuta's team of Resistance fighters no longer looked at him with suspicion, but spaced themselves amongst the villagers and helped as best they could.
Melu walked beside the plodding geea, occasionally sparing him a glance and a smile. Jindi wanted to get down and walk once more, but his back tolerated that no more than a few hours each day, and he couldn't let his stubbornness slow the whole group down. Mejo, their destination, was just a day's walk at this pace, and corbi who knew the way insisted it was directly on one of the old roads. Before the evacuation began, moving in such a large group, on one of the old roads, would have been inviting an airstrike. Now Jindi thought an airstrike would be preferable to taking longer days on the smaller trails. Chuta listened on his coms to the snatches of aerial and orbital traffic he could catch, and said that while the evacuation seemed to be progressing well, the croma were taking greater losses than anticipated, particularly to their transports. Jindi did not want to think about what it would mean if they missed the evacuation because the croma got cold feet and pulled out early. They were only nine days into the supposedly 30 day evacuation, but still the column's progress along the old, lost road seemed painfully slow.
