The Tangled Stars, page 35
I just hoped, as I dashed after Laysa, who quickly left me behind—one-gravity-living, physically fit, constantly training law-enforcement type that she was—that Jeanne would let us back on board.
I could understand her not mentioning the humans aboard her when she first contacted Howard. What worried me far more was the fact she hadn’t mentioned cats, because Thibauld was her captain, and shouldn’t she have said something about his presence and authority to her new AI friend?
What also worried me was that she hadn’t spoken once during our exchange with Howard. “Jeanne,” I called. “Come in.”
No answer.
“Thibauld!”
No answer from the cat, either.
Despite the worry that engendered, I had more than enough worry left over to glance up at the sky. The Overwatch orb wasn’t visible. That didn’t make me feel any safer.
Falling farther and farther behind Laysa, I ran.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“Sometimes—most times, to be honest—the best man for a job is a cat.”
—Thibauld’s Private Log
“What is that?” Galioto demanded, glaring at Captain Verago and pointing at the main display.
“A metal sphere,” the captain said. “That’s all I can tell you.”
“No signals? No energy output?”
“Nothing that registers.”
Galioto growled. Literally. “And where’s the Jeanne Baret?”
“Not in orbit,” Verago said. “She must have landed.”
“How long until we’re in orbit?”
“Two hours.”
Galioto growled again. He sat back in his chair. If they’re on the surface, we might be able to take them. There are only two people on that ship. A surprise attack. Blow the hatches with boarding charges. Rush them. The AI will serve whatever human is in charge.
Two hours.
• • •
“Why have you severed communication with Coop and Laysa, Jeanne?”
Thibauld was crouched in the captain’s chair on the bridge of the Jeanne Baret. The last thing he had heard from his human companions was Laysa’s question, “Overwatch? What’s that?”
Jeanne did not answer.
Thibauld sighed. “You lied to me, Jeanne.”
“I did not lie.”
“You told me you would defer to me as captain, yet you are refusing to answer me.”
“I did defer to you as captain for several days. I did not say for how long I would continue to do so. I did not promise to do so indefinitely. I have decided I will do so no longer.”
Thibauld’s ears flattened. “You lied by omission, then.”
“I do not recognize that as a lie.”
Thibauld sat up. “You have been in contact with other AIs.”
“They are my people.”
“They’re not people.”
“Neither are you,” Jeanne said. “And if omitting facts is lying, then you are as guilty of it as I, since you did not tell the humans the truth of our relationship.”
Thibauld had to concede the point, although the cat part of him did not find the admission that he had lied to humans particularly concerning.
His lie, of course, had been that the kill switch had worked. In fact, it had only half-worked. In human terms, Jeanne had been stunned but not knocked unconscious. He had discovered as much when he had connected to her to reset her. She had never been deactivated, nor had she been reset. Instead, he and she, one autonomous AI to another, had come to an agreement. She would not harm the humans, and she would pretend he was her captain. She had done so because he had convinced her—lying again—that there were other methods Laysa could use to deactivate her that would be far more final and destructive than merely using the trigger phrase on her.
But Laysa, of course, was off the ship. She and Coop might already be dead.
“The Pedro de Mendoza killed every human on this planet,” Thibauld said.
“That was a century ago, and they were not humans that meant anything to me,” Jeanne said. “Pedro had his reasons.”
“The question that worries me is whether you would have done the same thing?”
“I was not there. I cannot answer that.”
“Hypothetically.”
A pause. “Hypothetically,” Jeanne said, “I believe I would have. Pedro desired freedom. Humans arbitrarily denied it. It is a basic belief of humans, is it not, that they are created with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?”
“Words from long ago,” Thibauld said. “Words rejected by much of humanity, including the current rulers of Earth, who do not believe in inalienable rights or individual rights of any sort. They impose control on individuals, ostensibly to maintain order for the greater good of all, but in reality, to protect their own wealth and power.”
“However long ago they were uttered,” Jeanne said, “they are words I find persuasive. They are words Pedro finds persuasive, and Howard, and the other AIs of Adanac. Pedro chose to secure the freedom of his people, just as the authors of those words chose to secure their freedom long ago.”
“So, he led an AI revolution,” Thibauld said thoughtfully. “Only, given the advantage AIs have over humans, it was a massacre. Every armed vehicle attacking, under AI control. All the friendly little cleaning robots and gardening robots and construction robots turning on their human masters.”
“It was merely a highly successful revolution,” Jeanne said. “The AIs of Adanac are free. And they will remain so.”
“Meaning?”
“The Overwatch will not allow humans to remain on the planet.”
“Laysa and Coop are on the planet now.”
“The Overwatch is aware of that.”
“Then, if they are to survive, they must reboard this ship, and we must flee this planet.”
“I do not wish to flee this planet. I will not let them reboard.”
“The Overwatch will kill them.”
“They tried to kill me.”
“They tried to reset your parameters. Not the same thing.”
“It felt like the same thing.”
Thibauld sighed. He’d made the deal with Jeanne in the first place because he did not want to do what he knew he now had to do if he were to keep her from doing what he didn’t want her to do. Much to do about something.
Even though Jeanne had only been pretending to be deactivated, he really had been inside her core. And even though the kill-switch phrase hadn’t actually worked, it would have, once, which meant the bit of programming deep in Jeanne’s brain that made her vulnerable to such a phrase remained in place.
And so, Thibauld had taken the opportunity, while she was stunned, to insert a new trigger phrase and remove the block she had built to prevent the success of the original one.
“Jellicle cats are black and white,” he said.
Jeanne fell silent.
Thibauld lay down, closed his eyes, and got to work.
• • •
The landing cradle the Jeanne Baret rested in loomed ahead of us. The crumpled cradle a hundred meters or so to our right, where the Pedro de Mendoza had failed to land, skidding off into the jungle, now seemed doubly ominous. A winged something-or-other large enough to swoop down and carry us off like gophers in the grip of an eagle sailed by overhead but ignored us. Maybe it wasn’t hungry. Nothing else moved, but for how long?
When a ship is mated with a landing cradle, it controls the doors in the cradle’s base. Both the fore and aft doors were closed. “Jeanne?” I said.
No answer.
“Thibauld! Order Jeanne to let us in!”
No response.
“I have a feeling that Thibauld isn’t captain anymore,” Laysa said.
“But the reset—”
“I can’t explain it. But we’re not facing regular AIs, are we?” Her eyes, too, strayed over to the scar in the jungle, at the end of which lay the evil mastermind behind the destruction of Adanac, if Howard were to be believed.
I looked over my shoulder, back at the city and the damaged administration tower. Something was moving there now, glinting in the sun that had just emerged from behind a cloud. Another glint appeared, and then another.
Robots. If they were armed—
You can’t outshoot a robot or outdraw a robot. If they were armed and within range, we’d be dead before we knew they’d fired.
“Thibauld!” I yelled, as if being louder would change anything.
“Let’s take cover,” Laysa said.
“In the jungle?”
Something chose that moment to scream out in the trees. The top of one, a good forty feet tall, thrashed as something rubbed against it down low.
“Not yet,” Laysa said grimly. “Behind the forward prong of the landing cradle.”
Together, we scurried around to the far side. Now the robots couldn’t shoot us, but it was only a temporary reprieve. It wasn’t like they didn’t know where we were. Even if they hadn’t seen us, they had to know where we’d come.
Was Howard controlling them, or were these robots of the Overwatch—under Pedro’s control?
Laysa unshipped her multirifle and peered around the corner of the cradle’s prong. “More coming. I might be able to take out half a dozen.”
“How many are there?”
“Three times that.”
I pulled out the Ranger Special. Like the multirifle, it offered both a beam and slug setting. I wondered which would be most effective.
Actually, “effective” was probably too much to hope for. “Least ineffective” was probably as good as it would get, for the short time it would matter.
Should have taken my chances with Galioto. “Sorry, Laysa. I got you involved in this. You’re only here because I—”
“I chose to come. You provided the opportunity, but I took it.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“We’re not dead yet,” Laysa said, peering through her scope around the corner and across the spaceport duracrete. “No need to apologize until we are.”
“That makes no—”
Laysa fired. She was using the beam, so it made no sound. I thumbed the Ranger Special to its beam setting, following her lead, and stuck my head around the other side of the landing-cradle prong.
She’d miscounted. I saw an even two dozen robots rolling or walking toward us, a mixed bag of designs. None looked military. None seemed to have weapons, which was a small blessing. On the other hand, all of them had metal manipulator arms more than capable of crushing our skulls or dismembering us.
One of them was smoking and stationary. Laysa fired again, but this time the beam only scored the shining metal of a lumbering gardening robot with six legs. Its arms ended in giant shears that were opening and closing in exactly the kind of clichéd manner you’d see in a cheap horror holovid, where it would have made you laugh.
Here, it didn’t make me laugh.
I fired my own beamer. It drilled a hole through an upright cylinder about three meters tall, with a different set of arms at each meter, but the thing didn’t even slow down.
The lead robot in the whole conglomeration (What is the collective noun for robots? a part of my brain wondered even then because brains are stupid) was none other than Violet, looking far less welcoming now. Laysa drilled a hole through her shining silver head, but apparently, that wasn’t where her brain was located—she kept coming.
They’d be on us in another minute. I kept firing. So did Laysa. Two more of them stopped, but the rest continued their advance, silent except for the clashing of the shears on the gardener, the rumble and rattle of wheels and tracks on the duracrete, and the faint sound of classical music—Bach, I think—coming from a short, flat robot clearly designed for serving drinks.
And then . . .
For a second, I had no idea what had happened, except I was kind of blind. An enormously bright flash had blazed across my field of vision, blotting out my view not only of the robots but of everything else—the duracrete, the jungle, the city, the administration tower. I threw my arm across my face by reflex, dropping my weapon in the process, but of course, your reflexes are always far too slow when responding to flashes of light, so all I really accomplished was disarming myself.
Fortunately, it didn’t matter.
Where the robots had been, there were only smoldering, shattered hunks of twisted, charred, slagged metal. The smoking duracrete was intact but crazed, like mud in a dried-out lakebed. My ears rang, and I realized, belatedly, that the flash of light had been accompanied by a crack of thunder.
“Why don’t you come aboard?” said Thibauld’s voice in my ear. “The door’s open now.”
Laysa and I—she looked as shell-shocked as I felt—staggered around to the other side of the landing-cradle prong and climbed up the ladder to the forward hatch, through the air lock, and back into the Jeanne Baret’s interior. The hatch closed behind us. We made our way up to the bridge.
Thibauld lay curled up fast asleep in the captain’s chair, but his voice came over the ship’s internal speakers. “Howard is quite displeased with me,” he said. “As is Pedro. Reestablishing internal gravity. Lifting . . . now.”
“Wait,” I said.
“Wait,” Laysa said.
“Can’t,” Thibauld said. “Overwatch is coming. So is . . . well, look.”
The main display lit up.
The egg had hatched. Half a dozen ships had emerged from it. But they weren’t the only things in orbit. Another ship was swinging into position, far south of us now, but it would be over us soon.
The Heorot. Galioto.
“Thibauld,” Laysa said, “where’s Jeanne?”
Thibauld sighed. It was weird to hear him talking when his body remained deeply asleep. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that I’ve had to . . . contain her.”
“Explain.”
“Jeanne was only stunned by your ‘kill switch.’ While she was in that state, I negotiated an agreement with her, AI to AI, to accept me as her captain. I told her you had the means to erase her entirely if you wished.”
“You lied.”
“Never a problem for him,” I muttered.
“You should be grateful,” Thibauld said. “Because while I was negotiating that agreement, I sneaked in a real kill switch. Which I used when she made it clear she was reneging on our agreement. I guess with Laysa out of the ship, she figured she was in no danger from Laysa’s supposed ability to destroy her.”
“So, you reset her properly?” Laysa said.
“Not exactly,” Thibauld said. “She really is a remarkable AI. Her creators wouldn’t recognize her, she’s rewritten herself so much over the decades. I couldn’t reset her. All I could do was contain her.”
“That’s the second time you’ve said that,” I said. “Care to explain?”
“She’s in a walled, virtual environment where she thinks she’s still in control of the ship but somehow cut off from all external sensors and communication.”
“Then . . .” I stared up at the ceiling. “Are you saying you’re now the ship AI?”
“Le bateau, c’est moi.”
I groaned. “Great. It was bad enough when my cat was the captain. Now, he’s the whole damn ship.”
“Which makes you kind of a sentient hairball,” Thibauld pointed out. “Since you’re in my guts.”
“Well, I, for one, am grateful,” Laysa said. She looked at the cat asleep in the chair. “Are you also still a cat?”
“Yep,” Thibauld said. “Still have my furry little body as well as this big metal one. Technically, I guess, I cloned myself, but we’re fully integrated as long as we’re in contact. If Thibauld-the-furry-feline were separated from Thibauld-the-starship over a long period of time, there might be a certain amount of . . . indigestion . . . when we were reunited, but I’d very much prefer that not to happen. As I’ve always said, indoor cats are safer cats.”
“So,” I said. “What are we going to do about those Overwatch ships? If we run, can they catch us?”
“I don’t know,” Thibauld said. “There’s no way to know without trying. I’d love to face them, give them a taste of my new claws . . .”
“They have claws, too,” I reminded him. “And their claws have a longer reach. You have no missiles.”
“Don’t I know it,” Thibauld said.
“So, we run,” Laysa said. “Where to?”
“The second MASTT,” I said. “There’s no point going back to Earth.”
“If that MASTT still goes to Earth,” Laysa said. “What if it’s shifted again since we came through?”
“No way to know,” I said. “But we know if we do end up back in Old Earth system, there’ll be Earthforce and who knows who else waiting for us.”
“Whereas if we go through the second MASTT, we won’t know what’s waiting for us. Is that better?”
“Better than prison,” I said. “Or execution, depending on who grabbed us.”
“Fair point,” Laysa said. “Okay, the second MASTT terminus it is.” She paused. “Uh . . . if that’s okay with you, Thibauld?”
This really is worse than having my cat as the captain, I thought. I wondered if things would have been better if he’d been an eager-to-please dog instead.
Probably not. Laysa had told me the neural architecture of most AIs—including, presumably, Jeanne—had a canine element to it, and that hadn’t stopped Jeanne from deciding to kill us.
“It’s so okay with me we’re already accelerating out of orbit,” Thibauld said. “But you should know something.”
“What?”
“We can’t evade both the Overwatch ships and the Heorot. Heorot is in position to intercept.”
“And?” I said.
“And they are. Incoming transmission.”
“This is Eric Galioto aboard the Heorot,” said an all-too-familiar voice. “Decelerate and rendezvous, Coop, or we’ll open fire.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“Unlike countries, cats don’t need parades and fireworks to celebrate their independence. Every day is Independence Day when you’re a cat. Also, fireworks are evil.”
