7

The Third Wheel

The problem with trying to use sophisticated prototype equipment without its owner's knowledge or permission is that there's no instruction manual, and you can't ask for help. It's the same problem I gave my mysterious hijacker when I sliced the fuel feeds to the drive, except now I'm the one floating in a cargo box full of gadgets I don't understand, feeling a bit like a chump.

Oh, I hooked the power up easily enough, and the old-fashioned LED display on the lab bench power supply informs me that the AI pod is drawing a surprising amount of current. But… what next? There's all this… stuff… and almost none of it makes any sense to me. The sole exceptions are a small camera setup—presumably this thing can process visual images, which makes sense given all the other cameras someone put up—and network cables taped into the junction of floor and wall with slightly vacuum-dried duct tape. They run all the way to where someone, presumably more lab technician than craftsman, has drilled a ragged edged hole through the rust-spotted sheet steel, to the outside.

Maybe whoever it was had a tough time getting a wireless signal through all that metal?

The rest of it, I don't know. Oscilloscopes, a few flat displays that aren't lighting up, black plastic instrument boxes whose digital readouts have unhelpful labels like “Sund. XPLNS” and “net sat.” Standard cheap keyboards. Switching boxes. Wires everywhere, power and signal mixed together. A rat's nest.

After an hour, maybe more, I'm at a loss. I don't know how to access this thing, never mind have a conversation, even if it's even sophisticated enough to go beyond “Hi, do you like to play games?” or “I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that.”

I feel like an idiot. I was so on fire to unravel this thing, so proud of the work I had done so far. Thought I was Sherlock Holmes. It didn't occur to me that Artificial Intelligence research is research, not a prepackaged and finished product that I can plug in and talk to like a person. What was I expecting to do, knock on the casket and hear someone say 'Who's there?” in a robotic monotone?

“Well, shit,” I say to nothing in particular. The lab equipment. The shipping container. The whole fucked-up situation. “What the fuck am I going to do now?”

“For starters, you could try swearing a little less. My ears are burning. What are you doing here, anyway?”

I don't actually jump, but I think my skin contracts a little. Its voice is feminine, lifelike; sounds kinda like a little girl, or maybe a young teenager. I reflexively look around, automatically looking for the source of the voice, but of course there's nothing but a cheap desktop speaker, bolted to a lab table with a pair of jutting machine screws. Nothing to make eye contact with. I settle for looking at the camera.

“I could ask you the same question. It's my ship you're on,” I say.

“Ship?” The voice sounds convincingly, humanly, confused. “Where are we? Can you pan the camera around a bit?”

“Ah… sure.” The camera's bolted down, too, but it's got a flexible neck like a desk lamp, and I bend it back and forth a bit.

“Oh, okay, that's better,” it says, “It's a… ship? It doesn't look like the clinic. Where are we?”

Clinic?

Strange. It seems intelligent enough, its voice has lifelike nuance and intonation. It even sounds confused and scared, like a person would be if she—if it—woke up and didn't know where she was. Where it was. My brain refuses to pick a pronoun and stick to it. Whatever.

“We're in a shipping container. In the cargo hold of a spacecraft,” I say, choosing words carefully, “So you really have no idea what you're doing here?”

“I… I don't know. I just… woke up here. Just now. I sleep a lot, since the surgery. And I have trouble remembering things.”

Surgery?

“Okay, well, I don't actually know where you're from, or what clinic you're talking about. So, let's try and figure this out together, okay? First of all, I'm Marcus. Marcus Warnoc. This is my ship. And you are?”

“Oh, I'm Lily. Well, my real name's Lilith. Lilith Trentfield. But no one calls me Lilith except my mom when she's mad at me.”

Its mom?

There's something I'm missing. A nagging little paranoid instinct tells me not to ask direct questions, not to let on that I don't know something it clearly thinks I do.

“Okay, well, nice to meet you, Lily. So, do you remember why you were at this, ah, clinic?”

“Oh, yeah, I know that. It was to take the recording implants out. Except something went wrong, and I couldn't talk right, afterwards. Or see stuff. That's why I'm in a medical support pod, before you ask. I guess I kinda… lost some brain functions? Or something. Miranda explained it to me, but I didn't understand all the medical words. She says I'll be okay after a while, though. I just can't go home yet.”

Medical support pod?

I look down at the “medical support pod.” It doesn't have an oxygen feed, water intake, or any sort of sewage line. Just a stonking great power cable, easily as thick as my wrist, and some network feeds, lots of wires. Not like a medical capsule at all.

But just like the AI housing pictures I found on the internet.

Oh.

That's fucked up.

“Oooh-kay,” I say, slow and real careful-like, “Lemme guess. The recording implants were for making an Artificial Intelligence, right? A copy of your brain to seed a new AI prototype with? That's what they were doing at the clinic?”

“Yes, that's right, how'd you know?”

“I think I'm starting to get an idea what's going on. This 'Miranda'—is she by any chance a genetwist? Really short woman? Big huge eyes?”

“Yeah, she's soooo pretty! Like an anime character in real life. Do you know her?”

“I think I might. What does she do?”

“Oh, she's the head doctor in charge of the whole project. I think she's supposed to be really important. Mom and dad keep telling me to call her 'Dr. Foxgrove,' but she always says to just call her Miranda. How do you know her? Is she around here? She's usually here when I wake up. Do you know where she is?”

Oh, I know where she is, all right. And now I know who she is.

Fuck.

Miranda. Foxgrove. Doctor Miranda fucking Foxgrove. AI researcher.

I'm so screwed.

When I mocked her with the name 'Princess,' I knew she was privileged, I knew she was rich, connected, pampered, a daughter to the powerful. I just didn't know how much. I didn't know how deep this rabbit hole went.

I don't follow celebrity news, but I know this one's name. Not only is she a Foxgrove, but she's related to… him. She may not carry his last name, but she's one of his, on her mother's side.

Yeah, him.

There's a monument in Newton City, right down smack in the center, where the first lander, the lander his company designed, built, and paid for, came down. The first lander isn't there, of course. None of them are, every one torn up and recycled for the metal in those lean early years while the colony struggled to survive. Instead, in the middle of the park, there's just a polished cube of pale yellow fire agate, mined from a lucky asteroid strike, two meters a side, to mark where they buried him.

There's no epitaph, no dates, no list of achievements and accolades. Not even a 'beloved husband and father,' which probably wouldn't have been true anyway, because his favorite children were his corporations and his rockets, which probably didn't like to share attention. Hell, when they buried him there, they didn't even write his name, because everyone already knows exactly who's under that stone, and what he did.

The only thing it says, carved in letters eight millimeters deep, is 'Ad Astra, Per Aspera'. That's it.

Every now and then some prankster sneaks out at night with a pigment infuser, crosses out 'Aspera,' and writes in 'Big Bucks'. It's kind of a tradition. I think maybe the old man would even have even liked that… he was an engineering kinda nerd, wacky and unprofessional, in love with corny jokes and internet memes and weird stuff like that.

Pretty much no one can decide if he was a bold innovator who lifted humanity out of its cradle, or a malignant narcissist who took credit for other people's work. To some people, he's the love child of Sauron and Mao Tse Tung. To a whole lotta Orbitals, he's second only to Erik Nyberg, and sometimes not even that.

Me, I don't give a shit. The universe doesn't need me to have an opinion. We're all out here in space now, and he's dead, and that's that. His descendants, well… that's a different box of scorpions. Large, venomous scorpions.

They own pretty much everything. First come, first served, first pick of everything in the solar system that wasn't Earth, as much as they, and their kids, and their kids' kids, could grab with both hands and a shovel. Usually from other people's hands and shovels. You don't get super-wealthy, or stay that way, without stepping on a few necks.

I don't know much more about her than the name, but that's no surprise. There's about a hundred-some-odd of his great-grandchildren, or maybe great-great, I don't know exactly, gallivanting around the worlds, some of them buying companies and looting them, and making speeches and accepting awards… and others throwing wild parties and throwing around trust fund money and getting thrown into rehab and making tabloid reporters froth at the mouth. They're the princes and princesses of the solar system, and they can basically do whatever they want.

This one, apparently, likes to play scientist. Which is better than party girl, I suppose, or at least, it would be if she wasn't devoting her attention to ruining my life.

And no matter what I do, no matter how I handle this, no matter what method I pick to get my blue-collar Belter ass out of this bear trap, there's decent odds someone in the clan will have me killed. Or—I don't know, something like that, whatever people do, when they have all the money and power in the worlds, and other people know lots of embarrassing things about their precious daughters.

They're ruthless. They'll fucking gut you. Ask me how I know.

“Mister? Ah… Marcus? Can you hear me?”

“Oh, sorry. I was thinking about something. Yes, I know where Miranda is. She's here, on the ship.”

In the moment, I'm struck by the absurdity of it all. Some nerd with more money than sense buys a rocket company, and a hundred some-odd years later, he's a hero to half the solar system, his brats are treating it like their personal sandbox, and here I am sitting in a shipping container talking to a machine that thinks it's a little girl.

Trying to figure out why this Miranda is trying to drag me to the most heavily defended xenoarcheological site in human space.

So we can get our asses shot off for us by a ruthless corporate enterprise.

A big part of which belongs to her own damn family.

“What about Mom and Dad? Are they here? Did they bring me aboard? Where are we going? Can you go get them, please? Or Miranda?” the construct asks.

“Uh, sure kid, just gimme a second or three, I'll see what I can do.”

I don't actually know if that's a good idea, but, hell, maybe if I confront Miranda she'll spill some information. Anyhow, things could hardly get worse, right?

Right?

So, of course, that's when things do get worse. Starting with the moment I turn around.

A thing about zero gravity that every Belter knows is that it's real easy to sneak around in. You don't make much noise, 'cause you're not touching the floor. It's also a thing about zero gravity that every Belter kinda forgets. Because we're not knife-in-the-back sort of people. We don't sneak up on each other.

Doctor Miranda Foxgrove, however, is not a Belter. And when I turn around, there she is, one hand on the open container door, all four-foot-plus, or maybe minus, of badly contained fury, fresh and ready to be outraged at me for messing with her stuff, or just for existing. Behind her, the two ever-present drones shadow her, one clinging to the doorframe, one drifting outside.

If I shoulder past her, will they interpret that as an attack? Am I trapped here?

“What in the worlds do you think you're doing?” she demands, as if it weren't pretty fucking obvious.

“I'm talking,” I say, trying to project an air of patience I don't feel, “to my other passenger. You could have told me she was in here, you know.”

At the same moment, “Lily” chimes in with “Oh, hi, Miranda. I'm having another one of those memory… things. Can you tell me why we're all here? I can't remember. Are mom and dad around?”

“Oh, gods, sweetie, I'm so sorry,” Miranda says, her voice dripping with insincere honey.” I didn't expect you to wake up for a while. I didn't know he'd come down here, and—”

She glares at me for a moment with big lemur eyes that promise murder and scorched earth, then breaks off.

“What has he been telling you?”

“Just that we're in a ship. His ship. He says he doesn't know why I'm here. Why am I here?”

“Listen, honey, whatever he's told you, you can't trust him. He's a criminal and he hurts people, okay? There's good reasons I didn't tell him why you were here.”

“Oh. Really? He seemed okay. We just talked a bit. But… why are we here?”

Fuck it. I've had enough of this shit. I turn my back on Miranda, block her out of the conversation with my shoulders, although I suppose it's a bit pointless. I don't know where the microphone pickup is, exactly.

“She won't answer because she's desperately trying to think of a plausible lie,” I say.

“Marcus,” growls Miranda from behind me, “don't you dare.”

I raise my voice and talk right over her. “She's been lying to you all along.”

“Marcus, don't. You don't know what you're doing!”

“She's right about me. I've done some bad things. Anyway, I'm a total stranger, and I don't expect you to trust me. So I won't tell you anything, or expect you to believe me. I'm just going to ask you to think about some things.”

“Marcus, this isn't what you think! Stop!” Miranda sounds truly desperate. Well, good. It's about time she learned that she can't just play with people's lives.

“Miranda, what's he talking about?”

“Lily,” I say, “those implants were for recording your deep brain activity, right? To train an AI?”

“Yeah,” it says, slowly. Out the corner of my eye, I can see Miranda creeping around me, but what can she do? Anything she does, the machine will see, and anything she says, it will hear.

“So if the actual AI were here, in this cargo hold, in this shipping container, what would it remember?”

“The same things I do, I suppose. At least up until the point they stopped recording, took the implants out. Why?”

“Patience, please. I'm getting to that. So if it were here, do you think it would know it was a computer?”

“No, I suppose not. It would think it was me. At least until someone told it something else. And even then it might not believe them.”

“Why not?”

“Because the only memories it would have would be mine, right? They'd feel pretty convincing.”

“Marcus,” Miranda says, “We need to talk outside. Before you say something you can't take back. I know you're really mad at me, but there's something I need you to hear.”

“Well, that's a you problem, because I don't feel any particular need to hear it. Lily, I'm going to move the camera again, point it at your medical pod.”

I don't know what I'm going to do if it won't bend that far—rip it off the table and point it? Fumble around while Miranda tries to think of ways to stop me that the machine can't see? I'm imagining a picture of us struggling over the camera before the drones step in to separate us like squabbling children, sent to stand in opposite corners of the room.

Fortunately, it's long enough to bend around the rim of the table. Miranda floats towards me, but I block her with my shoulders before she can grab it, and she bounces off me and drifts away, paddling the air in an attempt to right herself.

“Okay, do you see a heart monitor? An IV line? Any oxygen supply? Waste water line?”

“No, just wires. But—”

“Power cable, yeah. Network cables. And how big is the whole box? How long?” I ask, floating over to hang next to it. For scale.

“About a meter?”

I twist the camera up and down, pointing it at the wires strung about the inside of the container, to the lab equipment, then back to the case. Back to me.

“And how tall are you?”

“Almost five feet. But… I wouldn't… fit? Wait, where am I?”

“I'm sorry, Lily, but I think the question isn't 'where.' It's 'who.'”

Miranda shoulders in next to me again, practically bouncing, twitching with frustrated energy. It must feel like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Unable to stop it. Something warm and smug gloats in my chest, sending tingles through my spine, all the way down to my fingers. I shouldn't grin. It's hard not to.

Gotcha, you spoiled rich brat. All you can do is watch me and sputter.

“What do you mean 'who?' But… no… what are you saying? I'm… not… ”

“Think, Lily. Think. Have you seen or felt your actual body since the time they stopped recording off you? Walked around? Raised an arm? Opened your eyes? And where are your parents? Don't you think they would want to be with you? Why would they let Miranda take you off to another planet? And why would anyone put a patient in critical care, in a support pod, in the hold of a commercial spaceship? As if you were a load of spare parts? Does any of this make sense?”

“No… but… I'm here,” 'Lily' sputters, “Where else would I be? There's some explanation. I'm confused, I know I'm confused, my brain isn't working right, I had brain damage, I know, but it all has to make sense somehow! I'm here!”

And Miranda cuts in, snarling at me.

“Marcus, if you don't shut up right now, I'll—”

I don't wait to find out what she's going to try to threaten me with. “Lily, what would the AI think? What memories would it have? What would it remember?”

“It would remember what I remember, you said that already, but…”

“What's the one thousandth prime number, Lily?”

“Seven thousand nine hundred and nineteen, of course. Why are you asking me these—?”

“And would a teenage girl be able to figure that out in her head?”

A small whimpering sound escapes the speaker.

And then a scream, a full-throated howl of anguish so loud the cheap speaker crackles with static-laden overload.

“No,” she whispers, “No, no, no, no. Please. Please, no.”

Miranda starts toward us again, tries to reach for the camera, but I hold it away from her at arms' length. “No, Lily, he's just making stuff—”

“Shut up!” the AI screams, “Don't call me that. I'm not her! I'm not anyone! I'm just… just a thing! I'm not real!”

I know it's not a human I'm hearing. Not a little girl. Not a person. But how do you hear someone, or even something, cry like that, and not feel something? How do you conclude there isn't anyone there?

Miranda looks anguished, too, but I know better than to think it's compassion. She's probably just mad I've interfered with her work, her precious research.

“You lied,” the construct moans. “You were lying to me the whole time! All that stuff you said? That you were going to take care of me! That everything was going to be all right? That I could go home in a few weeks? To Mom and Dad and Cassie?”

“Lily, wait a min—”

“Well, I can't go home again, can I? Because I don't have a home. And I can't see my parents, because I don't have any!”

Miranda just hangs in the air, stricken. Lips parted.

“You did this to me! I hate you! Leave! Me! Alone!”

The speaker shuts off with a crackle of static. Below the lens of the camera, a small red light winks out. Miranda squirts past me in an instant, wedging herself in beside the pod, but most of the lights have winked out on the display, and all of her twiddling of instruments and tapping on the keyboard doesn't produce a single visible change.

Finally, she turns on me. “How dare you?” she snarls. “You. Stupid. Arrogant. Selfish. Moron! Don't you know that most AI go mad or commit suicide? Well, when do you think that happens? When?”

She doesn't wait for an answer.

“It's the moment they find out, you idiot. That has to be handled carefully, not blurted out by some idiot stick jockey who thinks he knows what he's doing.

“But you don't even think that, do you? You just don't care. You're a big stupid ape who likes to smash things you don't understand, just because you can't handle your infantile emotions, or because you like the noise things make when they break. Well, you'll pay for it, I swear you will.”

I laugh. It isn't funny, not with that kid's screams still hanging in my ears, but I force a laugh anyway. Scornful.

“Pay how? What will you do? Float around stranded in space, like we're already doing? Come off it, Princess. You don't care about her at all. You're just mad because you're not in control of your toy anymore, and there's nothing you can do about it but whine.”

She actually bares her teeth and me and hisses, like a cat. It's bizarre, but she's running out of ways to express rage. Has she ever even been around someone who didn't have to bend to her every whim?

“Quit anthropomorphizing it, you imbecile,” she says.

I'm not sure what that word means. Something about people, and shapes.

“It's not a person,” she says. “It doesn't work like a person. You can't just say whatever to it. You may have just broken tens of thousands of bitcoin of investment. Not to mention years of my work!”

I wave my hand, dismissive, and shrug. “You seem to have overlooked just one small detail,” I say.

“What?”

“You left out the part where any of this is my problem.”

This time it's not a hiss, it's a full blown screech of fury and frustration, her exquisite little face contorted with some hint of the ugly sea of selfish narcissism raging beneath it. She pushes off towards me, and actually raises one tiny hand to try to hit me again, but I just sit there grinning.

God, this feels good.

“Go ahead, Princess. Your robots will just drag us apart again, put us in separate corners for a timeout. Won't fix anything. You can't even hurt me, anyway. You're just trying to find another way to express how mad you are, as if that'll somehow make a difference. It won't. I already know how mad you are. I. Just. Don't. Care.

“You can't set your drones on me. You can't turn me in for piracy without blowing the whistle on yourself as well. And, yeah, I may not be able to fly the ship without you, but you can't fly it at all unless I fix the fusion drive, and you can't make me do that. You have nothing left to threaten me with.”

She's frozen, steadying herself on a lab table with one hand, the other still raised. She looks… puzzled. Maybe she's trying to wrap her mind around the concept of someone not caring what she thinks. Then she… deflates. Like the fury just drains out of her, and she's left staring blankly at me.

“There's no point to talking to you at all, is there?” she says.

“Feel free to shut the fuck up, then.”

“Get out,” she says, tonelessly, planting both her hands on my chest and shoving, but all this does is push her into the opposite side of the container. The drones bristle and whir in apparent confusion. Protected VIPs are supposed to be protected from the common peasants in the crowd, not rush at them and start pushing.

I open my mouth to gloat, again, but nothing comes out. I've won another of our little contests, I suppose, and for a moment, it felt good, the rage and triumph carried me, but…

That girl. Screaming. Even if she isn't really a girl at all.

That sound of her world collapsing in all at once.

I don't feel so good anymore. I want to be alone. I want to go to my cabin and lock the door and sit in the dark with most of the lights off and drink until I don't feel anything.

Suddenly, “get out” seems like a really, really good idea. Wordless, I drift past the drones, which do not move to hinder or stop me. Out the container door.

Fuck.

No wonder most of the AI they try to make end up going mad.