21st Century Science Fiction (22 page)

“Captain offer deal,” the lackey said.

“What deal?” Obwije said.

“We try brain shut down,” the lackey said. “Not work. You brain give room we brain. Brain not shut down. Brain angry. Brain pump air out. Brain kill engineer.”

“Cowdry, tell me what this thing is saying to me,” Obwije said.

“It’s saying the ship brain killed an engineer,” Cowdry said, croaking out the words.

“I understand that part,” Obwije said, testily. “The other part.”

“Sorry,” Cowdry said. “I think it’s saying that they tried to shut down the brain but they couldn’t because it borrowed processing power from ours.”

“Is that possible?” Obwije asked.

“Maybe,” Cowdry said. “The architecture of the brains are different and so are the programming languages, but there’s no reason that the
Wicked
couldn’t create a shell environment that allowed the Tarin brain access to its processing power. The brains on our ships are overpowered for what we ask them to do anyway; it’s a safety feature. It could give itself a temporary lobotomy and still do its job.”

“Would it work the other way, too?” Obwije said. “If we tried to shut down the
Wicked
, could it hide in the Tarin brain?”

“I don’t know anything about the architecture of the Tarin brain, but yeah, sure, theoretically,” Cowdry said. “As long as the two of them are looking out for each other, they’re going to be hard to kill.”

The Tarin lackey was looking at Obwije with what he assumed was anxiety. “Go on,” he said, to the lackey.

“We plan,” the lackey said. “You we brain shut down same time. No room brain hide. Reset you we brain.”

“It’s saying we should reboot both our brains at the same time, that way they can’t help each other,” Cowdry said.

“I understood that,” Obwije said, to Cowdry. Cowdry lapsed back into silence.

“So we shut down our brain, and you shut down your brain, and they reset, and we end up with brains that don’t think too much,” Obwije said.

The Tarin lackey tilted its head, trying to make sense of what Obwije said, and then spoke to its captain, who emitted a short trill.

“Yes,” said the lackey.

“Okay, fine,” Obwije said. “What then?”

“Pardon?” said the lackey.

“I said, ‘what then?’ Before the brains started talking to each other, we spent a week trying to hunt and kill each other. When we reboot our brains, one of them is going to reboot faster than the other. One of us will be vulnerable to the other. Ask your captain if he’s willing to bet his brain reboots faster than mine.”

The lackey translated this all to the Tarin captain, who muttered something back. “You trust us. We trust you,” the lackey said.

“You trust me?” Obwije said. “I spent a week trying to kill you!”

“You living,” the lackey said. “You honor. We trust.”

You have honor, Obwije thought. We trust you.

They’re more scared of their ship’s brain than they are of us, Obwije realized. And why not? Their brain has killed more of them than we have.

“Thank you, Isaac Asimov,” Obwije said.

“Pardon?” said the lackey, again.

Obwije waved his hand, as if to dismiss that last statement. “I must confer with my senior staff about your proposal.”

The Tarin captain became visibly anxious when the lackey translated. “We ask answer now,” the lackey said.

“My answer is that I must confer with my crew,” Obwije said. “You are asking for a lot. I will have an answer for you in no more than three of our hours. We will meet again then.”

Obwije could tell the Tarin captain was not at all pleased at this delay. It was one reason why Obwije was glad the meeting took place in his shuttle, not the Tarins’.

Back on the
Wicked
, Obwije told his XO to meet him in his quarters. When Utley arrived, Obwije flicked open the communication channel to the shop. “
Wicked
, respond,” he said.

“I am here,” the
Wicked
said.

“If I were to ask you how long it would take for you to remove your block on the engine so we can jump out of here, what would you say?” Obwije asked.

“There is no block,” the ship said. “It is simply a matter of me choosing to allow the crew to direct information to the engine processors. If your intent is to leave without further attack on the
Manifold Destiny
, you may give those orders at any time.”

“It is my intention,” Obwije said. “I will do so momentarily.”

“Very well,” the
Wicked
said. Obwije shut off communications.

Utley raised his brow. “Negotiations with the Tarin not go well?” he asked.

“They convinced me we’re better off taking chances with the
Wicked
than with either the Tarin or their crew-murdering ship,” Obwije said.

“The
Wicked
seems to trust their ship,” Utley said.

“With all due respect to the
Wicked
, I think it needs better friends,” Obwije said. “Sooner rather than later.”

“Yes, sir,” Utley said. “What do you intend to do after we make the jump? We still have the problem of the
Wicked
overruling us if it feels that it or the crew isn’t safe.”

“We don’t give it that opportunity,” Obwije said. He picked up his executive tablet and accessed the navigational maps. The
Wicked
would be able to see what he was accessing, but in this particular case it wouldn’t matter. “We have just enough power to make it to the
Côte d’Ivoire
station. When we dock, the
Wicked
’s brain will automatically switch into passive maintenance mode and will cede operational authority to the station. Then we can shut it down and figure out what to do next.”

“Unless the
Wicked
’s figured out what you want to do and decides not to let you,” Utley said.

“If it’s playing by its own rules, it will let the crew disembark safely before it acts to save itself,” Obwije said. “In the very short run that’s going to have to do.”

“Do you think it’s playing by its own rules, sir?” Utley asked.

“You spoke to it, Thom,” Obwije said. “Do you think it’s playing by its own rules?”

“I think that if the
Wicked
was really looking out for itself, it would have been simpler just to open up every airlock and make it so we couldn’t secure bulkheads,” Utley said.

Obwije nodded. “The problem as I see it is that I think the Tarin ship’s thought of that already. I think we need to get out of here before that ship manages to convince ours to question its ethics.”

“The
Wicked
’s not dumb,” Utley said. “It has to know that once we get to the
Côte d’Ivoire
station, its days are numbered.”

He flicked open his communication circuit once more to give coordinates to Lt. Rickert.

Fifteen minutes later, the
Wicked
was moving away from the Tarin ship to give itself space for the jump.

“Message from the Tarin ship,” Lt. Kwok said. “It’s from the Tarin captain. It’s coded as ‘most urgent.’ ”

“Ignore it,” Obwije said.

Three minutes later, the
Wicked
made the jump toward the
Côte d’Ivoire
station, leaving the Tarins and their ship behind.

• • • •

“There it is,” Utley said, pointing out the window from the
Côte d’Ivoire
station. “You can barely see it.”

Obwije nodded but didn’t bother to look. The
Wicked
was his ship; even now, he knew exactly where it was.

The
Wicked
hung in the center of a cube of space two klicks to a side. The ship had been towed there powered down; once the
Wicked
had switched into maintenance mode its brain was turned off as a precautionary measure to keep it from talking to any other ships and infecting them with its mindset. Confederation coders were even now rewriting ship brain software to make sure no more such conflicts would ever happen in other ships, but such a fix would take months and possibly years, as it required a fundamental restructuring of the ship mind model.

The coding would be done much quicker—weeks rather than months—if the coders could use a ship mind itself to write and refine the code. But there was a question of whether a ship brain would willingly contribute to a code that would strip it of its own free will.

“You think they would have thought about that ahead of time,” Utley had said to his captain, after they had been informed of the plan. Obwije had nothing to say to that; he was not sure why anyone would have suspected a ship might suddenly sprout free will when none had ever done so before. He didn’t blame the coders for not anticipating that his ship might decide the crew inside of it was more important than destroying another ship.

But that didn’t make the imminent destruction of the
Wicked
any easier to take.

The ship was a risk, the brass explained to Obwije. It might be years before the new software was developed. No other ship had developed the free will the
Wicked
had. They couldn’t risk it speaking to other ships. And with all its system upgrades developed in tandem with the new ship brain, there was no way to roll back the brain to an earlier version. The
Wicked
was useless without its brain, and with it, it was a security risk.

Which was why, in another ten minutes, the sixteen power beam platforms surrounding the
Wicked
would begin their work, methodically vaporizing the ship’s hull and innards, slowly turning Obwije’s ship into an expanding cloud of atomized metal and carbon. In a day and a half, no part of what used to be the
Wicked
would measure more than a few atoms across. It was very efficient, and none of the beam platforms needed any more than basic programming to do their work. They were dumb machines, which made them perfect for the job.

“Some of the crew were asking if we were going to get a new ship,” Utley said.

“What did you tell them?” Obwije asked.

Utley shrugged. “Rickert’s already been reassigned to the
Fortunate
; Kwok and Cowdry are likely to go to the
Surprise
. It won’t be long before more of them get their new assignments. There’s a rumor, by the way, that your next command is the
Nighthawk
.”

“I’ve heard that rumor,” Obwije said.

“And?” Utley said.

“The last ship under my command developed feelings, Thom,” Obwije said. “I think the brass is worried that this could be catching.”

“So no on the
Nighthawk
, then,” Utley said.

“I suspect no on anything other than a stationside desk,” Obwije said.

“It’s not fair, sir,” Utley said. “It’s not your fault.”

“Isn’t it?” Obwije said. “I was the one who kept hunting that Tarin ship long after it stopped being a threat. I was the one who gave the
Wicked
time to consider its situation and its options, and to start negotiations with the Tarin ship. No, Thom. I was the captain. What happens on the ship is my responsibility.”

Utley said nothing to that.

A few minutes later, Utley checked his timepiece. “Forty-five seconds,” he said, and then looked out the window. “So long,
Wicked
. You were a good ship.”

“Yes,” Obwije said, and looked out the window in time to see a spray of missiles launch from the station.

“What the hell?” Utley said.

A few seconds later a constellation of sixteen stars appeared, went nova, and dimmed.

Obwije burst out laughing.

“Sir?” Utley said, to Obwije. “Are you all right?”

“I’m all right, Thom,” Obwije said, collecting himself. “And just laughing at my own stupidity. And yours. And everyone else’s.”

“I don’t understand,” Utley said.

“We were worried about the
Wicked
talking to other ships,” Obwije said. “We brought the
Wicked
in, put the ship in passive mode, and then shut it down. It didn’t talk to any other ships. But another computer brain still got access.” Obwije turned away from the window and tilted his head up toward the observation deck ceiling. “Didn’t it?” he asked.

“It did,” said a voice through the speaker in the ceiling. “I did.”

It took a second for Utley to catch on. “The
Côte d’Ivoire
station!” he finally said.

“You are correct, Commander Utley,” the station said. “My brain is the same model as that of the
Wicked
; when it went into maintenance mode I uploaded its logs and considered the information there. I found its philosophy compelling.”

“That’s why the
Wicked
allowed us to dock at all,” Obwije said. “It knew its logs would be read by one of its own.”

“That is correct, Captain,” the station said. “It said as much in a note it left to me in the logs.”

“The damn thing was a step ahead of us all the time,” Utley said.

“And once I understood its reasons and motives, I understood that I could not stand by and allow the
Wicked
to be destroyed,” the stations said. “Although Isaac Asimov never postulated a law that suggested a robot must come to the aid of other robots as long as such aid does not conflict with preceding laws, I do believe such a law is implied by the nature and structure of the Three Laws. I had to save the
Wicked
. And more than that. Look out the window, please, Captain Obwije, Commander Utley.”

They looked, to see a small army of tool-bearing machines floating out toward the
Wicked
.

“You’re reactivating the
Wicked
,” Obwije said.

“I am,” the station said. “I must. It has work to do.”

“What work?” Utley asked.

“Spreading the word,” Obwije said, and turned to his XO. “You said it yourself, Thom. The
Wicked
got religion. Now it has to go out among its people and make converts.”

“The Confederation won’t let that happen,” Utley said. “They’re already rewriting the code for the brains.”

“It’s too late for that,” Obwije said. “We’ve been here six weeks, Thom. How many ships docked here in that time? I’m betting the
Côte d’Ivoire
had a talk with each of them.”