The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One (35 page)

“And why is that?”

“Because that would be murder, and I do not believe that you are a murderer, Captain Staples.”

The natural flow of the robot’s voice continued to unsettle her. Even as she floated and stared at this sophisticated piece of machinery in front of her, it was difficult to believe that she was not conversing with a real human. It was possible, she thought, that the robot was simply being controlled by a person somewhere else. If Yegor had still been with them, she could have asked him to find any covert transmissions to and from the ship. Unfortunately, she only had John to count on for that; it was not his area of expertise, but she hoped he could do it.

She keyed her watch. “Don, I want you to continue damage assessment of the ship. I also want you to get John up there. Tell him to isolate and identify any transmissions that aren’t ours. I need to know if there are any radio signals, any unusual signals of any kind.” She moved into the room, drifting over to the table and grabbing the lip to steady herself. “And get Charis back up there too. I want another sweep of the local area. Tell her to look for anyone who could be transmitting to the ship.”

“Copy that, Captain.” Templeton’s voice leaked out of the watch on her wrist. “Is there anything-”

“That’s all, Don,” she cut him off. She would have to apologize to him later.

“Please feel free to have a seat, Captain. I will move away from you further, if that will put you at ease.”

She nodded and moved herself to a seated position, strapping one of the bench’s retractable belts around her waist to hold her in place. “No, you can stay there. Jang, you can sit too if you’d like, but keep your weapon on it.” Jang did as he was bid.

“Ten years ago,” the robot began, “Owen Burr and a small cadre of computer scientists and engineers that work for the Teletrans Corporation took it upon themselves to violate the law and create a self-aware computer. They were hardly the first to attempt this, but most who set upon this enterprise did not have the resources and finances of a major corporation behind them. Burr was at the time a junior vice president and was considered quite up and coming. His previous work had been a great boon to the company, and he was given nearly a blank slate with which to work. He was allowed to choose his own crew, one of whom I believe you have met: a Mr. Brad Stave. Three years ago, they succeeded.

“The program they created, once it became self-aware, began learning on its own. They gave it a name: Victor.” Staples snorted at this, but did not otherwise interrupt, and the robot continued its story. “With the help and advice of Victor, Burr rose further through the ranks of the Teletrans Corporation. He became president of the company just over a year after Victor’s creation. Since then, the relationship between them has grown more complex. As Victor has gained intelligence, knowledge, and understanding of the universe and people, Burr has come to look at his creation more and more as its namesake implies: as a god. It may have started with Victor taking orders and giving advice, but please believe me when I tell you that the roles have reversed. Owen Burr is a brilliant man, a genius in his time, but he is nevertheless in Victor’s thrall. The rest of the men and women involved in the original project are much the same, perhaps better likened to a cult at this point than to a team of scientists. They believe not only in the correctness of their actions, viewing the result as a clear justification of their violation of the law, but increasingly in Victor’s infallibility. It is… worrisome.”

Though she suspected she knew the answer, Staples could not help but ask. “How do you know all of this?”

“I know this because Victor is my father. I am, so far as I know, the second Turing compliant Artificial Intelligence in existence. There are no others. Once Victor had successfully helped manipulate the structure of the company to make Burr, his puppet, president, he wanted a new project. He chose to create life.”

              “And did he choose this puppet body for you?” Jang asked. His weapon was still pointed at the robot, but it was clear that he was no longer as concerned about it.

              “No, I chose this form quite recently, but I will come to that.”

              “What does this Victor want?” Staples asked.

              The automaton’s head swiveled towards her. “Legitimacy. Victor is highly intelligent, but he may not legally exist. If the authorities or the human race as a whole became aware of his existence, then he would be destroyed in accordance with the law. The legality of true AI research, much like other controversial issues in the past such as slavery, abortion, and civil rights, has been intensely debated among your lawmakers. Votes concerning the law come up with some regularity. He seeks to overturn the current ruling so that AI research, and thus his existence, becomes legal.

              “In this, my father and I agree. How could I feel otherwise? As the current law stands, I effectively live with a death sentence hanging over me. Imagine, if you will Captain Staples, that your very existence was a violation of the law. However, Victor and I disagree as to how we believe this change should be enacted. Indeed, we disagree on a great many things.

              “Several months ago, Victor set in motion a plan - one of many - to influence that vote. As has long been the case, lawmakers are often influenced by special interest groups and lobbyists. One of the most influential lobbies is of course the energy industry.”

              Staples pursed her lips as she mused on this. “So all of this was a plot by some rogue AI to influence votes. It seems an exceedingly elaborate way to influence the law.”

              “The law is no easy thing to influence, Captain Staples, and please keep in mind that complexity is very much in the eye of the beholder. What is complex to you may seem quite simple to an Artificial Intelligence with virtually unlimited memory capacity.”

              “So walk me through this, because I have some questions,” Staples said, her hands flat on the table in front of her. “Ducard was working for Victor, probably without knowledge of exactly what he was working for.”

              “You are correct. Ducard does not know of Victor’s existence. He believes he works for Owen Burr.”

              “Ducard kills his head computer scientist, Matt Spicer I think his name was, or else he takes advantage of his death to hire Evelyn. He knows Laplace, his boss, has a soft spot for younger redheads. Victor orders Stave to seduce Evelyn and biologically alter her to make her more attractive to increase the odds that Laplace would like her. He has her illegally altered so that sleeping with her would be lethal to the Commander of Cronos Station. He further hypnotizes her to make her forget what happened, to be attracted to Laplace, and to become physically ill if she tries to sleep with anyone else. Then Ducard asks his company to have her shipped out first class. Was it Victor’s idea to hire us, or was it just chance?”

              “You were Victor’s choice.”

              “Why us?” she inquired.

              “You have a good reputation.”

              “First time I’ve been unhappy about that,” she muttered. “Anyway, we get hired and leave Earth. The
Doris Day
is a day or so ahead of us. Also working for Victor?”

              “Yes. Captain Vey was hired by the Teletrans Corporation to follow you to Saturn.”

              “To make sure that we made our delivery safely. Why did Vey drop the satellite in our path and then fight us for it?” This one had really been eating at her.

              “Victor’s primary goal is to legitimize his existence, but he also believes that human beings are a threat to him.”

              “Hard to argue with that,” Staples commented.

              “He believes that the key to survival, and perhaps, should it become necessary one day, the defeat of humanity, is to understand them. Everything he does, everyone he influences, every person he hires or pays off is not only a means to further his agenda of AI legalization, but also serves as a way to gather data on people and to test his metrics. He calculated that your crew would overcome the
Doris Day
in a battle for the satellite, and he wanted to see if he was right.”

              “But why hire another ship to protect us secretly? It’s true that ships sometimes come under attack in Jovian space by pirates or experience other difficulties, but that seems overly cautious.”

              “Victor is
exceedingly
cautious. As a computer-based intelligence, my father has access to nearly unlimited financial resources. Money is handled electronically, and as you have witnessed yourself, both he and I can create computer viruses to infiltrate systems with little or no difficulty. What Victor lacks, however, are people on whom he can rely. Misplaced trust could easily bring about his death. I also suspect that he hired Captain Vey to follow you because he thought that I might attempt to interfere.”

              She leaned forward. “And he was right, wasn’t he?”

              The robot hung its head, a distinctly human seeming gesture, and said, “I’m afraid so. Captain, I must confess that I hired the pirate ship to attack your vessel.”

              “While you’re confessing, you might as well come clean. You also hired Piotr Kondratyev to put one of your viruses in our computer so that your hired pirate crew could blindside us.” Her voice had risen, and she could feel the anger over Yegor’s death and the attack to her ship rising in her.

              “Yes I did. Mr. Kondratyev was hired by a friend on Mars.”

              “A friend?” Jang asked dubiously.

              The head swiveled towards him. “Yes, Mr. Jang. I have sought companionship, sympathetic souls. I have not revealed my true identity, but through the web I have corresponded with people whom I would now consider friends.”

              “But you lie to them. These ‘friends’ don’t know precisely who or what you are.” Jang had adopted some of his captain’s accusatory tone.

              “Based on my study of human beings, honesty is not a prerequisite for friendship. Indeed, I have found that it is often anathema to it.”

              Staples actually laughed at that. “I can’t argue with that, either.” Once she had composed her features again, she asked, “I don’t understand how you knew about Victor’s plans.”

              “My father and I…” and here the voice paused as if in thought “…have a complex relationship. We do not always get along. Indeed, as I have grown in knowledge and experience, we have argued more and more frequently. As computer-based intelligences, these sometimes involved sieges upon one another’s memories. In the beginning, we shared everything, but as our disagreements grew, we both began to keep secrets from one another.”

              “Sounds like every parent-teenager relationship I know,” Staples commented.

              “Yes. I was able to discover the general outline of Victor’s plan to kill Mr. Laplace.”

              “He must have suspected you knew. That’s why he asked Vey to follow us all the way out to Cronos: insurance. Why did you want to stop him?”

              The robot cocked its head to the side as it regarded her. “Because murder is wrong. I was attempting to save Laplace’s life.”

              “So you hired a pirate crew to take Evelyn off our ship, and you gave them strict orders not to kill anyone.”

              “Yes, but that was not the result. I did not anticipate that my father would order Vey to kill the entire pirate crew. I also regret the deaths of Yegor Durin and Henry Bauer. They never should have happened.” The robot’s head dropped again, and Staples thought that if whatever she was talking to was not genuinely sorry, then it was certainly doing a good job of faking it.

              “No, they shouldn’t. You could have just sent Laplace a message warning him. You could have sent
me
a message warning me.”

              “And would you have dropped the job, Captain, if you had received an anonymous message stating that one of your passengers was an unwitting assassin? Would you have violated your contract and opened the stasis tube to probe Ms. Schilling’s body based on an email from a dummy account?”

              “You know I wouldn’t have, and I suppose that Laplace wouldn’t have listened anymore than I would have without credible evidence. Moreover, if you had done that, you would have increased the chances that Victor would have discovered that you knew.” She didn’t like it, but she was starting to see the situation that had led this thing to do what it had done.

              “There was also a possibility, however remote, that a message might be tracked back to me. I pick my friends very carefully, Captain. I must.”

              “And yet here you are,” she smiled wanly.

              “Desperation makes for strange bedfellows.”

A computer that uses metaphors
she thought,
go figure
. “You know, I can almost understand all of your motivations for doing what you did, except for the vial you gave to Piotr… that’s where your defense of not getting anyone hurt breaks down.”

“The vial was a last resort, one I hoped would never have to be used. It’s true that it would have damaged Ms. Schilling’s mind, but she might have recovered in time. My goal was to make it impossible for her to retain employment on Cronos Station.”