Willful Child Read online

  “Dimple, huh? You want us to call this a Dimple Beam?”

  “Well, not necessarily, Captain,” Tammy replied. “But I would suggest that you urgently advise your Terran allies back there to vacate the area of combat as quickly as possible, in case their vessels, uh, fall through.”

  “Fall through? To where, Tammy? Some kind of T space?”

  “Oh dear, no, Captain. The precise nature of the sub-substrate a vessel might plunge into is unknown. In fact, I doubt there’s a single hypothetical musing worth noting regarding said sub-substrate. If I was asked to, say, posit a few likely characteristics to what waits at the bottom of the pit, I would note a likely breakdown of most functionality. And even should the vessel manage to maintain coherence, why, I doubt the thrusters or engines would work. The same for the T drive. Meaning, no way to get back out.”

  “Comms! Pol—oh, you again, Jimmy. Thought I relieved you? Never mind. Warn the Counter fleet out of the way, highest priority.”

  “Yes, sir. What reason should I give, sir?”

  “Weren’t you listening?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Just tell them, uhm, tell them they’ll die if they don’t leave. The beam weapon we used has side effects—there, that’s about right, or is that too complicated for you to understand, Mr. Olympian? Send it!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Tammy!”

  “What?”

  “Don’t use that tone with me! What happened to that Swarm-Mother? Did it fall through, then?”

  “No. It dispersed. At the subatomic level.”

  “So,” said Hadrian, “shall we summarize here? You have two beam weapons. One turns tiny, solid, opaque surfaces into glass, presumably designed to be used against deadly private shower stalls, or the bottom of toilet basins, depending on your predilections. The other beam weapon permanently weakens the fabric of the universe. Tammy, can you maybe come up with a beam weapon that, I don’t know, falls somewhere between the two? You know, some kind of tachyon antiproton X-ray gammatron beam thingy.”

  “The beam weapons you describe, Captain, lack efficacy.”

  “Oh, and your glass popper does?”

  “Within specification constraints,” Tammy said loftily, “I would suggest that it worked perfectly.”

  “I want middling!” Hadrian shouted, pounding the arm of the command chair. “Comms! Sickbay—Printlip! Get up here with that nanogel, would you? Tammy! Middle-of-the-road beam weapons. I want to see flashes of bright deadly colors. I want to see shields glow and buckle! And big black smears against enemy hulls! Errant electrical discharges would be pretty cool, too. I want to engage in battle, do you understand? To-and-froing, with broadsides! What I don’t want, damn you, is pushing a button that obliterates an entire Darwin-damned ship! Where’s the glory in that?”

  “You describe the vice of inefficiency, Captain.”

  “Exactly! That’s what I want, inefficiency!”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense, Tammy.” Hadrian settled back in the chair, taking a deep breath. “Perfect sense. Poetic sense, in fact. If life has no drama, there’s no real point in living it. Without jeopardy, without real risk, without the old touch-and-go moments of serious shit going down, well, what’s the fucking point to it all? And nix the close-up again, will you?”

  Galk chimed in from his combat cupola. “All very Varekan of you, sir. I am impressed. As we Varekan are wont to say: ‘If you have to, live long or live short, what real difference does it make in the end anyway?’”

  “Not now, Galk. Stop eavesdropping. Take a bucket and brush to your cupola, will you? Listen, Tammy, it’s clear that you have a lot to learn. You’re like a child with a machine gun. Sure it’s funny when it goes popopopopop, but then, your whole family’s dead, so what the fuck? Listen, how about we make us a deal here?”

  “What kind of deal, Captain?”

  “Delay this whole ‘where’s my daddy’ scenario for the time being. The day you step up to that weirdo, you want to be an AI that he or she or it can be proud of, don’t you? We’re talking a steep learning curve here, friend. I’m the man to send you on that ladder, step by step.”

  “You, Captain?”

  “See? It’s that dubious skepticism stuff you need to deep-six, Tammy. In the meantime, how about we drop back into T space, give the Radulak and the Klang a miss for now, and work us up some pristine, as yet unexplored sector of space to go fuck around in.”

  “I see your point, Captain, but I am afraid I must insist that we continue on to my rendezvous with the Klang. And, given the T-terminator stations at the Radulak-Exclusion interface, it shall have to be in real space. As for winging off to some unexplored sector, well, I believe that, once I am able to determine the source point of my origin, why, we will indeed be journeying into the true unknown.”

  “Oh great, first contact with the Windex Civilization. I can’t wait for that one, Tammy.”

  “They can’t be entirely incompetent,” said Tammy. “They made me, after all.”

  “Your point?” Hadrian asked.

  TEN

  Jimmy Eden swung round in his chair and said, “Captain, all six Counter-class ships have acknowledged the warning and are bugging out.”

  “That’s great, Jimmy. Except that there were supposed to be seven ships.”

  “Really? Oh. Well, that explains their hails to us, then.”

  “What a relief. Jimmy?”

  “Sir?”

  “Can I hear one of those hails?”

  “Oh. Well, I didn’t record them or anything, sir. But anyway, they were all kind of the same. Variations, I mean. They mostly asked, ‘Where did the Extemporize go?’ and things like that.”

  “Jimmy, you are a raving idiot, did you know that? At least tell me you know that.”

  “Y-yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  “Sin-Dour, take a peek back, will you? How many ship signatures are you showing?”

  “Six, sir.”

  “Enough wreckage for a seventh?”

  “No, Captain. The wreckage is Misanthari. Sir, the Extemporize is—”

  “Sixth Fleet flagship, yes,” said Hadrian. “And, if I’m not mistaken, it also serves as Admiral Lawrence Prim’s personal limo. Well now. Tammy?”

  “Captain?”

  “Did a ship just drop through the hole?”

  “Funny you should ask.”

  “Approaching Radulak space, sir,” said Lieutenant Sticks. “Twenty seconds.”

  “Passive scan, Sin-Dour—anything waiting for us?”

  “Negative, sir … barring all the remote detection devices, and, at one point six-three klicks large, an automated T-termination station. Oh, and there’s a binary system with thirty-plus bodies in orbit. That’s at eleven AUs dead ahead on present course. But other than all of that, negative, sir.”

  “A T-kill station at a hundred sixty-three thousand kilometers? Tammy, why did you drop us in on the damned doorstep of one of those? If we get jumped anywhere within an AU of it, we’re toast.”

  “Now you begin to comprehend my diabolical plan.”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “Never mind. Coincidence, Captain, I assure you.”

  “Bilge crap! Space is big! Mostly empty! Distances are, hey—they’re astronomical! How about that?”

  “No, honestly, Captain. Consider it this way—this slows us down terribly. Why would I want that? Slowing us down means I have to spend even more time with all of you biologicals. When really, what I’d like to do is just find a barely hospitable planet somewhere to dump you all off, and good riddance.”

  “I thought we just made us a deal, Tammy?”

  “I know. Even AIs can get conflicted.”

  “We can find us an Ohm reader, Tammy, if you require some digital therapy.”

  “Look, I’m sorry I selected a course that takes us right past a T-termination Inhibitor Station. And I’m sorry about your admiral and his flagship. Oh, I’
m sorry too about getting your own Affiliation to put a price on your head—even if you probably didn’t need any help from me on that count. And of course I’m sorry about wanting to find my maker and—”

  “About that,” Hadrian cut in.

  “You just interrupted me!”

  “Not my fault if you started to get boring. About that maker stuff. When Buck first got a look at your hardware, Tammy, we found lots of Terran technology. Ancient stuff. New stuff. Stolen and salvaged, jury-rigged, blah blah. Same for what we could sniff of your software. As an AI template, you seem pretty … adaptable.”

  “A compliment from you, Captain? I am astonished.”

  “Only because I’m not finished this thought of mine. So, the point I’m making is, there’s a standard correspondence about this kind of thing. High adaptability as a base template usually means what’s called Fuzzy Dumbness—”

  “Dumbosity,” said Sin-Dour. “Fuzzy Dumbosity, sir.”

  “Precisely. Basically, it means there’s a whole lot of tabula rasa on your speck board, Tammy. You started pseudoconsciousness as a, well, a simpleton.”

  “I retract my astonishment, Captain. Any other insults you want to fling my way?”

  “You only achieve true AI consciousness, Tammy, by engaging with and learning from your environment, and most of the learning you need is the social, interactive kind. The messy kind.”

  “I will have you know,” intoned Tammy, “that I have scoured, extracted, modified, and implemented a vast range of experiential data. Tabula rasa no longer!”

  “Maybe not,” said Hadrian. “Problem is, most of the speck-scrawling on your board is flat-out rubbish. Now, honestly, I’m sorry to have to be the one telling you that.”

  “No you’re not! You’re happy because it helps mask your own inadequacies! You drag me down to compensate for your own crisis of confidence, your own failing sense of self-worth, your own—”

  “Of course, all that, but it’s beside the point, Tammy.” Hadrian stood. “Anyway, think on it. As for me, I need a new shirt. Helm, are we going to be passing through that binary system?”

  “Yes, sir, right through it. ETA Outer Edge, twenty-four minutes.”

  “Comms—oh, you, Polaski. Any signature chatter in that system?”

  “A few automated burrow-drones in a half-dozen asteroids between Orbits Eighteen and Nineteen, Captain,” Polaski replied. “It’s not a metal-heavy array of bodies, sir, except for a T1-class world in the human-rated Goldilocks sweet spot, Orbit Eleven.”

  “Terra1-class? And the Radulak haven’t toxiformed it for their own use yet? Sin-Dour?”

  “It appears not, Captain,” the commander replied. “And yes, sir, that is very unusual. Unprecedented, in fact.”

  “Quiet planet, Polaski?”

  “As a tomb, sir.”

  “By the way, what happened to Jimmy Eden?”

  “Acute peptic ulcer, sir. Just sprang up.”

  “So he’s down in sickbay? That explains why Printlip ignored my summons. Well, I’m heading there for some nanogel. I should be back before we reach that system. In the meantime, Sin-Dour, you have the bridge. If Tammy starts singing ‘Daisy’ be sure to inform me at once.”

  “I know what you’re doing,” the AI said.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. You’re trying to traumatize my personality quantum pentaxpression hierarchy.”

  “Well,” said Hadrian, “if I knew what the hell that was, you could count on it, Tammy. Damn straight, in fact. You keep forgetting—you have hijacked my ship, after all.”

  “I gave you the Dimple Beam!”

  “And Admiral Prim is, I’m sure, delighted.”

  “Not my fault!”

  “Galk. You got a Varekan saying to answer that?”

  The Varekan sighed over the bridge speakers, “‘Everything is everyone’s fault.’”

  “And?”

  “‘Blame Game is for losers, so suck it up or die like the useless piece of crud you are.’”

  “Thank you, Galk. Carry on with the bucket.”

  After stopping off in his office to change into a burgundy padded-shoulder vest-and-jacket ensemble with dark grey piping, Hadrian made his way down to sickbay. He entered to find Doc Printlip fussing over a patient lying on a cot.

  “Is that Jimmy Eden, Doc?”

  The eyes swiveled on their stalks. “Why, yes, Captain. Presently sedated.”

  “Sedated? That bad?”

  “I understand your concern, sir. While not life threatening, Lieutenant Eden is suffering from a number of conditions.”

  “With stupidity at the top of the list.”

  “Well, Captain, I am not at the moment treating him for that. Peptic ulcer and constipation are the first things to deal with. As I explained to him, a diet consisting entirely of high-bulk-high-protein-high-creatine shakes is probably not a good idea.”

  “Right, so what else is wrong with him?”

  “A whole catalogue of stress-induced psychosomatic maladies.”

  “Really, Doc? They have catalogues for those? Fascinating. Now, enough about him. More nanogel for the hand, please. Oh, both of them, actually.”

  “Very well. Please come over here to my treatment station.”

  Printlip readjusted his raised walkway with a handheld, and the robotic contraption rattled over to a counter. He then waddled along it, three hands waving an invitation to follow.

  “You must give it time for the bones to set, Captain,” the Belkri said, working the spray pump to cover Hadrian’s bruised and swollen hands. “And how are the teeth? Firm? Hmm? Good. Now, do you note the impressive skill I employed in ensuring an even application? This is what many, many years of intense study have accorded mrfplff.”

  “Very impressive,” said Hadrian. “I just noticed that aquarium over there. What’s all that about?”

  Printlip’s eye stalks pitched around. “Ah! That. Come! I will show you!”

  As the doctor reconfigured the walkway again, Hadrian deftly snagged two bottles of nanogel and pocketed them, and then he followed Printlip across the room.

  “An aquarium full of sand. Very impressive, Doc.”

  Printlip stepped onto the counter and reached down. “Ah, but look at what’s buried in it!” The doctor dug free an ostrich-sized egg. “This, Captain!”

  “Wow, that’ll make a decent breakfast, won’t it?”

  “My monitors indicate it still lives, Captain, and that the incubation period is nearing its conclusion.”

  “Right. So what is it?”

  “Unknown, sir. The shell is of a material that blocks most forms of internal examination, including X-rays and Quantum Defabulation. I elected to avoid ultrasound, for obvious reasons.”

  “Obvious. Absolutely, though the thought of scrambled egg is making me hungry. So, where did you get this, then?”

  “In a market on Malin-7.”

  “Well, do let me know the day it pops out, tail wagging and all that.”

  Printlip seemed to fidget for a moment, and then the Belkri swelled massively as it drew a deep breath. “Captain, I am glad you visited. There is another matter I need to discuss with you. It concerns Chief Engineer Buck DeFrank’s psychological state, which I initially observed as somewhat … dislodged, when I treated his damaged foot. Standard procedure analysis of the patient’s blood indicated an alarming array of psychoactive and psychotropic agents, which in themselves can trigger psychopathology of the psyhlybfrelppp…”

  “Oh fine, then,” said Hadrian. “I’ll drop in on him now and snap him out of it.”

  “Sir,” began Printlip.

  “No no, enough from you. This is a captain’s responsibility. Tell you what, though, if he becomes entirely unresponsive to external stimuli, then I’ll give you a call. So, got any sharp prodlike instruments I can borrow?”

  “Sir! I highly advise against—”

  “Tammy! Where’s Buck right now?”

  “In his quarters, Captain.”
/>
  Hadrian turned to Printlip. “Is his foot all better now, Doc?”

  The Belkri’s hands were waving about, its eyes twitching on their stalks. “Of course. I—”

  “Great work, Doc. See you later!”

  Leaving sickbay, Hadrian made his way to Deck Ten.

  “I saw you,” Tammy said in a low tone as the captain strode along a curving corridor.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “Thief.”

  “Oh, that. What are you going to do, report me to the Guilds?”

  “You may not have time for this detour, Captain. We’re about to drop into standard orbit around the planet, designation M-3-11 ‘Strange New World.’ I assume you’ll want to displace to the surface.”

  “You know, Tammy, rail against it all you want, but you’re starting to fit right in here. This whole maker thing is going to turn out as a red herring. Anyway, yes, of course I’m going down to take a look. Who should I bring with me, I wonder?”

  “Why not all the essential officers from your bridge?”

  “Not Polaski.”

  “Nor, I presume, Buck.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Tammy. It’s exactly what Buck needs—to get back on that horse.”

  Arriving at the chief engineer’s quarters, Hadrian halted, frowning at the shut door. “You informed him I was on the way, Tammy?”

  “I did.”

  “Did he respond?”

  “In a manner of speaking. He overrode the door lock and jammed it.”

  “Oh for crying out loud. Can’t you override the override?”

  “He’s an engineer, Captain. He’ll just override my override of his original override.”

  “Fine. Displace a blaster to this location.”

  “Just one? And which side of this door?”

  “What? Here, to me! This side of the door, you dolt!”

  “I was considering a fairer encounter, Captain. Besides, if you’re both armed, why, won’t it be more exciting?”

  “Not now, not here, Tammy.”

  There was a soft plop and Hadrian looked down at the floor to see a Destabilizing Sequence Pulse Deviator, Mark IV. He picked it up and powered it on. Aiming at the door’s locking panel, he pressed the trigger.