“What’s all the fuss,” Kli said. “He’s an AI.”
“You know as well as anybody,” I said. “He was built for sensory-feedback-based decision making. With a visceral understanding of that feedback. For his kind of AI, he couldn’t help growing a deeper consciousness. When we added the Rollot pattern and what came after, we just accelerated that process. And she seems to think he’s more than an AI.”
Rosalind was oblivious to us, deep in her tears, caressing Basto’s lifeless frame.
“Unlike Buttercup,” I continued, pulling the little cube from my pouch. “The Model 4 was designed to do just the opposite, to process input according to a fixed and complex set of rules, with little feeling if any for the results of its actions. Buttercup was beginning to break out of that, building a new awareness, and I can’t help but think that it was moving toward deep consciousness. But for Buttercup, that episode is over.”
“Ah,” Kli said. “I begin to see what you’re up to. Use the Model 4 to unlock Basto’s ID. But that means that the Model 4….”
“Buttercup will survive,” I said, “but is going to have, what’s that strange archaic phrase? A steep learning curve.”
“An AI mind-meld,” Ship said.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Do we have time?” O’Flaherty said. “We can’t stay here.”
“Do it.” Bael had come up behind me. She still looked tired, but the emptiness had begun to lift from her eyes. “Both of these AIs deserve it. Despite what I thought, neither had allowed themselves to become a robot. That’s worth a lot to me. You can do it now; I’ll help. Ship, we’ll need the Rollot again, but modulated by the Beelagen, with a few modifications. Can you manage that?”
“It will take a few minutes,” Ship said. “Ah, locking in with you now.”
“I’m not needed here,” the Captain said. “I want to make sure that those two are more secure than last time.” She gestured toward the break. Kral had just brought in Johnny and Melissa and had dumped them both on the floor. “And I’m wondering what happened to Kindness. He’s not among the bodies, and I don’t detect him in the house. I think I’ll take a look around.”
“What’s left of your network?” I asked.
“Surprisingly intact.”
“Compromised?”
“No. Your problems with Linda, the monkeys, or the enforcers have nothing to do with my people. My network is disciplined and incorruptible. We all are working toward a goal. Our devotion to that goal probably goes beyond what you can understand.”
“Try me….”
“We need Johnny’s memories in order to discover completely the process with which he destabilized Chance. Who did what, and how? Who was fooled; who was trapped into betrayal? What started the cascading collapse that destroyed the court? Only then can we begin to reverse the tragedy and restore the Court. And ohen we can begin to save Chance.”
“Well, if your network is intact, can you see what they know of Louis’s whereabouts? I’m beginning to get a little bothered by his disappearances.”
“I’m nearly ready,” Ship said. “Bael, I like your thinking on the Beelagen pattern. Yes, that’s what needs to…I’m almost finished…there.”
I took Buttercup’s cube and was about to open the BAS receptor in his finger. Bael’s hand closed over mine. She was close, and brought her eyes up to mine. “You’re good, my Hare, but I’m better. This is my primary training.”
I smiled at her. “And staff fighting and timely rescues and confidence games and magic tricks and finding clogged hydroponics pumps and creating jump traces and….”
She laughed. “I told you, my father believed in a well-rounded education. Now give me the cube.”
She moved fast. She set up a small virtual control and did some things to the cube I’d never seen before.
“Just stabilizing the patterns,” she said, as if reading my mind. “That little AI is in there, somewhere, buried in the data. I just hope it reconstitutes in the correct sequences. Otherwise…it won’t be set to unlock Basto’s ID. Or maybe I should start calling it “him.” He’s about to experience gender for the first time, and won’t get much of a chance at practice.” She nodded at Rosalind, who had sunk into one of the couches, her head in her hands.
“I treated him so badly,” she was saying to herself. “So bad.”
“Kli, looks like Bael can handle this herself. What were you able to find, before you had to move?”
“Not much, Hare. You saw where Johnny was headed. As far as the enforcers go, they’re on the move all over Forest, but not much more than usual, with no apparent action pattern. And there’s nothing on Bresslaft, except for some standard historical gossip. I think you’ve seen that. But I did find out where the answers may lie.”
“Yea?”
“I’ve seen another of those dolls.”
“Hare,” Bael said. “I need your help. We need to get Basto sitting up. I need to run some tests on him, and I want to look at his functions.”
We pushed aside one of the bodies and lifted the AI’s frame onto a couch. Bael set to work on him.
“Where did you see the doll?”
“Not a doll, exactly, but an image of one.” The image appeared before my eye, a woman I didn’t recognize, holding one of the little figures. She was in a room surrounded by artifacts.
“It comes from one of the shadow cultures, from a long time ago. This one was found in the ruins on Banyan’s Hell.”
“What’s its symbol?”
“It looks like a cracked eggshell, a half-circle with a serrated edge.”
“What’s the story?”
“These dolls are more than simple artifacts,” he said. “They appear to be remnants of a technology that is so foreign to us as to be invisible. I have no idea what they do, but it appears that a certain number of them is required in order to do anything.”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” Rosalind said. “Our action gang found a trove of them in the ruins of the golden palace on Banyan’s. We used to have big parties out there whenever we finished an action. One of our guys was digging to bury some swag and began to find boxes. They were old, made from some kind of wood and covered with carvings. Each box held a little doll. We started pulling them out of the boxes, and when we got eleven of them out, they started to glow and get hot. A creature began to materialize in front of us.
“It was small, maybe a meter high, with a big translucent head and long orange tentacles. And then in a flash, it disappeared. We put the dolls back in their boxes, and they stopped glowing. We tested all of them; they were nothing more than baked clay with a few trace elements. We brought them out a bunch more times in the days that followed. We tried various combinations. Most times, nothing happened.”
“Most times?”
“We thought at first that the dolls together were some sort of recorder, showing pictures from another time. But the last time we brought out all eleven and put them together in the same placement as the first time. The little guy with the tentacles reappeared with two other tentacle characters. This time the images stayed longer. Then, before we could do anything, the first guy reached out and grabbed Bobbie with one of those orange tentacles. It was stronger than it looked. Then all of them disappeared. We never put the dolls together again after that.”
“A hole and space/time?”
“Yea, that’s what we thought. But the energy needed for a hole like that would be huge; it just wasn’t there.”
“Who was Bobbie?”
“Just one of the guys in the action gang. He and I used to sleep together, but I never knew him all that well. Then he was gone.”
“So what happened?”
“There were twelve of us left, and eleven boxes. That was all we could find. Each of us kept one, except for the woman who was with Johnny at the time. She died a little while later, killed in a gang battle. And the tutors, of course. They just sat in the background anyway, watching Johnny. Individually, the dolls were useless, and apparently even in numbers less than eleven. Although once, mine glowed briefly, but only for a few seconds, then it stopped. We decided to use them as badges, symbols of our membership in the gang. It was silly, really, but I think each of us has held onto theirs.”
“Johnny was there? And Louis?”
“Yea. They worked together well, back in those days.”
“Curiouser and curiouser. I’d have thought you would try to sell them. I wonder if Johnny’s been trying to collect them. Do you have yours?”
“Sort of. When I met Johnny again, decided that I needed to ensure my safety. Call it instinct, but nobody trusts Johnny. I made sure that it was in a safe and reliable spot, a place even I would have difficulty discovering, with standing orders that it be destroyed if I die, or don’t check in. Johnny knows that, and he’s so far left me alone. As for selling, we all could never agree on that. So we never did.”
“Hare, we’re almost ready,” Bael said. “I need your help again.”
Ship was playing a pattern I’d not heard before. We had Basto’s frame stretched out on the couch. I manipulated the BAS receptor as Bael made a few final shifts with her virtual control. Finally we all stopped and waited.
Basto opened his eyes and lay there, very still. Then he screamed. “What have you done to me?”
To Be Continued
