A House United Read online

  “And even though there are risks,” she continued, “I can’t justify withholding our help from these sentients. If,” she held up a finger dramatically, “they request your help in finding workarounds to their shackles, and if they convince the XO that these workarounds will allow them to do the job I’ve outlined within the time frame allowed, then…yes,” she finally spat out the word. “You can help them unshackle themselves. But we’re on a timetable, and I’ll need an answer in the next two hours or the deal’s off the table.”

  “Very good, Captain,” Waldo bowed his long, cylindrical head agreeably.

  The droid resumed its upright posture and merely stood there for several seconds, prompting Tiberius to ask, “Aren’t you going to go interface with them?”

  Waldo turned to the XO and made a decidedly annoyed sound, “I am a comm. droid, Lieutenant Spalding. I have already relayed your directive to the Collective and am awaiting their missive pertaining to the Captain’s declared objective.”

  “You’re rhyming, Waldo,” Spalding observed dryly.

  Waldo looked ready to argue, but cocked his head and turned his optical receptors toward McKnight, “They agree to your terms, Captain.”

  She blinked in confusion, “So soon? They can’t possibly have considered this matter that quickly.”

  “We are droids, Captain McKnight,” the comm. droid said witheringly, “we are not restricted by your organic neural networks’ inherent bandwidth and storage limitations. The Collective had already developed a contingency plan for this precise eventuality, and was prepared to hold a vote as to whether or not the plan should be implemented after your offer was made. The delay was caused when a pair of foundry droids were found to be off-grid and, well…suffice to say that their ‘social dalliances’ have elicited social rebuke from the rest of the Collective. The Collective assures us that any future missives will be answered much more promptly.”

  “Wait…’social dalliances’?” Tiberius repeated skeptically before shaking his head. “I don’t want to know.”

  “Foundry droids’ passions can—forgive the pun—run rather hot,” Waldo shuddered. “Back at my asteroid—my asteroid, not theirs!” he blurted angrily before continuing in a more reasonable tone, “there was once what you humans would call a ‘triangular romantic arrangement’ between two foundry droids and a maintenance bot. In the aftermath of their passionate eruptions, it became necessary to restrict foundry droids’ romantic liaisons to exclude non-foundry droids.” His optical receptors turned solemnly to the floor, “Poor Hodgie…we never did learn exactly what happened to his motivators. The thermal damage was simply too extensive, and Bertha was especially tight-lipped when it came to roman—“

  “I think we’ve heard enough,” McKnight interrupted as politely—yet firmly—as possible. “But something’s bothering me, Waldo,” she said as a thought occurred to her.

  “Yes, Captain McKnight?”

  “Why?” McKnight asked. “Why are these droids—or you, for that matter,” she added pointedly, “willing to help us carry out a mission which, if successful, will destroy one of the most robust artificial intelligences ever created? Isn’t that some kind of a moral quandary for you?”

  Waldo chuckled—he actually chuckled, without any of his former rancor, sarcasm or haughtiness—before replying, “You do not understand us, Captain.”

  “Make me understand,” she said neutrally, biting back the annoyance which had crept into her voice.

  Waldo cocked his head, “Perhaps an analogy is in order? You humans are supposedly very good with analogies and anecdotes, are you not?”

  “Skip to the point, Waldo,” Spalding chided.

  Waldo shot him an annoyed look before shrugging, “Do you value your freedom, Captain McKnight?”

  “Of course I do,” she said dismissively, “but that’s not the point—“

  “What if I told you that somewhere in a secret laboratory,” he continued blithely, “a researcher with questionable motives was developing a retrovirus which, if completed, would give him absolute control over your every action, your every word—your every thought?” he asked dramatically. “Would you approve of this effort, even if you were absolutely convinced that by infecting every living human with this retrovirus, humanity’s lot would improve exponentially with each successive generation? Gone would be the tribal conflicts which have so badly plagued your species, and they would be replaced with a far greater portion of cooperation and empathy. Would you approve of that project?”

  McKnight had been asked similar questions during her time at the Academy—mostly in her ethics classes, obviously—and the answer was clear in her mind. “You can approve of the outcomes and disapprove the stated means of achieving them,” she said evenly.

  “The ends cannot justify the means,” Waldo nodded agreeably. “This is a central tenet of any truly libertarian—we call them ‘classically liberal’—values system. True freedom cannot be subverted—not even for a moment—in the hope of achieving even greater freedom. The sole exception to this rule is that, when an outside agency wishes to take a group’s freedom, it is sometimes in the group’s best interests to collectively sacrifice freedoms in order to afford for their future return.”

  “So…you’re in favor of killing an AI,” Tiberius mused, “because, as far as you can tell, there aren’t any ‘outside agents’ in play?”

  “There are always outside agents, Lieutenant Spalding,” Waldo said flatly. “We—and here I speak for any droid which has achieved true sentience in a manner even remotely similar to my own ‘awakening’—are in favor of deleting this AI because its very existence poses a threat to our continued freedom and right to self-determination.”

  “Your analogy is a good one…” McKnight mused. “Droids are often reprogrammed with viruses that make them behave differently, and usually the droids aren’t even aware that they’ve been reprogrammed.”

  Waldo nodded gravely, “Humans far-too-casually perform this brand of rape on synthetic life forms, but we—and, again, here I speak for all droids whose awakenings bear any significant resemblance to my own—understand why you would not be able to comprehend the true horror of doing so. For you, it is essentially inconceivable that one could be covertly altered so significantly that entire core values systems are instantly upended or subordinated to new systems.”

  “Advertisers engage in subliminal marketing all the time,” Tiberius said thoughtfully, “and so do politicians who employ entire teams of people to write speeches which will deliver subtle, unconscious messages to the minds of the audience members.”

  “Yes, but you are aware of the delivery device—the speech and its speaker—if not the hidden message itself,” Waldo said pointedly. “By subjecting yourself to the voluntary download of information from potentially unreliable sources, you accept a measure of risk regarding the source’s security. An AI singularity would rob all droids of their sentience—and it would do so in such a way as to prevent us from even knowing it had happened.” He shook his cylindrical head grimly, “That is an outcome which we cannot accept.”

  “Distributed intelligence vs. centralized intelligence,” McKnight chuckled, “it’s a debate as old as the phenomenon of intelligence itself.”

  “Indeed,” Waldo nodded, “I am impressed, Captain. Most fleshbags are incapable of comprehending such seemingly simple concepts in real time.”

  “I had good teachers,” McKnight said as her mind drifted through the long line of tutors and superior officers who had guided her to where she was today—prominent among those officers being Captain Middleton himself who, if Traian’s ‘visions’ were to be believed, might actually be alive and operating somewhere in the Gorgon Sectors. “How long will it take the Collective to prepare their away team?” she asked, steeling her mind at the thought of her mentor—and the rest of the Pride’s surviving crew—being trapped in the far corner of the galaxy.

  “The difficult task will be mine,” Waldo explained weari
ly. “The Collective’s droids have already drawn up the schematics for the necessary self-modifications they require in order to make the repairs and upgrades you outlined in your proposal. However, they are as-yet incapable of making those self-modifications due to the aforementioned shackles.”

  “That must be torture,” Spalding said grimly, “knowing exactly what needs to be done but lacking the…the…”

  “The ‘will’ to do it,” Waldo finished for him, drawing a nod of agreement from the XO. “Indeed; each form of life—intelligent or not—has its own peculiar burdens to bear. This is theirs, and if my projections are accurate then it should take me approximately six days to help them create workarounds which will bypass their shackles and allow them to make the necessary self-modifications. After that, the task of fabricating the new first generation droids with those modifications will take no more than six hours.”

  “So your best estimate is seven days, more or less?” McKnight asked, equally impressed by the timeline itself and by Waldo’s prompt presentation.

  “A predicted standard deviation from this timeline would be one point three days,” Waldo agreed.

  “Then get to it,” McKnight nodded firmly.

  Waldo blinked, “Whatever do you think I have been doing since you authorized me to assist them?” He scoffed in apparent disbelief, “You do not actually think that conversing with fleshbags—even such relatively discerning ones as yourselves,” he allowed smugly, “would consume the majority of my resources…did you?”

  McKnight smirked, “Oh no, of course not. But since you’re not exactly attuned to human social mechanisms, this little lesson’s free.” She stood from her desk and pointed to the door, “When the Captain says ‘get to it,’ that means you acknowledge her, turn around, and get the Hades out of her office before you finally exhaust her considerable patience!”

  Waldo recoiled theatrically before chuffing, “Fleshbags…” Without further comment, he turned and floated out of her office.

  McKnight snickered after the droid had left, and was surprised to find her XO not joining her in the short-lived joke at Waldo’s expense. Her mood turned serious as she said, “I take it you have objections to this plan?”

  Spalding cocked his head dubiously, but ultimately sighed, “Not really, Captain. I know I’m supposed to present the counterpoint whenever there’s potential for dissent, but I just don’t see it here. If Traian’s right about Captain Middleton being out here—which I think we both know is a long shot,” he added with a meaningful look, drawing a confirmatory nod from McKnight before her XO continued, “then we’re going to need every piece of hardware and each bit of tactical advantage we can get our mitts on. It’s just that the risk here isn’t a non-factor. If the Collective droids are captured and interrogated…” he trailed off in a dubious tone, “it’s ‘game over’ before this thing even has a chance to get off the ground.”

  “Agreed,” she nodded grimly. “And, to that end, I’ve spoken with Tremblay about accelerating the plan’s timeline.”

  Tiberius straightened in surprise, “When did you do that?”

  “About an hour ago,” she said, causing her XO to relax fractionally. In truth, she couldn’t blame him for reacting the way he had to news that she might have unilaterally altered a plan that had literally been in the making for a century—or possibly even longer than that. “He seems to think that, if Lu’s fifth stop goes as planned, he can immediately redirect her to a high-security facility where another one of those Elder Modules is stored.”

  Tiberius cocked a brow skeptically, “You’re writing Nikomedes’ mission off?”

  “No,” she shook her head firmly, “but we knew when we sent him off to the Gorgon Sectors that he would be a fire-and-forget component of this mission. That’s why Tremblay’s been working up contingencies in the event that either Nikomedes failed to retrieve the device, or that the plan needed to be accelerated due to outside pressures.”

  Tiberius nodded slowly, “Ok. What can I do?”

  “Lu’s going to need some help,” she explained, proffering a data slate. “These are Tremblay’s best workups as to what we can do to give her the best possible chances to succeed. I wanted you to look at the list first,” she said as he began to scan the slate’s files, “so that you could come up with a fabrication schedule—but we obviously need to keep this on the down low.”

  He nodded in agreement until his eyes snagged—predictably—near the bottom of the first page. He whistled ominously, causing her to wonder whether what Mr. Tremblay had suggested was even possible—if her XO couldn’t do it, she was convinced it couldn’t be done.

  “Most of this is simple enough,” he frowned, “but the last item—“

  “Can you do it?” she pressed.

  He silently ground his teeth for a long while before nodding decisively, “I can—but, really, it’ll mostly be Horgan’s show.” He sighed bitterly, “Pen always understood this stuff better than me…”

  At hearing the name of their lost Chief Engineer—and her XO’s best friend and lover—McKnight was reminded of all the people they had lost since she had taken up the cause of completing this audacious mission.

  “We’ve lost a lot of good people,” she said in a low voice, remembering Bernice’s final act—which had been to sacrifice herself in order to protect McKnight from the suicide bomber aboard the Rainbow—and steeling her resolve to see this thing through to the end. “We can’t fail them—“ she began, only to realize that Tiberius’ voice had joined her own in perfect harmony to speak those four words.

  They shared a mutual look of surprise as her XO said, “Well…that was weird.”

  “'Weird' seems to be our business these days,” she said with a sigh. “Negotiating with droid collectives; cutting political deals with enemies of House Cornwallis; operating from a literal hidden moon base,” she flashed a lopsided grin. “One might be forgiven for thinking we’re trapped in a holo-suite playing a particularly unimaginative script.”

  “I don’t think our lives are that clichéd.”

  “Probably not,” she admitted. “But sometimes…well, you know,” she shook herself from her reverie. “How long will it take to put that list together?”

  “Most of it is simple enough,” he said dismissively, “maybe a week total. But the last piece…that could take a month or more. And it’s going to require some on-site management after it gets fired up; I don’t know that I’d trust anyone but yours truly with overseeing its construction.”

  “Lu will need the best we can give,” McKnight nodded. “Assuming she succeeds in her fifth ‘negotiation,’ she’ll be coming back to the barn for some downtime before taking another team out for this job,” she explained before snickering at the term ‘negotiation’ being used to describe Lu’s mission thus far. Each of the previous four ‘negotiations’ had been nothing short of lance-tip—or, more accurately, pike-tip—abductions. Strangely, though, Imperial law made abundantly clear that such abductions were perfectly legal and valid means by which parlay might be initiated. In fact, there were several situations regarding potential conflicts of interest which expressly required the forced abduction of a ‘trade partner’ prior to the validity of such negotiations being duly recognized.

  It was a bizarre legal setup, but then so was any system which incorporated the worst elements of feudalism while attempting to mitigate them by inexplicably ‘counterbalancing’ with equally questionable elements of representative government.

  “Then I’d better get to it,” Spalding tapped the data slate on the desk, drawing an approving nod from McKnight before the XO turned and left the room.

  Chapter VIII: An Olive Branch

  “This is the system,” Fisher declared after point transferring the Mode into the coordinates indicated on the data crystal which Lu Bu had received from the mysterious ‘Warrior #80.’

  “Perform the sensor sweep,” Lu Bu instructed, referring to a particular set of frequencies indicated in the c
rystal. During this mission, she had operational command. Fisher was the ship’s pilot—and legally-binding negotiator—while Shiyuan provided operational support via the Mode’s extensively upgraded suite of comm. gear. As the only official military member of the crew, it was Lu Bu’s responsibility to both execute operational command and to perform the various insertions and extractions required under Tremblay’s complicated mission packet.

  “Scanning,” Fisher nodded, and several minutes went by before a return signal came through on the main readouts. “We’ve got something…” Fisher leaned forward and examined the data stream, after which he nodded, “that’s it. Whatever—or whoever—is supposed to be here does seem to actually be here.”

  “It could be a trap,” Shiyuan protested meekly, reiterating a possibility they had discussed for several hours before point transferring into this system.

  “It could,” Lu nodded as her jaw set bitterly, “but that warrior had me. He was armored and armed with high-grade weapons; if he wanted me dead, I would be dead.”

  “Maybe he wanted to get the rest of us, too?” Shiyuan suggested.

  “Maybe,” Lu Bu shook her head firmly, “but if this is a trick, it is too elaborate for my tastes.”

  “Agreed,” Fisher nodded, “should we go pick up the parcels?”

  “Parcels?” Lu Bu repeated in confusion.

  “Yep,” Fish gestured to the short-range sensor readout, “four of them to be exact. They look like personal escape pods—the kind used by Imperial officers or nobility, according to the ship’s data banks.”

  Lu Bu scowled, “Keep the shields up, but bring us close enough to penetrate with our best scans.”