173: AI

“Okay, look,” I say. “There’s something you should probably know.”

I explain the synnerve experiment. The Leadership stare at me with uniformly horrified expressions.

“We’re so, so sorry that that happened to you,” Tana says. “We should have picked up on what was happening. That should never have happened to you.”

“Is that why you were so upset about your friends getting treatment?” Spruggent asks. “Did you think they were being experimented on, too?”

I frown. “Do you honestly think that what happened to them was any better than what happened to me?”

“Do I think that giving someone healthcare is better than doing experiments on them? Yeah!” Spruggent’s pacing becomes more agitated. “We can’t tolerate this sort of thing! We have to take Kim to task.”

The other Leadership all hesitate. Glance at each other. Glance at me. And I know that if I take Spruggent’s side here, they’ll follow. If I want justice for what happened, they won’t refuse it. But I kept this secret for a reason, and everyone except Spruggent, judging by their hesitation, seems to have reached the same conclusion.

“We have a lot of chaotic things going on right now,” I say, “and an important goal to work together on. Antarctica will figure out what we’re up to pretty soon; they have to. And just because we have a food source that isn’t the Vault now doesn’t mean that we can be independent with all materials. Antarctica aside, the culture down here is changing rapidly with new information and will change even more rapidly with new colonists, and Dr Kim seems to be, so far as I can make out, your most respected and most skilled medical professional. Recent actions of sabotage and soforth have put stains on a lot of reputations and upset social structures enough, and my question is: is this something we want to address right now? If what she’s done is this horrifying, do we want to make it a known issue that she defied you all, ran these experiments without the knowledge and approval of the Leadership, and got away with it until I escaped? If you guys want to make this public, I’m all for it. I’m just saying that she was acting for Hylaran independence, which means that our goals are aligned. But I’m not giving her any more DIVRs.”

Spruggent looks annoyed, but the others all relax slightly, apparently relieved that I reached the same conclusions of them. Spruggent scowls. “We can’t have people going behind everyone’s backs and doing evil stuff.”

“This will be addressed,” Celti says firmly. “It absolutely will be addressed. But it’s not a danger for now, and for now, we don’t need that kind of unrest. We get this spaceship on its way, and then we can focus on Kim. Aspen, who else knows about this?”

“Dr Kim’s cronies, presumably, but I have no idea who they are. The rest of the ground crew. And Max. We’re all in agreement that pulling this up right now isn’t helpful.”

“Right. Well, let me promise you: once we have this spaceship ready, you will have justice.”

The meeting continues, but I can’t stop dwelling on Celti’s words. Specifically, ‘It’s not a danger for now’. It’s not a danger for now. Dr Kim isn’t in a position to experiment on any more DIVRs right now; if we don’t give her more, the issue can be delayed.

Except. She was running more than one experiment.

Dr Kim had claimed that her agelessness experiments were only being run on volunteers, and I’d taken her word on it – after all, everyone would notice if a bunch of Hylarans were being isolated for long enough to o that. But she’d only eventually isolated me because she was worried about my safety, what with the unrest. Until then, she’d run her tests under the guise of normal medical checkups. Couldn’t she be doing the same to them? And even if they are volunteers, do they understand the risks? We still don’t know what those anti-ageing genes will do to our own infected crew members. We know that the Hylarans grow and develop differently. Those genes could be fatal to them in all sorts of unpredictable ways.

I want to put the whole experiment thing behind me, for now. We don’t need to address any of that right now. We have other things to focus on. But…

I don’t know most of these people, I don’t know how they’ll react. So I wait until after the meeting and take Celti aside, and explain the situation. His face looks more and more troubled as I talk. He gives me a sharp nod, a stiff word of thanks, and walks away.

Well. It’s out of my hands, now.

I don’t see Dr Kim for a while after that. That’s not necessarily surprising; she’s a busy person, and she’s not my care provider any more. Maybe she has a lot of patients. Maybe she’s spending a lot of time in training, for treating the colonists when they arrive. Maybe she’s really concentrating on how to get a modern autodoc up to Captain Kae Jin. Whatever the reason, she isn’t around.

The first root vegetables are harvested, and the Hylarans universally hate them. That really shouldn’t surprise me as much as it does. They’ve spent their whole lives eating one specific thing; throwing them a radically different taste and texture probably defied all experience of what they’ve come to think of as ‘food’. Frankly, it’s a miracle that they didn’t hate the liquid meals from the biotanks.

They’re only eating very small amounts of the new foods in with their normal fare, to give their bodies and microbiomes time to adapt to the concept of variety, and they do so with the grim determination of a soldier training for war. The palpable threat of their Antarctic food source being cut off the moment somebody slips up and gets the wrong thing in the frame of a photograph looms over everyone, the knowledge that they will have to adapt to other sources and do so as quickly and easily as they can manage. So they do, with very little joy, and a lot of duty.

I try not to be too disappointed by this. I’ve sort of gotten used to seeing the Hylarans being awed and overjoyed by the things previously denied them. I was hoping that the first bite of carrot would be like the first glimpse of a flower, but of course, food doesn’t work that way, not to a population raised entirely on one unvaried food source. They’ll acquire tastes for other things as they go.

A few days later, we receive bad news from the ship. Mama can’t run it. I ask Tal and Asteria why not, and immediately regret it as they simultaneously launch into explanations of AI architecture that I don’t even try to understand. Mercifully, Captain Klees cuts them off after a mere eight minutes that feels like eight hundred.

“How vital is the AI?” he asks. The ground crew and our scattered Hylaran liaisons are gathered, as usual, in the radio tower to talk to the ship. “Humanity went into space long before we invented AI, and we were able to limp the Courageous on the last leg of the journey here without any serious problems that weren’t caused by the AI itself. I know it’s a big workload, but can a crew manually handle the ship, aided by individual computer programs, like we did?”

“For hundreds of years, forget it,” Tal says, “especially if they’re darting around asteroid fields and stuff. Those early astronauts you’re talking about were aided by hundreds of engineers on the ground. And their ships were way, way less complicated. If you want to strip this ship down to something simple enough to run with bots and crew members, it’s not gonna last more than a few decades. It just isn’t. Amy’s completely nonviable without plugging brains into her, she digested the AI she used to be and someone destroyed the backups so we don’t have those, and wrangling Mama’s code to do it would be almost as hard as building an AI from scratch, which is another task beyond us unless there’s several dozen surprise AI genuises in chronostasis up there. This is no mass market apartment complex assistant. We need Mama-level sophistication for this kind of AI.” Ke pauses a moment. “Although an AI that I could hack to play Doom on the side of the Courageous would be really cool.”

“The other exoplanet colonies might have backup copies of their AI, if they decided to bring them down from the ships with them,” Dandelion says thoughtfully. “Unfortunate that we have no way to contact them.”

“Antarctica would have access to all kinds of AIs that could do this,” Hive says. They exchange a grim glance with Celti, who bites his lip.

“You guys think it’s time to tip our hand to them?” Captain Klees asks.

“The longer we can keep them ignorant, the better,” Celti says. “Their only move is resource restriction, so when they find out we disobeyed orders and let you land, they might try that again, and it won’t kill anyone but it will be a serious inconvenience. The more advanced our farms are before then, the better, if only to avoid having to take too much food from the ship. But they do get a fair amount of data from us, and somebody’s going to slip up at some point; they are going to find out, and soon. It’s better for us to control that release of information, especially if we can get something out of it.”

“They have no stakes in the ship leaving,” Tal says. “Who says they’d help?”

Captain Kae Jin comes over the radio, her voice slow and breathless. “They’ll help if it costs them less to send us back into space than it would cost to supply the colonists on the ground, unless they decide to be vindictive and restrict resources. Which I think will depend on how they expect that to affect the operation of the Vault. The Hylarans were easy to bully with a famine the first time, because they weren’t expecting it, and they had no other source of food; they may or may not risk that again. They might decide we’ll be harder to bully, or better to deal with if they’re expecting a small number of cooperative managers of a convict colony. Or they might decide the opposite and restrict resources to try to incite violence between the two populations or something. Or they might decide to stay out of everything and focus on keeping things moving through the Vault until we’ve sorted everything out ourselves, way out here.”

“We don’t really know enough to predict their reaction,” Captain Klees agrees. “But as Celti says, they will find out, so we might as well be in control of the news and try to find a way to do things that gets us some help. An AI would be inexpensive to copy and send, surely. Could they send one through the Vault? I can’t imagine it treats electronics well.”

“We have the hardware,” Tal says, “they just need to send data. You can encode data in anything. They could send a really really big stack of paper and have us manually input it at this end, which would take forever and suck, but could be done.”

“If we can convince them to send it,” Captain Klees says. “We’re in the odd position of neither side really having all that much leverage, and it’s all going to come down to what cost-benefit calculations they make regarding our project.”

I don’t want to say anything aloud, since I’m pretty sure the ship and most of the Hylarans don’t know yet, but I touch the port on the back of my skull and shoot a meaningful glance to Celti, who exchanges a look with Max and the rest of the ground crew. Nobody looks happy about it, but nobody raises any objections.

If we get pushback, Dr Kim might have something to trade for our new AI.