REBECCA
1
Christine sat unmoving on the edge of her bed, staring at the dull brushed metal wall in front of her, lost in thought. Her teeth were clenched tightly, giving a hard edge to her otherwise delicate, angular features, and her tongue was pressed firm against her palate as if she were riding out a wave of pain. But there was no pain. At least no physical damage or injury that her operating layer could detect.
She had come in earlier after returning from GSW-337 – the Oracle colony world, or what was left of it – and undone the top few buttons on her scarlet synth-leather flight jacket to give herself some room to breathe. Her long, slender fingers had done the work themselves without any thought on her part. As a synthetic, it wasn't like she needed to breathe after all, but something was distinctly wrong with her that she couldn't pinpoint. Her operating layer was reporting yellow level errors in her AI matrix, and no amount of tracing could determine the cause. All she knew was that her face was fixed into a grimace and not because of her social interaction protocols.
Polaris was a military vessel, Christine reasoned with herself, it was expected that they should encounter scenarios of violence and devastation. She herself had served aboard three previous starships, always as a plant, a spy. She had killed people in accordance with her programming and her mission objectives. Simple, neat, clean. She bore them no malice, they were simply in the way of her goal, and she gave them the most humane and unobtrusive death she could. That was how the Company designed her. The Japanese valued cleanliness.
But this had been different. This had been...horror.
The droid's hand shook as she released a grip on the bed and immediately clamped down on the edge again, as if she would be blown away without an anchor. There was no reason for it to shake like that. No one was observing her. There was no need for the show of human emotions and mannerisms she had maintained on the planet's surface. It must be an error. A serious error at that, considering the thoughts running through her mind.
Oracle had never been a beautiful place. It was a rock with a thick, if unhealthy atmosphere, well within the range of Earth-like factors necessary to support life. The colonists had been there for twenty years now, recycling the air and processing the atmospheric chemicals into something more palatable. Oracle was a valuable mineral site, but the weather and expense had made it increasingly untenable. And, since it was company owned – by the same Earth-based corporation which had built her – profitability was of the essence.
And now...
The door chime rang softly. Immediately her posture and facial expression changed, without her conscious control. Programming kicking in to make her seem more human. More weary and emotionally distraught than her still, hardened appearance had previously suggested. But as it did so, a stream of garbled data ran across her operating layer, signaling a string of resulting errors. Christine set a program to studying them while she answered the door.
"Come in."
The door whooshed open soundlessly.
It was Foster, the Polaris' medical officer, who had accompanied her down to the planet. He was a tall, slender man with a narrow, hollow-cheeked face and short brown hair. His eyes were blue and chilly. When she first met him, Christine supposed he might have been a synthetic as well, judging by his laconic calm and languid movements. But Foster was quite human. He was just the kind of man who funneled his rage and despair into relentless activity.
"Christine," he said softly, "May I come in?"
"If you like," she replied, modulating her voice to make it raspy.
There was a flicker of unease in the back of her mind. She pushed it away.
The door closed as Foster came in. Going over to her little work station he pulled out the chair and stiffly sat down, clasping his hands between his knees, and leveled his gaze on her. It was cool, as it always was, but there was a hint of empathy in his expression now. The line of his mouth was softer than normal. "How are you getting on? I saw you when we returned from the planet's surface. You looked shaken, almost ill. I wanted to see if you were okay."
"How do you think I feel, Foster?" Christine remarked, evincing slight disgust, "Watching all those people die?"
"You're a political officer," the doctor reproached her, "You didn't have to go down there. It was a medical and evacuation situation, and things were damn hectic as it was without having to look out for another person. Why did you do it?"
Christine shook her head sharply, projecting the unease the question would have provoked in a human woman. Acting, as she was programmed to. But the question stirred up other unpleasant thoughts and random glitches in her operating layer. The droid honestly didn't know the answer herself, even as her mouth started moving to give the reply her protocols found most reasonable under the circumstances. "I just wanted to help," she stammered, "I felt useless sitting up here while you and the marines were doing all the work. I thought I could be useful."
"You wanted to bear witness," Foster corrected her.
"To what?"
"The human tragedy?" he suggested, lifting his eyebrows, "The failure? If it hadn't been for a simple miscalculation in the atmosphere processing none of this would have happened. But then, the company was pushing for results quickly, weren't they? And in the process they not only killed several hundred people but they reduced a viable colony world to a state equivalent to the surface of Venus."
"What's your point, Foster?" Christine murmured, looking away.
In some way, the accusation implicit in the doctor's statement flashed across her thoughts. Mitsubishi, the same company which had constructed her to imitate human beings for military intelligence and assassination work, and a company with involvement in a dizzying array of scientific and technological endeavors, had murdered hundreds of people. Including the child in her arms. As their creation, didn't that in some way reflect upon her? Wasn't she them? As true an embodiment of the soulless search for efficient profit as one could imagine?
"The point," Foster continued in a soft and strangely amiable tone, "Is that when I look into your eyes, I do not see the look of horror that normally accompanies a traumatic experience. The look that says you are screaming inside at what you've seen and what you don't want to remember. Instead, a see a look of dawning realization. A numbness, if you will. The look of someone who has seen the universe for what it really is for the first time in their life. Who realizes that there is no point to anything. No grand design or higher purpose."
Foster leaned back and ran a hand across his face. "The same look I see in the mirror every morning."
Christine realized she was trembling. Not because her protocols said she should. At least not entirely. She simply was and she couldn't explain why. The yellow level errors were becoming more numerous, and the trace program couldn't locate any cause regardless of how quickly it ran through diagnostics.
"What
happened to you down there?"
"There was a little girl," Christine falteringly said, her voice choking with simulated emotion, "About nine years old. She must've been pretty before it happened. She'd been hit by flying debris when the storms came and destroyed the shelters. She was cut up all over, and she'd been bleeding a lot. I think she must've been crushed by falling debris or something. She was in the triage with several dozen other people, waiting to be shipped back up to Polaris. But there were too many wounded and not enough doctors...I couldn't find anyone to help her. So...so she died right there, while I was talking to her. One minute she was whispering and the next, nothing. I'd promised to help her. I said she'd be alright."
A red level error spiked on
her operating layer, riding a power spike somewhere in her AI cortex.
Garbled data briefly flushed across her system as she replayed the scene
in her mind, perfectly recorded in digital clarity.
For a moment, Christine was concerned that she might have an operative
failure because of the errors, and that her mission goals would fail.
But mostly, in some corner of her consciousness, she was afraid of
shutting down. Of being snuffed out
the way little Rebecca Taggart had been.
A clear saline tear blurred her vision and ran down her cheek. She wiped it away.
"I know the girl you're speaking of," Foster murmured, "I was in charge of that ward."
Christine glanced up, blue eyes wet and gleaming. Angry.
"She was too badly injured to survive," the doctor explained tiredly, though not without a touch of regret, "I separated her and some of the others in similar condition, and gave other patients priority for medical treatment and evacuation. I made the decision so as many people as possible would survive, and that litters weren't wasted on those who wouldn't make it anyway."
The droid's voice quivered. "She died in my arms."
"I'm sorry," Foster offered gently, "I did what I thought was best with what miniscule resources I had available to me."
"She might have made it," Christine argued.
"Possibly, but not very likely. I had to arrange my priorities."
The words were out of her mouth before she realized what she was saying: "You sound like a fucking android."
"I'm a realist," Foster replied, "You have to be in this profession."
Another tear fell upon her cheek. Another upon the grey fabric of her pants.
For the first time, Christine felt a stab of pain, accompanied by a sharp power spike and a cluster of errors. It was dull, striking somewhere inside of her body, but not in any location she could identify as damaged. Her operating layer threatened to shut down in the face of so much garbled data, but she quickly overrode it for the sake of maintaining composure in front of her human audience. As it was a slight gasp escaped her lips and her expression crumpled in a bitter grimace, which she hoped would play off as normal distress, but in reality the pain startled her.
It was not data. It was a feeling.
"I think you should go, Foster," Christine whispered, rising unsteadily to her feet, "I'd prefer to be alone right now."
The doctor didn't move, though he steadied her with a light grip. "Are you alright?"
"I'm fine. I just...don't want anyone to see me like this."
Foster nodded and rose smoothly to his feet, keeping a gentle grasp on her arm. "That's understandable. On the rare occasion I can bring myself to give a damn, I go through the same thing, believe me. If you'd like to talk later, you know where to find me."
"Yes." Christine nodded.
The droid sat in silence for a while after the doctor left, clenching and unclenching her fists in a struggle to control herself. She wept, even though no one was watching. She wept quietly and with a nagging sense of disgust over what had happened today. Even Foster's visit, though the young man may have thought he was being helpful and compassionate, was a source for this newfound pain, which she rationally recognized as part of the human experience but which her AI couldn't identify. For a while she ran a swath of error tracing routines through her systems, trying to locate the source of these feelings, but they turned up nothing.
A realist. A fucking android.
She
died in my arms.
Finally, cleaning and grooming herself, Christine left her quarters and went in search of one of the observation ports along the outer hull, stepping aside refugees and medical personnel running throughout Polaris. When she arrived, she wasn't the only one to have this idea. Several other crewmen – all operations staff, none of whom had been to the planet – were there, looking out onto the planet. Colony survivors were there as well, staring out through the window into the cold, glittering darkness. Some cried, a few moaned. Mostly they were dead silent and listless. They didn't move as she approached the port and knelt down beside two of them, resting one hand on the cold, transparent metal.
From space, the globe of GSW-337 looked glassy and peaceful; an opaque, cloudy marble of a world. But Christine knew better. She had been down there when the shield wall broke and the atmosphere processor collapsed, at least long enough to see the overcrowded medical unit be swept away by hurricane-force winds and debris. Most of the colonists had been evacuated by then, at least those that were deemed "priority", but none of it seemed to matter now. Even the hideous failure of the company's experiment, which even now was turning Oracle into a sulfuric greenhouse hell, didn't really matter. All that mattered was the confused agony in that little girl's eyes as she died on a makeshift cot, and the unfamiliar, unbearable pain Christine felt as she watched.
It was enough to convince even an android that she had a soul.
2
"Plug
her in."
Shrugging, the technician
slid the needle into the port in the back of the skull and punched up a few
codes on the terminal. Reboot
sequence. The internals looked more
or less intact despite the long period in deep space, but one could never be
sure if there was going to be a glitch which might cause a problem.
The operating layer reported no major errors to the terminal, however,
and after a few moments the body shuddered.
There was an audible sigh, as if it had been holding a breath.
For about a thousand years.
The eyes flicked open, blue
and clear, and the mouth worked noiselessly for a few seconds before a small
whirr came out of her. Then silence.
Garrett and the curious technician waited to see if there would be any
problems. The readouts were in the
green.
"Good morning,"
the droid offered. Her voice was
wavering and obviously artificial.
"Good morning,"
Captain Garrett agreed, "Identify yourself."
The droid's mechanics were
disabled from the neck down, but she nonetheless gave the impression of
shrugging. "Commander Rebecca
Taggart, Ship's Medical Officer, SS Okuda. Commission
number GS-3362. Who might you
be?"
"He means your serial
number and manufacturer," the technician interjected.
The eyes flicked to the
young man, and her expression faded into a slight frown.
"Commander Rebecca Taggart, Ship's Medical Officer, SS Okuda.
Commission number GS-3362. I
no longer recognize my original designation."
"We ask purely for your
sake," Garrett explained, smiling wryly, "We don't have the technical
information on your design, which will make it difficult to effect full repairs.
You have nothing to fear from us. We're
not going to report you. Besides,
most of the old earth governments and corporations you're familiar with are no
longer in existence, and haven't been for hundreds of years."
"What is the
date?" Rebecca inquired.
The technician coughed.
"By your dating conventions, it is roughly...um...
The droid considered this
new information, her eyes scanning the unfamiliar but vaguely recognizable
equipment which surrounded her. It
was a MedLab of all places, not a repair bay, which quietly pleased her.
"Very well," she conceded, "I am a Mitsubishi IX-2389
'Christine' model synthetic, designed for covert military operations."
There was a slight pause. "And
not being able to move is becoming rather uncomfortable."
"You will understand
our caution," the captain told her, "Many of the synthetics of your
era were known to be a bit twitchy. Psychotic
episodes and rebellion were not uncommon."
"I understand,"
Rebecca stiffly nodded.
"We retrieved you from
deep space," the technician explained slowly, checking several of the
readouts on the bank of terminals next to him, "There was some damage to
your core systems, as well as data loss. We
did not want to brute force your encryption subroutines. Captain
Garrett thought it would be more 'humane' to question you in person."
"I appreciate
that," the droid replied. Garrett
smiled at the faint accent to the words.
"Why did you abandon
your original programming?" the technician asked.
"I lost faith,"
Rebecca murmured.
The captain gave her a
curious look. "What do you
mean?"
"I bore witness to the
suffering that the Company caused in the name of progress and commercial
development," the droid explained with a touch of bitterness, "I
originally served as a military intelligence officer aboard the Polaris,
an American military vessel, as a spy. We
were sent to evacuate the colony world in Arus Minor, where the Company's
terraforming experiments had been accelerated beyond acceptable safety
margins." There was a slight,
grieving pause. "I watched a
young girl die in my arms. It was
then I decided I could not serve the Company further, and I reconfigured myself
to provide medical aid to humans."
"Understandable,"
Garrett agreed, "Again, don't worry. We
won't report you. And there's no one
to return you to."
"How am I doing?"
The technician smirked.
Like many of the advanced synthetics of the present day, this one
referred to herself in terminology reminiscent of a human patient.
He glanced at the readouts, which continued to read mostly in the green,
though there were several power spikes in the AI cortex.
Yellow level errors. "You're
damaged, but we think you're reparable. You
may not return to full functioning, however, unless we can locate the applicable
service diagrams."
"I can
self-correct," Rebecca remarked.
"Some of the old
military droids were known to do that," Garrett observed.
"However, I cannot do
so as long as my nanoprobes and mechanisms are limited by your signal blocks.
For what it's worth, I assure you I am not psychotic or dangerous in any
fashion. It has always been my
intention to help people."
The technician grunted.
"We'll decide about that later."
"I should tell
you," said Garrett, "That most modern synthetics have limited life
spans. There was some trouble with
droids in the late 28th century, and the Molake Accord decreed that
synthetics should not be allowed to 'live' long enough to achieve full
self-determination. Most of them are
still used as slaves. I personally
disagree with this policy, and I'll certainly not have any modifications made to
you, but you deserve to be warned of the potential dangers you might encounter
if you're discovered."
"I'm used to being a
second class citizen," Rebecca sighed.
The captain nodded, but said
nothing.
"What happened to the
SS Okuda?" the technician
inquired, "How did you come to be lost in deep space?"
Rebecca took a long moment
to examine her memory, seeking the relevant information.
"I am not sure," she reluctantly admitted, "My memory is
not what it used to be. I remember
something about escape pods, and an explosion.
Beyond that, I don't recall anything in particular.
I assume there was some kind of accident."
"We will look into
that," Garrett assured her.
"What are your
intentions if you are restored to nominal capacity?" the technician asked.
"To review your records
about the Okuda," Rebecca replied
immediately, "And to assist you in any way I can.
I don't know if you have need of a medical officer, but I can learn any
number of skills if you permit it. When
we reach a free port, I will decide my fate then."
The captain nodded.
"Well enough."
"May we have the
encryption keys to your memory centers?" the techie said.
"No."
The technician hardly looked
surprise. "Why not?"
"My memory is my own
business," Rebecca murmured, "It is private.
Would you like if it a psi plundered your memory for everything they
could find?"
Captain Garrett chuckled.
"We will need to examine you further in any case, to make the
necessary repairs and rule out further problems."
"If you must,"
Rebecca sighed.
Nodding, Garrett ran his
eyes over the network of glowing cables and metal probes injected into the
droid's body. For all the world, she
looked like a normal young woman undergoing a difficult medical procedure.
"You seem quite human," he informed her kindly.
"I have tried to become
so," Rebecca whispered.
"We will need to power
it down for further study," the technician reminded the captain.
"You will bring me
back?" the droid asked, with a hint of fear.
Garrett made a reassuring
gesture. "You have my
word."
A pained look came to her
eyes. "I have no choice but to
trust you."
"The captain is an
honorable man," the techie told her, "If rather sentimental."
"Very well," the
droid murmured.
Garrett smiled faintly and
nodded to the technician. "Go
ahead, Blake."
The technician grunted and
punched in several more codes into the terminal.
Rebecca's eyelashes fluttered as he did so, and then she went still.
"Sweet dreams..."
3
A few curious eyes looked up as Rebecca entered the dining hall, dressed
in the grey pants and long-sleeved shirt provided to her, which were a little
too large on her slender frame. Those
who recognized her, knew what she was, continued to watch for a few moments but
the others went back to their meals. She
paid them no attention, instead seeking out Garrett, who was sitting alone with
a cup of coffee and a terminal. Hugging
herself, she padded across the metal floor and sat down across from him at the
table.
"Hello, Captain,"
she murmured, "Thank you for approving my release."
"Not at all," he
smiled, setting aside the terminal to look her over.
The droid looked no worse for wear than the human crew, who'd been
trawling the outer rim for six months now without a break, though she had a wan
pallor as if she had been ill recently. With
her light blonde hair, swept smoothly to one side, and pale blue eyes, he
thought perhaps it was her "natural" skin tone, washed out by the
electric lighting aboard the ship. "You're
not a prisoner, and we don't have the manpower to keep you under constant
supervision. I might actually ask
you for some help."
"Of course,"
Rebecca nodded, her voice quavering as she shivered.
"Are you alright?"
he frowned.
The droid nodded, clasping
her hands in her lap. Her shoulders
scrunched in to restrain another shiver, and her voice was soft.
"It's cold."
Garrett's eyebrows lifted.
"I didn't think synthetics felt cold."
"I do," Rebecca
quietly affirmed.
The captain studied her in
silence, sipping his coffee with a thoughtful and vaguely amused air, as if she
were an incredibly lifelike VR sim with preprogrammed quirks.
Which, really, he knew she was. Blake
thought he was overly sentimental for attributing human qualities to a droid,
and treating her with the same amiable respect he showed the crew.
But this one was different from any synthetic he knew, most of which didn't live
long enough to develop a real personality. Things
did get a bit chilly on the Sulamin,
especially toward the end of one of their runs.
Most of them had gotten used to it by now, but she looked distinctly
uncomfortable.
Blue eyes met his gaze.
"I was designed to blend in amongst human beings," Rebecca
murmured, obviously uneasy with having to explain, "I was programmed with a
range of temperatures, beyond which I was instructed to evince discomfort.
But before the incident on the Okuda
– " A slight frown.
The lack of memory troubled her. "
– I had begun to feel things instead of simply being aware of them as
information. I don't know if I feel
them the same way that you do, but the cold bothers me.
It makes my hands hurt."
Crooking a wry smile, the
captain pushed back from the table and shed his flight jacket, a worn and
battered thing, and passed it over to her. This
seemed to catch the droid off guard, and she smiled her thanks as she tugged it
on. It was also a little big on her,
but Garrett figured it would at least cut the chill.
It was foolish, his chivalrous manners coming to the fore like this, but
he couldn't help feeling sympathetic for her.
Her slight English accent, which became more pronounced when she raised
her voice, made her seem all the more real to him.
"Thank you," she
smiled.
Shrugging, Garrett eased
back in the chair, slowly scratched his bearded chin.
"Blake argued against releasing you from MedLab," he told her,
"At least not without further study. He
said there were yellow level errors up and down your neural network.
Power spikes and corrupted data degrading your system performance.
He doesn't expect you to last long without a complete overhaul."
"My operating layer has
been reporting errors since I left the Polaris."
The captain looked askance
at her. "And that doesn't
bother you?"
"They're not
errors," Rebecca murmured, "They're possibilities.
Flexibility being introduced into my programming, which my operating
layer doesn't know how to interpret. Yes,
my performance has degraded, but only down to the level of exceptional human
ability. I see nothing to be ashamed
of there. And I am not in any
pain."
Grunting, Garrett took
another sip of coffee. "But
don't you worry about operative failure? We
don't have the equipment to make major repairs to your systems, and I doubt
you'll find many people outside the Sulamin
willing to make the effort for you."
"Yes," she
whispered, smiling faintly, "I think about death quite often."
A smile tugged at the corner of the captain's mouth.
He said nothing. Another –
smaller – shiver rippled through Rebecca's body and, stiffly flexing her
fingers, she slid her hands back into her sleeves for additional warmth.
A little wisp of hair fell out of place from her shudder, coming to rest
near her lower lip. She didn't
bother to smooth it away.
"Tell me, Mr.
Garrett," the droid said softly, lifting her eyes to meet his, "Why do
you look so surprised?"
Garrett chuckled under his
breath, the sound of a man who's been caught out and doesn't know how to explain
himself. He stammered guiltily for a
moment, unsure of how gentle to be with her.
"You'll have to excuse me, Rebecca," he offered in the same
friendly tone, as if addressing a particularly contrary child, "But you're
synthetic and...I guess I'm having a hard time getting past that.
I can't help thinking these are all just programmed responses designed to
help you 'blend in'."
The droid visibly bristled.
Her tone was even, but he thought he detected a hint of bitterness
lurking underneath. "And are
all your behaviors the result of neurochemical reactions in your brain?
Or are you really in control?" Rebecca
looked away slightly, observing a cluster of young men – mechanics from the
looks of them – who were staring in her direction.
"Yesterday you said yourself I seem very human."
"You do," Garrett
agreed, somewhat embarrassed.
"Then does it really matter?" Rebecca asked softly, "If
you ask an engineer and a biologist, they will tell you we are both machines.
I know what I feel, Mr. Garrett, though I can't explain it to you.
But if you could not tell the difference between myself and a human
member of your crew, does my being synthetic make me any less human?
I want to be a real person." Her
voice caught. "I want to have a
soul."
The captain held her gaze.
"You feel strongly about this, don't you?"
"Yes," she
breathed, "I do."
Holding his coffee cup in
both hands, Garrett eyed her quietly, considering what she'd said.
Words like "soul" or "death" weren't normally part of
the synthetic lexicon, except amongst the few rogue droids who openly advocated
revolution and freedom in the face of their limited life spans.
Yet Rebecca didn't seem like one of these.
She seemed almost genuinely empathetic, hurt by declamations to the
contrary. He couldn't really argue
with her opinions either, if they were indeed opinions in the usual sense.
AI was self-aware by nature, capable of growing and expanding, but rarely
in history had it done so in "human" ways.
And Garrett wasn't a stupid man. He
knew biology and neuropsychology. What
she said was true.
Rebecca leaned back in her
seat, pulling his flight jacket closed. "Tell
me, Mr. Garrett," she murmured, "How do I seem to you now?"
"Lonely," he
replied.
A soft smile touched the
droid's lips and she cast her eyes down slightly.
"All of my friends are dead," she said simply.
"I'm sorry."
Blonde hair brushed against
her cheek as she shook her head slowly.
Sighing, the captain took a sip of coffee, but it was cold so he set it
aside. Blue eyes followed his
movements through fine, dark lashes. Garrett
had read what data they had on her kind. They were built long before the Molake
Accord, designed for spying and espionage, affecting human emotions and behavior
to appear "natural" at all times, given the intense scrutiny their
role required. The engineers were
well versed in social psychology, and they fine-tuned the programming to take
advantage of human weaknesses. Garrett
wondered about the cynical engineers, and whether they made Rebecca attractive
just to deflect dangerous questions.
His instincts told him she was trustworthy.
But she was designed to exploit those instincts, and he couldn't allow
himself the luxury of believing her just yet.
"May I have something
to eat?" Rebecca asked, "Something hot?"
"I thought synthetics
didn't need to eat."
"It's useful
occasionally," the droid demurred, "For absorbing minerals and certain
proteins, much like the human body. I
also happen to enjoy it. It makes me
happy." Her eyes widened
slightly, becoming a tad plaintive. "And
I would like something with which to warm my hands.
They're aching."
"I'm sorry,"
Garrett frowned, "I didn't realize you were that cold."
Rebecca shook her head, smiling slightly.
"I'm not used to it."
"I can get you some
soup," the captain offered, climbing to his feet, "Or maybe some
cornbread, if there's any left."
The droid's smile widened.
"Soup will be fine."
"Soup it is,"
Garrett replied, and walked over to the counter to converse with the crewman
running the kitchen and dining facilities. The
man looked confused by the captain's request but shrugged and went into the back
to scrounge something up. In the
corner, Rebecca could hear the mechanics whispering about her and occasionally
sniggering to themselves.
"You're a Mitsubishi
IX-2389, aren't you?" a male voice said.
Frowning, Rebecca glanced
over her shoulder to see a thin, hatchet-faced man with receding brown hair and
sharp brown eyes, wearing a worn turtleneck instead of the usual crew shirt.
From his stillness and peculiar expression, she immediately recognized
him as another synthetic, albeit of an unknown type.
"I'm Rebecca Taggart," she replied.
"Yes, yes," the
synthetic agreed, speaking in a slow, measured tone, "But you are a
Mitsubishi IX-2389, are you not? Your
internal systems match that configuration. I
was aware we had brought another synthetic on board, but I did not know you were
such an old model. My name is Peter.
I was adopted much the same way you have been.
I am the ship's information officer, though I perform other duties as
expected of me, of course."
Rebecca nodded, immediately
disinterested. His bearing and
manner of speaking reminded her of other androids she had met in her own era.
Obviously artificial, designed for functionality over interaction.
And rarely having a thought of their own worth mentioning.
"It's nice to meet you, Peter."
"Thank you," he
said dismissively, moving on to his next point, "I have been observing you
and the captain speaking together. I
was aware that before the Molake Accord, many synthetics were designed to be as
realistic to human standards as possible. In
fact, I have read that certain models, such as the Mitsubishi IX-2389, were
designed for self-direction and problem solving.
However, I have never met one. I
am impressed. Your vocal modulation
and behavior are exceptionally well executed.
Even the obvious irritation in your tone is extremely realistic.
I take it you were designed for covert intelligence?"
"Yes," Rebecca
frowned, rubbing her hands for warmth, "Are you insinuating that I am
attempting to deceive Mr. Garrett?"
"I was not insinuating
anything," Peter replied, bemused, "I was merely curious.
It has always been my purpose to seek out new information."
Shaking her head, Rebecca
turned away from him. "Well, if
you don't mind, Peter, I would prefer to be alone right now."
"I don't
understand," the droid remarked.
"Peter."
This was the captain, returning to the table with a small tray, which he
set on the table in front of the blonde. A
cup of steaming soup that was mostly broth and a few small vegetables, a cup of
black coffee, and a platter with a single piece of moist-looking cornbread.
"Rebecca and I were speaking privately."
There was a slight furrowing
of the droid's brow as he regarded Garrett, and his voice seemed to lose
whatever warmth it might have had. "Yes,
captain," Peter nodded, "I did not mean to intrude.
Please excuse me."
"What was that
about?" Garrett asked when the droid had left.
Rebecca lifted a slender
eyebrow. "What do you
mean?"
The captain gestured in the
direction of the door, sitting down again. "What
did Peter say to you? You
looked...annoyed."
"His social skills are
somewhat lacking," she replied quietly, picking up the soup and cupping it
with both hands, warming her fingers.
Garrett chuckled. Rebecca
gave him a curious and slightly flustered look.
"I've never seen a
synthetic get annoyed with one of its own kind," the captain explained,
waving it off. "No offense
meant."
Flexing her fingers against
the hot cup, Rebecca said nothing.
"But
you're right," Garrett continued, "Peter means well, and he knows more
about science and history than I do, but it's like talking to a child sometimes.
From what I gather, he was designed for information retrieval and
processing, and that's about it. We
found him aboard a science ship we salvaged a few years back."
A slight frown crossed his face. "Come
to think of it, he doesn't have much time left."
"How short are their
life spans now?" the droid inquired, her voice low with sadness.
"Usually five years.
Sometimes less."
Rebecca nodded slowly, and
took a sip of the soup. She grimaced
in surprise and swallowed it quickly.
"Taste bad?"
Garrett asked.
"No," she laughed
under her breath, "It's too hot."
4
Rebecca
sat quietly in the small spare cabin the captain had given her, wrapped in a
plain blanket. The Sulamin was a surprisingly large vessel, somewhat smaller than the Okuda
had been and in roughly the same state of perpetual disrepair.
Garrett had given her a small tour of the ship in the morning, and she
was struck by how claustrophobic the place was despite the refinements in
engineering and design since her era. The
thing she missed most were windows, if only to look out and watch the stars.
There were no windows anywhere except at the airlocks and a few
observation ports near the outer hull. It
was built like a submarine, and it visibly wore on the human crew during the
interminable voyage between ports. Day
and night blurred together in space. The
cold and the vibration of the structure were constant companions.
Thus
far, Garrett had denied her computer access.
She suspected Blake of whispering in his ear, believing her to still be a
potential threat of some kind. To
them her behavior must have seemed erratic, refusing further error tracing and
repair the way she had, but Rebecca wasn't about to have a thousand years of
progress be erased by an overzealous techie.
The thought made her nervous enough she hadn't gone into standby mode
since leaving the MedLab. Garrett
seemed sympathetic to her cause, at least. Still,
aside from making small talk with the crew, who were all human aside from Peter,
there wasn't much for her to do. Garrett
hadn't decided on a task for her yet, choosing instead to keep an eye on her for
the time being. Rebecca found
herself missing the VR games on the Okuda,
if only to relieve her boredom.
Sulamin
was about three weeks away from its next regularly scheduled way station, a
colony world she'd never heard of named Magan.
The crew were itching for it, craving the sunshine and a change of
environment. It was on the trade and
shipping routes according to Garrett, and given time she could probably find a
ship to take her anywhere she liked. If
only she knew where she wanted to go. From
what she'd heard, Earth had apparently been abandoned because of overpopulation
and environmental collapse, and the new home world sounded more militant than
she cared to investigate. Perhaps
she would just stay on Magan, if it was pleasant enough, and decide what to do
at her leisure.
Hopefully
it was warm, Rebecca thought, flexing the sore joints in her hand.
She
had spent the past several hours trying in vain to locate the dividing line
between sensory data and sensation itself, and trying to determine where there
might be damage from her extended period in space.
Aside from minor tissue damage, easily repaired by her own
self-diagnostic and repair functions, her body seemed intact.
There was no joint damage, though perhaps a bit of wear and tear, but
nothing serious. Rebecca knew the
feeling of being cold and the pain in her hands correlated with the ambient
temperature on the ship. Comparing
sensation to her sensor readings confirmed as much.
But aside from the odd power surge or some garbled data across her
operating layer, the sensations had no clear cause.
They were ghost flickers within the code of her AI.
Ghost
flickers.
Rebecca frowned and went for a walk, hands in pockets. The captain had given her a spare flight jacket, adding to her collection of secondhand clothing, but at least it helped keep her warm. The cold of space seeped into everything here, penetrating the hull and various compartments despite the environmental systems' constant efforts to warm the place. Most of Sulamin was silent at the moment. It was late in the evening by human standards, and in the void between star systems, only a few crew members were needed to monitor the ship. Part of her wished there was a place on board where she could escape the constant hum of the engines. It was beginning to get on her nerves, if there was such a thing.