“Perhaps,” said Joanne. “For the moment, though, I am canceling the deal.”
“Just a moment, Joanne,” said Michel, “I don’t think that we can…”
“And who’s in charge here?” asked Joanne, 1.4 meters of icy calm, turning to face her former boss.
“Well,” interrupted Saskia mildly, “if the deal has been broken, I rather think Michel is in charge again. We can hardly be seen to act on the Stranger’s advice if we are breaking the deal.”
Donny was looking down at his console. He gave a sudden mirthless laugh. “When you’ve finished, ladies, I think you should see this. I’ll put it on the main viewing field.”
Pale gold letters sprang to life in the middle of the living area, flowing across the floating shape of the Stranger.
Violation of Contract?
Are you sure you wish to disengage from a Fair
Exchange?
Yes/No ?
“That looks ominous, Joanne,” said Saskia softly. “What are you going to do?”
Joanne bit her lip.
“If I could just give you some advice, Joanne,” said Michel softly, “we were warned at the start. Once you break a deal, that’s it. You are off the Fair Exchange network for good. My advice is that we just grit our teeth and learn from this one.” Yet again. The unspoken words were picked up by everyone present.
Joanne’s face remained calm; even so, the rest of the crew could feel the fury boiling within her. Edward moved around Craig’s chair, trying to get farther away from her. Jack picked up his doll and held it tightly in his hand, its little legs kicking pitifully as it tried to get free. Finally, Joanne spoke. “All right. We accept the deal.” She glanced at her console. “Of course we do. Stranger, we will be with you in eighty-five minutes.”
The Eva Rye was decelerating, matching velocities with the black-and-silver swastika of the Stranger. Four glassy lenses gazed through emptiness at the rainbow colors of the ship that would save it from the region of Dark Plants. It was silly, the Stranger knew, but it imagined it could already feel the aching of oblivion to be found in the region ahead. The Stranger had once plunged into a gravity well, fallen headfirst onto a planet. Its body had burned brightly, the plasma formed by the speed of its entry into the planet’s atmosphere whipping out from its limbs in long swirling strands. It had felt the rising pull of the mass below, drawing it down and down. That’s what the region ahead felt like: six hundred years away, the region of Dark Plants was an inescapable emptiness, working on the bright star of the Stranger’s intelligence, pulling it inwards. The Stranger had written words on its own body, a quotation from a classic text.
“Do you know how I see the Milky Way? As a glow of intelligence. AIs such as myself have spread throughout the galaxy. Humans have piggybacked their way along, parasites, living off our greater intelligence…”
Maybe someday the Dark regions would swallow up the entire universe. When the Stranger had first seen the Eva Rye, it had felt a huge wave of relief. Now the ship was coming closer, invisible black lightning arcing about its gaudy teardrop shape as it displaced its momentum to the free hydrogen around it. The Stranger reached out with its senses and stroked the mismatched patterns on the ship’s surface, followed the seams between the materials, teased them apart and reached into them to touch the ship deep inside, interfacing with the dormant mechanisms it knew to be there. Sensually, it set about waking them up.
“Donny, what’s that?”
Joanne pointed to the red band that had begun to loop around itself, in a figure eight, inside the viewing field.
“I know what that is,” muttered Michel.
“It’s the Stranger,” said Donny hoarsely. “He’s activated the Self-Replicating Mechanisms. The ship is copying itself.”
Suddenly all were on their feet.
“What’s going on?” said Edward.
