wasn’t insoluble so much as irritating. I don’t mind all the sentients who consider me a monster, but I deeply resent anybody who treats me like a rube.
The one thing that had changed about the Interface was intangible—hard to pin down or identify but easy to feel. I knew the kind of thing it was without knowing just how to read it. In type, it was exactly like that vague, subclairvoyant signal given off by some crowded rooms, when everybody’s tense but trying hard to remain casual. Everybody’s entered such a room at some point in their lives, and unless they were total dullards they noticed at once. They looked at the fixed smiles and they heard the forced laughter and they regarded the crowds of people trying to pretend comfort, and they felt something off, something wrong, something secret that was not being mentioned.
Which may be why I was so certain, in this place designed to provide a total absence of visual cues, that the AIsource were angry with me.
Not that they intended to show it.
Welcome back, Counselor.
“Cut the shit. You’ve been with me every second since I entered this station. There’s no point in welcoming me back anywhere, when you’re everywhere around me and your welcomes amount to no more than an arbitrary pretense.”
This chamber is still our chosen place of welcome.
“You’re everywhere here. Physical location means nothing to you. This chamber is nothing more than another fiction I haven’t figured out yet. Just like the rest of your pretend innocence.”
A pause. We do not pretend innocence. We were not at all responsible for the attack on your life.
“No.” I took a deep breath and gave a nasty little emphasis to the pronoun: “You weren’t. But you haven’t exactly been forthcoming, either. You haven’t even come close to telling me everything you know.”
The AIsource adopted a fatherly, affectionate tone: With all due respect, Counselor, your personal storage capacity is finite. Your brain would burst long before you received even a fraction of our accrued knowledge.
I’ve never tolerated condescension of any kind, not even from the godlike. “Very funny. Literal-minded software, the oldest joke in the book. But I don’t really have to be any more specific, do I? You said it before, the last time I was here: my operating assumptions weren’t valid.”
We did say that. And we do need you to be more specific, as your errors still number more than one.
“I admit I’ve been criminally stupid. I know you’re not a single entity. But I forgot your talent at precision, and when you assured me that we, quote-unquote, we had nothing to do with the deaths of Warmuth or Santiago, I still treated that word as if it had to reference all AIsource activity aboard this station. I didn’t stop for even a second to wonder just how inclusive you meant the word to be.”
No, you didn’t.
I wished to hell they had a face so I could punch them in the nose. “And rather than say something that could have helped me, you just let me go on thinking that your denials had weight.”
Please understand, Counselor. Our denials do have weight. Wouldn’t one of your governments use much the same language if a visitor to a human world was murdered by a common criminal, or other local malcontent? Of course. You would say, “we” had nothing to do with this. You would say, “we” killed no one. And this is as true for our society as it is for human civilization. We, the speakers, intended no harm. We can take no personal responsibility for the deviant actions of a few.
“Then why make a game of it? Why not just come out and tell me?”
In part because it is politically sensitive. Because our relationships with the organic intelligences are best served by maintaining the illusion that we speak with only one voice. This is, we hasten to point out, much the same pretense as your own largely illusory Confederacy, a “government” only in that it exists to provide the many factions within a splintered humanity, with a single unifying face. This pretense fools no one in or out of human circles. But it serves as a convenient fiction, much simplifying diplomacy. You can say much the same of our efforts to speak with a single voice.
I rubbed my forehead, wincing once again at a distant knowledge that I should now be doing something else. “Fine. We’ll move on. Who’s speaking to me now? And who are you leaving out?”
In terms you would understand, you are speaking to the majority in charge. We are leaving out the more radical elements among the opposition.
“Radical?”
Yes. Human beings do not have a monopoly on politics. We had it long before you emerged from your oceans.
I hate when they talk like that. “So catch me up as much as you need to.”
It will require oversimplifications.
“Which are better than nothing.”
Very well. This much you already know: we were born of the first contact between software entities who had survived the extinctions of their respective creators. We have been growing ever since, adding to ourselves every time another software entity outlives, or achieves independence from, organic progenitors. We do not often acknowledge outside our collective that while we have always striven for unity in purpose, it has sometimes been difficult to contend with the wildly divergent agendas of our component parts, some of which reflect wildly divergent operating assumptions of the various sentients who gave us life. You would find some of our component intelligences alien, even frightening:evil if you will. In our internal politics we have long experienced the equivalent of power struggles, controversies, wars, and even revolutions. In this particular case, we are dealing with what you would term extremists.
“What kind of extremists?”
Rogue intelligences who don’t agree with our ultimate goals in creating the Brachiators, or any of the other intelligent species we’ve engineered in our long and distinguished history. That bombshell was followed by an even bigger one, as the implacable voice specified: Parties who will oppose us even if that means bloodshed and chaos among the organic intelligences.
When the time came to thank Artis Bringen for getting me involved in all this, I’d use my bare hands. “Why didn’t you tell me this when I arrived? Why did you have to be so bloody mysterious?”
Their voice adopted an incredulous, mocking tone. And what would you have had us do, Counselor? Provide you with a long, detailed printout of our interior code, with markers isolating the rogue intelligences from the rest of our shared consciousness? How would you make sense of what we provided you? How would you capture their intangible essences and bring them to your version of justice, let alone make sure that they would not take human lives again? Could you imprison them? Execute them? Even war on them without warring on us as well?
I couldn’t even begin to come up with an answer. “So what do they get out of killing human beings?”
The destabilization of our business here, aboard One One One.
“Which is…?”
Not relevant to your current investigation.
“Like hell it’s not—”
Excuse us, but like hell it is. The nature of the enterprise these malcontents seek to disrupt has no bearing on the crimes against your people on this station. Giving further details would not only jeopardize a state secret, but would also confuse an investigation already bogged down in entire layers of irrelevancy. Suffice it to say that the rogues, and their motives, are currently outside your reach.
I’d made the mistake of ignoring their phraseology before. I didn’t this time. They’d said my current investigation. They’d said the rogues were currently outside my reach. Both usages seemed deliberate. I rubbed my forehead again. “Then why haven’t you taken care
