The unknown drew him, even though he knew that if he moved himself, it would further upset the equilibrium. He told himself that, as long as an unknown this large loomed within these far-flung colonies, the stability he saw was illusory.
It wasn’t even really a decision. As soon as he knew that the unknown existed, there was a hole in the fabric of his universe. He would
Parvi looked at the list of names on the cyberplas sheet in her hand. She read the capsule biographies and shook her head. “Why go to so much trouble? There are plenty of scientists on Bakunin.”
“Perspective,” Mosasa said. His tone was flat, as always, and it irritated Parvi how it never quite became mechanical. He should speak in a synthetic monotone; sounding like a disinterested human being was just
She knew her irritation was irrational. An artificial voice could sound indistinguishable from human even when not spoken by an illegal self-aware AI. However, most programmers were polite enough to slip in some sort of audible hook, just so you knew there wasn’t a real person behind the speech.
Parvi looked up at Mosasa.
That was the other thing. He looked like a real person. A tall, sculpted man with hairless brown skin covered with photoreactive tattoos and body jewelry. He might have been handsome if it wasn’t for the dragon’s head drawn across the side of his skull and a third of his face. She knew that a long time ago there was a human being named Mosasa, and that man looked pretty much the way Mosasa looked now.
She also knew that man had been dead for at least a couple of centuries.
“What do you mean, ‘perspective’?” Her words echoed in the hangar while Mosasa stood with his back to her. He was doing something inscrutable to the drive section of a Scimitar fighter, an old stealth design from the Caliphate that had somehow ended up in the possession of Mosasa Salvage.
“I am investigating something unknown,” he said without turning around. “An unknown whose shape implies an impact that could involve all of human space. Having a wide section of social and political background in personnel will be an aid to my analysis.”
“I see.”
“After you make contact with the science team and arrange for their arrival here, I will need you to assemble the military team.”
“I don’t see any military personnel here.”
“All in time.” He waved a hand, dismissing her.
She sighed and turned around, walking out of the hangar.
Parvi hated working for Mosasa. It made her skin crawl whenever she was in his presence. It was with a palpable physical relief that she walked out of the hangar and into the desert air on the outskirts of Proudhon. It wasn’t just that he was an AI. That was bad enough. The taboo against Artificial Intelligence devices of any sort were broad and deep in every human culture, dating from the Genocide War with the Race over four hundred years ago. Seeing what the Race-built AIs could do with their social programming was enough to put that tech in a class of evil only shared by self-replicating nanotechnology and the genetic engineering of sapient creatures.
No, Mosasa couldn’t just be an AI, living on the lawless world Bakunin, the only place where he didn’t face summary destruction. No, Mosasa had to be an AI built by the Race itself, a remnant of an old weapon surviving long past the war for which it was built, a weapon that in some sick fashion had learned to mimic a human being.
But Mosasa paid well, and Parvi needed the money.
So she tucked the cyberplas sheet into her pocket, got onto her contragrav bike, and shot back toward Proudhon. She had a bunch of tach-comm calls to make on her boss’ behalf.
CHAPTER NINE
Initiations
The shortest freeway will have the highest toll.
