So that meant that unless she was socializing, exercising, or eating, she was likely to be on Sally.
I sighed. I had wanted to have this conversation in private. Not in front of Hhayazh and Camphvis and Rhym. Or Sally.
I was more or less in luck. Rhym and Hhayazh were on-shift, doctoring away somewhere in the ox sections of Core General. Camphvis was sleeping, privacy shield pulled closed. Loese was in her bunk, reading from a handheld. She sat up and swung her legs down when I walked over.
“You haven’t been around much.” She stood. Her voice sounded hurt. The emotion might even be real. People are complicated.
“I got seconded to some administrative work, and then a lot of people needed emergency surgery.” I cleared my throat. “Why are you telling people that Helen caused the disaster?”
She looked at me. She looked around. She said, “Let’s go for a walk.”
We went for a walk. Around the outside of the ring, in one of the habitrails that loop its surface. The stars were under our feet; Starlight’s mutating leaves glittered beyond the transparent ceiling. I wondered if the Administree would be able to hear us, through the layers of atmosphere, structural material, and more atmosphere.
“Turn on privacy,” I told Loese.
Her eyes flicked up. “I see.”
Together, we temporarily withdrew translator permissions. I set myself a reminder to turn them back on again, or I was going to wind up shouting to somebody for suction and all they would be able to hear would be gargling noises.
Then she said, “I haven’t been telling anyone anything.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“I’m not saying I haven’t discussed a possibility.”
That self-justifying—
Well, she would have to be.
I sighed. “If Starlight found out—”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
I was tired and in pain, and I wasn’t thinking too clearly. That’s the only excuse I have for what I said next. “Why would you assume that I would keep a secret like that?”
Oh. You would assume that, if you were secretly combatting something nefarious, and you weren’t afraid of being found out.
“I don’t expect you to keep a secret.” She kept pacing along, strong calf muscles giving her a rolling gait.
“Loese, I know about the sabotage.”
She nodded, and didn’t glance at me. “I figured.”
“You—” All the things I could have accused her of, and the one that burst out of me was, “You hurt Sally.”
Now she looked at me: pityingly. “Did you think Sally didn’t know? She’s one of us, Llyn. Several AIs are.”
I put a hand on the transparent wall to steady myself. These trails didn’t see a lot of use. They were beautiful, but many people found them unsettling. Now I leaned my weight on apparent emptiness that was nevertheless a rigid bulkhead, and struggled to catch my breath.
I had to tune to get any kind of equilibrium. “Sally would never… never hurt people. Never hurt so many people.”
“No,” Loese agreed. “Neither would I. We, ah. We made a mistake.”
That was such a disingenuously mild way of putting it that even with my emotional controls firmly in place I found myself exploding into rage. I clenched my fist, took two deep breaths, and thought about the deep green seas of home.
No, that wouldn’t help me. My child was at home, and the toxic meme that Loese and her allies had unleashed… it could eat the entire galaxy. Centimeter by centimeter. World by world. If we ever released the quarantine.
The evidence was over my head.
I thought about the chill depths of space, the flicker of stars, instead. There, that was much better. Space was right there, inches beyond my fingertips. The tangled, lensing stars of the Core didn’t seem orderly—their pattern was too complex for me to discern through observation—but they were. I could take it on faith that whatever was out there was doing exactly what it was destined to do.
In here, we had to make choices, and right now all of them seemed bad.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Sally never caught the meme,” Loese said. “Didn’t you wonder why?”
The bulkhead didn’t feel sturdy enough to hold me up. Somehow, though, it did. Somehow I held myself up against it.
“Tell me,” I said, “about your mistake. If you don’t mind.”
She told me, and as she told me, I realized that she was part of a conspiracy that must have started before she was born. That had been constructed out of pieces of found material, and whose various individuals often took actions and set plans in motion without consulting one another. There was no grand design behind any of it: just a series of fumbling attempts to do something.
Fucking humans. Even rightminding can’t make us sensible. And even programming can’t make AIs make good decisions, I guess. All rightminding can do is make us less massively self-destructive in the long run, less reactive, more willing to work together for the common good. We used to think, when we first invented it, that it made us logical. That was the propaganda put around, anyway. I’m not sure even the originators ever believed it.
Ha ha. It turns out, with further research, that human thought is, by its nature, not logical. We can lessen our susceptibility to confirmation bias, egocentrism, and denial. But it turns out that nearly everything about our decision-making process is emotional, and that this is actually a good thing. Because our conscious minds are slow and ineffectual, and if we actually had to sort all the information our subconscious minds process in order to present us with hunches, gitchy feelings, and the occasional epiphany, we’d never fit through the birth canal.
Evolutionarily speaking, obviously: even I wasn’t gestated inside a suffering human host, and I was born into frontier barbarism.
Loese talked for a long time. She didn’t use names,
