“Apparently,” said Sally, “the archinformists were all already on board, so it was easy to divert them here.”
Well, naturally. Where else would you find a lot of archaeologists but at the galaxy’s most interesting archaeological site?
The next dia’s session with Helen started off like every other so far. After I ate, I took my second bulb of tea over to where Helen was floating, out of the way against the aft bulkhead. I mourned my lack of coffee. There was one place—one—on Core General where humans could go for the devil bean. Its air was scrubbed before recirculating and you had to rinse your mouth out with wash before leaving.
I understand. I do understand. The Sneckethans eat nothing but rancid space fish, and we make them use their own cafeteria also. They’re pretty good sports about it, so the least humans can do is be good sports about coffee. The smell of tea doesn’t inspire the same hatred in our fellow sentients, and I’ve gotten used to it. I come from a coffee-drinking settlement, though. We even grew it onworld, for consumption and export. Suitably isolated from the local biosphere, naturally.
I do think it’s ironic that the root meaning of cafeteria is “place to get coffee.”
But I digress. I sat myself beside Helen and settled in.
That was when Dia 25 started to differ from Diar 1, 2, 3, and 4, et cetera. I almost dropped my tea when Helen acknowledged me at once, brightly. “Hello, Dr. Jens! Can I make your day more complete?”
Day, I noticed. Not dia. She really was from a long time ago.
I felt safe beside her. Sally had an override on her programs by then, and had installed a governor. That’s not as oppressive as it sounds. Helen still had free will and consciousness. It was just that if she tried to think about taking violent action against Sally or her crew… she wouldn’t be able to. Sally assured me that Helen’s program was very primitive, by artificial intelligence standards, and that she—Sally—wasn’t at all worried about her ability to control Helen. She’d written herself a routine to do nothing but monitor Helen and the microbots, which she was still keeping quiescent.
“Actually, I came to talk,” I said. “I thought you might be lonely.”
I might have been learning to read the non-expressions on her not-quite-a-face. It seemed that her demeanor lightened. “What would you like to talk about?”
Helen looked up, as if glancing at the ceiling. As if looking for Sally up there. I could read it as nervousness, which led me to swallow a flash of unproductive anger as I thought about the engineer who must have programmed that fragile little gesture of performative subservience into her.
That engineer was possibly frozen in a coffin a couple of meters away, neither determinately alive nor dead until we thawed him out. Schrödinger’s engineer.
Pity calmed me a little without my having to tune.
“What would you like to talk about?” I asked. “I’m tasked to help you assimilate, after all.”
“That other doctor who speaks to me sometimes. It’s an artificial person?” She seemed overawed.
“Sally? Yes. Sally is the ship. She’s an artificial intelligence. A… yes, I suppose you could call her a created person.”
“And she’s allowed to be a doctor?”
“She’s allowed to be anything she wants to be,” I said. “Or nothing at all, if that’s what she prefers, though I have yet to meet an AI that didn’t get bored if it wasn’t taking on four or five challenging careers simultaneously. They have to pay off their creation, and all Synizens are required to perform a certain amount of government service if their skills are needed. But yes, she’s a pilot, and an astrogator, and a doctor. One of the best doctors I’ve ever met.”
Helen seemed to pause for a long time. It was unusual for an artificial intelligence to take long enough to process something for a human to notice it. With most AIs, I would assume that she was giving me a moment to catch up, or waiting to see if my electrical signals needed a little extra time to feel their way through all that meat. Some of the more social AIs built lag time into their communication so we felt more at home and could get a word in edgewise. With Helen, damaged and primitive as she seemed, I thought she might actually lag that hard.
Helen said, “You say she. Does she have a body somewhere?”
“A peripheral? Not to the best of my knowledge, though a lot of AIs use them. It can be useful to have hands. Some operate waldos, though. Especially surgeons.” I laughed. “And shipminds.”
Helen was looking at me. Just looking. Well, inasmuch as someone without eyes can look. “Are you a created intelligence?”
I spluttered. “No, I’m made of meat, I’m afraid. I was grown in the traditional human way, by combining zygotes in a nutrient bath. Did you think I was a peripheral?”
“I thought—” She reached out and touched my exo with one resilient silver fingertip. It was inobvious, matched to my skin tone, resilient and flexible… but it was still an armature supporting my entire body. I guess I should have expected her to notice.
Nevertheless, I jerked back defensively. Helen recoiled like a cat who had touched something hot.
“You thought?”
“This might be a control chassis.”
We were both, I realized, running full-on into a wall of culture shock and miscommunication. Except Helen probably didn’t even have the concepts to express the dislocation and lack of basic knowledge she was feeling.
I tuned myself back until I stopped hyperventilating. “It’s an adaptive device to help with a pain syndrome. My exo helps me move, and it helps me manage my discomfort.”
Discomfort. That clean medical term that helps you separate yourself from what you’re feeling. Or what the patient is feeling.
Pain.
I didn’t tell her that without it,
