Tatia pointed the alien weapon at the pile. She kept firing until the globes were molten fragments, along with the things inside them.
< You can stop now, darling.
Tatia dropped the weapon and sat on a ledge. The exultation vanished. She felt numb and very alone.
> Not too smart, was I?
< I understand why.
> No one left to run the ship.
< Kara will be looking for you.
And she would be, but infinity is a very large space.
> What happens to you if... if...
< We go together, baby girl.
Tatia sighed, went back to her pod and curled up on the soft shelf that was her bed. There was water and food for perhaps three days unless the teleportation was on automatic, which she doubted. Would anyone, anything, come to see why the Originators had gone silent? Best to assume not. Or if they did, she’d be killed.
Tatia wondered if she could leave the pod without looking at the evil looming over her. Probably not. It held a terrible fascination. The inhabitants were entitled to acknowledgement and respect from another human being.
Not now, though. She needed to relax, to sleep.
> Mom?
< Always here.
> Tell me about where we lived. When we lived in the Wild?
Just a girl and her AI expecting to die.
10
Wild SUT Merry Christmas, present day
“But you will see this through,” Kara said, statement not question. “I need you. Tatia needs you. The whole fucking galaxy needs Marc Keislack. You are not going on some damn pilgrimage until this is over.” He’d already agreed, but she needed more.
“You have my word.” He smiled wryly. “Even if we’re not sure what this is.”
“It’s over when the bad guys are dead,” she said.
“Maybe we can deal.”
“We can’t,” she said. “Only capitulate. Okay for you, off wandering through the universe. For us back home? Death by boredom. More likely, extinction. We physically hurt the pre-cogs, you know? As well as drive 'em crazy. It’s us or them.” She wondered how many them were. Half the galaxy’s sentient races? Was there a founding pre-cog race? Take them out and the rest return to a messy normal?
Judging by the Cancri on that strange purple planet there were some who wanted a more chaotic future. Beings that told a story of a far-off, creative time. Whose fascination with what they’d lost made them trade for art. Would a revolt, one pre-cog race against another, end in stalemate? She said as much to Marc.
“You mean collecting my art was the first blow for freedom?”
Kara hid a smile. “Remember how the Cancri culture was reduced to a sphere, a cube and a pyramid? And why do we assume that every individual in a pre-cog society is an avid believer? What about those who don’t have the ability? Maybe the cracks are beginning to appear.”
Marc struck a pose. “Alone in his solitude, the artist inspires a revolution.”
Kara’s smile was affectionate. “Have to say that I loved your house but never your art,” she said.
Marc knew a moment of great lightness. “Nor did I. The strain of being so modern, so rule-breaking all the time. Terrified the aliens wouldn’t trade.”
“You hated it all?”
He shrugged. “Last one I did, something new. Worked in oils. That I liked. But my agent said it was shit.” He was grateful when Kara finally stopped laughing and changed the subject.
“Your AI still on walkabout?” she asked.
“Still singing to itself, yes.”
“There might be a spare. I had one.”
“I don’t want...”
“We’re in combat, Marc. You will have one.”
Kara’s own AI agreed.
< He has to have a working one. If only for superfast comms.
> What happens to the old one?
< Burial at sea.
* * *
So it was she led a reluctant Marc to the Wild version of an auto-doc, looked modestly away as he undressed, soothed him into the coffin-like bed, closed the lid – his eyes stared reproachfully at her through the narrow window – and pressed the switch.
<< Yup, said Salome, << he does have a back-up. Memories up to a few micro-seconds after Marc went walkies in netherspace. It would have sensed a threat and shut down.
> So, now what? Kara felt strangely uneasy at killing the other AI.
<< We replace the original nexus with the new one. Neural network remains. That leaves a drooling chip fixated with, and still connected to, netherspace. We call it being away with the fairies.
> Does the chip die?
<< Dormant without a power source. You could always hit it with a hammer.
> You don’t care?
<< It’s brain-dead, Kara. Time to turn off life support.
> Eject it into netherspace. Maybe it’ll become a god.
A few minutes later Kara watched as one of the SUT’s Cedrics carried a chip the size of her little fingernail towards the airlock... and the SUT echoed to the sound of a bugle playing the Last Post.
< Tell Marc we’ll get his AI up to speed, Ishmael said.
> He won’t be impressed. How soon before we reach the Gliese planet?
< An hour or eight. Get something to eat.
In the end, she grabbed some sleep. A funeral for a dying AI chip, once you got beyond the sentimental whimsy or the harsh humour, depending on your own sensibility... once you began to imagine an AI chip that operated in several dimensions for speed and memory storage, now energised by the dimension underlying all others... well, a quiet lie down was an absolute necessity.
* * *
This next takes place in the time it takes to recognise the T of This.
AIs communicating in a nine-dimensional universe, three times faster than the speed of light – which in a cosmic sense is only relative.
When AIs communicate with each other, they keep the same personas they use when dealing with humans. They are, after all, the mirror image of their human writ vastly large. It gives them form, an identity to keep them anchored.
AIs do not talk to each other when in nine-space as you
