They both let go and regarded me with identical measuring expressions, their eyes steady as a single thought percolated in the space between them. “You’ve changed, Counselor. I’m aware that I haven’t known you for even two full days yet, but you’re already different from the woman I met. I don’t know if you’re even aware how different you are.”
“I’m aware of something,” I said. “I’ve been feeling it since yesterday. I just don’t know what it means.”
“Neither do I. I don’t know what’s different or how it can be so easy to see if I can’t figure out what it is. But it’s there. It’s, I don’t know, an improvement somehow.”
I didn’t know what to say about that, so I just nodded, and turned to enter the portal.
But they weren’t about to allow me such an easy exit. “Counselor? One other thing?”
I stopped. “What?”
“That conversation we had last night? After the evacuation? You have decided to trust me, haven’t you?”
I considered that. “Yes.”
“That’s why you brought me, along with Godel and Lassiter. You knew I’d back your play, whatever it was.”
I considered that. “Yes. I knew.”
“And you’ve never been a person willing to give away her trust.”
“No. I’m not.”
They nodded. “So we’ll have to talk about this, sooner or later.”
“Sooner,” I promised, and slid down the chute into the Interface.
The chamber hadn’t changed much since yesterday. Its dimensions still skirted with the infinite, its ambience still resembled a bottomless blue sky, its atmosphere still exuded a comfortable warmth of the sort designed to engage the senses as little as possible. I wondered if a Riirgaan or Bursteeni summoned here would find the thermostat set higher or lower to accommodate their differing skin temperatures. I decided they probably would, and from that found confirmation of my earlier judgment that the room was nothing more than an exercise in theater.
Just what the AIsource had to gain by putting on such an elaborate show remained a mystery to me. But it 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.