Yerusha gathered herself together. “If I could get into The Gate system, I might be able to pull out whatever’s left of the station AI. If she’s not too bad, I can string her together enough to deal with the coordination routines. She can broadcast from the Pasadena’s system.” She paused. “But unless we can convince The Gate crew to let us in, it’ll take a better cracker than me to break in.”
“All right.” He turned to the boards and started writing orders.
Yerusha felt herself staring again. “Don’t tell me you’re a cracker?”
“No, I’m not.” Schyler didn’t look up. “But Marcus Tully is, and I know where he keeps some of his heavy duty cat burglars. Get down to the data hold. Odel’s on duty if you need him. I should have the system keys in a few minutes.”
“Aye, Watch.” Yerusha was all the way to the hatch before she turned and asked her last question. “It’s an AI, isn’t it?” she said quietly. “A live one?”
“It looks like it.” Schyler still didn’t look up.
Yerusha turned on her heel and ran down to the berthing deck to grab Foster’s wafer stack.
Behind Dobbs, the pathway filled up. Cohen and Havelock were at work, cutting off the retreat for the Live One, and for her.
Don’t think about it, Dobbs told herself uselessly. She tried to concentrate on swimming upstream.
Another path closed on her left, and then one on her right. A sensation of weight and confusion touched her and she ducked. A path above cut out, taken down from outside rather than inside. The Gate crew was closing in on them too.
It’s going to be scared. It’s going to be near crazy with fear. It’s going to… Dobbs clamped down on her thoughts. What would it do? It had lashed out at her once, would it do it again? Or would it realize she couldn’t be destroyed like a diagnostic or a passive AI and try a different tactic?
A wall slammed down in front of her. Dobbs pulled herself up short and held still for a moment. She shifted sideways. The wall followed her. She stretched herself up. The wall did the same. It followed her, sensing her position and backing up and moving forward as she did.
This is it. She held herself rigid for a moment. It’s back behind there.
Dobbs backed away and grabbed up some shredded code to make a new line out of. She cast the line out against the moving wall. The walls surface shivered as it tried to understand what this new thing was. The wall focused on the line tightly, like a person would focus on an itch they couldn’t quite reach.
Steady, Dobbs. The line began to slip down. The wall followed it towards the shifting lower regions of the unsteady path she occupied. Three. Two. One. Go!
Dobbs jumped. She hurdled the wall through the thin membrane of awareness it had left at the very top. It snapped shut, solid and tight just a moment too late. Dobbs landed on the other side, in a space that was clear and empty for all of thirty seconds.
The Live One surged towards her. Dobbs held her ground. There was no way past its own wall and it could probably sense there was nowhere to go out there even if it decided to breach its own defences. It pulled back and studied her. Dobbs itched at having to wait. It had touched her before, but she must still be a strange entity for it. There was no recognizable code for it to grapple with. Nothing in the networks indexes matched her outer patterns. She didn’t resemble a diagnostic or surgical program. It would have to accept the fact that here was another intelligence. Eventually, it would have to try to communicate with her, or to kill her.
The AI circled, filling the world, choking off her breathing space.
“Trapped,” the Live One rasped. “Trapped.”
Yerusha’s hand shook as she cycled open the hatch to the data hold. A rogue AI. In The Gate was an AI that had caught a soul. The Gate was capable of holding a soul. The Pasadena was capable of holding a soul. She should have guessed from the failures on the Pasadena. She should have seen the pattern.
She set Foster’s wafer stack down next to the main boards and tried not to think about how the AI had been the one to kill Foster.
She stopped herself. You’ve got to think about it, because it’s going to do the same thing to Maidai. What does it know? It’s probably trying to protect its territory. The metaphor made her feel somewhat better, but it didn’t quite cover up what she also knew to be true: that no matter how much philosophy the Freers had developed on the subject, no one knew how a souled AI thought, or what they were trying to do as they tore through the networks.
But maybe, maybe, I can find out. The idea sent a powerful thrill through her. She opened a receiving line to the outside, just in case there was a broadcast to pick up, if, maybe, The Gate managed to get its back-up comm system working and take care of their own problems. Maybe.
First things first, she reminded herself forcibly. You’ve got to get Maidai out of there.
The hatch cycled open. Odel, breathing hard and looking sick, dove across the threshold.
“What the hell’s going on?” he demanded, coming up beside her. “What are you two trying to do?”
“Save The Gate, and anybody else we can.” She slid the stack into the nearest empty port. “And to do it we’re going to have to open a line to the station, so it’d probably be a good idea for you to get the hold sealed off and keep an eye on the seals afterwards because we don’t want the…virus back in here, do we?”
Odel’s mouth opened and closed again. “Right,” he said, but she saw the promise that he would be relaying all of this to Lipinski.
I should have told him it’s an AI. Yerusha turned back to the boards. We’re all in this together. I shouldn’t be hiding information. She wrote out the orders to access The Gate system. On the other hand, Lipinski’s training him, so he probably won’t be too happy knowing there’s a live AI out there.
Yerusha got no answer from The Gate, so she tried another line, and a third. Finally, she wrote out search orders. On the fifth try, the Pasadena managed to find one open line.
COMMUNICATIONS EMERGENCY IN EFFECT. ENTER AUTHORIZATIONS AND KEY WORDS.
“Intercom to Watch,” she called. “Have we got the keys yet?”
“Sending them your way now.”
The keys spelled themselves on the board and Yerusha drew links between them and the system request. The links held.
CURRENT AUTHORIZATION CONFIRMED; PROCESS ENGINEER GABRIEL TRUSTEE.
Yerusha choked. Beautiful. She wondered if Schyler had done that on purpose.
She put her pen to the board and set to work quickly. When she won the adoption lottery, she had signed onto all the courses she could about AI maintenance, construction, organization and behavior. If things inside The Gate net were as bad as they looked from the outside, Maidai would be in defensive mode. Her priorities would have shifted from performing tasks to making sure she maintained the ability to perform tasks. Her diagnostic parameters would be scouring what was left of the net, looking for uncorrupted storage space where she could shunt her core processes.
The trick now was to let Maidai know that the wafer stack in the main comm board was that kind of space. It would have been easier with extra hardwiring, or if there was time to re-configure the stack to something that matched The Gate net more closely. All Yerusha could do, though, was open links between the ship and the station as fast as she could scribble down the orders.