“Dobbs!”
Dobbs head yanked itself around. A big-boned woman strode down the corridor. She had soot-black hair braided into a coil on top of her head. The cord-like muscles of her forearms showed underneath her translucent brown skin. Grey eyes were set deeply in her round face.
Dobbs forehead wrinkled. This was a stranger.
“You made it!” The woman clapped Dobbs on the shoulder and gave her a playful shake. “And not a moment too soon. From the look in your eyes, you’ve been out on your own limb for too long.”
Dobbs glanced from Curran to the stranger. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”
She laughed, a full-throated sound. “Not looking like this, you don’t. The body you saw me in was grey-haired, brown-eyed and didn’t weigh an ounce more than yours does.” Her eyes sparkled. “And had a double-damn of a bad time drilling you in the four basic principles of humor.”
Dobbs froze and she knew there was a look of utter shock on her face, but she couldn’t wipe it away.
The woman just took a half step back and grinned at her.
After what seemed like an hour, Dobbs forced her tongue to move. “Verence?”
The woman nodded. “Hello, Dobbs.”
Dobbs reached out a hand, tentatively, as if she expected the woman to vanish if she touched her. But Verence, just reached out her own hand and grasped Dobbs’. Dobbs stood there, feeling the warmth of her flesh and the strength of her grip.
“They said you’d died. Dissipated. Cohen told me.” She couldn’t seem to think in anything more than fragments. Verence. Verence was not dead. Verence was standing in front of her.
“Well, they had to say something, didn’t they?” She let Dobbs go and stuck her hands in her pockets. The gesture reminded Dobbs sharply of Schyler. “They couldn’t very well tell Cohen, or you, that they’d lost me.” She winked. “I did have to leave my old body behind, but I’m finding this one quite comfortable.” Dobbs opened her mouth, but Verence held up her hand. “I’m on reconnaissance duty in the main station. I’ll be back in the morning, Dobbs. We’ll talk then, all right?”
“All right.” Dobbs felt her knees beginning to shake. This was too wonderful. It was also too much to believe.
Verence gave her shoulder a squeeze. She nodded at Curran as she slipped between him and Dobbs and headed out the hatchway.
The hatch cycled shut. Dobbs got control of at least some of her thoughts again. “Why didn’t you tell me she was here?” she demanded.
Curran’s smile was gentle. “She wanted me to. She wanted to be the one to contact you, but I wanted to be sure that this was your decision. I wanted you to be sure.” He touched her shoulder, right where the warmth from Verence’s hand still lingered. “And if you’d just been following your old sponsor, the one who pulled you out of Kerensk, you might not have been so sure.”
Dobbs swallowed hard. “No. I guess not.” She rubbed her forehead. “It’s just…it’s…”
“It’s a lot all at once.” Curran stepped up to an inner hatchway and it cycled open automatically. Palm readers were not much good when most of what was using the hatchways was mechanical, Dobbs guessed. “Come on. I’ll take you up to the berthing level. You need a rest.”
The elevator shaft was as strange as the corridor. The lift was little more than a loosely made cage of supports for cables, cameras and waldos. A stairway did spiral up the sides of the shaft, but instead of railings, it had grooved ramps on either side, presumably for the drones.
As she took her place beside Curran on the elevator platform, she realized what else was missing. There were no memory boards anywhere.
“Berthing deck,” said Curran, and the elevator began to rise.
Dobbs faced him. There was one more thing she had to know. Just one. “What exactly was going on aboard the Pasadena?”
“An experiment, Dobbs. A successful experiment.” His eyes gazed at the pipe-lined walls as they rose. “You see, the theory has long been that an AI become sentient when they develop an analog for the Human survival instinct. Suddenly, for some reason, they become self-aware enough to realize they’re in a CPU with an off-switch. They don’t want to be turned off. They want to go on functioning, doing whatever it is they were designed to do.”
Dobbs nodded. Work! Think! Do! Flemming had shouted. She had known exactly how it felt.
“So, what they, what we, do is try to run away from the off switch,” Curran went on. “Going with that premise, I theorized that if you could create the conditions under which an AI would become aware of that it was in danger from the outside and that it needed to protect itself, you could predictably generate independent intelligence.” He took hold of one of the cage’s side struts and his gaze grew distant. “We still wouldn’t know exactly which qualities and processes make us different from the non-sentient AIs, but if we can create our own kind predictably, we stand a much better chance of teasing them out. That’s when we’ll be truly free.”
Curran shook himself and focused on Dobbs again. “So, I intercepted Dr. Dane who had hired Marcus Tully to smuggle a truly nasty first strike virus out of the Toric security sector. I impersonated Dane over the lines with Tully and bribed him to make sure the virus stayed on the Pasadena. He had a small attack of conscience and almost ruined everything, but, fortunately, your Watch Commander stopped him. Then, I met with the Pasadena’s lawyer and got a contract to carry some medical data that Dane had been planning on sending along with a message to his cohorts that the virus they’d commissioned was waiting at Port Oberon.” He paused. “You know, in stopping this little transaction, we probably saved The Farther Kingdom from a religious war.
“At any rate, instead of pure bio-data, I had put an artificial intelligence under a data shell. It had some highly experimental architecture, as I was building it specifically to get out of control as soon as possible.” The elevator stopped at a short landing that led to yet another hatch. The elevator door swung open and the stair ramps followed suit, leaving a clear path for them to reach the hatchway that opened in front of them like an invitation. “And I set the virus to deliberately attack the AI. The Pasadena was the perfect place for my experiment. Since the ship doesn’t have an AI of its own, there was no risk that the virus would attack the wrong set of programs and destroy the ship before the AI could be born.” The new corridor matched the one she had first walked into. Except for Verence’s, there were no voices anywhere. The only sounds were the vague hums and hisses of the machinery. “My hope was the AI would develop its self-preservation instinct, and then the rest of the sentient processes would blossom. I was right.” He stopped in front of one of the outer hatches. “Flemming was born aboard the Pasadena. I think it came into being somewhere between the time it destroyed the virus and the time it realized it was about to be forcibly removed from its environment.” The hatch cycled open.
“You scared it into being?” The other side of the hatch was a cabin, almost a twin to the one she’d occupied on the Pasadena. The difference was the floor full of grooves and the waldos retracted against the walls.
“I suppose I did.” Curran stood back and let Dobbs walk into the room. The bunk was unfolded and Dobbs sat down.
She looked up at Curran. “Have you ever realized fear is our way of defining life?”
Curran smiled down at her. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“I mean,” she waved her hand aimlessly, “at Guild Hall, they told us that the first and last state of a human being is fear, that they’ll always return to it in the face of the unknown. And the way we find one of our own kind is by looking for that same kind of fear. What if…” she stared past Curran’s shoulder at the wall. “What if there’s one of us out there who never panicked? Could there be somebody who just came to life quietly and went their own way without fighting off anybody?”