“If she’d prefer, we can disconnect her when we leave and take her down with us. It wouldn’t be a big deal.”
He looked down at the array of lamps on the panel that marked Belle’s location. “You listening?” he asked.
Theoretically, Belle was not supposed to listen unless she picked up her name. Or caught high emotion in the conversation. So she did not respond.
“Belle,” I said, “are you there?”
“You heard the suggestion?”
She was playing it by the book.
Alex described it for her.
she said.
“Of course,” he said.
Her voice was slightly off key. That would have been a deliberate signal.
I spent most of the next few days reading Arcadian philosophy tracts so I could discuss life, death, and consciousness with Belle. The issue that plagued us both was immortality. AIs, of course, don’t die in the manner that biological life-forms do. But like us, the physical parts that contain data storage will, over time, wear down. Belle, however, is a 7K Bantam model, of which there are thousands. They are identical. So what happens if her data is released in bulk form to another of the Bantams? Does her consciousness transfer with it? Does life go on? Or do we simply create another AI with her implanted memories?
It was easier for most people to think of AIs as simply data-processing systems that pretended to be alive.
We were going back and forth on the bridge one morning shortly after breakfast when Belle changed the subject. Belle asked.
“February second,” I said.
I had no idea.
“Oh. That’s my birthday.”
Gabe blinked on. He was standing beside the right-hand seat, smiling at me. Behind him one of the windows at the country house was visible in a rising sun. he said.
I didn’t respond because he was only a recording. But I remembered. I’d been out with him a number of times when my mom was his pilot. They’d surprised me a couple of times with birthday presents. But what I really remembered was riding down to the ruins of Boclava on Dellaconda. Ruins three thousand years old, the remains of an early human civilization whose collapse Gabe had hoped to explain but, as far as I knew, never had.
Gabe was saying,
“I got one too,” said Alex.
“From Gabe?”
“Yes.”
We went into the passenger cabin, and Gabe appeared again. He was in the same space in his office, but it was daylight and he was wearing different clothes. he said,
“Great idea,” I said.
said Belle.
“Good.” I sat back and got a serious shock: my mom appeared. The image didn’t move. It had been copied from a photo. She was tall, unflappable, with gray eyes and black hair, standing in a blue-and-gold uniform on the bridge of the . Gabe had described her once as exactly the person you’d want on the bridge if you ran into a meteor storm. Then a teenage Alex replaced her, another photo, with his arm raised saying hello. And me, at about ten, holding my pet kitten, Ceily, in my arms.
There were other pictures, of passengers, of clients, of Alex as he grew up, and of Gabe. Of people I didn’t know. There were more photos of my mom. Of all the images, the one that got to me was Ceily. I lost her early.
Finally it was February 9 on the terrestrial calendar, two days before our scheduled arrival at the intersect point, where we hoped to pick up Charlotte Hill’s message. We surfaced midway through the afternoon, which allowed time for Belle to measure the arrangement of the stars and inform us how close we were to our target. In fact we’d done quite well. But we weren’t there yet. We accelerated and, over the next day and a half, moved into position. The black hole was twelve light-years away. Pollux was a brilliant red star in the opposite direction.
We sat back to wait.
XXXIX.
We were in the target area, in the middle of the second day, when Belle’s voice woke me.
“Yes!” A wave of exhilaration took over my soul. I hadn’t expected that this goofy effort would actually give us anything. I was immediately wide awake, wrapped in my sheet, about to ask Belle to turn on the lamp when she continued:
Oh. I’d been expecting that, so the reader will understand the wave of disappointment, even though ordinarily I’d have loved hearing from him.
She activated it:
Belle halted the playback. she said, Not radio. As Charlotte’s would be. I wondered if she’d done that deliberately. Then she played the rest:
said Belle.
We were well into the third day, almost at the end of our time allotment. Alex had begun suggesting it wouldn’t do any harm to remain longer since we really couldn’t be too sure about our numbers. I was ready to throw it in, but I had no inclination to debate the issue. So I was about to say sure, let’s give it some more time, when Belle informed us we had another transmission. she added.