Before she had started speaking with Trinh, Iris had asked ART-drone if it thought the B-E shuttle had actually followed us when we entered the blackout zone. ART-drone did not; post-handoff it had retained ART’s most recent pathfinder scan data from this area of the planet and also its estimated location of the Barish-Estranza ships and their shuttles that were currently deployed. It thought this shuttle could only have entered the zone earlier, maybe even by a day or so. Further analysis would have to be done by ART’s primary iteration, but there must have been a gap in pathfinder scanning that B-E had exploited. ART-drone was miffed by this lapse and figured that ART-prime would be fucking furious.
Iris had said thoughtfully, “The timing is suspect, isn’t it. I wonder if the historian decided to tell us about this place because Bellagaia got word that one of the colonists in the other factions had told B-E.”
Tarik had groaned and rubbed his eyes. “A little heads-up would have been helpful.”
No shit. There was at least a 65 percent chance that we were stuck in this situation because some asshole main site colonist had talked. Why they would do that, I had no idea. Trinh had told Iris that there had been no sign of any kind of alien remnants in or near this installation and, more important, no contamination incidents. So maybe it was jealousy? Except the main colony would have no way to know that after they lost contact. I don’t know, not even humans know why humans do things.
I realized I’d just been standing here again when Ratthi, still monitoring my drone video from the shuttle, asked, “What’s that other door for? Another section of the hangar?”
So I’d missed that, nice. It was a large hangar door, not unlike the one in the hangar we had entered from on the terraforming side, but less monumental. It was still big enough for a shuttle to fly through. To AdaCol2, I said, query?
It showed me a map, pretty limited, of just this part of the installation. This hangar was on the north side, and the corridor led across to another hangar on the east side, so you could fly a shuttle through it to the other side of the installation and were apparently supposed to.
I sent the map to the shuttle’s display surface to show the humans. Iris, now on hold with separatist Trinh, said, “I wonder what this planet was like before the terraforming.”
“Much worse than it is now, apparently,” Ratthi said. “I wonder if the Pre-CR inhabitants also terraformed?”
“Huh,” Tarik commented, and started pulling up geographical data.
Nothing was happening, I might as well stand here as anywhere else I guess. I leaned against the hatch, watching the SecUnit and the B-E shuttle through ScoutDrone2’s camera. Both continued to do absolutely nothing, too. The wind was getting worse outside the shelter of the hangar. It suddenly made an unpleasant shrieking noise that was so loud threat assessment threw an “unidentified condition” alert. It would have been terrifying (I saw the human in the B-E’s shuttle’s cockpit make an abrupt motion, probably a flinch), but ART-drone’s analysis of the sound said it was just violent air movement. I looped my ambient audio so I could filter the wind noise and turn it down a little. ART-drone said, Pathfinders report that weather conditions are deteriorating. The possibility that I may lose contact with them is high. That meant they’d go dormant and set down somewhere, or leave the storm area, depending on how bad it was.
AdaCol2 popped in to confirm that matched with the data from its surface weather stations.
That’s great.
Iris’s comm alerted as Trinh came back on to start talking again. I shifted them to a backburnered channel. I had run out of proactive things to do. I set some alerts and pulled up an episode of Sanctuary Moon. I didn’t want to watch anything new without ART-drone, who couldn’t split its attention to the same extent as ART-prime.
I had been watching for 2.45 minutes when AdaCol2 said, query: activity?
It could tell I was doing something but not what it was. There was no reason not to tell it and I didn’t want it to think we were hiding things from it. Up until we actually needed to hide something from it, anyway. I replied, monitoring media. I didn’t know if it had the kind of visual interpretation function that would let it “see” the show; there are bots that like visual media even though they can’t interpret the images like a human would. Even ART had trouble with the emotional parts, things like how the music meant mood and tone changes, unless it was watching through my filter. (In its spare time, now that it has some data for comparison, it’s writing an update for itself to fix that.) There are some parts of media that you really need human neural tissue to fully understand, but most higher-level bots could still take in the visual information and follow the story, the same as with a text-only or audio-only file. So I put the episode into our connection for AdaCol2 to access.
It said, Type: entertainment and gave me access to a partition loaded with media files.
Oh, hello.
The books and music section alone was huge. I checked the tags on the shows, running them through Thiago’s translator module. It was 82 percent fiction, heavy on the pre-adult programming according to the category index. There was Cruel Romance Personage, which I had never watched (maybe it was good, I didn’t know, I couldn’t get past the title). It had been around for at least four decades in corporate standard years, longer even than Medcenter Argala. But there were so many others I had never seen or heard of before. Some words in the titles and descriptions weren’t matching the versions in the language modules I had loaded. I checked the book and audio sections again and got similar results.
I hadn’t pinged ART-drone because it was busy, and this hadn’t seemed like a ping-worthy conversation at first, but the additional connection from AdaCol2 must have tripped an alert. ART-drone said, It’s linguistic drift. Many of these are Pre–Corporation Rim media.
Okay, the thing I didn’t tell anybody about my right leg getting eaten in the altered memory sequence: I’m 73 percent certain that never happened to me, but there’s an 89 percent chance I did see that happen to a human at some point.
Before I hacked my governor module, I did an initial survey contract on a planet that had many types of extremely hostile fauna. (Initial surveys are the ones where you get all the data that gets written up in the documents that all the later surveys are furnished with so they don’t get killed. Initials should ideally be bot- and drone-only but some surveys go cheap and use humans, sometimes conscripted humans.) The archive of that survey hadn’t been wiped, but I may have deleted portions of it myself. Yeah, so.
Am I making it worse? I think I’m making it worse.
The other thing is, I did not handle the news that I had crashed myself with an altered memory fragment very well. Or at all well.
Can you tell?
“I’ve fucked everything up,” I’d told ART. This was when I was in Medical after my “incident.” Mensah and I had called Amena so she wouldn’t worry (or at least so she would know that I was still alive, even I know that’s important for human children). I told Mensah I wanted to watch media and she had left, and I’d blocked the humans’ comm and feed access to the room.