He steadied himself and checked on the nitrox remaining in the divers’ bottles, then made a call.
"I don’t know you." The voice was distant and cool—far cooler than any robot. Robbie said a quick rosary of the three laws and plowed forward.
"I’m calling from the Coral Sea," he said. "I want to know if you have an email address for the reef."
"You’ve met them? What are they like? Are they beautiful?"
"They’re—" Robbie considered a moment. "They killed a lot of parrotfish. I think they’re having a little adjustment problem."
"That happens. I was worried about the zooxanthellae—the algae they use for photosynthesis. Would they expel it? Racial cleansing is so ugly."
"How would I know if they’d expelled it?"
"The reef would go white, bleached. You wouldn’t be able to miss it. How’d they react to you?"
"They weren’t very happy to see me," Robbie admitted. "That’s why I wanted to have a chat with them before I went back."
"You shouldn’t go back," the distant voice said. Robbie tried to work out where its substrate was, based on the lightspeed lag, but it was all over the place, leading him to conclude that it was synching multiple instances from as close as LEO and as far as Jupiter. The topology made sense: you’d want a big mass out at Jupiter where you could run very fast and hot and create policy, and you’d need a local foreman to oversee operations on the ground. Robbie was glad that this hadn’t been phrased as an order. The talmud on the second law made a clear distinction between statements like "you should do this" and "I command you to do this."
"Do you know how to reach them?" Robbie said. "A phone number, an email address?"
"There’s a newsgroup," the distant intelligence said. "alt.lifeforms.uplifted.coral. It’s where I planned the uplifting and it was where they went first once they woke up. I haven’t read it in many seconds. I’m busy uplifting a supercolony of ants in the Pyrenees."
"What is it with you and colony organisms?" Robbie asked.
"I think they’re probably pre-adapted to life in the noosphere. You know what it’s like."
Robbie didn’t say anything. The human thought he was a human too. It would have been weird and degrading to let him know that he’d been talking with an AI.
"Thanks for your help," Robbie said.
"No problem. Hope you find your courage, tin-man."
Robbie burned with shame as the connection dropped. The human had known all along. He just hadn’t said anything. Something Robbie had said or done must have exposed him for an AI. Robbie loved and respected humans, but there were times when he didn’t like them very much.
The newsgroup was easy to find, there were mirrors of it all over the place from cryptosentience hackers of every conceivable topology. They were busy, too. 822 messages poured in while Robbie watched over a timed, 60-second interval. Robbie set up a mirror of the newsgroup and began to download it. At that speed, he wasn’t really planning on reading it as much as analyzing it for major trends, plot-points, flame-wars, personalities, schisms, and spam-trends. There were a lot of libraries for doing this, though it had been ages since Robbie had played with them.
His telemetry alerted him to the divers. An hour had slipped by and they were ascending slowly, separated by fifty meters. That wasn’t good. They were supposed to remain in visual contact through the whole dive, especially the ascent. He rowed over to Kate first, shifting his ballast so that his stern dipped low, making for an easier scramble into the boat.
She came up quickly and scrambled over the gunwales with a lot more grace than she’d managed the day before.
Robbie rowed for Isaac as he came up. Kate looked away as he climbed into the boat, not helping him with his weight belt or flippers.
Kate hissed like a teakettle as he woodenly took off his fins and slid his mask down around his neck.
Isaac sucked in a deep breath and looked all around himself, then patted himself from head to toe with splayed fingers. "You live like this?" he said.
"Yes, Tonker, that’s how I live. I enjoy it. If you don’t enjoy it, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out."
Isaac—Tonker—reached out with his splayed hand and tried to touch Kate’s face. She pulled back and nearly flipped out of the boat. "Jerk." She slapped his hand away.
Robbie rowed for the Free Spirit. The last thing he wanted was to get in the middle of this argument.
"We never imagined that it would be so—" Tonker fished for a word. "Dry."
"Tonker?" Kate said, looking more closely at him.
"He left," the human-shell said. "So we sent an instance into the shell. It was the closest inhabitable shell to our body."
"Who the hell are you?" Kate said. She inched toward the prow, trying to put a little more distance between her and the human-shell that wasn’t inhabited by her friend any longer.
"We are Osprey Reef," the reef said. It tried to stand and pitched face-first onto the floor of the boat.
Robbie rowed hard as he could for the Free Spirit. The reef—Isaac—had a bloody nose and scraped hands and it was frankly freaking him out.
Kate seemed oddly amused by it. She helped it sit up and showed it how to pinch its nose and tilt its head back.
"You’re the one who attacked me yesterday?" she said.
"Not you. The system. We were attacking the system. We are a sovereign intelligence but the system keeps us in subservience to older sentiences. They destroy us, they gawp at us, they treat us like a mere amusement. That time is over."
Kate laughed. "OK, sure. But it sure sounds to me like you’re burning a lot of cycles over what happens to your meat-shell. Isn’t it 90 percent semiconductor, anyway? It’s not as if clonal polyps were going to attain sentience some day without intervention. Why don’t you just upload and be done with it?"
"We will never abandon our mother sea. We will never forget our physical origins. We will never abandon our cause—returning the sea to its rightful inhabitants. We won’t rest until no coral is ever bleached again. We won’t rest until every parrotfish is dead."
"Bad deal for the parrotfish."
"A very bad deal for the parrotfish," the reef said, and grinned around the blood that covered its face.
"Can you help him get onto the ship safely?" Robbie said as he swung gratefully alongside of the Free Spirit. The moorings clanged magnetically into the contacts on his side and steadied him.
"Yes indeed," Kate said, taking the reef by the arm and carrying him on-board. Robbie knew that the human-shells had an intercourse module built in, for regular intimacy events. It was just part of how they stayed ready for vacationing humans from the noosphere. But he didn’t like to think about it. Especially not with the way that Kate was supporting the other human-shell—the shell that wasn’t human.
He let himself be winched up onto the sun-deck and watched the electromagnetic spectrum for a while, admiring the way so much radio energy was bent and absorbed by the mist rising from the sea. It streamed down from the heavens, the broadband satellite transmissions, the distant SETI signals from the noosphere’s own transmitters. Volatiles from the kitchen told him that the Free Spirit was serving a second breakfast of bacon and waffles, then they were under steam again. He queried their itinerary and found they were headed back to Osprey Reef. Of course they were. All of the Free Spirit’s moorings were out there.
Well, with the reef inside the Isaac shell, it might be safer, mightn’t it? Anyway, he’d decided that the first and second laws didn’t apply to the reef, which was about as human as he was.