Someone was sending him an IM. "Hello?"
"Are you the boat on the SCUBA ship? From this morning? When we were on the wreck?"
"Yes," Robbie said. No one ever sent him IMs. How freaky. He watched the radio energy stream away from him toward the bird in the sky, and tracerouted the IMs to see where they were originating—the noosphere, of course.
"God, I can’t believe I finally found you. I’ve been searching everywhere. You know you’re the only conscious AI on the whole goddamned sea?"
"I know," Robbie said. There was a noticeable lag in the conversation as it was all squeezed through the satellite link and then across the unimaginable hops and skips around the solar system to wherever this instance was hosted.
"Whoa, yeah, of course you do. Sorry, that wasn’t very sensitive of me, I guess. Did we meet this morning? My name’s Tonker."
"We weren’t really introduced. You spent your time talking to Kate."
"God damn! She is there! I knew it! Sorry, sorry, listen—I don’t actually know what happened this morning. Apparently I didn’t get a chance to upload my diffs before my instance was terminated."
"Terminated? The reef said you left the shell—"
"Well, yeah, apparently I did. But I just pulled that shell’s logs and it looks like it was rebooted while underwater, flushing it entirely. I mean, I’m trying to be a good sport about this, but technically, that’s, you know, murder."
It was. So much for the first law. Robbie had been on guard over a human body inhabited by a human brain, and he’d let the brain be successfully attacked by a bunch of jumped-up polyps. He’d never had his faith tested and here, at the first test, he’d failed.
"I can have the shell locked up," Robbie said. "The ship has provisions for that."
The IM made a rude visual. "All that’ll do is encourage the hacker to skip out before I can get there."
"So what shall I do for you?"
"It’s Kate I want to talk to. She’s still there, right?"
"She is."
"And has she noticed the difference?"
"That you’re gone? Yes. The reef told us who they were when they arrived."
"Hold on, what? The reef? You said that before."
So Robbie told him what he knew of the uplifted reef and the distant and cool voice of the uplifter.
"It’s an uplifted coral reef? Christ, humanity sucks. That’s the dumbest fucking thing—" He continued in this vein for a while. "Well, I’m sure Kate will enjoy that immensely. She’s all about the transcendence. That’s why she had me."
"You’re her son?"
"No, not really."
"But she had you?"
"Haven’t you figured it out yet, bro? I’m an AI. You and me, we’re landsmen. Kate instantiated me. I’m six months old, and she’s already bored of me and has moved on. She says she can’t give me what I need."
"You and Kate—"
"Robot boyfriend and girlfriend, yup. Such as it is, up in the noosphere. Cybering, you know. I was really excited about downloading into that Ken doll on your ship there. Lots of potential there for real world, hormone-driven interaction. Do you know if we—"
"No!" Robbie said. "I don’t think so. It seems like you only met a few minutes before you went under."
"All right. Well, I guess I’ll give it another try. What’s the procedure for turfing out this sea cucumber?"
"Coral reef."
"Yeah."
"I don’t really deal with that. Time on the human-shells is booked first-come, first-serve. I don’t think we’ve ever had a resource contention issue with them before."
"Well, I’d booked in first, right? So how do I enforce my rights? I tried to download again and got a failed authorization message. They’ve modified the system to give them exclusive access. It’s not right—there’s got to be some procedure for redress."
"How old did you say you were?"
"Six months. But I’m an instance of an artificial personality that has logged twenty thousand years of parallel existence. I’m not a kid or anything."
"You seem like a nice person," Robbie began. He stopped. "Look the thing is that this just isn’t my department. I’m the rowboat. I don’t have anything to do with this. And I don’t want to. I don’t like the idea of non-humans using the shells—"
"I knew it!" Tonker crowed. "You’re a bigot! A self-hating robot. I bet you’re an Asimovist, aren’t you? You people are always Asimovists."
"I’m an Asimovist," Robbie said, with as much dignity as he could muster. "But I don’t see what that has to do with anything."
"Of course you don’t, pal. You wouldn’t, would you. All I want you to do is figure out how to enforce your own rules so that I can get with my girl. You’re saying you can’t do that because it’s not your department, but when it comes down to it, your problem is that I’m a robot and she’s not, and for that, you’ll take the side of a collection of jumped-up polyps. Fine, buddy, fine. You have a nice life out there, pondering the three laws."
"Wait—" Robbie said.
"Unless the next words you say are, ‘I’ll help you,’ I’m not interested."
"It’s not that I don’t want to help—"
"Wrong answer," Tonker said, and the IM session terminated.
When Kate came up on deck, she was full of talk about the reef, whom she was calling "Ozzie."
"They’re weirdest goddamned thing. They want to fight anything that’ll stand still long enough. Ever seen coral fight? I downloaded some time-lapse video. They really go at it viciously. At the same time, they’re clearly scared out of their wits about this all. I mean, they’ve got racial memory of their history, supplemented by a bunch of Wikipedia entries on reefs—you should hear them wax mystical over the Devonian Reefs, which went extinct millennia ago. They’ve developed some kind of wild theory that the Devonians developed sentience and extincted themselves.
"So they’re really excited about us heading back to the actual reef now. They want to see it from the outside, and they’ve invited me to be an honored guest, the first human ever invited to gaze upon their wonder. Exciting, huh?"
"They’re not going to make trouble for you down there?"
"No, no way. Me and Ozzie are great pals."
"I’m worried about this."
"You worry too much." She laughed and tossed her head. She was very pretty, Robbie noticed. He hadn’t ever thought of her like that when she was uninhabited, but with this Kate person inside her she was lovely. He really liked humans. It had been a real golden age when the people had been around all the time.
He wondered what it was like up in the noosphere where AIs and humans could operate as equals.
She stood up to go. After second breakfast, the shells would relax in the lounge or do yoga on the sun-deck. He wondered what she’d do. He didn’t want her to go.
"Tonker contacted me," he said. He wasn’t good at small-talk.
She jumped as if shocked. "What did you tell him?"
"Nothing," Robbie said. "I didn’t tell him anything."
She shook her head. "But I bet he had plenty to tell you, didn’t he? What a bitch I am, making and then leaving him, a fickle woman who doesn’t know her own mind."
Robbie didn’t say anything.
"Let’s see, what else?" She was pacing now, her voice hot and choked, unfamiliar sounds coming from Janet’s voicebox. "He told you I was a pervert, didn’t he? Queer for his kind. Incest and bestiality in the rarified heights of the noosphere."
Robbie felt helpless. This human was clearly experiencing a lot of pain, and it seemed like he’d caused it.
"Please don’t cry," he said. "Please?"
She looked up at him, tears streaming down her cheeks. "Why the fuck not? I thought it would be different once I ascended. I thought I’d be better once I was in the sky, infinite and immortal. But I’m the same Kate Eltham I was in 2019, a loser that couldn’t meet a guy to save my life, spent all my time cybering losers in moggs, and only got the upload once they made it a charity thing. I’m gonna spend the rest of eternity like that, you know it? How’d you like to spend the whole of the universe being a, a, a nobody?"