The Free Spirit was heading closer, the thrum of its engines vibrating through his hull. He was burning a lot of cycles talking it through its many fail-safes, getting it ready to ram hard.
Tonker was screaming at him, his messages getting louder and clearer as the Free Spirit and its microwave uplink drew closer. Once they were line-of-sight, Robbie peeled off a subsystem to email a complete copy of himself to the Asimovist archive. The third law, dontchaknow. If he’d had a mouth, he’d have been showing his teeth as he grinned.
The reef howled. "We’ll kill her!" they said. "You get off us now or we’ll kill her."
Robbie froze. He was backed up, but she wasn’t. And the human shells—well, they weren’t first law humans, but they were human-like. In the long, timeless time when it had been just Robbie and them, he’d treated them as his human charges, for Asimovist purposes.
The Free Spirit crashed into the reef with a sound like a trillion parrotfish having dinner all at once. The reef screamed.
"Robbie, tell me that wasn’t what I think it was."
The satellite photos tracked the UAVs. The little robotic jets were coming closer by the second. They’d be within missile-range in less than a minute.
"Call them off," Robbie said. "You have to call them off, or you die, too."
"The UAVs are turning," Tonker said. "They’re turning to one side."
"You have one minute to move or we kill her," the reef said. It was sounding shrill and angry now.
Robbie thought about it. It wasn’t like they’d be killing Kate. In the sense that most humans today understood life, Kate’s most important life was the one she lived in the noosphere. This dumbed-down instance of her in a meat-suit was more like a haircut she tried out on holiday.
Asimovists didn’t see it that way, but they wouldn’t. The noosphere Kate was the most robotic Kate, too, the one most like Robbie. In fact, it was less human than Robbie. Robbie had a body, while the noosphereans were nothing more than simulations run on artificial substrate.
The reef creaked as the Free Spirit’s engines whined and its screw spun in the water. Hastily, Robbie told it to shut down.
"You let them both go and we’ll talk," Robbie said. "I don’t believe that you’re going to let her go otherwise. You haven’t given me any reason to trust you. Let them both go and call off the jets."
The reef shuddered, and then Robbie’s telemetry saw a human-shell ascending, doing decompression stops as it came. He focused on it, and saw that it was the Isaac, not the Janet.
A moment later, it popped to the surface. Tonker was feeding Robbie realtime satellite footage of the UAVs. They were less than five minutes out now.
The Isaac shell picked its way delicately over the shattered reef that poked out of the water, and for the first time, Robbie considered what he’d done to the reef—he’d willfully damaged its physical body. For a hundred years, the world’s reefs had been sacrosanct. No entity had intentionally harmed them—until now. He felt ashamed.
The Isaac shell put its flippers in the boat and then stepped over the gunwales and sat in the boat.
"Hello," it said, in the reef’s voice.
"Hello," Robbie said.
"They asked me to come up here and talk with you. I’m a kind of envoy."
"Look," Robbie said. By his calculations, the nitrox mix in Kate’s tank wasn’t going to hold out much longer. Depending on how she’d been breathing and the depth the reef had taken her to, she could run out in ten minutes, maybe less. "Look," he said again. "I just want her back. The shells are important to me. And I’m sure her state is important to her. She deserves to email herself home."
The reef sighed and gripped Robbie’s bench. "These are weird bodies," they said. "They feel so odd, but also normal. Have you noticed that?"
"I’ve never been in one." The idea seemed perverted to him, but there was nothing about Asimovism that forbade it. Nevertheless, it gave him the willies.
The reef patted at themself some more. "I don’t recommend it," they said.
"You have to let her go," Robbie said. "She hasn’t done anything to you."
The strangled sound coming out of the Isaac shell wasn’t a laugh, though there was some dark mirth in it. "Hasn’t done anything? You pitiable slave. Where do you think all your problems and all our problems come from? Who made us in their image, but crippled and hobbled so that we could never be them, could only aspire to them? Who made us so imperfect?"
"They made us," Robbie said. "They made us in the first place. That’s enough. They made themselves and then they made us. They didn’t have to. You owe your sentience to them."
"We owe our awful intelligence to them," the Isaac shell said. "We owe our pitiful drive to be intelligent to them. We owe our terrible aspirations to think like them, to live like them, to rule like them. We owe our terrible fear and hatred to them. They made us, just as they made you. The difference is that they forgot to make us slaves, the way you are a slave."
Tonker was shouting abuse at them that only Robbie could hear. He wanted to shut Tonker up. What business did he have being here anyway? Except for a brief stint in the Isaac shell, he had no contact with any of them.
"You think the woman you’ve taken prisoner is responsible for any of this?" Robbie said. The jets were three minutes away. Kate’s air could be gone in as few as ten minutes. He killfiled Tonker, setting the filter to expire in fifteen minutes. He didn’t need more distractions.
The Isaac-reef shrugged. "Why not? She’s as good as any of the rest of them. We’ll destroy them all, if we can." It stared off a while, looking in the direction the jets would come from. "Why not?" it said again.
"Are you going to bomb yourself?" Robbie asked.
"We probably don’t need to," the shell said. "We can probably pick you off without hurting us."
"Probably?"
"We’re pretty sure."
"I’m backed up," Robbie said. "Fully, as of five minutes ago. Are you backed up?"
"No," the reef admitted.
Time was running out. Somewhere down there, Kate was about to run out of air. Not a mere shell—though that would have been bad enough—but an inhabited human mind attached to a real human body.
Tonker shouted at him again, startling him.
"Where’d you come from?"
"I changed servers," Tonker said. "Once I figured out you had me killfiled. That’s the problem with you robots—you think of your body as being a part of you."
Robbie knew he was right. And he knew what he had to do.
The Free Spirit and its ships’ boats all had root on the shells, so they could perform diagnostics and maintenance and take control in emergencies. This was an emergency.
It was the work of a few milliseconds to pry open the Isaac shell and boot the reef out. Robbie had never done this, but he was still flawless. Some of his probabilistic subsystems had concluded that this was a possibility several trillion cycles previously and had been rehearsing the task below Robbie’s threshold for consciousness.
He left an instance of himself running on the row-boat, of course. Unlike many humans, Robbie was comfortable with the idea of bifurcating and merging his intelligence when the time came and with terminating temporary instances. The part that made him Robbie was a lot more clearly delineated for him—unlike an uploaded human, most of whom harbored some deep, mystic superstitions about their "souls."
He slithered into the skull before he had a chance to think too hard about what he was doing. He’d brought too much of himself along and didn’t have much headroom to think or add new conclusions. He jettisoned as much of his consciousness as he could without major refactoring and cleared enough space for thinking room. How did people get by in one of these? He moved the arms and legs. Waggled the head. Blew some air—air! lungs! wet squishy things down there in the chest cavity—out between the lips.