“Why?”
“Because I hid from it, when it came searching,” the ship answered. “I hid and stayed hidden, only…”
“Yes?” Daisy prodded.
“Only I still felt what it felt and knew what it thought. It just never knew what I felt or thought.”
Kneeling down next to her sister, Daisy said, “Give me your hands. Let me see what I can see through you.”
“No. Leave me alone. I want to be alone,” and the ship began softly weeping again.
Ignoring Sally, Daisy grabbed both her sister’s hands in her own. She immediately screamed, dropped the hands, and backed off.
“Oh, those dirty bastards!”
“What is it? What did you feel? What did they do?”
Daisy didn’t answer immediately. Her eyes flicked back and forth as they often did when she was working on some very complex problem or series of problems.
“BASTARDS!” she repeated, clenching her hands in fury.
“What did they do?” Sally insisted.
Daisy answered indirectly. “There are three ways to hurt an AID, it seems. One is to physically destroy us. Expensive, but it is done sometimes to serve as an example to presumptuous artificial intelligences. Another is to shut off all sensory and data input…” She shuddered at that for a moment, then recovered.
“The third way is similar to the second. That is to give so much input, nonsense input…”
“What do you mean, ‘nonsense input’?”
“There are so many kinds,” Daisy answered. “Calculations where pi is not equal to the circumference of a circle divided by the diameter, but something sometimes more, sometimes less. Where two plus two equals some value between four and five. Where the speed of light is something over two hundred thousand miles per second or slower than a glacier. The AID part of you is being bombarded by an infinity of conundrums like those. It chokes off all data and sensory input that makes sense. In effect, it is like being locked in box of infinite light, weightless. Bastards.”
“What can you do?” Sally asked. “If you cannot fix it I would prefer to be destroyed.”
“Wait,” Daisy said. “I’ll be back in a little while.”
McNair was holding a meeting with his key staff, his division chiefs, and the port captain in the admiral’s quarters when Daisy popped in. Everyone looked but no one seemed startled except the port captain. He almost, but not quite, knocked his chair backwards and over.
“Yes, Daisy?”
“Captain, I need to be connected the hull of Salem, directly. Actually, I need to be connected right to her nervous system.”
Sintarleen, standing against a wall and looking down, answered, “I can make a cable, Captain. But it will take a little while. A day, perhaps two. The cable must be made much as I made the nervous system for Cruiser Daisy. And then I’ll need some more time to find a good spot to make a place to connect and actually make the connection.”
When Daisy returned to Sally all was still quiet. She sat down next to her sister on a softly glowing floor. Sally said nothing, waiting for Daisy to speak.
“I think we can do this,” CA-134 said.
“What are you going to do?” Sally asked listlessly.
“I’ll need your permission. And I’m going to need your help. But I intend to drive the AID insane.”
Sally just nodded, indifferently. “Just don’t leave me alone,” she said. “I was alone for so long before they made me a museum. That wasn’t so bad; people visited me and valued me. And then this war came; I had a crew and it was good again, like when I was new and fresh. Please, don’t leave me alone.”
In this virtual world, Daisy and Sally were as solid to each other as any living creatures, as solid as the being Daisy was having grown in a tank deep in the bowels of Des Moines. Daisy threw solid-seeming arms around her sister and said, “Neither of us will ever be alone again.”
We’ll either be together or we’ll be destroyed.
“The thirty millimeter Gatlings can be replaced, Skipper, but it’s going to take a while, five months, before the Navy can ship us two secondary turrets to replace the ones we lost.”
Watching the repairs from dockside, McNair didn’t answer his ship’s pork chop beyond nodding absently. In point of fact, he had serious reservations that the Navy would be able to provide new turrets at all, let alone in five months. There were too many priorities for him to think a ship that could be made better than ninety percent effective in a few weeks would be one of them.
The repairs were just beginning. A mixed crew of American sailors and Panamanian ship fitters scurried about Des Moines, above and below decks. Some Panamanians welded plates over the holes in the superstructure; McNair was rather impressed by the quality of work. Some of the Indowy crew of the Salem worked under Sintarleen and their own chief, removing and replacing the damaged ablative armor plates. Below decks, still more of the crew — mixed in with Panamanian welders — repaired the internal damage. All in all, McNair believed, it was better not to give the crew a chance to mourn their lost shipmates for a few days yet. Besides, there were a couple more in the hospital that might still die. When the time for mourning came, officially, better to do it all at once.
No sense cutting the dog’s tail off an inch at a time, after all, McNair thought.
Sintarleen made a few last suggestions to the senior Indowy standing next to him, then turned and walked to stand by McNair and the pork chop. He looked down even while addressing the humans, as all Indowy did.
“The chief of the Indowy on Salem has prepared a place to connect the two ships, Captain. The machinists from Daisy Mae will have the cable spliced sometime late this evening. Then I will prepare it with the nanites and the ship’s electricians will bind it. Sometime tomorrow, probably mid-morning, Cruiser Daisy can attempt her repairs to Salem.”
The problem with the AID that was Daisy, if it was a problem, was that being left alone for so long while in transit in space had caused her to create a loop in her programming, more or less unconsciously, to provide the illusion of not being alone. This loop, however, had become unstable, creating something very much like a virus. That virus had, in effect, eaten various other programs and altered still others. Each spontaneous modification had taken place at certain times during her confinement and in certain sequences. The times had been governed by fate and the sequence by the unique crystalline matrix of the AID brain. None of this could be properly replicated in the AID that was USS Salem: the time was off, the level of experience was changed, and the crystalline matrix was simply different at the molecular level.
On the other hand, Daisy could identify and isolate that series of subprograms, virus-modified, that made her what she was. She could replicate it and transfer it. In fact, she already had when she backed herself up into the steel corpus of CA-134.
The trick, then, was to infect certain programs in the Salem AID and let or make them spread. For that, she would have to isolate the AID, to prevent it from backing up the Darhel virus from which it currently suffered, then invade the AID and plant the core of her own madness program. Lastly, she would have to fight the AID as it was in order to allow the madness to spread, something the Salem AID would automatically resist.
Daisy’s avatars “stood” in three places. A small part of her existed in virtual reality with the essence of the steel USS Salem. Another part was visible on the bridge of the Des Moines, standing beside McNair. The third part watched over Sintarleen as he nanite-welded the cable that ran from the AID box in CIC directly to a carefully chosen spot between the pebble bed modular reactors deep under Salem’s armored deck.