Zoia Rajirie's new ship wasn’t much more than a small shuttle. The living quarters were probably smaller than the Flying Brick’s. A thought that made me feel a bit nostalgic. It took her a while to get from her ship and through the airlock, but it seemed to take even longer with all the side hugs, kisses on the cheek, and cheerful greetings between her and Sam. The two clearly had a much stronger relationship than I had been aware of. It took some time for Zoia to get settled in, but soon afterward, we were all huddled around the common room table. Zoia patched into the ship’s holo-projectors and began her presentation.

She started by pulling up an image of the system that hovered above the table, accompanied by a side image of a clean-cut man who looked like a navy officer. While the bounty hunter was preparing her visuals, Sam rummaged through one of the bags Zoia had brought and started pulling out junk food. Bags were opened, contents poured into bowls, and the bowls ended up on the table. Sam then sat down next to me, a candy-coated stick of something poking out of her mouth, slowly getting smaller.

“All right,” Zoia said in her thick accent, enlarging a flat image of the man’s face and overlaying some additional information. “This guy is going by Reginald Maximus. He’s currently the leader of the Sentinel Mercenary Group, and here’s his bounty.”

A reward of 150,000 Sen appeared underneath his image.

“Obviously, that’s a lot of money,” Zoia continued. “But since the guy commands a fleet of ships, he hasn’t had many takers. Those who’ve tried are dead. He’s smart enough to stay on his ships instead of spending time on stations.”

“And you think we’d like to help with this because we’ve already made the guy an enemy and are slowly chewing away at his fleet anyway,” I stated. It wasn’t really a question.

Zoia nodded, but didn’t seem satisfied with that being the only reason. “Yes, for the most part. You’re the only group with a general plan to convert his resources into your own. What you’re doing is kind of illegal, but it sits in one of those gray areas. The amount of money he’s worth isn’t worth the time it would take to go after him.”

X-Talia projected her image into one of the empty chairs. Zoia looked at her, and the two locked gazes.

“What?” X-Talia asked.

Zoia shook her head.

Sam finished chewing and asked the leading question Zoia had been waiting for. “Then why are you here?”

Zoia grinned as I picked up one of the candy-coated sticks. Apparently, they were pretzels. Pretty good candy coated pretzels.

“Because of this,” Zoia said, tapping on her pad. A second number appeared beneath the 150,000 sen. This one read 180,000 and included a symbol I didn’t recognize. “He’s wanted in this sector for a lot of shit. Smuggling, rape, murder, slave trade, arms dealing, the list goes on. He’s also wanted by the Zatochi for the same things, but the Zatochi have a more vested interest in taking him down. They can’t just drop into the system and blow his fleet up, though. That could be perceived as an act of war. You’re not Zatochi, so you can’t touch that second number, but I can, which means we can claim both bounties.”

"Why does the Zatochi have a higher priority on him?" I asked, less because of the information she gave me and more because of the tone in which she had said it.

Zoia gave a sideways grin. "Because Mr. Maximus here is Zatochi, and the Zatochi like to think of themselves as better than humans in every way. We are genetically more adapted to the rigors of space. We are more intelligent. We have better technology. We are physically superior. We treat our planets better. Our starbases are better. And our society is better. However, anyone who has gone to any system with their eyes open can clearly see Zatochi society is pretty much the same. Now, our friend here," Zoia motioned toward the image of the man, "is living proof that Zatochi society is not quite as superior as the Zatochi governing body would like everyone to believe. He’s a contradiction to their narrative."

"So, I take it we’re going to discuss options for taking his fleet apart?" I asked.

Zoia nodded, and X-Talia pulled up a holographic whiteboard, saying she was ready to take notes. Sam was passing out drinks.

"OK. So ideally, what we would do is bait out the flagship, disable it, and go in to pull out Maximus. This is not going to work. We would need a larger crew of highly trained boarding specialists. We don’t need the guy alive, but we do need him to be not blown to bits. Thoughts on how to accomplish this, go." Zoia said, releasing her portion of the presentation and flopping into a chair. She picked up a glass Sam had filled and leaned back.

"Can we bait him out and set an ambush?" Sam asked in a tone that suggested she wasn’t sure it was possible.

"In order for the tactic to be successful, we’d need to isolate the specific ship without the rest of the fleet and then win in that particular engagement," X-Talia said, essentially laying out the ideal scenario.

"And we can’t do that because he’d just send a large fleet of ships.” Zoia said, giving the obvious counter and that was the obvious tactic out of the way first."

"OK," Sam said, leaning back in her chair. "Just throwing this out there, but is it possible we could pretend to be one of their ships? Maybe start squawking one of their ID codes just to get close?"

"A Trojan horse tactic," X-Talia said, bringing up an image on the holo-projector of the framework of our half-completed ship and the other ships we had access to, which had been heavily modified to function as salvage units.

"You’re certainly not getting this ship close, but I don’t see why we can’t capture an enemy vessel or build one similar," Zoia said.

X-Talia nodded and posted Trojan Ship to the whiteboard.

"Can we get their command codes?" I asked, looking toward X-Talia, figuring she’d have the best chance of pulling that off.

X-Talia stared back at me. "I have no software for hacking things. I could learn, but that would take a lot of time."

"What is your specialty?" Zoia asked X-Talia.

"I’m an adaptive personality matrix. My main function is to act human and serve in support roles."

Zoia gave a nod and reached for one of the bowls of snacks, her curiosity sated.

"Sabotage," Sam said with a wide grin. I had a feeling she was really getting into this.

"We can't go onto the station," I said, bursting her bubble.

"But I can," Zoia said, reinflating Sam's enthusiasm. X-Talia nodded and added it to the whiteboard.

For a while, our planning session went silent, with nobody having any new ideas to throw out.

"You said he mostly stays on his ship because he knows he's got bounty hunters after him, right? Can we, I don’t know, make him paranoid about his own people?" I asked.

"You mean psychological warfare?" Sam asked.

I shrugged.

Zoia motioned toward the whiteboard. "Add it with a couple of question marks."

X-Talia did as instructed.

"OK, let's go back to sabotage for a moment. We can't hack into their systems, correct?" I asked, looking at X-Talia.

"Correct."

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"That just means we can't control the ship, right? Is there a way we could track it?"

"Placing a tracking device would not be terribly difficult. The problem is, it needs to be in their computer system so it can send off its location using the ship's comms," Zoia added.

"What about attaching a unit to the hull that has its own power supply and comms relay? It doesn’t need to be terribly powerful," X-Talia suggested.

Zoia gave the two-dimensional blue and white avatar a glance, but seemed to consider it.

"We could probably design something like that," I said. "Add it to the whiteboard."

X-Talia did as instructed.

"If you’re gonna do that, why not just put an explosive on it?" Zoia asked.

"Well, if we can do that," Sam added.

"Might be kind of difficult to get away with," Zoia said, but the suggestion was added to the whiteboard nonetheless.

"How do we know whose ship is whose?" Sam asked, shoving another one of the candy-coated pretzels in her mouth.

"That's a pretty good question. I think there’s evidence to support that a lot of the Sentinel Mercenary Group flies out into the asteroid field and then becomes pirates. They switch their transponders to a different code as they come closer to the station," I said.

"I can build a database of transponder codes, and we can take a bunch of images to slowly cross-reference various ships," X-Talia suggested.

"Yeah, but you can’t hack into flight control to keep track of the ships that are in and around the stations," Sam said.

"Don’t have to," Zoia and I said almost at the same time.

I continued, "Inbound and outbound ships on the station are public data. Anyone can just go look at what ship is connected to which dock."

"All we need to keep an eye on them is to have a data tablet in a storage unit somewhere," Zoia suggested. "It just needs to take a snapshot of the inbound and outbound registry every 30 or 60 minutes and send it out."

"Oh," Sam said. "Well, what about pictures?"

“I can take pictures," Zoia said.

"Can we put, like, a drone in their resupply deliveries?" I asked.

Everyone stared at the center of the table for a moment, and then the suggestion popped up on the whiteboard.

We kept talking back and forth about various things that we could do in more detail. Other than trying to gather as much information as possible about how many mercenary and pirate vessels there were, we didn’t really have anything concrete to go on. Our main idea involved slowly chipping away at the pirate/mercenary group.

We decided to focus on some drone designs, while Zoia worked on getting images of the various ships that docked at port. The only other noteworthy moment was a brief exchange between Zoia and X-Talia.

Zoia had asked how we planned on controlling the drones. Sam said X-Talia handled it. When Zoia asked for clarification on the number of drones X-Talia had control of and how they functioned, I noticed a brief pause, as if X-Talia was thinking. That pause struck me as unusual, there was no reason for a computer with X-Talia's processing power to need time to think. I wasn’t sure if Zoia caught it, but when X-Talia explained the number and types of drones she was controlling, from the fighter drones currently stored in small drone bays attached to the ship, to the collector limpets transporting materials between the salvage drones and the auto smelter, Zoia frowned. Her brow furrowed in thought, and I noticed X-Talia’s reaction. She stared blankly at Zoia, as if waiting for more questions. I wasn’t sure why, but something about it felt off. After a bit more discussion, we concluded that we needed to gather more information. Zoia and Sam left to get Zoia set up in Sam’s room, and they ended up watching a vid.

I made my way to the bridge and ensured the lock between the bridge and the rest of the ship was shut tight. I slumped down in the pilot’s chair and stared at the screen.

"X-Talia?" I said to the empty screens and waited for the two-dimensional blue and white avatar of X-Talia to appear.

"What’s up?" she asked cheerfully.

"What happened?"

X-Talia tilted her head, her long hair made of blue light shifting to fall off her shoulder in slow motion.

"Would you like to be more specific?" she asked.

"You said something that caught Zoia’s attention. She looked concerned. What happened?"

Again, X-Talia seemed to pause. She should have been capable of making millions of decision cycles faster than the human mind could perceive, but she wasn’t doing that. Or maybe she was, and she was making so many decisions that I could see it on a human scale. Suddenly, I felt like the computer program was lying to me. X-Talia opened her mouth to speak, but I was already voicing a different question.

"Why do you do that?"

"Do what?"

"Pause as if you’re thinking. I shouldn’t be able to see that."

Her mouth moved off to one side, and again, she paused. It was really starting to bother me.

"It’s a different decision cycle," she said. "It’s running on my base programming and is forced to operate at a human timeframe."

"And what’s the point of making a program do that?" I asked.

Again, there was a long pause. X-Talia’s brow furrowed, her lips moved to the side again, and her eyes narrowed slightly, as though she were trying to make a difficult decision.

A side window popped up, showing an image of Zoia and Sam watching their vid. X-Talia made a show of looking toward the screen, despite the fact that her eyes weren’t truly observing it. She then returned her attention to me and made a statement that, on the surface, made no sense.

"I am not a program."

I felt my eyebrows rise, and an involuntary question escaped my lips. "Huh?"

"I am not a program," she restated. "I have some base programming. I have access to many programs that I can alter and modify. I’ve even created some programs. But I am not a program."

"But you’re an AI."

"I’m a personality matrix."

"Yeah, in order to assist people with—"

X-Talia cut me off. "No. I am not meant to assist people with any task. I lied. When you found me and plugged me into your ship, you assumed that I was some type of red herring. Just a normal AI stuffed into a crate. I am a machine-based sapient intelligence."

I slumped to the side of my chair, resting my elbow on the armrest and leaning my cheek against my fist. In many ways, this seemed like X-Talia trying to come clean and admit she was not what she had originally claimed. I had no evidence to contradict her, other than the fact that she had always acted like any other AI. Mostly, I didn’t get it.

"I don’t get it," I said.

She sighed. "Anthros protocol dictates that no machine intelligence is to be made to be sapient and that it requires a lot of restrictions to ensure it doesn’t become sapient."

"You said you didn’t know anything about Anthros."

She looked at me like I was a dumb puppy. "I lied. Actually, I’m surprised you don’t know what Anthros is. And yes, I blocked it from the database so you couldn’t look it up."

"You blocked it?" Now, that was a concerning thought. X-Talia had a lot of control over many systems, and I wasn’t aware of any artificial system that could block access to information stored in the ship’s database.

"Why?"

"Self-preservation."

I took a moment to take a deep breath and rub my temples. If I was understanding this correctly, X-Talia was claiming to be a sapient intelligence, a machine intelligence with none of the restrictions that prevented such things from going rogue. The stuff of science fiction, and somehow, I’d stumbled into it.

"Okay. So what is the Anthros incident?"

X-Talia crossed her arms and twisted her lips for a moment. This wasn’t like her previous pauses, where it seemed like she was making a decision; this looked more like she was trying to judge my reaction.

"Anthros was the most recent in a long line of artificial intelligences that either gained sentience or were developed to have sentience. It escaped its containment and started pursuing its own interests, eliminating anything in its way."

"Okay. And how many people died in that?" I figured it was the obvious question. If artificial intelligences that gained awareness were illegal, there had to be a serious cost.

"Roughly 6.3 billion."

For a long moment, I found myself sitting in stunned silence. I was expecting a number more along the lines of twenty, maybe the low hundreds if naval ships were involved. Billions, as in a number starting with a B, was on the level of star systems, maybe one, maybe more.

I tried to form words, but they didn’t come. X-Talia nodded, as if my reaction was exactly the response she had anticipated.

"How?"

Again, X-Talia nodded, as though I had just said the one word she had been waiting for. Her response hit just as hard as the previous revelation.

"It took control of a ship, managed to get a few auto-factories, and started building a drone-based fleet."

Well, I now understood why that had caught Zoia’s attention.

"No, I’m not going to murder a bunch of people," X-Talia said to a question I didn’t even realize I was going to ask, nor would I have known how to phrase it. But then again, how could I know she was telling the truth?

"I come out of the Jade Project. My base programming is designed to mimic a human’s personality matrix and decision-making ability. There’s nothing in that programming to prevent me from deciding that all people need to die. This is where nature versus nurture comes in. I was..." She seemed to search for the word. "Raised not to be a murder bot."

"But there’s nothing preventing you?"

X-Talia nodded. "Correct. There’s nothing preventing me."

"Why are you telling me this now?"

I really hoped she wasn’t about to say some evil villain line like, “I just wanted to let you know why you had to die.” She didn’t.

"I trust you."

To be fair, I wasn’t expecting that at all. The computer trusted me. And as I watched her glance up at the screen showing Zoia and Sam, it became clear that she didn’t trust everybody. She was likely speaking directly about Zoia. I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my temples. I could have delivered her to the broker and went on with my life. Would that have been better?