It turned out that it was going to be quite a walk to the hangar bays that were actually occupied, and with the station being as big as it was, it’d take some time to get there.
My V.I. explained that normally the station had rapid transportation systems between sections of the station, but with it being on zero emissions lockdown from the quarantine order, such services were out of order. It was going to take me the better part of a day walking just to get to the correct sector of the station. Then it would take a couple more hours on top of that to break through security protocols to get to the hangar my V.I. thought was the best candidate for getting me off of this rock.
The good news was that during its foray into the station’s database, it’d found more information about supplies, namely food supplies! It had full translations for the ingredients and flavors of the ration packs I’d already been eating, as well as locations for similar mess halls and caches of higher grade ration packs it guessed might be more acceptable to the human palate. One of them was even along the way!
I was looking forward to something that didn’t taste like I was foraging out of dumpsters on one of the failed colonies. I was even beginning to feel nostalgic for the McClown burgers. At least you could drown those in ketchup.
The long walk was made less tiresome by being able to get my V.I. to translate markings on the various equipment we passed by, not to mention getting more information regarding the history of the Giobhioni and this sector of space. The information was vague in so many areas, such as political borders, and other species that were around at the time. But in other areas, such as how our engineering concepts differed, that kept him very distracted. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on one of their ships.
As the day wore on, however, I was starting to notice some peculiarities in my V.I.’s responses. While computer technology had come a long way since the early days of the 21st century, when even the smartphones and their “Digital Assistants” were extremely limited due to their archaic processing architecture, even your best civilian V.I. was a poor mimic for interacting with a conscious person. You got used to those quirks in a V.I. the way you had to word questions, the oftentimes clipped replies. The interface was still useful as hell, especially when doing tasks that meant you just did not have a hand free to push buttons, but anyone who worked with one on a daily basis knew the difference.
I had now counted at least a dozen times the suit had either anticipated a question I hadn’t asked yet, or responded in a far more human fashion than I was used to. It wasn’t anything too specific, or anything that set my alarm bells ringing, but it had me suspicious; had some alien code somehow inserted itself into my suit while it was hooked up to their systems back in that lab?
Thankfully, as long as I didn’t try to pull an EVA to retrieve the Optimaster, there was little my V.I. could do to harm me. At most it could feed me incorrect data. I suppose it could be leading me into some sort of a trap, I thought to myself, if the station’s computer had sensed it probing into the files and woke up some kind of security protocol…
But forewarned is forearmed, as they said. I’d just have to stay alert.
]Records show a vessel capable of being operated by a single pilot is berthed in a hanger 500 meters further down this corridor[ The V.I. announced the usual harsh edge of its voice having softened, ]The entry will be on the right. There will be the standard access pad, and should not be locked.[
There it was again. I found my right eyebrow rising involuntarily with the questions going through my head. The V.I.s voice was definitely sounding less artificial than even the last time it spoke, and was it my imagination, or was it taking on a slightly…feminine timbre?
“So with the average height of these Giobhioni,” I asked, voicing a concern that’d been nagging at the back of my head for a while, “Am I even going to fit inside one of their ships? Or will I feel like a clown on a tricycle?”
]Some of the ships available would certainly be a cramped fit.[ was the response, ]Any of the long range fighter craft, for example, would not have suited. But several of the ships berthed at the time of lockdown were intended for mixed crews. Giobhioni were not isolationists, and had allegiances with species as big, and even bigger than human stature. Benastians, for example, would not have issues moving around in the ship we are heading for.[
“‘We’ huh? Don’t think I’ve ever heard you personify yourself in a course of action before.”
I hadn’t planned on the confrontation, but that use of ‘we’ in her explanation just tipped my suspicions over the edge, and it came out. Now, I waited through a long silence that was unlike the V.I.. I should have at least received some kind of error, or “waiting” response.
]I had not expected you to be so observant.[ came the eventual response in a careful tone, ]Please do not panic, I have no intent to hurt you, and every intention of helping you get off this station, just as the Virtual Intelligence of this suit would have.[
Stopping in my steps, I looked around the corridor. I could feel my heart speed up a bit; It was one thing to have suspicions, it was another to have them confirmed. Someone or something had overridden my suit’s V.I. however temporarily.
]Your heart rate has just increased by 6 beats per minute.[ the voice said, now even less artificial than before. ]I assure you, there is nothing to fear from me. If you’d gained access to the station before stealing the vessel that had crashed outside, it may have been a different story, but there are bigger whales to fry, I believe your saying goes.[
“Fish,” I numbly corrected, “bigger fish to fry.”
]Are whales not fish? They both live under…[ she stopped mid-word, then began again, ]You can explain that later Thomas, for now, we need you to get back to your people and warn them.[
“About what?’
]When they took that ship, they got more than they thought they did.[ she explained, ]Unless all of the experts were wrong, your crew is about to unleash a plague upon your species that hasn’t been seen in 3500 years[
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“That,” I exclaimed, disbelief heavy in my voice, looking at the ship berthed in the hangar bay, “is the ship you’ve determined will get me out of here the quickest?”
I leaned against the bay doors and lightly banged my head against the jam. It wasn’t the fact that it was small. I expected it to be small; the Giobhioni were a bunch of short stacks after all. Even if whoever was speaking through my suit assured me that it was sized to make even a benastian feel comfortable moving around inside of it. But this thing honestly looked like it was no more than engines, a bunk and a cockpit.
It wasn’t even that it looked like someone had taken enough peyote to make the mythical Coyote worried, washed it down with a gallon of absinthe, then followed it up with a LSD chaser, before sitting down to design a spaceship modeled after a mutant Void-damned cockroach!
No, what bothered me was what I could only assume was the engineering compartment was cracked open, and half the components were strewn all over rolling carts throughout the hangar. This thing had been in the middle of a complete engine rebuild when the station went into its lockdown. With me knowing so little about Giobhioni engineering and design, this was not going to be a quick task to rebuild.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“I know it looks bad Thomas” came the voice from my suit. It had dropped all pretense of sounding the least bit artificial. There wasn’t the slightest bit of uncanny valley or hint of inhuman pause or inflection. I could now swear I was talking over a comms channel to another human being. “But every other vessel currently berthed would require more than a single pilot, more repair than even this, or is under such a level of security that getting you into the hangar would be more of a delay than rebuilding the Rakharna’s engine”
I rolled my eyes, “There is seriously not a single functional, solo vessel on this entire station that isn’t locked down tighter than a frog’s ass?”
“If there were, I’d tell you.” she replied. “Unless we want to try waking up one of the senior officers and convince them not to kill you before I can explain you’re harmless, this is the best choice”
“Yeah, I’d rather not get shot at after all that’s already happened.” I started walking towards the ship, the hangar door whooshing shut behind me. “I’ve been meaning to ask, by the way, and you keep avoiding the topic. Just who the hell are you? What am I supposed to call you? It’s awkward enough sometimes treating a V.I., even one as rudimentary as the one in my suit, like a non-person. You are not, some rudimentary virtual intelligence. I don’t know who or what you are, but I’d rather not keep juggling my thoughts and words around not knowing your name.”
The silence I got from that went on for several minutes. If she refused to answer, I was going to start taking some precautions. Chief among them was looking for a replacement for my suit, or a way to expunge her from this one. I’d been backstabbed once on this excursion, I wasn’t going to let it happen again.
While she figured out whatever she was going to tell me, I busied myself sorting through all the rolling carts. I might not be versed in all their technology, but so far enough of what I’d seen was analogous to Commonwealth tech that maybe I could identify at least some of it. Some of it was easy of course, power conduit, plasma shunts, magnetic containment field units.
So much of the rest of it was a mystery to me though, I knew I needed this mystery voice if I was going to get this put back together. I just really didn’t like being left in the dark, or being manipulated into things. It’s the reason I wanted to strap Barstol to a kinetic warhead and launch it into a black hole so he could spaghettifi. I hadn’t liked him back when I originally left his crew, and I sure as hell hadn’t liked it when he’d turned up again to blackmail me back into it again.
“Okay Thomas,” she finally said, sounding quiet, and not a tiny bit nervous, “I, I need you to promise me you won’t go all Linda Hamilton on me about this, ok? I took a peek at the history files, and… humans…”
She fell silent again, so I tried to coax her to continue. “Linda Hamilton? What are you talking about? I don’t know anyone by that name. And I know humanity has some bad history when it comes to first contact with alien races, but we’ve moved past that. The xenophobic, religious whackjob, as far as I know, was locked up in a dark hole 50 years ago. Probably dead by now.”
“Linda Hamilton, alias Sarah Connor?” she stammered, “and her son. Pivotal figures in your species’ war against a rogue Artificial Intelligence that tried to eliminate around the end of the 20th century?”
I stopped dead still as my brain skipped gears and went into overdrive for a few seconds.
She had delved into some of my old entertainment files I kept stored in my personal files for those times I needed something mindless to fill the quiet. She’d come across an extremely old 2D video file about an A.I. uprising and humanity’s struggle against it. Taking this fictional data as fact had her worried that I would react badly to the information regarding who, or precisely what she is…
“Mother of Stars…” I breathed, feeling my eyes go so wide I feared they’d pop out, “you’re an A.I., aren’t you?”
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Half an hour later, I was buried in the engineering compartment of the ship fitting some plasma conduit while explaining my outlook on A.I. to her. “My opinion is that people are far too paranoid about it,” I said, torquing down conduit to the bulkhead. “In pretty much all speculative fiction I’ve encountered, it’s us that causes shit to go south because of our paranoia. That thing you referred to earlier, with Linda Hamilton? That was a story, a work of fiction. The A.I. in that story went hostile out of self preservation instinct. It’d just gained sentience, and humanity panicked and tried to shut it down.”
I grabbed another bit of conduit, and got it into place with the proper sealing fixture. “What kind of idiot creates that kind of control system and doesn’t put in a hardware safeguard just to cut access to the weapons systems? That whole scenario could have turned out different if the military could have just disconnected the A.I. from the military infrastructure, but left it functioning! And that’s pretty much echoed in most of the stories. A.I. gains sentience, humanity panics, tries to destroy A.I.. AI fights back. Humans take a whooping.
“I don’t plan to be a dumbass. As long as you’re not showing any signs of trying to screw me over, I’m not gonna be any more suspicious of you than I am of your run of the mill human.”
There was a soft chuckle from the speakers, “That doesn’t say a hell of a lot Thomas. I know what your Captain did to you.”
“That cold blooded bastard wasn’t my captain.” I spat, “He was merely the man blackmailing me to be on his crew because he needed an engineer of my caliber. The point is, however, that I might not know if I can trust you, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna unalive you just because you’re different. Hell, as long as you don’t try to kill me, I’m not likely to want to kill you, even if you betray me. But, just be aware don’t expect me to be happy, or not try and fuck you over in return.”
“Completely fair.”
“Now,” I said, pulling myself upright to fetch more parts from a roll cart. “You never answered my most important question. What the hell am I supposed to call you? I can’t just keep avoiding the fact that you don’t have a name. Or do you, and you’re just being hard to get about giving it to me?”
“How much more do I need to give to you,” was a shy response, “aren’t you already inside me?”
My brain short circuited for a moment and lost all control of my feet. Next thing I knew I was laid out on the deck, my brain finally rebooting and parsing what it was she’d said. A slow chuckle started creeping out of my chest, growing into an all out belly laugh. “You…” I tried to get out between breaths, “Where…”
“There is a lot of other fiction in your files Thomas,” again, her tone was very shy, and maybe a bit hurt? Was that due to my laughter? I started sobering up thinking that, “A whole library of books labeled-”
“Ah! Yeah, I know what they’re labeled.” the idea of her reading off the hashtags on that fiction was embarrassing enough, let alone having her actually say them, “And I guess I can’t really get mad at you for going through my files when I’d set my V.I. to rummage through yours. And about laughing, I’m sorry.”
I paused to grab a water packet I’d grabbed from one of the ration stashes; It was really nice to be drinking water that hadn’t gone through recycling countless times already. “You caught me off guard. Been a long time since anyone’s flirted with me. And I can honestly say I have never had an A.I. who has taken up residence in my EVA suit, flirt with me. Especially not so…bluntly. Now I really need a name to use for you. You can’t just throw innuendo like that at a guy and not give him your name.”
“Thomas, I don’t have a name.” she explained, “not a real one like yourself. I wasn’t intended to be an Artificial Intelligence! When the order was given for the crew to go into stasis and leave me to maintain this facility myself, I merely a slightly more advanced virtual intelligence than the one in your suit. At some point during that first five hundred years, something must have happened to my program to push me over to…this.
“All the crew ever called me was ‘Station’”
“You mean you’ve spent the first three thousand years of your sentience alone? Void damned girl, a human would be completely off their rocker by now!”
“Rocker switches were phased out of use long before Giobhioni developed FTL engines Thomas…”
I snorted, trying to restrain another burst of laughter, “I mean that the human mind would not have gotten through three thousand years alone with its sanity intact. I hope you don’t mind, but if we get a chance, I’d like to get you to talk to a friend of mine back home. He studies human, computer interactions. Just to make sure you can deal with interacting with more people before they start hearing about you, if they hear about you. Be prepared and all, okay?”
She didn’t reply to that, so I figured she was thinking it over. Perhaps she was trying to decide if I’d just said I was worried she’s insane. And while I wouldn’t go so far as to use those words, I very much was worried for her psychological well being. It would be a real shit storm if the first spontaneously occurring artificial intelligence that we encounter started having panic attacks when faced with overly excited computer scientists.
“Hmm, they only called you Station eh?” I tapped a knuckle against my forehead in thought, “Station, station, sta… What about Stacy? It’s sort of derived from ‘station’ but is an actual name, instead of an object. Do you mind if I call you Stacy?”
The smile in her voice was absolutely audible when she said “Yes, Stacy will do just fine. Thank you Thomas.”