For Want of a Nail (4 page)

“What?” Rava’s voice cracked as she spun in her
chair to face him. “Why didn’t you say that earlier?”

“Because it means killing Cordelia.” Ludoviko
lifted his head and Rava was surprised to see his eyes glisten with
tears. “As her wrangler, you can’t be party to it and I couldn’t
chance you letting her know.”

“But wouldn’t she— no. Of course not.” Since
Cordelia didn’t have access to her long-term memory, she would have
forgotten the existence of another AI. Rava’s stomach turned. “Did
it occur to you that she might change her response if she knew we
had that option?”

“You mean, she might lie to us?” Ludoviko’s
voice was surprisingly gentle.

“But Cordelia isn’t a machine, she’s a
person.”

Ludoviko cocked his head to the side and left
Rava feeling like a fool. Of course this reaction was exactly why
he thought he was justified in not telling her about the backup
AI.

“You are correct. Cordelia is a person.” Aunt
Fajra tapped the handy in front of her. “A dangerous, unbalanced
person who can no longer do productive work.”

“ But it’s not her fault.”

Aunt Fajra looked up from her handy, eyes
glistening. “Is Georgo’s dementia his fault?”

Rava slumped in her seat and shook her head.
“What if . . . what if we kept her disconnected from the ship?”

Ludoviko shook his head. “And what, overwrite
the same block of memory? Only remember a week at a time? Nice life
you are offering her.”

“At least she’d get to choose.”

***

Cordelia’s cameras swiveled to face Rava as the
door slid open. “He’s dead, isn’t he?

Rava nodded. “I’m sorry.”

The AI appeared to sigh, coded mannerisms to
express grief expressing themselves in her projection. Her face and
cameras turned away from Rava. “And me? When do you roll me back to
the earlier version?”

Rava sank into the seat by Cordelia’s chassis.
The words she needed to say filled her throat, almost choking her.
“They . . . I can offer you two choices. There’s another AI in the
hold. The family voted to replace you.” She dug her fingernails
into the raw skin around the cuticle of her thumb. “I can either
shut you down or let you remain active, but unconnected.”

“You mean without backup memory.”

Rava nodded.

Under the whirring of fans, she imagined she
could hear code ticking forward as Cordelia processed thoughts
faster than any human could. “For want of a nail . . .”

“Sorry?”

“It’s a proverb. ‘For want of a nail—” Cordelia
broke off. Her eyes shifted up and to the left, as she searched for
information that was not there. “I don’t remember the rest of it,
but I suspect that’s ironic.” Hiccupping sobs of laughter broke out
of her.

Rava stood, hand outstretched as if she could
comfort the AI in some way, but the image that showed such torment
was only a hologram. She could only bear witness.

The laughter stopped as suddenly as it had
begun. “Shut me off.” Cordelia’s image vanished and the cameras
went limp.

Breathing shallowly to keep her own sobs at bay,
Rava pulled the key from her pocket. The flat plastic card had
holes punched in it and metallic lines tracing across the surface
in a combination of physical and electronic codes.

Counting through the steps of the procedure,
Rava systematically shut down the systems that made Cordelia
live.

One. Insert the key.

She had known what Cordelia would choose. What
else could she have opted for? Really. The slow etching away of
self, with pieces written and over-written.

Two. Fingerprint verification.

Uncle Georgo had chosen to stay, though, and
Cordelia might have followed his lead.

Three. Confirm shut down.

If only Rava hadn’t dropped the chassis. . . but
the truth would have come out eventually.

Four. Reconfirm shut down.

She stared at the last screen.
For want of a
nail. . .
Tomorrow she would visit the consignment shop and get
some paper and a pen.

Confirm shutdown.

And then, with those, she would write her own
memories of Cordelia.

END

I often find it interesting to see how
completely a story can change during the course of working on it.
"For Want of a Nail" began life as a wildly different story. I kept
two of the characters, one scene, and the fact that they were in
space. Nothing else remains of the original.

In 2008, I attended a writing workshop run by
Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rusch. The guest
instructor was Sheila Williams, from
Asimov's Magazine
. The
last part of the workshop called for us to write a story from a
prompt. The catch was that we had to write it overnight based on a
prompt. My prompts were "black hole" and "rebellion." They also
asked us to use all five senses on every page.

The resulting story is a mess.

It is so completely incomprehensible that Dean
said he fell asleep while reading it. Twice.

But... Sheila really liked the opening scene and
the tactile sensations there. I'd based it on the challenges I run
across when I'm fixing puppets. Access hatches are never large
enough and it is impossible to see anything. I'd love to have the
camera that I gave to Rava.

The frustrations apparently came through clearly
enough that Sheila actually asked me about the story a year later
when I saw her at an event. You know, when an editor who reads as
many stories as she does remembers a scene, you don't ignore that.
So I pulled the story back out to see if there was anything worth
saving.

The story was still a mess. What I liked though
was Cordelia and her relationship with her wrangler. I also really
liked the idea of living in a closed ecosystem. One of the things I
found unbelievable in my original story was a plot point where they
were able to use the cable for one thing on another item. Having
just lost the cable for my cell phone and been stymied by the
proprietary nature of the blasted thing, I started to wonder what
would happen if you lost a cable where you couldn't go buy a new
one.

That's where "For Want of a Nail" came from.

What you're going to read now is "Unthread the
Rude Eye" which is the very first draft of the story. I've left it
unedited, which means you'll get to see the [brackets] I insert to
remind myself to research things or fix things later.

In this case, I fixed things by writing a
different story.

With one hand, Rue adjusted the VR interface
glasses where they bit into the bridge of her nose, while she kept
her other hand buried in Cordelia's innards. There was barely room
to get the flexible shaft of a mono-lens and her hand through the
access hatch in the probe. With only a single camera attached to
them, the interface glasses didn't give Rue depth perception as she
tried to plug the transmitter cable back in. The probe had not been
designed to need repair. At all. But if Rue couldn't get the
transmitter plugged back in, then when it was time to mount
Cordelia's chassis into the probe, the A.I. wouldn't be able to
beam updates of herself back to the ship.

That would be the same as a death sentence for
the A.I., considering how close they were sending her to the event
horizon. Cordelia was supposed to ride the ion-wind out, but damn,
the possibilities for error were way too high.

The square head of the cable slipped out of
Rue's fingers. Again. "Monkey!" She slammed her heel against the
ship's floor in frustration. "You know, remind me next time to
build a bigger access hatch."

"Maybe you should take a break." The AI's voice
had more than a hint of amusement in it. "We could watch a movie.
I've got
The Chaos of Dereb
loaded. It's got good
explosions. "

"Vile temptress!" Rue resisted the urge to pull
the mono-lens out of the jack in her glasses and glare at Cordelia.
"The smallest access hatch in the universe will not defeat me." She
picked up the cable head and tried one more time. "I just want to
know how the heck this came unplugged in the first place."

"I've queried the ship for access logs of this
room."

For another moment, Rue focused on the cable
before her brain caught up with what Cordelia had said. Access
logs. As in, who had been into the room. She yanked the mono-lens
out of the jack and the lenses went transparent. "Wait. You think
someone did this?"

In the corner of the cramped storage room, the
AI's desktop interface sat on a folding steel cart. It showed the
hologram of her current avatar, a middle-aged Victorian woman with
graying hair pulled up in a bun. Twin cameras mounted to the
interface whirred as they swiveled to face Rue. "The tolerances for
the probe's connections are built to survive passing through the
accretion disc and then close to the event horizon of Cy-1. I
hardly think that the slight vibrations of transit caused it to
wiggle free."

"'Hardly think' as in
an opinion
or as in
statistical probability
?"

"Both." Cordelia arced an eyebrow. "Did you have
a theory?"

A knot twisted in Rue's stomach, because,
really, she didn't have a clue. It shouldn't have happened. "Maybe
an effect of the Skip drive?"

"If Skip drives regularly caused things to
unplug then--"

"Yeah, yeah. I see that." Rue rested her head
against the rounded side of the probe and closed her eyes. The
titanium sphere was simple and immediately understandable. It was
designed to hold the AI's chasis as she dropped toward the event
horizon of Cy-1. At its back, a fin held a beta-carbonite sail,
which, in theory, would deploy
before
she reached the
horizon and let her sail out on the ion wind that black hole
ejected. All the simulations showed that it would work, but it
still carried a lot of risk.

The cold metal soothed Rue's forehead with its
smooth surface. She did not want to think about the possibilities
that Cordelia raised, but as the A.I's wrangler, she wouldn't be
able to avoid it long.

Her fingers rolled the slick plastic head of the
cable, building a picture in her mind of the white square and the
flat gold cord stretching back from it. She slid it forward until
it jarred against the socket. Rotating the head, Cordelia focused
all her attention on the tiny clues of friction vibrating up her
arm. This was a basic, easily understood problem. The larger issues
of the Artificial Intelligence Movement were beyond her
understanding.

Clearly, Rue agreed with A.I.M. on some of the
key issues of AI rights, or she wouldn't have chosen to be a
wrangler, but in their push for machine rights, some members became
over-protective.

Take Cordelia. She
wanted
to be here.

But AIM was convinced that the astronomy
department had coerced Cordelia with programing to accept a suicide
mission into the black hole. As if any wrangler worth her salt
would go against the wishes of the AI in her care. Cordelia had
designed
the experiment and Rue supported the AI's choice,
even if the mission worried the bejeebus out of her.

Which was why the unplugged cable was so
troubling. It screwed with Cordelia's chances of survival. Rue
rotated the head a fraction more and felt that sweet moment of
alignment. Pushing the head forward, the pins slid into their
sockets easily, as if they were taunting her. It thunked into
place. "Oh, yes. That's good."

Almost simultaneously, Cordelia sighed in
relief. "Thank you. It was disturbing to have lost touch with the
probe."

"I
told
you I would triumph ." Pulling
her hand out, Rue only then became aware of the sharp ache in her
forearm where a strut had been pressing. She rubbed the red imprint
on her arm, trying to massage blood back into it. "How long before
you hear back from the ship about the access logs?"

Cordelia chewed on her lip, which was her coded
body language for uncertainty. Not for the first time, Rue marveled
at how complete her charge's illusion of physical form was. She'd
asked a Metta model, early in her training, if the AI consciously
sent those signals out or if it were unconscious the way an
F&B's body language was. The Metta had laughed and said that it
was exactly the same. Sometimes she was aware of it and sometimes
she manipulated it so that other people would know she was
thinking, but she wouldn't tell Rue which was which.

"What are you hesitating about?" Rue stood,
stretching her arms over her head to work the kinks out of her
back. Her fingertips brushed the pitted steel ceiling. God, this
was such a cramped ship.

"Oh, I was only thinking that you must be tired
and that we don't need to go over this right now." Cordelia's
avatar glanced up at a corner, to the ship's camera. "Why don't you
take a break. Just leave my interface here for now."

The hum of the ship's ventilation told Rue that
the life support systems were functioning, but the air seemed
suddenly thick and rank. It caught in her throat as she inhaled.
Cordelia was still looking at the ship's camera. That bit of body
language was so not subtle. It practically screamed that someone
was watching them.

"Sure. Yeah. I haven't had lunch yet, so why
don't I do that and we can do diagnostics after." Rue wiped her
hand across her face, leaving the salt of sweat on her lips. She
tapped the VR glasses as casually as she could. "Holler if you need
anything."

Sliding the door shut when she stepped into the
hall, Rue double-checked to make sure the thing had locked. In the
left corner of Rue's glasses, Cordelia faded into view, her
Victorian matron's form at odds with the hard gray walls of the
ship.

As Cordelia spoke, the earpiece resting against
Rue's skull transmitted the sound. "I am very likely being
paranoid."