The Cold Steel Mind (8 page)

‘It doesn’t end well?’ Aneka suggested.

‘No. That said, while freezer deaths are rare, when they happen they are generally very unpleasant. With nanostasis you just don’t return to life.’

‘Huh. Getting anything, Ella?’

‘No, not really. The electronics aboard the Agroa Gar seem to be more active than they were a day or so ago…’

‘The data correction algorithms are likely to become more active as they work through greater numbers of index sectors and find large chunks of file,’ Al commented inside Aneka’s head.

‘…but there’s nothing particularly anomalous showing up,’ Ella finished. ‘I’ll send the data through to the station anyway. You may as well take us in, Shannon.’

Giving a curt nod, Shannon shifted her hands over the controls and the shuttle reoriented itself towards the underside of the Garnet Hyde. ‘Shuttle to station, we’re coming in. Nothing to report.’

Drake’s voice sounded over the speakers. ‘Probably just some transient interference. Maybe the military were running some test or other.’

‘Or someone on a training course screwed up,’ Shannon agreed.

Aneka frowned. ‘I thought they did hostile environment training here.’

‘They do,’ Drake replied.

‘Should a trainee have access to something that causes weird effects in orbit on a survival course?’

‘Well, if we have no joy explaining it internally, we’ll ask them. Cleared for docking. Bay doors are open.’

‘Bringing her around,’ Shannon said. ‘Everyone get a seat and strap in.’

12.8.524 FSC.

A yellow message in Aneka’s morning diagnostics caught her attention. ‘Al, what does “Full storage defragmentation and categorisation not completed” mean?’

There was a tiny pause. ‘I’ll shelve the sarcastic answer. The algorithms which optimise your long-term memory did not run to completion, which is odd, but not a serious problem unless it starts happening on a regular basis.’

‘Why wouldn’t it? Run all the way through, I mean.’

‘Well, it should always be able to run to completion. We should keep an eye on it. I’ll schedule a more extensive diagnostic run on your hard storage for tonight in case there are failing sectors. You were offline for over a millennium. Some of the data losses you incurred, the holes in your memory, could be due to physical faults which were not detected.’

‘Can they be fixed?’

‘Perhaps, but even if they can’t they can be marked as faulty and the system will avoid putting things there.’

‘Just so long as I don’t lose more.’

‘The memory integrity check came back clean. Nothing else is being lost.’

‘Good. I don’t want to discover I can’t remember my name again.’

~~~

There was music playing on the Agroa Gar’s flight deck when Aneka walked in. She looked between Gillian and Ella, and grimaced. ‘Where the Hell… No,
why
the Hell are you playing Justin Bieber?’ She noticed Monkey perched on a seat at the sensor console nodding; he obviously was not impressed either.

Gillian turned, frowning. ‘I rather liked it. We discovered a huge archive of material apparently taken from whatever the Internet was called back then.’

‘The Internet,’ Aneka supplied. ‘Sometimes the “World Wide Web,” or just the Web.’

‘Oh, well, it seems that they gathered vast amounts of material from it and stored it for research purposes.’

‘Well, I know they looked at it. That’s why I got a boob job done when they constructed this body. The idea that my body was reconfigured to suit the ideals on the Internet was not one of Al’s finer comments.’

‘How were they to know?’ Al asked.

It was a good point, but not one she wanted to hear. Instead she walked over to the console. The interface was in Xinti, but there were both basic and complex search functions. Aneka typed, grinned, and then selected one of the returned tracks. Elvis Presley erupted into the opening bars of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’
.
‘There you go, your favourite royal singer.’

‘This,’ Ella said, ‘was what “The King” sounded like?’

‘One of his rockier numbers. He did ballads, things with more blues to them.’ She shrugged. ‘I wasn’t a big fan.’

‘I can see why. Is there anything in here you did like?’

Aneka typed and then tapped, and Disturbed’s ‘Down with the Sickness’
began blasting out. ‘This is more my style.’

Monkey was now standing behind them. ‘Wow, that’s… good. It’s more… I don’t know, it’s more raw than modern music.’

Aneka chuckled. ‘Yeah, somehow I could see you at a Disturbed concert.’ Her fingers moved over the keys again. ‘Maybe they’ve stored some movies. I may be saved from those interminable sex comedies you lot like so much.’ The screen changed and Aneka found herself looking at a list of films.

‘Looks like they did,’ Gillian commented.

Aneka nodded, her hands lifting away from the screen. It was displaying what she wanted, but she was almost sure she had not finished typing in the query.

~~~

The chatter at lunchtime was almost exclusively about warp engines. Aneka ate what passed for ham sandwiches, though the meat had very little to do with ham, and let the voices pass over her. She had almost no clue what they were talking about. The basic concept of a warp drive she had mastered: the engines compressed space ahead of the ship and expanded it behind. This allowed the vessel to travel at faster-than-light velocities as far as the wider universe was concerned, but at no time was the ship itself actually exceeding light speed within its frame of reference. Her brother had been very much into science fiction and she remembered him mentioning the idea that warp speed, just like in
Star Trek,
was possible. She seemed to recall that the problem was the amount of energy required.

That problem, it seemed, had been solved, but the Agroa Gar’s drive apparently presented a different issue. ‘The synchronisation hardware between the two cores,’ Tosimna was saying, ‘must somehow be able to pass data from one core to the next at faster-than-light speeds.’

‘It wouldn’t have to be much faster,’ Wallace countered, ‘but I do agree. Some form of short-range tachyon system?’

‘I would suspect a coupled quantum entanglement mechanism. More reliable over such a short distance. The particles could be generated just prior to engaging the drive. I have a simulation program that could be adapted to this configuration. Perhaps we could work on that this afternoon?’

Wallace grinned wolfishly. ‘Sounds fascinating. We’ll use the station labs, more comfortable for both of us.’

Ella leaned over towards Aneka. ‘I think Doc Wallace is in love,’ she whispered.

Aneka glanced at Cassandra who was looking on with an indulgent smile. ‘She’s rather enjoying his infatuation,’ Al commented.

‘More people watching?’ Aneka asked silently.

‘Everyone needs a hobby.’

‘Did you manage to look at that data we uncovered regarding the reactor failure, Abraham?’ Gillian asked. They had managed to find the computer’s logs and data recorders from the period leading up to the accident. There was nothing after it.

‘Cassandra has been analysing the data leading up to the explosion,’ Wallace said.

‘It appears that there were disruptions in the ship’s power systems for almost an hour prior to the eventual failure,’ Cassandra informed them.

‘I remember them saying something about that,’ Aneka said. ‘It’s why they paused my “conditioning” and stuck me in stasis.’

‘Yes. There were disruptions in control systems; the communications system went offline preventing them from calling for help. If I were to theorise, I would suggest that some of the damage Monkey and Delta attributed to a power surge actually happened prior to the reactor failure.’

Wallace grunted. ‘That fits with the data from the actual explosion then. The data recorders suggest some form of violent heat burst immediately before the reactor blows and, obviously, nothing more was recorded.’

Aneka frowned. ‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’

‘I’m proposing that the accident which trapped you in space was not an accident. Someone sabotaged the power systems on the Agroa Gar.’

13.8.524 FSC.

This morning the diagnostics showed no yellow lines; everything was, once again, optimal. Optimal aside from the time. Aneka frowned at the sequence of time displays as they appeared in the list, double-checking that she was reading them right before asking Al about them.

‘I was offline for two hours longer than normal?’

When he answered the AI seemed as perplexed as she was. ‘That would be what the downtime figure would seem to indicate.’

‘Well, I don’t need the rest…’

‘Perhaps you did. If the optimisation routines failed to complete last time, they may have taken longer to run this time.’

‘Yeah… Except if that’s the case, why didn’t they run longer yesterday? I’d like you to supervise some diagnostic runs today, while I’m awake. Run through everything and keep an eye on the results. As detailed as you can go.’

‘That will mean some of your normal support functions will be offline while I’m doing it. Basic senses won’t be affected, but you’ll lose the wide-spectrum overlay facility and some of your extended senses.’

‘I think I can manage.’

‘I’ll start now then. This is likely to take a while.’

‘Take all the time you need. If there’s something going wrong, I want to know about it.’

~~~

‘Al’s answer does seem logical,’ Ella said. Aneka had told her and Gillian about the odd glitches in her systems while they were trawling through more of the computer’s databanks. ‘Though you’re right that it seems odd that they just didn’t run longer the night they were delayed if they could do that.’

‘Perhaps some other factor made them run longer,’ Gillian suggested. ‘The sector checks, for example.’

‘Yeah,’ Aneka conceded. ‘There’s probably a perfectly reasonable explanation, and that sounds like a good one.’

‘What does Al have to say about it?’

‘Al’s busy. He’s been quiet all morning. I think he even told Cassandra he would be too busy to talk today.’

Ella giggled. ‘Those two are getting very pally.’

‘They have a mutual interest and they’re both volitional AIs.’

‘Mutual interest?’

‘Cassandra finds people fascinating and Al was engineered to observe me and my interactions with others. I think she finds Al interesting too. She’s an emergent, right? He was created with a specific purpose. She finds his psychology interesting. I find it… I can’t get my head around being created to serve and liking it.’ She frowned. ‘It’s like the robots on Alpha Mensae Four. They no longer had a purpose, so they elected to terminate themselves. I just… don’t get it.’

‘You can’t really compare an AI with a Human mind,’ Ella replied. ‘Cassandra is closer because she essentially created herself, but even she has some drivers dictated by the form she was created from. You should ask her about it. Al is another thing entirely. His software was engineered for a specific set of tasks, just like… a medical robot. Those tasks are complex and require a sentient mind to perform, so he has a fully functioning mind, but he was made to
want
to perform them.’

‘There is a technique which produces similar effects on a Jenlay,’ Gillian commented. ‘It was banned early in the life of the Federation, even as a punishment, but it works. You place nanofibres in the brain which stimulate the pleasure centres when certain behaviours are performed. The subject quickly begins to do as they have been wired to do because they enjoy it.’

Aneka grimaced. ‘That’s…’

‘Reprehensible at best,’ Gillian said, nodding, ‘though I’d have to say that some of the techniques used to eliminate learned anti-social behaviours only differ in that they don’t involve invasive brain surgery. The ban came because a group of assassins had been created and hotwired to enjoy killing. Even then it was only because they killed a Senator.’

Aneka shook her head. The future still managed to throw up things that perplexed her. It was not that different from her time in a lot of ways, but sometimes she came across something she just found difficult to come to terms with. Then again, if the technology had been available, would it have been banned?
Yes,
she thought,
and people would have done it anyway.

14.8.524 FSC.

There was no noticeable delay in waking up and everything was ‘optimal.’ Al was, however, at a loss to explain the odd behaviour of the last two nights. ‘I found absolutely nothing out of the ordinary,’ he said once Aneka had watched her diagnostic displays scroll past with more attention than usual. ‘All systems appear to be running at their normal efficiency. There are no bad physical sectors in your long-term storage matrix. Your brain and my computer cores are operating at full efficiency.’

‘So… if there was something wrong, it’s corrected itself. I mean, that’s what the nanothings do, right? They find problems and fix them?’

‘Yes, but they report the problems to a central coordination program. The issue and the resolution of it are reported each morning. I have access to every single problem they have fixed since you were brought online.’

Aneka stared at the inside of her eyelids for a few seconds. ‘What about the missing two hours? Anything odd there.’

‘Yes, and no.’

‘Very Zen.’

‘Well…’ If Aneka did not know better she would have said that the AI was annoyed that he did not have the answers. Actually, she did not know better. Maybe the fact that he was supposed to be her support and was failing to diagnose this problem was really irritating him.

‘Just tell me what you’ve found. We can work through this together and figure out what’s wrong. Hell, we’ve got Abraham and Delta here. Between you, me, a genius, and a robotics technician we can probably work this out.’

‘Very well. I found nothing.’

‘That’s… not much to work with.’

‘True, but it is significant. I found
nothing.
’

Aneka considered the statement. ‘You mean, like something was deleted?’

‘Or not recorded.
Everything
you experience is recorded, even your… dreams, for want of a better word.’