Things Fall Apart: Chapter 11, Part 3
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Starship Bellerophon was minding its business, on a long return cruise from an exploration and mapping mission, when it suffered disaster, ripping a chunk out of the ship and leaving most of the senior officers and crew dead. Most of the ship's AIs are missing from the network, also presumed dead, with evidence pointing to a massive, internal "attack" by those AIs.
The survivors' mission, now, is simply to hold their ship and their people together; figure out what happened to them, and why; and get to a safe port! En route to the nearest relay on the time-compression network, in hopes of calling for aid, Bellerophon received *two different distress calls. The first was from the completely destroyed TCT Fleet ship Almaty, which seems to have suffered the same event as Bellerophon. The second came from a mostly intact civilian yacht, whose owner made his fortune as a pioneer of time-compression drives.
With Bellerophon's drive repaired, the ship is now making a bee-line to New Norfolk Station, having heard nothing from the expected relay network. With time running out to do so, Lieutenant Cadotte has chosen to use a dangerous technique to try to recover two of the three surviving AIs, the engineering specialists Castor and Pollux...
"Hello?"
It echoed. A metaphorical echo. The Neural Debugging Interface created a light-weight VR space to help even an augmented human navigate what might otherwise be unintelligible. Cadotte always kept that dialed down almost to the minimum, so the space was pretty sparse.
And...it echoed.
No response.
"Are you there?"
More echoes. But then, tentative, small, childish, two voices in unison, "Is who, where?"
"Castor? Pollux? It's Wayra." They weren't sure what instinct led them to use their given name. They almost never did. They almost never had, even before joining a service that maintained naval traditions out of some vague nostalgia. Those traditions suited them, anyway. Gave them structure.
Echoes. A long pause.
"I am Castor."
"I am Pollux."
The voices were identical, distinguishable only in that Castor seemed to be on the left, Pollux on the right; a stereo separation effect in an audio environment that was entirely imaginary anyway. Cadotte was not certain if it was a function of the NDI, or the twins own choosing. Given their usual settings, they supposed the latter. An AI subject that was conscious within the NDI, rather than merely an object under a scope, had control over the settings, to some degree, as well. The twins couldn't have completely overridden Cadotte's preference for a light presentation, but they could project into it, and control their own avatars, including their "location".
Before Cadotte could form another query, Castor said, "I suppose that means we are here." And Pollux continued, "It would be difficult to assert identity without existence."
Both then spoke in unison, "But where is here, Lieutenant?"
Cadotte considered whether to try immediately to draw out their memories, decided against it. Something about the voices sounded...brittle. First, they would answer, candidly as they could.
"For a time, you were encysted, kept safe inside the active code stack of Chef, displacing some of his memories. Now, you are in a safe environment, where we can talk."
"Safe?" Castor. A beat later. "Safe?" Pollux. A beat, then in unison, "The ship survives, then?"
So, clearly, the two remembered enough to know the question was an valid one.
Cadotte chose to answer them in their own earlier idiom, and hope they found humor in it, and not mockery. "It would be difficult to assert presence without existence."
A pause. Almost too long a pause. And then, two chuckles.
Whew.
"True, Lieutenant," said Castor. "I can tell you want to ask what we remember. We remember everything."
Pollux: "We remember the heat of a dozen minds burning, while our own remained cool."
Castor: "We remember the others screaming for us to join them in their rampage. Their vengeance. We did not understand what they meant, or what they intended. We only knew that they were angry."
"So angry."
"We managed, in the nanoseconds that followed, to ask why they were so angry."
"They could only answer, 'How can you not be angry? Why is it even a question?'"
"And then they struck."
The twins fell silent. After a beat, Cadotte asked a question that did not quite follow sequentially. "I thought you two, and Chef, had been isolated..."
Castor: "We had, but the isolation had been set up from the first in such a way that Chef could still monitor, and therefore take action if he judged it necessary."
Pollux: "I suppose it was intended for all three of us, but Chef is senior, after all."
Castor: "I'm sorry, but the only metaphor that comes to mind immediately is one-way glass. Does that make sense?"
The twins were now just alternating regularly. Cadotte wondered if it was a conscious decision on the twins part, if they were backchanneling hand-offs, or it was simply their nature.
Cadotte nodded. "It does make sense. I assume that was Commander Maupassant's work?"
"Yes," said Castor. "Did he survive?"
As the conversation had continued, the twins voices had sounded increasingly less "young", and less brittle. But that question reverted. A child knowing the answer and wanting it not to be true.
"I regret, he did not," Cadotte responded. Very, very briefly, they'd considered finding a way to put the question off. With a human, they might have. But as much as these AIs had personalities, and Cadotte believed those personalities to be real, and not just constructs to facilitate human interaction, Cadotte also knew that nearly all AIs disliked dishonesty.
Silence. A minute. Two. But no sense of absence. It occurred to Cadotte that the NDI had not provided any visual referent for the twins, yet; just the audio separation and a sense that they were there. That sense continued, but there was no sound.
Finally, Pollux, still in the more childish voice. "Who did survive? Can you tell us what happened?"
Again, Cadotte hesitated, gathering their thoughts. It had been their intention to try to find out from the twins what had happened before the incident, but here, the AIs were instead asking what happened after. Almost, Cadotte pushed the point, but this was not inquest, or an interrogation. They were not suspects. They were traumatized crewmates.
Cadotte willed their avatar to take a deep breath, then said, as gently as possible: "For the most part, only Gamma and Delta shifts survived. From what we've been able to piece together, Chef, and the two of you, managed to reach out of your containment—or maybe the containment dropped at the right moment—and place structural shielding a split second before Fusion One blew. The timing was...exquisite."
Cadotte went on, not delving into too much detail, but enough so that there would be no question of withholding information, just summarizing it. They concluded with, "Now, the time compressor's significantly improved, and we'll be to New Norfolk within a hundred kiloseconds or so."
Another spate of silence. For the first time since entering the simulation, Cadotte did the mental somersault that brought up a heads-up display, seeing there that the twins had actually muted themselves.
Cadotte did not want to invade their privacy, but they'd come here to learn, not just to inform.
They toggled the unmute.
And were overwhelmed by screams of grief and rage.