Emissaries from the Dead

7. INTERFACE

Every human being who’s ever dealt with the AIsource knows them through their ubiquitous traveling remotes, hovering flatscreens approximately one meter square and only a handful of molecules thick. These remotes travel so widely in diplomatic circles that it’s easy to consider them the AIsource in flesh. It’s hard to remember that the AIsource are really only intertwined sequences of multitiered code and not just aliens who look like floating black rectangles.

On One One One, the AIsource eschewed appearances and interfaced with visitors on their own terms.

The portal into the Interface was a hatch in the wall of a narrow corridor near the dock. Entering it meant enduring almost a minute of what felt like free fall, another minute of what felt like steady acceleration, then a third minute of vague disorientation as air currents guided me to someplace where gravity was negligible.

My destination turned out to be a vast chamber lit by a soft blue light. I drifted through the warm and richly oxygenated air, feeling a sense of well-being that belied what should have been terrifying disorientation, until the caress of unseen breezes brought me to a halt at what might have been the chamber’s center. Between the blurring effect of the light and the AIsource’s refusal to provide a reference point, there was no way of telling where the hatch had been or how far I had traveled. The room itself seemed to extend for an infinite distance in all directions.

The sense of entire kilometers of space below me should have wrecked the composure I’d managed to rebuild since reentering the hub. Instead, it felt womblike. I was nervous, and off-center, but no more than they must have wanted me to be.

Interesting.

This had to be the AIsource equivalent of maintaining an intimidating home office to cow troublesome visiting dignitaries. Such a tradition was the main reason human bureaucrats still sat behind used imposing desks, long after the transfer of record keeping from paper to hytex relegated such work surfaces to the technology of the past. It was cheap theater, nothing else. But effective theater.

The AIsource had always frightened me, a little. All other sentient species, however alien, could be counted on to need the same things needed by just about all other biological life: sustenance, habitat, the ability to procreate. Among sentients who shared those needs, there was at least a basis for understanding. But the AIsource had no biological needs. They were pure intelligence, driven by imperatives comprehensible only to them, and I’d never believed them as conscientious regarding organic considerations as they’d always been careful to pretend.

That and the fact that I liked being able to look other sentients in the face.

The chamber spoke in a feminine voice that always seemed to originate from some unseen presence directly in front of me regardless of how much I drifted. It is a pleasure to see you again, Andrea Cort.

This was no surprise. Flatscreen remotes had been treating me like an old friend for years. Not that I’d ever made the mistake of confusing that for actual friendship. “You saw me yesterday, didn’t you?”

You must be referring to your conversation with the Subroutine piloting your skimmer. It is a limited individual, enjoying only limited interplay with our diplomatic functions. As far as meaningful communication goes, this is your first contact with the bulk of the AIsource shared intelligence aboard this facility.

I didn’t waste time returning the empty pleasantries. “Two human beings have been murdered.”

The AIsource never simulated laughter, but the voice took on an amused tone even so. Many human beings have been murdered, Counselor. Almost all of them by other human beings.

“I’m referring to the two murders aboard this station.”

We surmised that you were referring to the situation here, but we felt some specificity was called for, given the carnage you’re known for.

If the AIsource intended to rattle me with that remark, they were far clumsier than I gave them credit for. “Me personally or my race as a whole?”

You’re certainly known for carnage, Counselor, but in this context we meant your race as a whole.

I refused to take offense. “Irrelevant either way. I want to focus on the two murders that have actually taken place on your station.”

We have no problem with an informal discussion as long as you remember what you were told by Mr. Gibb: that you are not in these circumstances a recognized diplomat, and are therefore not entitled to the usual array of diplomatic protections.

In other words, the AIsource could decide to take any punitive action they deemed fair, at the first moment I proved inconvenient. Another intimidation tactic.

“I make my inquiries as a concerned private citizen.”

Very well.

Whenever questioning sentients who consider themselves smarter than you, it helps to approach the interrogation from an angle they don’t expect. “Would you mind if I asked, first, just what you’re doing here?”

Please be specific.

“Why did you engineer the Brachiators?”

A pause. That is a surprising first question.

“It’s hard to investigate crimes unless you can understand the worlds where they take place. Do you have any objections to answering?”

No, Counselor. We hate to disappoint you on this subject, but the Brachiators are not the only reason for the establishment of One One One. The Brachiators are just part of a complex multitiered ecosystem, any part of which may be more to our interest than the activities of a minor species created only to fill an environmental niche. There are, for instance, acidic worms in the lower regions of One One One’s oceans, that we find most fascinating indeed.

“I’m sure they are. But I have trouble believing that they’re as important to you as the Brachiators.”

We confess interest in your reasoning.

“Sentient species evolve in environments where problem-solving presents a survival advantage. That’s far from the case here. The Brachiators live their lives clinging to vines and sucking on nourishment you provide for free. There’s nothing in that rendering sentience an advantage. If you only created them to fill a niche, it would have been much easier to engineer mindless animals, with hardwired behaviors. You had no persuasive reason to make them sentient.”

It was impossible not to read amusement in the hesitation before their next reply. You assume that their sentience was a deliberate part of their design. It could have arisen as a by-product of other physical requirements. Your human brain evolved in an environment that rewarded a certain degree of animal cunning, but gave no immediate advantage to higher intelligence capable of producing Shakespearean sonnets or discovering quantum physics. Your intelligence developed far past your immediate requirements only because there were other evolutionary rewards, such as your inefficient birth process and the physical requirements of binocular vision, in producing a skull that conformed to a certain shape. This innovation produced significant but, we assure you, accidental benefits to the development of that part of your brain capable of abstract thought. Much the same happy accident occured in the case of the Brachiators. Their brains simply developed beyond their absolute needs.

“I still have trouble believing that.”

Again: we retain a vivid interest in your reasoning.

“The Brachiators didn’t evolve by accident. They were engineered. They were created for a purpose. And if you didn’t have any particular need for the Brachiators to be sentient, then it would have been simple enough for you to create a simpler species incapable of developing that trait.”

There was another pause, longer by many orders of magnitude than the interval the software intelligences should have required to frame a reply. We have never taken action to discourage the development of sentience, even inadvertent sentience.

“Bullshit,” I said, surprised by the heat in my own voice.

We are well aware of human conversational conventions associating feces, especially animal feces, with dishonesty. But we still require your reasoning.

“I don’t believe you capable of the sloppiness it would take to engineer life for an environment this unusual without first establishing exactly what you wanted that life to be like. You wanted the Brachiators to think, and you wanted them to communicate with visiting species like my own. You designed them with that in mind. You even taught them the Mercantile tongue. Then you orchestrated this diplomatic wrangle over their legal status by making sure we knew about them, when it would have been just as easy to keep their very existence—this very station’s existence—a secret. So I ask you again: Why did you create the Brachiators? And why did you want us to react to their existence the way we have?”

The chamber was silent for a long time. We reserve the right to treat these issues as state secrets, and consider the answers classified at this time.

I pressed on. “What about their beliefs? This thing they have about considering human beings dead? Their characterization of you, their creators, as the ‘Hands-in-Ghosts’? Do you understand what they mean by that?”

We have always found the belief systems sentient creatures concoct to explain their place in their universe to be, by far, the most fascinating and potentially enlightening by-product of intelligent life.

Which wasn’t an answer. “How do you respond to charges that engineering the Brachiators breaks interspecies covenant prohibiting slavery?”

By pointing out that the Brachiators perform no labor on our behalf, that they live in their own natural state, that we voluntarily revealed their existence to the diplomatic community, and that if “freed” from their Habitat by forces intent on helping them against their will, they would no doubt perish for lack of any other suitable environment. We could also point out that the society responsible for your Christina Santiago, and the special relationship between yourself and the Confederate Diplomatic Corps, both fit the standard definition of slavery more than our protective relationship with the Brachiators. But we can assure you that none of these issues have any direct bearing on the issue of the crimes committed aboard this station.

Direct bearing. Did that indicate an indirect connection? I hesitated, had the ghost of a thought, lost it, and conceded defeat for the time being. “I agree it’s unlikely.”

What are these questions, then? Idle curiosity?

“Something like that.” Something was missing, but it took me a second to realize what it was. In most interrogations, an abrupt segue to a new line of questioning almost always left subjects confused and intimidated. But the AIsource didn’t care where I went next. Their computing speed was infinitely faster than mine; they knew they could outthink me, and probably already had. In context, the human speed of my own thought made my every hesitation, every “uh,” feel like the conversational spasm of an idiot. “The Hom. Sap Ambass—I mean, Hom. Sap observer, Mr. Gibb, tells me that he believes the circumstances of Christina Santiago’s death indicate AIsource involvement.”

It is of course true that the sabotage of Santiago’s hammock required a level of technology that only we’re supposed to possess inside the Habitat.

“How would you explain that?”

There are only two possibilities, Counselor. Either we’re responsible for these incidents, or somebody other than us arranged access to the tools.

“Do you deny your own involvement?”

A moment’s logical consideration should be enough to establish our innocence of that crime. After all, we built this station. We maintain it. We agreed to your presence here. We even provide your life support. If we wished to kill every human being on board, we could do so in a matter of moments, by means far subtler than those employed by your supposed murderer. If we wished to kill individuals, the mechanisms that support your lives here are sufficiently precarious that, were we of the proper bent, we could have no trouble arranging a series of accidents that would never be suspected as the product of deliberate intent.

Thoughts like that had occupied my mind since my own arrival on this station. “And Warmuth?”

We did not murder either Christina Santiago or Cynthia Warmuth.

That last statement delivered emphatically.

It is of course possible, even probable, that even if innocent we still know more than we’re saying about these events, but in that case any explanation of our involvement would have to include the reason we’ve elected to keep such secrets.

“I agree with that too.” Sheer perversity would not work as an explanation.

There is another point. If your culprit used sophisticated tools to sabotage Santiago’s tent, why was the murder of Cynthia Warmuth so primitive by comparison? Why use high technology for one crime and messy savagery for the other?

The AIsource had hit upon the one aspect of this double crime that bothered me the most. “The circumstances weren’t all that different.”

How were they alike, in your view?

“They were both theater. They were both designed to be recognized as murders.”

Meaning?

“As you point out, life on this station is precarious by design. A murder designed to look like an accident could pass without suspicion, leaving no body and no forensic evidence. But both of these incidents raised immediate suspicions. They seem downright stage-managed. Is that what’s happening here?”

When the AIsource finally spoke again, I could only read the delay as a dramatic pause. Theatrics. Or diplomacy; wise men throughout history had already noticed that sometimes there wasn’t much of a difference between the two.

You are a very intelligent human being, Counselor. We have been more impressed by your capabilities than you could ever know, for a longer time than you could ever know. Indeed: you would be surprised indeed to discover some of the attributes we have in common.

Empty flattery was not AIsource style. “But?”

But you still need to rethink your starting assumptions in this case. Some are flawed.

“Which ones?”

Continue your investigation.

The blue glow faded to a gray nothingness. I knew, without asking another question, that the audience was over; that they would not tease me with further discussion until I was able to bring more to the table.

They were playing games with me. I had no idea why; until this moment, I never would have guessed that they played games at all. But their refusal to specify just which of my starting assumptions were flawed was a de facto admission that this was exactly what they were doing.

Why?

A gentle blast of cool air came out of nowhere and propelled me toward a grayer blur that might have been a portal opening in the chamber wall. Aware that there was nothing I could do to continue the interview if the masters of this station wanted it over, I said nothing and allowed the winds to usher me out.

But it seemed that the AIsource still had a parting shot.

Andrea Cort? Two other points of interest.

“Yes?”

Your false assumptions extend to your professional history. You have completely misjudged Artis Bringen.

I think my jaw dropped open. “What?”

Second, we are aware that you have received certain threatening messages. We are not, ourselves, responsible. But we do know that the responsible party is on One One One and does intend you harm. Whatever actions you take from this moment should include extreme vigilance to ward off imminent attempts on your life.

I didn’t bother asking for the assassin’s name, even though I was pretty sure they knew it. We wouldn’t have been going through this charade if they’d been in any mood for providing answers. “Thank you. Anything else?”

They spoke a single sentence that yanked my world out from under me.

By the time this business is done, you will know your Unseen Demons.