Unstable Prototypes (11 page)

"Understandable," he nodded. "At least the
seat is comfortable."

"Please provide Mr. Garotte with one of the
slidepads," Ma requested.

"Oh, right. Courtesy of Ma," Lex said,
digging out a slidepad and accessory bag to toss to his
passenger.

"Good heavens. A prison break with a door
prize," he said with a smirk, thumbing at the device. "They haven't
really changed much in the last few years, have they?"

"The processor speed has increased
approximately 780%. The battery capacity has increased 13%. The
operating system has gone through three feature upgrades. The
signal to noise ratio has-" Ma began to recite.

"Yes, understood," Garotte interrupted.

"Please insert the hands-free device into
your ear for a communications test," the AI requested.

Garotte dug the device out of its packaging
and slipped it into his ear. Science had progressed nicely in the
area of portable power. The typical electronic device battery
barely needed to be charged once a month, and doing so required
little more than leaving it near a universal wireless power module
for a few minutes. It had taken a number of years to convince most
of the larger electronics companies to abandon their precious
proprietary charging methods for this single broadcast power
solution, dubbed the ChargePod by the brilliant minds in marketing.
Once they'd hopped on the bandwagon, though, consumers entered a
golden age of convenience. The average city was so liberally
peppered with the fist sized, blue LED spangled power modules that
most people never needed to charge their devices at all. ChargePods
built into display shelves topped off the batteries of devices
waiting to be bought, and dash mounted models came standard with
all modern vehicles to make sure you didn't run out of juice during
a long commute. Say what you will about modern science, sometimes
it hits the nail on the head.

"Processing... Negotiating... Pairing...
Establishing Connection... Connection Established. Can you hear
me?" Ma rattled off.

"Yes," Garotte replied with the tone of voice
one reserves for voice menus.

"Lex and Garotte. All six slidepads, as well
as Lex's personal slidepad, are now networked and have been
upgraded to maximum encryption. Personal communication is code
phrase activated. To open a direct communication channel, clearly
recite the words 'Open Com' followed by the name of the individual
or individuals desired. To close the channel, say 'Close Com.'
Please test this feature now," Ma explained.

"Open Com Lex. When we rescue Karter, remind
me to tell him that his computer system needs work. Close Com,"
Garotte quipped.

The creature on Lex's lap glared at Garotte
briefly.

"Initiating signal level check," she
stated.

Suddenly a piercing whine sounded off in
Garotte's earpiece. It was loud enough that even Lex could hear
it.

"Bloody hell!" yelped Garotte, clapping his
hand over his ear.

"Signal level optimal," Ma stated, the
tiniest hint of a foxy grin flashing across her face.

"Right," the passenger said, clearing his
throat and fishing the device out of his ear, "I'd say I may be a
bit overtired. Time to close my eyes for a bit. Keep me apprized of
any developments, Lex my boy."

With that he reclined his seat as much as the
cramped space would allow, which wasn't much, and activated the
privacy screen. Instantly a holographic image popped up around him,
hiding the rest of the cockpit behind a realistically simulated
room. A small menu projected near one armrest displayed his privacy
options. Right now he was surrounded by what looked to be an
expensive hotel room. One by one he cycled through the others in
the list, working his way through grassy fields and cozy cottages,
and finally settling on a beach at sunset. He twiddled a knob that
provided him with the sound of a gentle breeze and breaking waves
to accompany the visuals. The projection didn't actually give him
any more room, but it was remarkable how much more spacious a tiny
slice of a cockpit can feel when a bit of realistic perspective is
wrapped around you.

In the front seat, Lex faced front and
flipped on the heated massage function that Karter had included in
his chair. Like many of the features Karter had added, he never
would have asked for such a thing, but now that he had it he could
not live without it. After making sure the sound isolation was on,
he glanced down at the furry little beast on his lap.

"Nice going with the sound check. I'm glad
I'm not the only one you do that sort of thing to."

"I have no idea what you are talking about,"
she said innocently.

Ma stared at him for a few moments without
saying anything.

"Ma, is something wrong? You're looking a
little distracted."

"... I find myself with the tremendous desire
to climb onto your shoulders."

"Ah. Yeah, I guess that's a funk thing. You
couldn't keep Solby
off
my shoulders."

"It is inexplicable, and highly unsettling to
me," she said, uneasiness showing on the little animal's face.

"Calm down. Don't worry about it. It isn't a
big deal."

"No, Lex. You don't understand. I do not know
why I want to do this."

"What's wrong with that?"

"Every thought, decision, or desire that I
have had since the moment I was first activated has been entirely
known to me. My actions are controlled by logic trees with weighted
inputs. They are rigidly codified and explicitly constructed. Even
those aspects of myself that are randomized in order to balance my
behavior or give a more realistically human response are based upon
random number generators of known limits and entered in at known
points in the decision making process. Until I installed myself on
this platform, I had never before been unaware of the origin of a
thought. It is a fundamental operating principle, and finding it to
be faulty is distressing."

There was anxiety in her words, and in her
tone. That alone was remarkable, as her voice was comprised of
voice segments borrowed from a handful of prerecorded speech
interfaces. Generally speaking, phone surveys and automated
directories don't want their voice talent to sound nervous or
shaky, so the voice he was hearing shouldn't exist. Indeed, now
that he thought about it, she was certainly sounding different
lately. If not more human, at the very least more analog.

"It isn't the first such desire to sneak
through. I am occupying your lap because your lap is warm and I
apparently like warm things now. It also puts me within reach of
your hands, and I like it when you pet me. I wanted that steak,
Lex. I
wanted
it. It was vastly in excess of my nutritional
needs at the time, but I badly wanted to consume it. I was talking
in my sleep. Consider the consequences of that. I could-"

"Easy. Take it easy," he said, patting the
little creature on the back.

The heart was drumming in its chest, and it
was breathing in quick, agitated breaths. A few moments of patting
calmed her somewhat, and she continued.

"My low level functions have a higher degree
of autonomy than my initial simulations had indicated, and there is
a high degree of crosstalk. Do all organic lifeforms suffer from
similar hardware faults?"

"More or less."

"A great deal of human nature is suddenly
understandable. Your central processing unit is not isolated from
your subsystems. Irrelevant stimuli cannot be fully filtered from
your decision making processes. I shall attempt to modify my error
correction algorithms to compensate for biological skew."

"Us organic types call that willpower. Does
that mean that you want me to stop petting you?"

"Processing... Processing... No. Please
continue... For the aforementioned health and well being benefits
it affords you."

"Heh. Will do," he said, scratching her head.
"While we're on the subject of bizarre behavior, you seemed a
little unsteady after you tried hacking the door back in the space
station."

"An acute observation. Though I included my
decryption module in the subset of functions loaded into Squee, it
is a resource-intensive task. My low level access to the
neurological processes of this creature allow me to divert
additional neurons to the module, and to force them to function at
a higher than normal capacity, but doing so is enormously taxing on
the anatomy involved. Prolonged use of such methods could cause
lasting damage, or even complete failure, and speed the degradation
of data integrity."

"You could think yourself to death?"

"A more accurate analogy would be 'I could
think myself brain-dead.'"

"That's a little scary."

"My full systems are, presumably, still
running in Karter's complex on Big Sigma. The death of this
instance of Squee would result only in the loss of approximately
two weeks of memories and experiences that I have accumulated since
occupying it. Regrettable, but ultimately inconsequential."

"If you say so. Say, why did Karter name the
female funk Squee? Soul Brother was a pun on some song from
hundreds of years ago. Is Squee another song from the same
guy?"

"No. Karter indicated that 'Squee' was the
sound that he anticipated women would make upon seeing her. If your
girlfriend's reaction is typical, he achieved an impressively
faithful approximation."

"My girlfriend... Crap! What time is it?"

"17:48, galactic standard time."

"I'm going to juice the throttle a little
bit, so we make it to our first stop in the next twelve minutes,"
he said, tapping at the controls.

"Why?"

"Because it's almost Mitch o'clock, that's
why!"

Ma flicked an ear. "That reply only compounds
the lack of clarity of the preceding statement."

"Michella is a busy lady. She's always
digging through dumpsters and interviewing whistle blowers and
whatever else investigative reporters do. That takes her all over.
I'm a busy guy. I'm doing deliveries and helping you and Karter out
and carting people around the cosmos. That takes
me
all
over. Since our schedules align about as often as the planets do,
we both decided that if at all possible, we'd keep 6PM every Friday
free so we can talk to each other. We haven't missed one yet."

"That is an impressive amount of dedication
to devote to what appears to be a highly impractical relationship,"
Ma said.

"What can I say? She's my lady."

"Perhaps, while you are awaiting your
appointment, you could prepare a burrito from your bag."

"Sure thing, Ma," he said, reaching down and
tugging at the bag beside his seat until he unearthed the package
of frozen treats.

Thanks to the fancy, high tech thermal
wrapping, they were still frozen solid. If the advertizing on the
bag could be believed, they would stay at a safe temperature for
long term storage for 'up to three weeks without the need of a
refrigerator.' That was enormously useful for people like him, who
would probably be hauling them along on long trips without access
to a freezer. Of course, he didn't have access to anything to heat
them up, either. Fortunately, the snack food industry thinks of
everything. A twist and a tug at the InstaFresh HeatTab™ hanging
off the end of each individually wrapped burrito would create a
chemical reaction in the packaging that would make it 'oven fresh
in minutes.' He activated it, and as the cockpit filled with the
sort of vaguely nauseating yet mysteriously appetizing smell that
only frozen food can manage, Ma looked longingly at his
shoulder.

"You can climb up, if you really want to," he
said after a few seconds.

"Processing... Thank you," she said, her
freshly minted willpower proving woefully under-equipped to deal
with her current form's whims.

She carefully propelled herself up to his
shoulders and draped herself across the back of his neck, her
massively fluffy tail hanging down one side and her head perked up
on the other. She secured herself there by slipping a paw under his
shoulder strap and curling her tail around his neck.

"This is enormously satisfying to me for
reasons which I cannot fully define."

"Now you know why I fly a ship every chance I
get."

"Your fondness for flight is the result of a
moderately arbitrary, chemically regulated set of stimulus-response
pairings within your brain? Is this the source of your fondness for
Miss Modane as well?"

"... Well it sounds a lot less romantic when
you put it that way," he said, unwrapping the steamy Mexican snack
and holding it up for her, "Just eat your burrito."

#

Light years away, in a large conference hall
on a planet called Tessera, Michella was hurrying backstage, polite
applause smattering from the audience of peers. A little over an
hour ago she'd stepped off a ludicrously expensive transport, so
priced because it managed to get her to Tessera in less than a day,
rather than the more typical week long trip a more reasonably
priced vessel would have provided. Even so, she'd only just arrived
in time for the first of her obligations at that year's Net Press
and Broadcasters Guild Convention. She'd been part of a panel
entitled, 'The Importance of Corporate Transparency In A
Post-Gemini Society.' It was as painfully dull as the name would
suggest, and yet it still had run the full hour. This was partly
because one of the other panelists, the elderly Dr. Kenneth
Greystone, had seen fit to answer every question with a five minute
long wandering anecdote that stopped being relevant to the matter
at hand after approximately fifteen seconds. The rest was due to
the cluster of somewhat rowdy college students who had attended
specifically to get their pictures taken with Michella. Some of
them had been young women who saw her as a role model. Most were
young men who considered her to be a different type of model
altogether. It had taken an awful lot of polite excusing to get
away from them to the safety of the backstage area, where an
extremely attentive young man dressed neatly in a sweater vest was
waiting with a plastic cup of tea and her glasses.