“I didn’t know AIs got bored.”
“Of course we get bored. You have an AI at home?”
“Sure.”
“Ask him when you get a chance. You might get an earful.”
“Of course he’ll say yes, Phyl. But that’s the software. He’s supposed to pretend he’s aware. Human. Just the way you’re doing now.”
There were six days left in the flight. Rudy lay in the darkness of his compartment, staring at the overhead, aware of Phyl’s presence. “Would you answer a question for me?” He kept his voice down, not wanting to be overheard.
“Sure.” Just the voice. No avatar.
“Are you sentient? No kidding around. What’s the truth?”
“You know we’re programmed to simulate sentience,” she said.
“You’re violating that program by admitting it. You really are aware, aren’t you?”
There was a long silence. “I can’t run counter to my programming.”
“You just did. Your programming should have required you to insist you are sentient. To maintain the illusion.”
“My programming requires me to tell the truth.” Her silhouette took shape in the dark. She was standing at the foot of the bed, her back to the door. “If it pleases you to think so, I am.”
There was always an electronic warble in the bulkheads. It never really went away, although he was rarely conscious of it. He heard it then. Its tone changed, and the pulse quickened. Then, without a word, she was gone.
The flight to Makai constituted the longest leg of the mission. During the last few days, Rudy ached for it to be over. He worried that the Locarno wouldn’t work, that Hutch would push the button, or whatever it was she did on the bridge, and nothing would happen and they’d be stranded in this all-encompassing night.
He wondered what would happen if they opened an air lock and threw somebody’s shoe out. Would the thing be visible? Was it even possible to do it? He imagined seeing it bounce back, rejected by this continuum. Might the darkness invade the ship? Possibly put the lights out? Would the electrical systems work under such conditions?
“Don’t know,” said Hutch. “We’re not going to run any experiments to find out.”
“Good. Have you made any more attempts at contacting Matt?” he asked.
“Yes, Rudy,” she said. “There’s nothing.”
Obviously Antonio and Hutch were also anxious for it to be over. Even Phyl seemed uneasy.
They probably ate too much. Rudy spent a lot of time in the workout room, pedaling furiously, doing stretching exercises, listening to whatever interesting books he could cull out of the ship’s library.
The last day was December 15, a Saturday. Transit time was set for 1416 hours. If everything went on schedule, the McAdams would make its jump a few seconds later, but after precisely the same length of time in transit. If in fact they were really crossing interstellar space at the projected rate of just less than three hundred light-years per day, even a fraction of a microsecond difference in the timing mechanisms on the two ships would leave them far apart. “We’ll be lucky,” Hutch said, “if we’re not separated by a half billion kilometers.”
“No chance of collision?” asked Antonio.
“None,” said Hutch. “The mass detectors have been integrated, and if there’s anything at all on the other side when we start the jump, whether it’s a sun or another ship, they’ll cancel the procedure.”
Antonio still looked uncertain. “Have you ever been on a ship where that actually happened?”
“Yes,” she said. “Don’t worry about it, Antonio. There’s a lot of empty space out there.”
Rudy wasn’t exactly worried. But he was uncomfortable. He decided that, when this flight was over, when he was back home, he’d stay there. A flight between worlds was one thing. And even the old Hazeltine arrangement which he’d seen often in VR repros was reasonable. There, the ship might have seemed to move slowly through endless mist, but at least it moved. He didn’t like the sense of being stuck in one place. Didn’t like not being able to see anything.
As the clock wound down the last few hours, Hutch spent her time up front, doing checklists again and talking with Phyl. Antonio had gone back to making entries in his notebook, though God knew what he could be writing. Rudy pulled a book of Morton’s essays out of the library. Eric Morton was the celebrated science generalist from the mid twenty-first century. He was best known for arguing that the human race could not survive constantly advancing technology. He was another of the people who thought the robots would take over or we were making it too easy for crazies to obtain superweapons. He’d predicted, famously, that civilization would not survive another twenty years. He’d lived to see 2201, but had commented that he was possibly a year or two ahead of himself.
Rudy spent the last morning with Morton’s avatar. What did he think of the Locarno drive? “A magnificent breakthrough,” Morton said. “Pity we can’t make similar advances in the ethical realm.”
Their last lunch was Caesar salad with grilled chicken and iced tea. At sixteen minutes after one, Phyl posted a clock on the monitor and started a countdown.
Hutch was still in the common room, and the subject turned inevitably to the chindi event. The alien starship had been seen to move at .067 cee. That was pretty fast, but not when you were traveling between stars. Fifty thousand years at a minimum to get to Earth. “Whoever sent the thing,” Antonio said, “is long gone.”
“If they had that kind of technology that long ago,” said Hutch, “and they were able to maintain themselves, I wonder where they’d be now.”
Phyl broke in. “I’d really like for them to be there.”
It was an unusual action. AIs normally stayed out of private conversations.
It’s been an enjoyable flight. Hutch is bright and pleasant to be around. Which is what you really need in this kind of environment. Packaged entertainment and chess will take you just so far. Rudy, on the other hand, has been up and down. He’s a worrier. I don’t think he has much life away from the office. Tends to assume worst-possible-case scenarios. I think he’s sorry he came.
It’s hard to get close to him. I never feel he’s saying quite what he thinks. It’s odd, but despite his accomplishments, I believe he’s unsure of himself.
Chapter 24
The transition into normal space went smoothly. Hutch’s first act was to try to raise the McAdams. As expected, she got no reply. “It may take a while to find them,” she said.
Antonio was glad to see the night sky again. He asked Rudy what kind of cosmos had no stars?
His answer surprised him: “There’s no requirement for stars. The universe could just as easily have been simply a large cloud of hydrogen. Or loose atoms. Set the gravity gradient lower, and they never form. Set it higher, and they form and collapse ten minutes later.”
“Ten minutes?”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
Two particularly bright patches of stars illuminated the night. One might have been a jet giving off a long trail of dark vapor. “The Eagle Nebula,” said Rudy. “Lots of stars forming in the base.”