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.”