Rathere's reaction to the holographic advertising on the agency's wall had matched the AI's prediction wonderfully: the widened eyes, the frozen step, the momentary hyperventilation. The machine's internal model of Rathere, part of its pedagogical software, grew more precise and replete every day. The software was designed for school tutors who interacted with their charges only a few hours a day, but Rathere and the AI were constant companions. The feedback between girl and machine built with an unexpected intensity.
And now, as the pressure lock hissed and rumbled, the minder relished its new configuration; its attenuated strands spider-webbed across Rathere's flesh, intimate as never before. It drank in the data greedily, like some thirsty polygraph recording capillary dilation, skin conductivity, the shudders and tensions of every muscle.
Then the lock buzzed, and they swam out into the crushing, planet-spanning ocean, almost one creature.
Isaah paced the tiny dimensions of his starship. The elections could be a gold mine or a disaster. A radical separatist party was creeping forward in the polls, promising to shut off interstellar trade. Their victory would generate seismically vast waves of information. Prices and trade relationships would change throughout the Expansion. Even the radicals' defeat would rock distant markets, as funds currently hedged against them heaved a sigh of relief.
But the rich stakes had drawn too much competition. Scoops like Isaah were in abundance here, and a number of shipping con-sortia had sent their own representatives. Their ships were stationed in orbit, bristling with courier drones like nervous porcupines.
Isaah sighed, and stared into the planetary ocean's darkness. Perhaps the day of freelance scoops was ending. The wild days of the early Expansion seemed like the distant past now. He'd read that one day drones would shrink to the size of a finger, with hundreds launched each day from every system. Or a wave that pro-pogated in metaspace would be discovered, and news would spread at equal speed in all directions, like the information cones of lightspeed physics.
When that happened, his small starship would become a rich man's toy, its profitable use suddenly ended. Isaah called up the airscreen graphic of his finances. He was so close to owning his ship outright. Just one more good scoop, or two, and he could retire to a life of travel among peaceful worlds instead of darting among emergencies and conflagrations. Maybe this trip…
Isaah drummed his fingers, watching the hourly polls like a doctor whose patient is very near the edge.
Rathere and the AI swam every day, oblivious to politics, following the glitter-trails of the behemoths. The huge animals excreted a constant wake of the photoactive algae they used for ballast. When Rathere swam through these luminescent microorganisms, the shockwaves of her passage catalyzed their photochemical reactions, a universe of swirling galaxies ignited by every stroke.
Rathere began to sculpt lightstorms in the phosphorescent medium. The algae hung like motes of potential in her path, invisible until she swam through them, the wake of her energies like glowing sculptures. She choreographed her swimming to leave great swirling structures of activated algae.
The AI found itself unable to predict these dances, to explain how she chose what shapes to make. Without training, without explicit criteria, without any models to follow, Rathere was creating order from this shapeless swarm of ejecta. Even the AI's pedagogical software offered no help.
But the AI saw the sculptures' beauty, if only in the expansion of Rathere's capillaries, the seemingly random firings of neurons along her spine, the tears in her eyes as the glowing algae faded back into darkness.
The AI plunged into an art database on the local net, trying to divine what laws governed these acts of creation. It discussed the light sculptures with Rathere, comparing their evanescent forms to the shattered structures of Camelia Parker or the hominid blobs of Henry Moore. It showed her millennia of sculpture, gauging her reactions until a rough model of her tastes could be constructed. But the model was bizarrely convoluted, disturbingly shaggy around the edges, with gaps and contradictions and outstretched, gerrymandered spurs that implied art no one had yet made.
The AI often created astrogational simulations. They were staggeringly complex, but at least finite. Metaspace was predictable; reality could be anticipated with a high degree of precision. But the machine's model of Rathere's aesthetic was post-hoc, a retrofit to her pure, instinctive gestures. It raised more questions than it answered.
While Rathere slept, the machine wondered how one learned to have intuition.
The elections came, and the radicals and their allies seized a razor-thin majority in the planetary Diet. Isaah cheered as his craft rose through the ocean. A scoop was within reach. He headed for a distant and obscure ore-producing system, expending vast quanities of fuel, desperate to be the first scoop there.
Rathere stood beside her rejoicing father, looking out through the receding ocean a bit sadly. She stroked her shoulder absently, touching the minder still stretched across her skin.
The minder's epidermal configuration had become permanent. Its strands were distributed to near invisibility in a microfiber-thin mesh across Rathere. Its nanorepair mechanisms attended to her zits and the errant hairs on her upper lip. It linked with her medical implants, the ship's AI taking control over the nuances of her insulin balance, her sugar level, and the tiny electrical jolts that kept her muscles fit. Rathere slept without covers now, the minder's skein warming her with a lattice of microscopic heating elements. In its ever-present blanket, she began to neglect sub-vocalizing their conversations, her endless one-sided prattle annoying Isaah on board the tiny ship.
"Zero point-five-six?" muttered Isaah to himself at the next customs sweep. The AI was developing much faster than its parameters should allow. Something unexpected was happening with the unit, and they were a long way from home. Unless Isaah was very careful, the AI might reach personhood before they returned to the HC.
He sent a coded message to an acquaintance in the Home Cluster, someone who dealt with such situations, just in case. Then he turned his attention to the local newsfeed.
The heavy element market showed no sudden changes over the last few weeks. Isaah's gamble had apparently paid off. He had stayed ahead of the widening ripples of news about the ocean planet's election. The economic Shockwave wasn't here yet.
He felt the heady thrill of a scoop, of secret knowledge that was his alone. It was like prognostication, a glimpse into the future. Elements extracted by giant turbine from that distant world's oceans were also mined from this system's asteroid belt. Soon, everyone here would be incrementally richer as the ocean planet pulled its mineral wealth from the Expansion common market. The markets would edge upwards across the board.
Isaah began to place his bets.
The dark-skinned boy looked down upon the asteroid field with a pained expression. Rathere watched the way his long bangs straightened, then curled to encircle his cheeks again when he raised his head. But her stomach clenched when she looked down through the transparent floor; the party was on the lowest level of a spin-gravitied ring, and black infinity seemed to be pulling at her through the glassene window. The AI lovingly recorded the parameters of this unfamiliar vertigo.
"More champers, Darien?" asked the fattest, oldest boy at the party.