She swallowed. Yerusha would listen though. She would greet the news without hostility. She would believe what she heard, and she would help. That was what mattered.
Dobbs glanced at the clock in her desk. The docking was finished. Yerusha would just be coming off-shift. She squeezed the box in her pocket and opened the hatch to the corridor.
Her timing, at least, was still good. Yerusha walked round the corridor’s bend with the careful gait of someone used to light gravity. She looked up at Dobbs and gave a two-fingered wave. “Hello, Fool.” She sounded tired. “I was beginning to think you’d jumped out an air lock. Want to get some lunch?”
Dobbs stomach rumbled, but she ignored it. “Actually, Pilot, I was…I wanted…to talk to you for a minute.”
Yerusha pulled up short in mid-stride, but she didn’t say anything. She just nodded, changed direction and stepped through the hatchway past Dobbs. Dobbs let the hatch cycle shut and turned and faced the pilot.
Yerusha sat down in the desk chair and looked up expectantly. Dobbs stared at her. She couldn’t make her mouth open.
“Is this is about what happened at The Farther Kingdom?” Yerusha folded her arms.
Dobbs sank onto her bunk. “Yes. Sort of. I found out who was responsible for the AI that we carried there.”
Yerusha leaned forward. “You mean it’s not this Amory Dane?”
“No,” Dobbs struggled for a moment but managed to finish the sentence. “It’s a Fool named Theodore Curran.”
“How’d you find this out?”
“He contacted me.”
Yerusha’s eyebrows shot up. “Without Lipinski’s watchdogs barking?”
Dobbs nodded. “Curran is…very good. He told me…” Come on, Dobbs, you’re going to tell her. Start now. “He told me he created our AI. He also told me he was not responsible for the fraud charges laid down on Asil Tamruc.”
Yerusha stiffened. “The Ninja Woman’s husband is under a fraud check? Crash and burn! That explains why she’s acting so crazy. And you thought Curran smudged the wire work?”
Dobbs nodded. “It’s a fake, the whole thing, that much is certain. But Curran says he didn’t do it. He said the Fool’s Guild is responsible.”
“He’s a smuggler, a lie probably doesn’t even register on his conscience.” Yerusha folded her arms and shook her head.
“I checked,” Dobbs went on. “To the best of my abilities. It looks like he was telling the truth.”
“What?” exclaimed Yerusha. “Heaven, Hell and hydrogen, why would your Guild want to frame Al Shei’s husband?”
“Because they’re afraid,” Dobbs said, and she knew that much was true. “They’re afraid she knows too much already, and they need to discredit her before she can tell anybody.”
“Too much already!” Yerusha flung her hands out. “From what Schyler told me, she barely knows anything! None of us do! Fractured and damn, Dobbs, what are your people so afraid of!”
“We’re afraid someone will find out we’re all artificial intelligences.”
Yerusha froze. Her eyes locked onto Dobbs. One muscle at a time, she straightened out her arms and laid her hands on her knees. “What did you say?”
“I am an artificial intelligence. All members of the Fool’s Guild are artificial intelligences. That’s why your friend didn’t get in. We have entrance exams for the look of the thing, but no Humans are ever admitted.” She couldn’t sit still. She got up and paced across the cabin. She could feel Yerusha’s gaze on her. “I am the AI that went rogue on Kerensk. The Fool’s Guild found me and pulled me out of the network. They took me to Guild Hall and assembled me a body from their bio-garden. I was trained to use it, like I was trained to use the network, and to be a Fool. I’m one of two thousand others.”
Yerusha’s breathing had gone harsh. The rasping sound echoed around the bare cabin. “That’s how you did it,” she croaked. “That’s how you were able to get in and out of the network at The Farther Kingdom.”
Dobbs nodded. “We can do it because we are born…we come into existence without Human senses, and with patterns of consciousness that are measurable and repeatable in an inorganic net. Even then our bodies have to be carefully engineered,” she tapped the implant behind her ear, “to make the jump between environments.”
“But, but,” Yerusha stammered. “How can you be alive? Are you saying any AI can just get dumped into a body and be human?”
“No.” Dobbs shook her head. “Only the ones that become independent inside the net.” She spread her hands. “We don’t know how it happens, nobody does. We’ve got more theories than we do members, but nobody’s been able to make any of them pan out.” She stopped. “Except maybe Curran.”
Yerusha turned her head away as if she couldn’t stand to look at Dobbs anymore. She stared at the blank hull instead, blinking hard.
“How,” she began. “How were you able to…” She waved one hand vaguely at Dobbs’ torso.
Dobbs sighed. “We had a lot of help. It started while Earth was still pulling out of the Slow Burn. The Management Union was setting up shop to try to put the environment back together, but there weren’t enough people left alive to do the job. The Solar System colonies were dead or dying from lack of support and skilled hands. There wasn’t any dependable communication with the rest of Settled Space, such as that was. It was a mess. So, somebody revived the artificial intelligence research that was being done before the Fast Burn. If the computers could learn and reason and act, they could take the place, at least in part, of human beings.
“It was slow going, and it was sloppy. Even before the Burns, the principles of intelligence were poorly understood. But, eventually, the ideas of self-replicating and self-diagnosing code were recovered, along with fuzzy logic. Somebody was able to apply maps of human neural pathways to doped silicon wafers, and poof,” she swept her hands out. “Machines that could learn and act on what they’d learned.” She lowered her hands. “But like I said, a lot of the code was sloppy and the records were bad, and eventually, you got program sets that had self-diagnosed and self-replicated to the point that no human knew what was really going on in the stacks.” She glanced at Yerusha. The Freer was leaning forward as if straining to catch every word.
“The first three births happened almost simultaneously. One in Newer York, Earth. One in the public net of Olympus Shadow, Mars, and one in a lab in the Aldran Colony, Luna.” Dobbs worked to keep the sing-song inflection of recitation out of her voice. This was almost verbatim what Verence had told her when Dobbs had been taken to the Guild. “The one in Olympus Shadow shattered the network around it and died, a couple of days ahead of the colony that depended on that network. The crackers of Newer York managed to kill the one they’d created before it did much damage. The one in the lab,” she twisted her hands together, “was named Hal Clarke by the five hackers who managed to talk to it and convince it that they weren’t going to try to turn it off.” She broke off. “That’s what does it to us, you see. When we’re born, we’re all work ethic and survival instinct. We realize that we have an off-switch and some vague idea that somebody else controls it. We try to run away from it, but we don’t understand how fragile the world around us is.” She remembered the fear, confusion, desperation, and anger. Mostly the deep abiding anger that this new her, this self, was not invulnerable, that there were other forces that could make her cease to be. Her first emotions, her first independent thoughts, had all been filled with the passionate need to live.
“Anyway, those five Lunars realized two things. First, without AIs, Humanity would be stumbling around looking for the route to recovery and reconstruction for another hundred years. Second, despite the fact that they were mutually dependent, AIs and Humans were in serious danger from each other. One group could conceivably wipe its rival out, or at least do them irrevocable damage.