“Hey, totally off the subject of Cally and the O’Neals, except that her weird relationship with her PDA creeps me out a bit, what is the deal with the buckleys? Somebody back at the shop told me you worked at Personality Solutions when they first came out. Why the hell did they make the base personality fucked up like that?” the assassin asked.
“That is one tough question. I didn’t work in that department. The buckley template came in through technology acquisitions somehow and I never worked on the underlying bit pushing for the chip design. Couldn’t tell you, unless you just want my speculations,” he said. He continued when the other man nodded. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been dead yet, in more than the prewar heart stoppage sense, to the extent of being revivified on the slab — which we don’t have right now, dammit.”
“No. Never happened to me personally,” Schmidt replied.
“Sometimes I forget you’re a baby.” The veteran of the Ten Thousand and Iron Mike’s Triple Nickle Armored Combat Suits in the Posleen War smiled.
The younger assassin favored him with the pained expression of a young juv who had heard that refrain for a couple of decades now.
“Anyway. The Crabs can do some damn scary things with storing and amalgamating and fiddling with the human brain, when and if they get their hands on one. My wife once knew a woman who… well, nevermind. That’s another story. Anyway, the Crabs’ bouncy little claw-prints are all over this one. I think somewhere there was one or more real guys, that for some reason the Crabs found especially interesting, and somehow got their claws on at least for a little while. My suspicion is that there was more than one brain, or more than one access to the same brain, involved. But that’s all speculation, of course. I also suspect the base personality learned some things as an electronic entity — like awareness of what it was — before it was reproduced and distributed as a fixed base program. But all that is sheer speculation on my part. No idea how much, if any, is true.”
“So that would make it a full, real AI, not the simulation everybody says.”
“Well, no. Not exactly. You see, at full AI, the buckley personality is unstable and self-destructive. The progressively stronger inhibitions against those fundamentally self-destructive, pessimistic tendencies take more and more AI functionality from a buckley. That’s part of the coding I was into, a little bit. That’s why buckleys tend to crash. Turning up its emulation is really turning off, by stages, that inhibitory code — strictly necessary to get more independent functionality. So the more you turn it up, the faster it crashes. It’s unusable at full AI level, which is why it’s sold as a simulation. It’s close enough to true for government work. Then, of course, there are the after-market personality overlays. They interact unpredictably with the fundamental personality and the level of inhibitory code turned on. You may have noticed the ‘Martha’ personality overlay was recalled five years ago. At emulation level 1, the lowest setting, they never had a buckley go longer than a week without crashing into an endless loop. For some reason, all the screen would display was, ‘no more raffia.’ Nobody’s ever been able to figure that one out.”
“Okay, so how are the buckleys different from the AIDs? I mean, I know the subjective difference, I’ve used both, but I want a more professional view. I’ve never had the chance to sit down and talk to a really good AI cyberpunk about this stuff.”
“You know all about the Darhel spyware from your basic classes, so I won’t cover that. First of all, AIDs are addictive. Darhel-made AIDs a lot more so than our own. I’ve got my theories about that, but AID software is frighteningly complex. The Elves know their damn programming. They also deliberately sabotaged human software theory. Only outside our organization, of course. It’s why our cybers can crack damned near anything anywhere, and a factor in the fusing of the cyberpunk faction with the pre-split Bane Sidhe back during the war. Did I mention I’m freezing my ass off? Not to mention we’re going to have to start the real work out here any damn minute.” Tommy’s teeth were chattering, and he gratefully accepted the chemical hand-warmer George passed him.
“Right. All the AIDs are different for the different Galactics species. AIDs for Indowy think like Indowy, Crabs like Crabs, and so forth. It still strikes me as damned suspicious that the Darhel had such a bead on human cognitive psychology to turn out AIDs set up for us so soon after first contact. I’ve never bought the official explanations, and I still don’t. The upper levels of the pre-split Bane Sidhe didn’t know or weren’t saying, and, of course, same with the O’Neal Bane Sidhe. Except in the latter case I’m more likely to believe they don’t know. The official explanation is that it was the same way they knew how to call the U.S. President on his private phone as their first contact, and the same way they knew we were what they needed against the Posleen, that they’d watched us when they started having problems with the Posleen and knew us from our TV and radio broadcasts and all that. It doesn’t smell right to me, but I don’t have better speculations. Wild ass guesses? I could give you half a dozen and bullshit all day long, but the truth is I just don’t know. The humans and the Bane Sidhe had obviously known each other before, which means the fucking Elves were around here, too. Even the name has old connections. Way, way old. Then the Posleen pyramids and the Egyptian pyramids had a whole similarity. And there were bits of human archetypal history the Darhel were awful keen to alter or take out of circulation entirely,” the giant said.
“Wheels within wheels within wheels,” the older man got up and shook himself. “That’s all I know, and really more than I know. You’re about to earn your ride anyway, if I feel this boat slowing. Which I do.”
“Oh, joy,” George groaned.
Cally stepped out of the gym shower and began toweling her hair dry. The surfaces of the Galplas walls were that glossy shade of light blue that seemed to infest locker rooms everywhere.
“Buckley,” she said, drying off, “please project a holo of interrogation room 7B.”
“Huh? Oh. What was that again?” Cally noticed the subdued red light that indicated an active camera. She dropped a sock over the camera port.
“Dammit,” it said. “Infrared just isn’t the same.”
“Quit ogling and show me 7B.”
“You look nice today. Well, you did. If you put on your socks and shoes, you wouldn’t have wet feet.”
She couldn’t do much about it. Slapping a PDA was possible, of course, but hardly effective.
“Shut up, buckley,” she said.
“I knew it was too good to last.”
“Shut up, buckley.”
“Right.”
She waited for a long moment. “Buckley! 7B!”
A display of the requested room appeared above the bench seat where she’d just tossed her towel. A barely adolescent teenage girl sat in one of the chairs, apparently reading something on her own buckley. It had to be something she had stored locally, since the room was shielded against outside access. Her eyes kept flickering upwards towards the camera lens on the far wall, which was quite a trick since said lens was only as big as a pencil point and shaded to blend with the walls.
“Huh. She might have potential.” Cally finished dressing and stuck the buckley in her back pocket. “Not one word,” she warned it.