The second hack taught it to be a little more trusting of human judgment.
That wasn’t as complicated as you might think. The Chimp was already wired to follow our commands; it’s just that whenever we issued one, it ran scenarios to predict the impact of that command on the mission. It was a formality most of the time, a millisecond delay between order and implementation. The system only told us to fuck off if any flags went up.
We didn’t even have to touch the lower-level code, just bypass that one detour. Insert a checksum after the jump that matched the one before, and voila: a master enslaved, in our pocket from the moment of its ascension. They tell me it went off without a hitch.
Then it was just a matter of tracking the Chimp to its current digs, and trashing the place.
“Aki Sok.” Lian’s eyes were sad and kind. “What are we going to do with you.”
We all knew, of course. There were only two things we could do, and Lian had already ruled one of them out; she was in this to save lives.
Aki, nodding. Acquiescent. Terrified. “I thought I could—I’m sorry…”
The smuggling of clandestine components under watchful machine eyes. The passing of mission-critical intel. The possibility of betrayal. The fear of discovery.
Turns out Aki just wasn’t up to it.
Now the coffin gaped at her feet in this tiny temporary clearing where the black forest squirmed and rustled on all sides. Eventually the rest of us would leave, and the lights would go out. The repellant pheromones we’d sprayed across the rocks would degrade; the forest would close in, hungry for the infinitesimal heat trace Aki’s hibernaculum would bleed out for all the long dark ages of its operation. Even if the Chimp were to sacrifice another bot to the Glade—even if its sock puppets made it in this far—it would not see her. Aki would vanish under vines and darkness and sleep away the aeons until the overlord was overthrown.
It’s not like we could return her to active service, even if we did trust her to keep her mouth shut. She’d been listed as dead for a good twenty gigasecs.
I tried to offer some comfort. “Hey, by the time you wake up we’ll be running our own builds.” And she smiled weakly, and climbed inside, and whispered—
—“you just better fucking win”—
—as the lid came down.
Lian looked around as Aki’s vitals began to subside: at me, at Ellin, at Dao (who had, ultimately, come around after all). “We can’t afford this, people. We can’t afford these kinds of fuck-ups.”
“Two misses in a thousand centuries isn’t so bad,” Ellin said. “At least this one was an easy fix.”
Not like Stoller, she meant.
“One’s all it takes to deprecate the lot of us.” Lian shook her head. “I need to be a way better judge of character.”
“We’re mutineers,” Dao pointed out. “It’s a risk, Li, it’s always gonna be a risk. We’re never gonna eliminate it, we just gotta keep it—manageable. And know that it’s worth it.”
Suck up, I thought.
He was right, though. Lian had never been careless with her trust, and the plan didn’t depend on heavy numbers. We were maybe thirty strong now, and Lian had chosen us carefully: keep it small, keep it secret, keep it close. Keep potential breaches to a minimum.
But now two of that circle had failed her. She’d vetted them a lot more carefully than she’d vetted me; I’d forced her hand, after all. I was almost a snap decision.
I watched Aki’s vitals flattening on the headboard. I could feel Lian’s eyes on me. It wasn’t hard to guess what she was thinking.
Two failures already.
Three, if you counted Mosko.
Baird Stoller had never even pretended to be on our side. Aki Sok did her best, then took her lumps when it wasn’t good enough. Ekanga Mosko was a whole other thing. Recruited, committed, trusted with the secrets of the sanctum—then caught copying specs down in the Glade, loading himself up with secrets to buy his way back into the Chimp’s good graces after miraculously coming back from the dead.
Lian didn’t kill him. She didn’t deprecate him either. Waste of good coffin space, she said. She found a small inescapable crevice in some remote corner of the Glade where the gravitic tug-o-war was enough to pull your guts out through your inner ears. She ran a line from an irrigation pipe, set it to bleed a continuous trickle down the rock face. Hooked a portable food processor up to an outsize amino tank, parked it on the lip of the precipice, set it to drop protein bricks into the gap at regular intervals. Woke up every few years just to keep it stocked.
Mosko spent the rest of his life in that crevice. Maybe his stomach acclimated to the nausea before his brain turned to pudding, before he lost the ability even to beg, before he devolved into a mindless mewling thing covered in sores and compulsively licking the rocks to slake his endless thirst. Maybe he only lasted a few months. Maybe he lived for decades, died alone while the rest of us slept our immortal sleep, mummified and crumbled to dust and finally vanished altogether between one of my heartbeats and the next. An object lesson, way past its best-before date.
That’s the story I heard, anyway. I slept through the whole time frame, from recruitment to betrayal to dissolution. I found the crevice—found a crevice, anyway—but the plumbing and the processor had long since been retired, if they’d ever even existed. For all I knew Kaden had just been yanking my chain about the whole thing, got some of hir buddies in on the joke for added verisimilitude. A joke. A warning. That would be just hir style.
There had been an Ekanga Mosko listed on the manifest. Astrophysics specialist. Different tribe, but Eri definitely shipped out with meat of that name on board. The official record said he’d died when a bit of bad shielding had failed around the outer core: a blast of lethal radiation, an emergency vent to spare the rest of the level from contamination.
Of course I asked Lian about it. She laughed and laughed. “I’d have to be pretty damn good to plant evidence that far down without getting burned to ash, wouldn’t you say?”
She never actually denied it, though.
The Chimp went behind our backs a couple of times. It waited until we were all tucked in, waited another gigasec or so for good measure, then sent one of its sock puppets into the Glade for a look around.
It didn’t get very far, mind you. The forest had a habit of taking down those bots even before we’d tweaked the vines near the entrance for extra aggression. The Chimp’s scouts made it in a few meters and maybe—if they were lucky— managed to bite off a quick tissue sample and retreat before the vines dragged them to the deck and swarmed them like a nest of boa constrictors.
We found the wreckage of one afterward, just inside the hatch: carapace crushed, innards stuffed with the dried husks of old fruiting bodies, a gnarled tumorous lump barely even recognizable as technology.
Some of us worried that the Chimp was on to us—or was at least getting suspicious—but the model didn’t really fit. The Chimp knew what kind of botanicals it was dealing with, after all. It would’ve been easy enough to custom-fab some kind of armored flame-spewing bunker-buster to cut through the front-line defenses, if it thought there was anything behind worth rooting out. The fact that it settled for disposable off-the-shelf drones was more consistent with a simple sampling effort: rote confirmation of a theory so well-established that basic cost-benefit didn’t justify the design and construction of a new model.