Kizzy cleared her throat. “That’s why I asked you down here. We’ve got one option left, and it’s a really shitty one.”
“Okay.”
“Hard reset.”
Even with only second-hand technical knowledge, Ashby knew the term, and it wasn’t a pleasant one. A hard reset of an AI was like stopping someone’s heart for a few minutes, then trying to get it beating again. He exhaled. “That’s a fifty-fifty chance, Kiz.”
“At best. I know. It wasn’t even on the table until we’d run out of other things to try.”
“Best case, worst case?”
“With a hard reset, it’s really only one or the other. Best case, Lovey comes back a little shaky, but functional. By starting her up from scratch, she reverts to her default power-up order, as opposed to the one she’s customized for herself over the years. The idea is that if an AI’s pathways become corrupted, reverting to the settings she had right at the start can smack her into seeing how to untangle the mess. You know in kid vids, when someone with amnesia gets a whack on the head, and suddenly they remember everything? It’s like that. Except it actually works.”
“So she’d be good as new?”
“Eventually. A few days, maybe a couple tendays. She’d need time to recover. At this point, she’s the only one who can put herself back together. If Jenks were to start messing with her code, she’d wake up as somebody different, and that’s—”
“That’s not an option,” Ashby said. There was a hole in the ship now, a emptiness where Lovey’s voice used to be. It made him realize how unfairly he’d categorized her. When people asked him about his crew, he never said, “… and of course, there’s Lovey, our AI.” He hated what that said about him, even though no other captains named AIs as part of their crew. He knew how Jenks felt about Lovey—who didn’t?—but he’d always seen it as an eccentricity, rather than a legitimate truth. Confronted now with the techs’ desperate attempts to save her, and the threat of losing her entirely, Ashby knew he had been wrong. He found himself trying to remember how he’d spoken to Lovey in the past. Had he been respectful? Had he been as considerate of her time as he was to the rest of the crew? Had he remembered to say “thank you?” If—when Lovey came out of this, he’d do better by her.
“Worst case,” Kizzy said, “is that Lovey doesn’t come back at all. Lovelace will come back—the original, out-of-the-box program—but she’ll be a clean installation. See, when she comes back on, she’ll notice two things: the ship’s systems, and her old memory files. In those first few seconds, she’s just, like, a raw mind, trying to make sense of stuff. That’s where the fifty-fifty chance comes in. She might recognize those files as her own and incorporate them back into herself, or she might see them as damaged scrap that needs to be cleared out of her way. There’s no way to predict what she’ll do, and there’s no way we can choose for her. And if she scraps those files, she won’t be our girl. A new Lovelace would be similar, probably. But she’d never be the same.”
“She wouldn’t remember us at all?”
“Clean slate, Ashby. Lovey would… she’d be gone.”
“Shit,” Ashby said, looking toward the core. For a while, he said nothing. What was there to say? He asked the question, even though the answer was obvious. “There’s really no other way?”
“No. But either way, we’ll have a functional AI.”
Ashby was taken aback by her pragmatism. That wasn’t like her. “That’s not my concern.”
“Oh,” Kizzy said. She gave an embarrassed frown. “It seemed like a thing a captain would worry about.”
Ashby put his arm around Kizzy’s shoulder and squeezed. “I worry about more than just captain things sometimes.” She leaned her head against his chest. He could feel her exhaustion.
“I keep asking myself if we could’ve done more if one of us had checked on her sooner.”
“Don’t go down that road, Kizzy.”
“I can’t help it. We just thought it was the voxes, we never thought—”
“Kizzy, you had the nav grid failing and fuel lines breaking. Even if you’d realized what was wrong, would there have been time to stop and fix her?”
She bit her lip and shook her head.
“Would it have made a difference if you’d started working on her right away?”
Kizzy was quiet a moment. “No. The damage happened fast, but it didn’t spread, not for her, anyway.”
“Then don’t beat yourself up about it. You did the best you could.”
She sighed. “If you say so.”
“I do.” He looked to the core. “How’s Pepper doing?”
“She’s a grade-A super champ. I think she’s got the fuel lines working even better than I had them.”
“I’ll make sure to pay her well.”
“She won’t accept it. You know modders. A present, though, she’d take a present.”
“Such as?”
“I dunno,” Kizzy said, stifling a yawn. “Some of my tech junk, maybe a box of Dr. Chef’s veggies. I’ll help you think of something.”
“You need to sleep, Kizzy.”
She shook her head. “Got to see this through first. Won’t be much longer.”
“What can I expect from the reset?”
“From the ship? Nothing. We got her to hole up in the core, so she’s not spread out anywhere now. No one will even notice. We’ll shut her down, wait ten minutes, and then… then we’ll see.”
“I’ll be there,” Ashby said. “We’ll all be there.”
Kizzy looked up at him with a grateful, weary smile. “She’d like that.”
Ashby nodded toward Jenks, who had disappeared from view. “Is he starting now?”
“No,” Kizzy said. “He’s patching back into the core.”
Ashby frowned. “That’s dangerous. Has he been doing that all along?”
“No.” There was a pause in Kizzy’s voice, the sort that preceded a lie. Ashby didn’t see a point in calling her on it.
“Why’s he patching in?”
“He’s asking her permission to do a reset.”
“Couldn’t he ask that from out here?”
There was another pause, this time a truthful one. “Yeah. He wants some privacy.” Her voice cracked. “You know, just in case.”
Lovey, do you understand what I just told you?
Yes. You’re going to do a hard reset.
Only if you say it’s okay.
It’s okay. I don’t want to be like this anymore.
Do you understand what—what might happen?
Yes. I don’t want to be like this.
Lovey, I don’t know how much you can understand, but I—
You’re scared.
Yes.
You’re sad.
Yes.
I understand.
I don’t know… I don’t know what to say. I don’t know if I can tell you how much you mean to me.
You don’t need to. That directory is still intact.
What directory?
The one with logs of everything you say.
Since when do you have that?
5/303. It’s hidden. I hid it from you.
Do you have one for everybody?
Why would I assign a single numerical value to everybody? And a boring number, too. I like threes. They feel nice.
No, the directory. Of things I’ve said. Do you have similar directories for everybody on the ship?
There’s only one for you. Its file path is unique. I don’t see others. I don’t remember. I’m tired.
The date on that directory. That’s the day I installed you.
Yes.