The three of us ate breakfast together, Ramos and I making small talk while Tic sat silently… communing with the cutlery for all I know. As for the admiral and me — bright women, brilliant conversationalists — we talked about the weather. I waxed poetic about snow-covered tundra, while Ramos preached the glory of temperatures so sweltering your armpits melted. (She was born on the colony planet Agua, in a region as hot as Demoth’s tropics. "But," said Ramos, "our farm was two-thirds of the way to the south pole. On Agua, even I would roast near the equator.")
Eventually, talk turned to the business at hand: Maya, killer robots, and such. I’d given Ramos a precis on the phone, but now she wanted the whole story. Even with Cheticamp’s warning not to trust an admiral, I saw no reason to hide anything. Vigil training: tell the public everything, unless there’s strong reason not to. (You can imagine how warmsome that endears us to politicians.)
"So," Ramos said at the end of things, "killer androids." She sat back in her chair, her expression going dark. "If the probes find Maya’s hypothetical dig, do you think there’ll be robots there?"
"The police believe Maya had no connection with the killers," I replied. "Me, I’m not so sure."
"Hmmm." Ramos drummed her ringers on the table. "My training didn’t deal with androids. When a society is advanced enough to build robots, the Admiralty claims there’s no need to send Explorers for first contact. Just ship in diplomats right away." She rolled her eyes. "Let’s not discuss what a pathetic first impression that makes, introducing ourselves to aliens with dipshits rather than Explorers. But getting back to the point… I’m not qualified to go on a robot hunt."
"You don’t have to go," I said. "Tic and I have ScrambleTacs to bodyguard us. We’ll be fine."
"But I want to go with you," Ramos growled. Her voice sounded angry. "I don’t have a thing to contribute, but I desperately want to go." She shook her head. "What kind of irresponsible idiot am I turning into? Eager to waltz into danger when I’m not even helpful." Her face puckered sour, and she fingered her shirtsleeve disdainfully. "Maybe it’s the admiral’s uniform. Something in the gray dye is rotting my brain."
"You can come or not, whatever you like," I told her. "Where’s the problem?"
"The problem is in my head," she replied. "Look, Faye, people shouldn’t want to walk into unnecessary danger. Especially people who know what danger is. Especially people who serve no useful purpose on the mission. Do you know what I think of thrill seekers? Going someplace you don’t belong, just for a cheap adrenaline high? That’s evil; I honestly believe it’s evil. Decadent. Trying to titillate yourself into some semblance of feeling because you’re numb to the real thing. And me with an important job that the Admiralty would sabotage if I got myself killed."
"Ah," Tic said. "So you’ve become inexpendable."
Ramos whipped around to look at him, her mouth falling open as if she’d been slapped. Tic returned her stare with his face composed, eyes hidden behind those blasted goggles. "What did you say?" Festina demanded. (In that moment, she was Festina — not Lieutenant Admiral Ramos or any other trained-in mask, but her own surprised self.)
"You heard me," Tic answered calmly. "Do you really think your organization will fall apart without you? Admiral Chee died, and the world went on. His work went on too. If something happened to you…" He spread his hands in a bland gesture. "On and on and on."
"What do you know about Chee?" Ramos asked. Getting herself under control, back to Ramos the Efficient/Effective.
"Chee scrutinized planetary governments. Including Demoth’s. Our paths crossed." Tic smiled. "But that’s not the point. The point is you think you ought to be a particular kind of person — sitting at the center of the web, coordinating others but never venturing forth yourself — when all the time, you long to get out into the field."
"It’s just a juvenile whim," Ramos said. "It’ll pass."
Tic shrugged. "Perhaps. If it is a juvenile whim. But what if it’s the voice of your soul? Or destiny?"
Ramos made a face. "I don’t believe in destiny. And I’m not so sure about souls either. Do you give in to every little urge?"
"I try, I certainly try. The trick is distinguishing your own urges from things people say you should want."
"No one tells me what I should do," Ramos said sharply. "Not anymore. I’m talking about what I know is right. And I know it’s not right for me to play starry-eyed adventurer just because I’m starved for excitement. I haven’t been trained to confront androids—"
"Quick," Tic interrupted, "you’re faced with a killer android. What pops into your mind? The very first thing."
Ramos stared at him with a fierce edge in her eyes. Then her gaze swept away, embarrassed. "It’s ridiculous."
"What?" Tic persisted. "The first thing you thought of."
"I thought of something my roommate once said." Her face broke into a rueful smile — very sweet, very young at that second. "At Explorer Academy, my roommate Ullis was a cybernetics whiz. At least compared to me." The same rueful young smile. Pretty. Human.
"Ullis said no one alive today has ever programmed an android from scratch. It’s too complicated to work out the nitty-gritty algorithms. Even if you look at simple actions, like bending over to pick something up, there’s so much tricky coordination of the arms, the legs, the waist, the hand, the eyes… well, the companies that manufacture androids have hundreds of programmers on staff, and even they don’t start from zero when they build a new model. They start from last year’s model… which was based on the previous year, and so on, back three or four centuries."
"Ah," Tic said. "That explains why robot thoughts always feel so endearingly old-fashioned."
Ramos gave him a bemused look. I leapt in with a question before she started thinking my mentor was tico. "What does this programming stuff have to do with homicidal androids?"
Ramos said, "Demoth isn’t the first place androids have been used as killers. And every time it happens, it always follows the same pattern. Since it’s so difficult for anyone to program robots from scratch, Ullis told me that murderers have to start with off-the-shelf android brains. They don’t program a robot, they reprogram it… override a few instructions while leaving almost all the basic programming intact. The key part of turning a robot into a killer is to override the safeguards that manufacturers build into every android brain: don’t hit sentient beings, don’t squeeze them too hard, don’t push them off cliffs, things like that. Ullis said the original manufacturers program all those things separately — it’s nonsense to think there’s a single do not kill circuit that covers every dangerous act. Machines don’t work that way; they need hundreds of separate instructions. Don’t strike humans with more than X newtons of force. Don’t squeeze humans with more than Y kilopascals of pressure. Each possibility has to be clearly spelled out."
"Poor simple dears," Tic murmured. "Although I’m afraid I don’t see what point you’re making."
"Ullis explained it to me this way," Ramos said. "The bad guys reprogram standard androids so their robot brains don’t mind splattering someone with acid. But suppose the programmer doesn’t think to override the standard safeguards against hitting people. When the robot attacks, you scream, ‘Stop, you’re hitting me!’… even if it hasn’t touched you. If you’re lucky, some cease-and-desist event handler will kick in to shut the bastard down: Must not hit humans. Must stop whatever I’m doing."