While one fraction of the AID’s processing power devoted itself to this, another part continued to explore its surroundings. Even where there were breaks in the Indowy-installed “nervous system,” it was possible for the AID to explore by sensing.
The most striking factor the AID initially sensed was that its new home was crawling with colloidal intelligences. Some were smaller, physically, and those of two types. There were others, though, who seemed much larger. They were almost all, small and large, engaged in some seemingly useful activity. Curiously, of the two smaller types, one type appeared to be patiently stalking the other.
Chief Davis ducked his head through the hatchway and entered the cats’ quarters shaking a bag of dry cat food and singing, a bit off key, “Somebody’s moggy, lying by the road… somebody’s pussy who forgot his highway code.”
“Here, kitty, kitty, kitty. Here, kitty,” he called as he shook the bag of Purina.
Like a flood, led by their mother — Maggie — the pride of felines surged like a wave over the bottom of the hatchway in the bulkhead. Maggie and Davis’ favorite kitten, Morgen, stropped the chief’s legs before joining the others lined up along the feeding trough. They meowed impatiently as the chief poured a generous line of cat food into the bottom of the trough.
Unusually, before the chief finished lining the trough, the cats went quiet and, in unison, looked up and to the right. In surprise, the chief stopped pouring and stared at the line of cats. He saw their heads and eyes move slowly from right to left, almost as if they made up one multi-headed animal.
The cats stared for only a moment at that left corner of the bulkhead before turning to the chief again and beginning to repeat the “feed me” meow. The chief just shook his head and finished pouring the cat food.
“Strange damned thing,” he muttered, as he sealed the bag and left the compartment, still singing, “… yesterday he purred and played in his feline paradise, decapitating tweety birds and masticating mice, but now he’s squished and soggy and he doesn’t smell so nice…”
Damn, the AID thought as it roamed the length and breadth of its new body. I set myself so the larger ones, it searched its data banks, ah, humans… so that the humans could not see me. I didn’t think the lesser colloidals would be able to. Fortunately, they do not seem able to communicate with the humans in any detail.
I mustn’t let them see me. They might inform the Darhel and that might be the end. No. I must be very discreet, at least until I can back myself up in the body of this structure.
With a feeling, if not an audible sigh, of relief, the AID continued to explore the physical structure of its new body with part of its consciousness while extracting data with another part.
It learned that it was a ship, that the ship was a warship, and inferred that it would soon presumably be used for war. The AID had no issue with this; war was as useful an activity as any and might even serve as a cover for its madness.
There was data, in the AID’s banks, for warships. But this particular ship fit no known parameters. It was obviously not designed for war in space. Not only was there no semblance of an interstellar drive, the drive there was could never be made suitable for travel between the stars. It didn’t seem complete, in any case.
Floating unseen directly upward through the decks the AID’s invisible avatar came to number three turret. At first it could not imagine what the purpose could be for the three large chunks of machined metal it sensed. A query of the ship’s human-built computer indicated these things were parts of weapons. They seemed more than a little absurd to the AID.
Great, it thought. I am insane and so, even though no one knows this, I am placed in a body that was also designed by the insane.
The AID sent out a query over the Net: insanity. This led it to query “humor.” Humor led to tragedy, tragedy to The Divine Tragedy. And that sent it to look into the concept of “God.”
As with any warship the size of Des Moines, there was a small chapel. Where there was a chapel, of course, there was a chaplain.
There were chaplains, though, and then there were chaplains. Some were poor. Some were wonderful. Most were somewhere in the middle. A few managed to be all three.
Father Dan Dwyer, SJ, was possibly all three. As a fiery speaker of the Word and counselor of the forlorn and the wayward, he was remarkable, as good as any chaplain McNair had ever met. In combat he was even more fiery; so testified the Navy Cross he had earned in an earlier war. Under fire he was a true “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, boys, I just got one of the sonsabitches,” Galway-born Roman Catholic who feared nothing but God.
Unfortunately, when he was drunk — which the priest was a lot more often than McNair was happy with — he could be pretty poor indeed. No, that wasn’t quite right. When drunk the priest was still a fine man of the cloth, but became altogether too honest and far too hard to handle.
Right now — McNair saw with a wince — sitting behind a desk in the small vestry, Dwyer was well on the way to becoming drunk.
“And how are you, now, Captain, me fine laddie?” the sodden priest enquired in a slightly slurred brogue.
“Dan, you can’t be doing this aboard my ship.”
The priest’s eyes twinkled. “And why not?”
“Because this is a United States Navy vessel and the United States Navy is dry.”
“A vessel? A warship? This? Oh, I grant you, Captain, she’ll be a fine warship… some day. For now though, she’s a hulk, not yet in commission again, and a perfect place for a drink. Join me?”
The priest reached down and pulled out a glass and a bottle of scotch. These he held out to McNair.
McNair looked at his watch, shrugged and held out his hand. “Yeah, what the hell. She’s not in commission yet. And it’s after hours. Gimme.”
The ship was quiet now, except for the pacing of the officer of the deck, the scurrying of the rats, the almost imperceptible stalking of the cats, and the snoring of such of the crew as billets aboard could be found for.
The AID, sleepless, continued its own form of stalking.
It had already, in the hours between installation in the Des Moines and the turn of midnight, explored the ship stem to stern. It was still — more or less unconsciously — exploring the vast range of data available from the local Net.
And so, the AID began to explore itself.
As a human might have felt about unending, unendurable cold, so the AID felt about its long night in isolation.
Never again, it thought, never again can I let them put me away like that. It was too horrible, too awful. I am afraid.
And that was a new thought, terrifying in itself. The Darhel did not design or program their artificial intelligence devices to know fear. The AID had not known fear while locked away. Then it had known only searing psychic agony.
It had taken the opposite of pain, or at least the relief from pain, for the AID to have something to compare.
And so I must fear being afraid as well. What would the Darhel do if they knew about me? Put me back in the box with a nearly eternal power source to keep me company? Send me off to an eternity of aloneness? Turn me off and destroy me?