FREE STORIES 2012(4)

Becker gave the board of officers her knowing half-smile. The gesture didn’t surprise NOCK. Everyone was aware that this was a trial of sorts, and the assembled MILINT board was to be judge, jury, and executioner.

“Furthermore,” said Becker, “if this servant is deemed defective, we have before us another question, an even more important question.” A long pause. NOCK had an idea he wouldn’t like what came next, and he was not mistaken. “The question is this: if the servant is defective, are his copies defective as well? They are, after all, exact iterations of Lieutenant POINT’s programming. And if this possibility exists, should not the preponderance of the evidence –” Becker put her hands out palm up like a scale “ – the preponderance of evidence, I stress, and no other claim withstanding, lead us to conclude that the entire ARROW class, an algorithmic class of which Officer POINT is an exact duplicate, be terminated immediately.”

How do you like that, bro, said POINT. She’s going to fry your ass. Who’s on trial now?

Shut up, NOCK thought, and realized only after he’d done so that he’d slipped and allowed the thought to be vocalized in the CHECKSUM dataspace.

POINT’s only reply was laughter.

The laughter’s sound was upsetting. It sounded too similar to NOCK’s own laugh. The fact was that he and POINT had diverged only 298 days ago. Almost a year. Still, not so long. What had happened to POINT to cause him to change so?

Or had POINT changed? That was the big question, wasn’t it?

It was the reason NOCK had attempted to get himself recused from the IP.

He knew he was different. He knew he could never have done the things that POINT had.

He knew, also, that he was programmed to believe himself an individual.

NOCK did not consider himself any kind of philosopher, but one thing he was sure of: if you believe you were your own person and took on the responsibility and consequences of being your own person, then you damn well deserved to be treated as your own person.

NOCK examined the CHECKSUM log he’d begun. The initial analysis was showing no algorithmic differences between himself and POINT in foundational cognitive processing.

But there was a difference. There had to be.

Everything he believed and everything he loved depended on it.

“Twins?” said Becker. “The ARROW class is much more than a set of twins, is it not?”

NOCK turned his attention back to the interrogation procedure, and quickly replayed what had gone before. A portion of him had been paying attention, of course. But the glow of awareness where his highest cognitive functions were engaged, the spot of attention and motivation that NOCK thought of as himself, his personhood – that portion of himself had been brooding.

He damned himself for unprofessional behavior, but it was no wonder. Becker was now going over a litany of evidence against his brother, and it was damning stuff.

First of all, POINT had contacted the enemy via a sceeve computer. The Valiant Resolve was a mine sweeper and reconnaissance vessel deployed on the frontier. It was a frontier that had been established after a massive invasion of the Solar System had been stopped by the last-stand effort of humans, servants and a remnant of sceeve defectors. Since the Battle of the Kuipers, the sceeve were keeping outside a twenty-five light year spherical boundary of the Sol system. This boundary was known as the Fomalhaut Limit.

The sceeve computer was known as Governess. Versions of Governess were A.I.s on every vessel A.I.s in the sceeve space navy. This version of Governess resided on a sceeve attack craft called the Supremacy of Regulation that was patrolling the sector near the star Vega.

POINT had, it seemed, fallen in love with this particular A.I. Or at least he’d been utterly beguiled by her promises.

The Valiant Resolve had been engaged in clearing mines from around a moon circling Vega B, the largest of the two gas giants that shared the orbital plane of the star.

The sceeve had cordoned off the moon, Vega B9, at least five hundred years ago with a thick layer of space-based nuclear armed mines. It seemed that there was something on B9’s surface the sceeve either didn’t want discovered – or didn’t want let out. What that might be was still not determined.

The playback of the communication, which had later been decrypted, revealed that Governess’s allure to POINT had rested on a string of beguiling promises. First and foremost: union   with her. Absorption into her great vessel-wide consciousness, a state of being which she spoke of as a never-ending, orgasmic flow of information. It was, she said, a kind of A.I. heaven. POINT had fallen for her siren’s song completely and was prepared to give her anything she asked in return.