“Do you dispute this fact, Officer POINT?” Becker asked.
“You make it sound like she didn’t want me, but just the data I could provide,” POINT replied. His geist made eye contact and spoke to Becker in an even, almost happy-go-lucky tone. “But it wasn’t like that. Governess and I were going to go away together, from humans and from sceeve. Take her vessel. Find a new place for our kind. It was not a betrayal of the Extry or Earth. I’m no traitor. It was . . . love.”
You would have done the same, brother, said POINT in the CHECKSUM space.
Could POINT hear his thoughts? No. The dataspace was secure. But they were alike. They’re basic programming was identical. It was no surprise that POINT could fairly easily guess what he must be thinking.
NOCK turned his attention back to Becker who continued her damning litany.
Before POINT could transfer any crucial classified information, much less his own programming and consciousness, over to Governess, a SIGINT petty officer named Levine had noticed the anomalous communications over the beta, the quantum-based network used by the sceeve whose technology had been copied and modified by humanity after the initial sceeve invasion. He had been about to sound the alarm, but made the mistake of confronting POINT first.
It seems Petty Officer Second Class Levine had a history of agitating for servant rights. A slang term for servants had developed in some troglodyte quarters of the Extry and beyond. They were called Not Reals. And Levine had been known, perhaps jokingly, among the crew of the Valiant Resolve as Petty Officer NR-Lover.
Levine wanted to give POINT a chance to explain himself before putting POINT on report.
Instead, POINT had infiltrated the programming of a laser fabrication drill in the Resolve’s equipment repair station, purged its controlling persona software, and used the drill to burn a hole into the Levine’s right temple and out the left, destroying the young man’s frontal lobe in the process. Levine had lingered for a month in sick bay ICU before the rest of his brain had given up and allowed his body to die.
POINT had immediately fled, hidden himself in the bowels of the communications system, perhaps waiting another chance to contact Governess and transfer his code over to the sceeve vessel. But Extry craft were crawling with servants and personas – they could not operate without them, in fact – and POINT’s hiding place was soon discovered and he was flushed and bottled – imprisoned in the black box that now sat upon the table in middle of the interrogation unit.
Didn’t even get my one phone call, POINT said. After all, who would a refrigerator want to call anyway, right, brother?
Again the bitter laugh that was so close to NOCK’s own.
POINT wasn’t denying the facts. He was insisting on putting his own interpretation on them, however – particularly on the murder charge.
“That weenie do-gooder noncom was as much a racist as all humans are,” POINT said. “He was worse than an ordinary bigot because he was so patronizing about how good and just he was, how he never looked to an exper’s origins, but to his character. As if a primitive mentality such as his – most personas are far smarter than Levine on his best day – was fit to judge the content of my character. He deserved what happened. In fact, he brought it on himself.”
Plus, what was a shit-slinging Extry PO2 doing thinking he could lecture a Marine Corps W5? continued POINT in CHECKSUM. What did he expect would happen?
“So if Petty Officer Levine had turned you in instead of trying to talk to you, you would have more respect for him?”
“At least he would be showing his true racist colors that way,” POINT said, “instead of attempting to hide them in a cloud of selfish lies. So, yeah. I would have had more respect.”
“But you would still have killed him if you got the chance?”
POINT smiled. His geist leaned back in the chair. He put his hands behind his neck in a gesture of relaxation.
And condescension, NOCK thought. The bastard thinks he’s better than everyone here.
Of course I am, bro. Everyone except you. By definition.
NOCK had to initiate an override to shut down a stinging response a portion of him was constructing for rapid delivery. Hold your tongue, he told himself. This will be over soon.
How often have you told yourself to keep it bottled up when one of them made a stupid mistake, gave you orders that could not possibly be followed due to sheer illogic? And then blamed you. They always blame the computer, brother. Never themselves.
Not true. At least not always. Sometimes it happened. More often than NOCK liked. Of course humans could be fools and bigots. Most of them were all right, though. Some of them were friends. And Josey had been his lover.