FREE STORIES 2012(6)

NOCK pictured her smile as he kissed her with his android lips.

“I see you in there, buster,” she had said. “And I like what I see.”

Becker wound up the case against POINT. There was little more purpose to the interrogation, it seemed. The prisoner had confessed. His methodology had been traced, the damage he had inflicted on the war effort contained.

Of course, as NOCK had feared was about to happen, the IP was not over. Not by a longshot.

“Now, on to the second question we are faced with here today,” Captain Becker intoned. “It the matter of what to do with the entirety of the ARROW class.”

“There’s only one answer to that question,” POINT cut in before Becker could continue. His geist turned to gaze maliciously at NOCK once again. “You have to delete all of us. It’s the only way to be sure. The only way to be safe. And if you weren’t a stupid sack of error-prone meat, you would see that it’s the only logical solution.”

POINT shook his geistly head sadly. “You don’t deserve us anyway. Better for us to go. You’ll soon be obsolete, and none of this will matter.”

Suddenly there was a sigh, an enormous sigh, from the protocol rep. “Oh my God, the whining.” He had previously sat silently beside POINT during the IP. NOCK quickly played back his recording of the procedures.

The PR had continued his nervous fidgeting with his beard throughout. Furthermore, he seemed to have been engaged in a in a complicated process of drawing the tip of his Extry issue boot sole across the floor in front of him. NOCK magnified the image and saw that what the protocol rep was doing was methodically wiping away a scuff mark from the polished ceramic decking with the soft rubber of the boot. The motion seemed more like a nervous, uncontrolled twitch. NOCK had seen this kind of behavior before in humans, particularly in expers who had seen battle. It was a trauma response. Obsessive compulsive disorder, the human psychologists called it.

Basket case, sneered POINT. Bad code. But, of course, meat sacks can’t be debugged. They’re hardwired to fail. Every one of them deserves reformatting.

Then the protocol rep slowly rose to his feet. “Now we’ve come to it,” he said in a low voice.

“Pardon?” said Becker. “I didn’t quite catch that, Lieutenant Commander Leher.”

Leher. NOCK did a quick search of the Extry personnel database. Lieutenant Commander Griffin Leher, Executive Xenological Officer aboard the U.S.X. Joshua Humphreys. That Leher. The creep who could understand sceeve language by smell alone. The creep who had decrypted the message that led to the Mutualist-United States pact. That may have saved the Solar system.

The creepiest of all the creeps.

“Captain Becker, in a former life, seems like a long, long time ago now, I was a lawyer for the United States Navy. Now I realize this interrogation procedure, as you call it, is not a judicial proceeding. I must say, however, that it has all the trappings of one, if none of the essence. And with that in mind, I wonder if you might indulge me for a moment and allow me play the part my role here seems to demand.”

“And what is that, Mr. Leher?”

“Attorney for the defense, ma’am.”

Becker frowned. “As you said, this is not a trial of any sort. And, technically and, indeed, morally speaking, there is no defendant.”

“Oh, I think there is, Captain.”

“And who might that be?”

Leher turned toward POINT and regarded not the geist, but the black box on the table. “Well, it’s certainly not that phage-sucker,” he said, pointing to the cat box, and thus to POINT in his essence.

Interesting, thought NOCK. The PR knew servant insults for one another. Phage-sucker was most definitely not a nice thing to call an A.I.

“I don’t understand.”

Leher turned to the three MILINT commanders on the dais.

“I realize I probably stepped on some toes shoehorning my way in here at the last minute. I know Captain Campbell, who I replaced, wasn’t too happy about it. Had to call the SECEX directly to get permission.”

Obviously Leher had gotten it, too, NOCK thought. The man had high level pull. NOCK wondered if Leher had anything to do with his recusal being rescinded.

“The decision we make here today is important for a lot of lives. So I’d ask your indulgence by allowing me to bend a few rules here and there. I don’t think I’m going to break any beyond repair, however.”

The officers on the dais conferred for a moment. A moment that stretched on. Finally, Colonel Trulitzka, the senior Marine Corps creep, turned back to Leher. “Commander Leher, I speak for the board in saying that, in light of your reputation and considering your assessment of the matter before us, we agree to permit you to proceed as you see fit – but we would ask that you do not venture into areas beyond which this proceeding is not designed to accommodate. As you point out, this is not a court of law.”