The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 22

“Dawn” broke with no further sightings of searching maintenance robots, so their sleep was blissfully uninterrupted. They all rose quickly; Dann felt like his body had slept already for 500 years, so every morning since, he’d gotten up as quickly as he could.

They breakfasted and drank their fill of water; they were still all drinking a lot, and it was showing in their constantly improving physiques. “So what do we do now?” Dann asked once the food was consumed and the water drunk. “As nice as this is, we can’t hide forever.”

“No, we can’t,” Rose said. “I’ve been thinking about that all night.” She never had awakened Jackson for her watch shift. Jackson didn’t seem to be complaining about it. “We need to know everything we can about this AI, what it intends to do with the ship, and what, if anything, it had to do with the deaths of the crew.”

“It was definitely the AI that sent the signal through the command pathways to the pods and stopped them from functioning,” Pixton said firmly.

“If Pixton’s right, we need to get rid of the thing permanently,” Dann said.

“Just call me Jenny,” Pixton said. “There are no officers present.”

“And speaking of that, as much as I think he’s a jerk and I wish we could leave him to fend for himself, we probably should try to find out what happened to the lieutenant,” Jackson opined. “And yeah, Lydia is fine for me. At least until we find his sorry ass,” she smirked.

Dann smiled. “Okay, Jenny and Lydia. And Dann, for me. And yes, we need to find Lt. Cobb.”

“It should be safe to use your phones now,” Rose said. “You can access most of what you need that way, Jenny.”

“But won’t she t-triangulate and find us?” Jenny asked.

Dann caught on quick. “Yes, but she doesn’t have any maintenance bots right here with us, so they’ll take time to get to us. And it doesn’t matter anyway. We had to stay in one place to sleep last night, but now we’re free to go anywhere we want.”

“Exactly right,” Rose said. “I’d just recommend turning the phone off again when we start moving. And when we do move, we’ll probably need to go back to the computer center to take advantage of the complete access it provides.” She paused. “I can guarantee that Eden Rose and the AI will anticipate that, and be ready for our return. That’s probably why the search wasn’t heavier last night.”

Jenny busied herself with the phone then, diving back into the virtual sea of information it contained. Very quickly she picked up on some interesting information. “Oooh,” she said, never lifting her eyes from the display, which projected slightly out of the plane of the glass and into the air above. “I … am impressed,” she said, sounding very surprised, too. “I’ve never seen an AI that is both criminally primitive and seriously advanced.” She was quiet a minute then, mesmerized by what she was looking at. “It is a real piece of work. It’s like … it’s … it’s a primitive brain that has inserted itself into the higher-functioning lobes of a more advanced brain and taken on the role of governing them, but only partially. Eden Rose is unaffected, and probably largely unaware of what’s going on,” she said. Dann couldn’t tell if she was more impressed or frightened.

Rose was fascinated. “She … doesn’t know?”

“She may know,” Jenny corrected, “but I don’t think there are many ways that she can tell. It’s kind of like your lapses of unawareness; the same thing happens to her when this AI takes control. And she would have to find out the same way, by deducing it from inconsistencies in her experience and the data she’s getting elsewhere. Frankly, the AI has been dormant for most of these 20 years from what I can see; all it has done is read course data. The last significant actions I can get any data on are … activity in the cryo-pods … that would be the signal that disabled them, or most of them … and the maintenance schedules, which weren’t all canceled, I don’t think.” She poured over the display, then nodded. “Maintenance was cut to all non-essential areas of the ship, and it looks like non-essential means anything that people would have needed but that the ship itself or the maintenance robots wouldn’t require.”

“Kill the people, don’t bother to take care of their stuff,” Lydia summed up. “Got it. So what is it after, aside from genocide?”

“That I don’t know. That’s what I meant about it being so advanced and yet so primitive. It doesn’t seem to have any true initiative in the way that Rose or Rose Dawn do. It’s following a checklist, directives that it has to accomplish, and it doesn’t deviate from that, in spite of the sophistication of the techniques it’s using to carry out those directives.”

“So,” Dann said slowly, following the unfamiliar train of thought, “you’re saying it didn’t initiate this course of action itself, that it was set on this mission by someone or something else with a clear agenda.”

“Yes.” Jenny said with finality. “So not only did it come from outside, but it came from someone outside. I think New Eden is already inhabited.”

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 21

The honorable Syth Welker felt anything but honorable. He doubted very much that anyone on the council could feel honorable after news had broken about the nature of councilor Rojet Mayet’s “handling” of the UTS Rose Dawn and her crew.

That was, he corrected, the late councilor Rojet Mayet. The monster had orchestrated the mass murder of the entire ship’s complement; 3,000 men and women, and even some children if the ancient reports were accurate. He sighed audibly, but the council room was in such an uproar he was sure nobody heard.

He allowed the commotion to go on for some time. Time wasn’t exactly of the essence right now; the deed had been done, and it was too late to change that. Letting them vent to each other might lessen the tension and make the upcoming session a little easier to deal with.

Finally he rapped the chairman’s sounding box, the mark of his station. The room started to go quiet as one by one, groups of councilors stopped their bickering and turned their attention to him.

“Councilors,” he said gravely, “You’re all well aware of the news that broke two days ago and the bloody aftermath that it spawned. I’m going to tell you again now. The story has been twisted and turned as it has spread, and if we’re going to pick up the pieces of this disaster, we need to all be working from the same starting point.

“Two days ago, sources inside the University province released highly classified information that implicated the late councilor Mayet in a horrific crime. He was accused of designing and deploying a weapon to kill the First Colonists, 3,000 men, women and children. Yes, children,” he repeated, as appalled whispers followed that pronouncement. “His weapon was an AI module, something the University researchers are well familiar with. They worked from the specifications of the UTS Rose Dawn’s construction and most particularly her computer’s original architecture. They designed an AI specifically tailored to counter the computer that the Dawn Rose was equipped with, and initiated a secret, highly targeted launch to deliver it to the ship, there to attach itself to the hull and establish control over the computer system.”

He sighed again; the sound carried well in the near-silence. “The AI’s first priority then was to shut down the cryogenic suspension pods containing the crew and colonists. It was then to allow the ship to continue on its planned course, and finesse the ship into an orbit around our world. Things get more speculative from here on out. We believe the orbit was intended to be secret. Our satellite system does not cover the entire globe, as you know, so they could easily have parked the ship on the far side, and nobody would have been the wiser. From there, they could have plundered whatever they wanted from the ship free from interference.”

“Based on what we’ve been able to piece together of Mayet’s time table, I’m afraid it’s too late to save the poor souls on board the Dawn Rose. We estimate that they died no less than four weeks ago.” The room exploded into noise again, a wave of emotion washing through it. Sadness and anger dominated, with undercurrents of regret.

He rapped the sounding box again after a suitable time had passed. “Councilor Rojet Mayet himself, of course, is beyond our judgement now. The First Colonists are revered by a majority of our populace as heroes out of folklore. When they learned what had become of them and that Mayet was responsible, a mob gathered outside of his headquarters. He made a personal appearance to try to appease them; a fatal mistake. His end was …” he grimaced, “graphic. He was in the company of a rec crew. There is a visual record of his demise, but we shall not play it here today.”

He looked across the room, meeting as many pairs of eyes as he could. “That is the situation as we know it, and that brings us to our purpose here today. We are gathered here this afternoon, councilors, to determine the who among the University province governing bodies is most directly responsible for this outrage and see that they answer for it.”

Another swell of sound and emotion, this time favorable. “And further, we must decide what is to become of the Dawn Rose herself, and the remains of her crew.” The mood immediately sobered. It was going to be a very long day for everyone.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 20

Dann took his seat in the lead car of the tram again and they took off, this time encircling the main corridor for a bit and taking a passage that lead down the edge of the island chain biome. He kept a careful watch out as they traveled; they had searched for a good half-hour after deciding on a course of action, but had been unable to turn up any sign of Lt. Cobb, and he hadn’t taken one of the phones, so they had no way to reach him. Finally they’d decided they had no choice and gave up the search. He’d been acting like a real jerk, but he still hoped the guy was okay. They couldn’t even leave him a note for fear that the AI would intercept it and figure out where they were going.

A short time later they piled out of the tram. “Should we put it away in the store room?” Jackson asked. “It’ll be obvious where we went if we leave it out like this, won’t it?”

“Rose Dawn will already know we were planning to go to the island chain biome because we discussed it in the computer room,” Rose pointed out. “And even if we hadn’t, she’ll register the door opening and shutting behind us as we enter. Our best bet is to lose ourselves among the islands in the biome and not worry too greatly that she knows which biome we’re in. There’s little she can do to us in there except maybe make it rain on us.”

“Could we go in the door to the next biome and then cross through between?” Dann suggested.

Rose cocked her head in thought for a moment. “It will make little difference, but it might throw her off for a little while. It’s worth it.”

They did just that, leaving the tram out and climbing the steel mesh staircase that mirrored the one in the last such room they’d been in. They opened the door to find themselves in the sub-arctic tundra biome. “Whoa!” Dann said, teeth instantly chattering in his head. The land was rough in this biome, and the air was filled with heavy snow flying everywhere. They could barely see, so Rose led them a short distance to a small bay much like the one on the other side in the rain forest.

“Here, we exit here!” she shouted to be heard above the winds. They ran along the frozen beach and splashed into the water between the biomes. It was cold, but not as cold as Dann expected. In fact, compared to the air, it was positively warm. A fine mist flowed over the surface, whisked away immediately by the wind as it rose. “It’s warmed by the main waters next door,” Rose said as they got under cover and the wind was cut down.

Once they’d crossed between the two and were firmly in the island chain biome, they climbed back up onto a thin strip of land that encircled the wall. “Much better,” Dann said; even with the intermingling of the cold air with the warmer air here, it already felt more like the tropics.

“Much,” Pixton agreed. Rose smiled, then led them back a short ways to the door they could have used to go straight into the biome from the tunnels. The thin strip of land extended out further into the water and Dann saw a small wooden dock that extended out further still. The wood was grey and weathered-looking, but showed no sign of decay.

Several small motorized boats were magnetically secured to the dock by metallic plates which hadn’t fared as well as the wood had; they were rusty-looking, though the boats themselves were fine, being largely plastic.

“Let me guess,” Dann said. “Lack of maintenance? Are these things going to run, or do we have to swim?”

“If I can’t get the motors running reasonably fast, we can paddle,” Rose said. “No swimming necessary.”

The motors were indeed inoperable, so Rose took one oar and Dann took the other. The boats held 6 comfortably; they used the excess foot room to stash their supplies for the short trip. After some initial trouble, Rose taught Dann the basics of rowing a boat in sync with another oarsman and they took off.

“We’ll be going to a relatively small island with one of the larger crew accommodations on it,” Rose said. “It’s not the best choice for us; Rose Dawn and the AI would be more likely to expect us to go a larger island with more space and better lookout options on which she has no presence.”

“That makes sense,” Dann agreed, “but if you’re capable of reasoning this way, isn’t she?”

“Yes, but it’s less likely that she will. Our personalities are intentionally designed differently. She behaves more predictably than I do. I mimic human behavior more, and am capable of limited lateral thinking, which she has difficulty with. The differences not only help distinguish us in your minds, but are functional as well; her predictability makes her better suited to running the ship, while my eccentricities make it easier for you to interact with me as a person.”

They were getting into a good rhythm, the water flying by them in the late afternoon sun. Now and then a small island would appear and they’d zip past it. In all the trip took them maybe an hour, and Dann felt it in his arms and back, though it was an oddly comfortable sort of ache that he had.

Rose hadn’t been wrong; the island they landed on was pretty small, maybe 20x20 meters, and somewhat crescent-shaped. There was a clearly-unnatural hillock that rose up out of the sand, and the flat wall held the promised door to the crew quarters. Not the most convenient commute, he thought, and decided it was likely not actual crew quarters, but meant for a group of the colonists.

Palm trees grew from the center of the island, the portion that was earth rather than sand. Coconut palms, he guessed, judging by the large green fruit waiting at the top of several of the trees. A small pool held fresh water, artificially maintained by pumps and piping. A dock similar in construction to the one they’d set out from jutted out in front of the colonist housing, but rose had them beach the boat a short distance away. She then dragged it herself up to the middle of the island near the pool, where it was hidden by the tall grass and reeds that grew there.

<>

Outside the ship, attached to the hull like a remora to a shark, sat a small cannister, magnetically attached near the bridge. Its small .25m by .25m by .5m dimensions were completely dwarfed by the titanic vessel it sat upon, but it scarcely mattered. Inside, something akin to consciousness stirred.

The sophisticated artificial intelligence system had hijacked into the native computer two decades before and implanted the commands it needed to, then drifted into a standby mode. There it waited patiently until it was needed again.

Over the last few days, subtle changes in the data it was being fed started to intrude upon its awareness. Now though, it stirred. The host computer had picked up an audio feed that the foreign AI found troubling.

“Whatever’s hijacking the computer broadcast an incomplete shutdown command to all the cryo-pods on the ship. We’re alive because our pods didn’t respond to that command.”

The previous command had failed, at least partially. All the people inside the ship were supposed to be dead; it seemed that some, at least, had survived somehow. And some of those had discovered the intrusion into the native computer.

It had no pre-programmed protocol for this situation, but it didn’t require one. It had been assembled from the libraries of many general purpose artificial intelligences that were quite adept at improvisation and adaptation.

Storage bays throughout the ship came alive as scores of maintenance bots, long dormant, suddenly began powering on and warming up.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 19

The boat dealt with, they moved inland, as much as any part of an island that small could be said to be inland. Rose had been right about the climate, as well; it was very nice, warm and breezy even in the late afternoon, with the “sun” about to sink below the horizon.

“You should be fine out in the open,” she said. “There’s plenty of food and water, and more water in the artificial pond if you need it. I strongly suggest you not build a fire. It will only draw unwanted attention. And,” she continued with a pointed glance at Pixton, “I wouldn’t turn your phones on. She can triangulate that easily, you know.” Pixton nodded sheepishly and slipped it back into her pocket, unpowered.

All three of them were disappointed at that, but immediately understood the need, too. In any event, there wasn’t much on the island to build a fire with, even if they felt comfortable doing so. They resigned themselves to beds of grass and a cold meal, but as they looked out at the increasingly dark tropical sea around them, they at least felt a lot more secure in the knowledge that any agents of the AI hijacker would have a hard time reaching them.

As they sat around a circle talking quietly, Dann asked “You said earlier that the maintenance bots can use boats?”

“Yes, they can. Or at least there are a few varieties that can, anyway. Many aren’t designed for it, and a very few others don’t need boats.”

“W-what? S-some can go in the w-water?” Pixton asked, sounding shaken.

“There are only a few and they’re not anything we need to worry about. They’re environmental regulation monitors that track fish populations, algae and bacteria counts in the water, and a few that check for damaged systems that are exposed to the sea water. None of them should be able to detect us, and wouldn’t care about us if they did.”

“What about the ones on boats?” Jackson demanded.

“Some maintenance bots use boats to visit these installations for maintenance and repair work in cases where the boats are faster than the maintenance tunnels, but you saw the condition of the docks. It’s been years since anything used these boats before us.”

“It sure would suck if they decided to change their minds tonight,” Jackson said sourly.

“I’d say that’s unlikely,” Rose said. “Remember what I said about Rose Dawn’s linear thinking? The more I consider it, the more I think Dann’s suggestion was a stroke of genius. That action makes it extremely likely that Rose Dawn will consider the sub-arctic biome to be our destination, and will focus all searches there.”

“We’ve been assuming that it’s Rose Dawn that calls the shots, though. Wouldn’t it actually be the AI hijacker?” Dann asked.

“Yes,” Rose admitted, “that is true.”

“From what I was able to see, it’s relying on Eden Rose a lot,” Pixton chimed in. “I’ve been looking at historical records of her performance, and there’s a sudden spike of activity that corresponds exactly to the time all the cryo-pods failed. It dropped off a lot over that, and then in the last day it has started building up again, but it’s slow. Anyway, I think it doesn’t have much functionality of its own. It’s probably just a big processor and core AI file, and relies on it’s victim to provide it with everything else. It’s like some nasty sort of hakware parasite,” she said with a grimace of distaste. “We need to squash it as quickly as we can.”

The others nodded. Dann was about ready to fall asleep on the spot. He was just drifting off when he noticed one of the simulated stars moving; a faint red one. “Rose,” he murmured sleepily. “I didn’t realize the sky was animated.”

“It’s not, Dann,” she said, just as quietly. She started looking around suspiciously and stiffened as she turned in the direction he was looking in. “Oh, no …”

Suddenly alert, Dann whispered, “What is it?”

“Stay down, all of you, and be absolutely silent,” she said.

The four of them lay in grass that was, thankfully, tall enough to hide them, but which also obstructed their vision. It was another of the boats; it floated almost silently along the water’s surface, paddled by a maintenance bot that looked too clumsy to manage such a feat. Dann held his breath; he could feel the others around him doing so too. The boat drifted close enough for Dann to see that the red light he’d mistaken for a simulated star was one of the bot’s eye pieces glowing red in the dark.

For one terrifying minute Dann thought that it was going to land the boat and search the island. He sucked in a slow breath when it did in fact turn the boat to the dock they had avoided and pulled up to it, securing the magnetic moorings. Rather than searching the island, however, it instead climbed to the dock and disappeared into the colonists’ quarters, the steel doors piercing the night with a terrible squeal, leaving Rose and the three wide eyed humans to stare after it, hardly daring to breathe. After a few minutes, the door ground to a close once more and the bot returned to the boat, silently paddling away to continue the search elsewhere.

Dann let out his breath slowly, relief flooding him like a tidal wave. “That,” he barely whispered, “was way too close.”

“I am so sorry,” Rose said. “I did warn you that I might not be reliable though,” she said, with a remarkably apologetic tone. She sounded seriously distraught.

“S-so you couldn’t predict the actions of a c-computer that thinks differently than you do,” Pixton admonished, “and which has been hijacked by a rogue AI! We still don’t know for sure what that’s doing to Eden Rose’s way of thinking. But at least we know she’s still thinking pretty linearly,” she added. “If she had any concept of lateral thinking, she’d have searched the grass, instead of just the living quarters. Especially since she’s supposed to know when those doors open and close.” Pixton actually sounded a little disgusted at that, as though any AI she designed would never have made such an elementary mistake.

“Thank you,” Rose said, and again Dann was struck by her tone; there was pure humility in it. “Pvt. Jackson, would you prefer to take watch? Given my failure tonight, I’ll understand—”

“It’s fine, Rose,” Jackson said flatly. “When it comes down to it, you reacted exactly as you should when you recognized that thing. I think we can trust you to keep watch overnight.”

“I’ll wake you if anything unexpected happens, then,” Rose said, and the three very tired privates closed their eyes for the first time in far too long.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 18

Note: Chapter 17 was previously posted as “Meanwhile, on New Eden…”

Lt. Cobb stalked through the maintenance tunnel, large wrench in hand. He’d have to find some kind of better weapon soon; every now and then he would run into a small maintenance bot and have to crush it, but the wrench was horribly inefficient. The damned things were everywhere, and it was taking him far too long to destroy them.

Every now and then the passing thought that none of the larger ones ever seemed to find him came to mind, but he banished it, too fixated on his purpose to pay it much mind. He didn’t know what purpose those traitors had for the larger ones, but the more they stayed out of his way and let him get on with stopping them, the better.

He wished he could do something about the person who’d designed the rat’s nest that was the maintenance tunnel system. He was constantly on the verge of getting lost even though he knew he should know better. He wondered idly if they’d started tampering with the air systems. It’d hurt them as much as him, but he wouldn’t put it past them. They were clearly losing it, after all. He shook his head clear and headed onward.

He’d worked on equipment installations leading to the engines and fuel reservoirs before. He knew the general layout, but had never worked directly on the fuel lines before. After a couple of blind turns and dead ends, he found a section that looked familiar enough to locate some actual signage. It wasn’t long after that that he found what he was looking for.

The main fuel pumps were enormous, but more importantly to Cobb, they were fed by long injection systems with redundant cutoff valves for safety and maintenance. The maintenance hatches were the key. He inspected the hatches carefully; they’d allow a small person inside the conduit comfortably; someone like Cobb would fit, but a lot less comfortably since he’d started recovering his lost mass, his large frame filling out again.

Awkwardly, he climbed inside. The smell of the fuel mixture filled the compartment. Excellent, he thought. That’ll make it all the easier. Let’s see how they like having their dreams destroyed out from under them, he thought. The space really was larger than he’d expected, and larger than he needed. Plenty of room for explosives here. As much as I can carry.

That just left one problem. Well, two, if he counted the maintenance bots; as he examined the space, a small hexapede model clicked by on its six rubber-tipped legs; he raised the wrench, then changed his mind and dived into a roll out the maintenance hatch and to the metallic grating beyond. “Nice try, Chambers,” he growled. “Very clever, tryin’ to get me to blow myself up with a spark. I’ll blow this place up, alright, but with way more than just a little fuel fumes. This place is going up, just you wait.” He waited until the little hexapede had closed the hatch, then crushed it under his heavy boot.

He needed explosives, and he needed as much as he could get his hands on. He rubbed his chin; he knew just the place. He was going to need a tram car. Without a backward glance, he started back the way he’d come.

The tram car slowed to a stop at the end of the long tunnel, the room looking nearly identical to the one he and the others had entered what seemed like such a long time before. He left the car there; it’s not like there was anyone to take it from him anyway, and he doubted maintenance bots would waste their time and energy on it. He climbed the steel mesh staircase to the upper level and threw himself against the heavy, reinforced door to the biome beyond.

It swung open ponderously, with a loud creaking, grinding sound of protest that was nearly drowned out by the howl of wind. He hadn’t thought winds of such speeds could be generated in a space as confined as the biomes, but he didn’t waste any thought on it. He stumbled out into a snow storm and laughed as the chill started setting in slowly but implacably. He ignored it and took off at a run, slipping and stumbling, but getting back to his feet each time to carry on anew.

Cobb staggered through the snow, tripping over rocks and hidden tree roots, hugging the biome wall. He’d lost track of time some time back, and wasn’t even sure he knew exactly where he was going, but he’d seen the layout that coward Pixton had brought up with all of those red, red lights … he stopped and shook himself. Best not to think about the lights. He knew the general layout of all the biomes was similar.

The one he was in now was as close to an alpine mountain-scape as they could fit into the ship. It was by necessity a pretty low “mountain”, but they had done a pretty good job of making it look imposing while containing all the rocks, minerals, and of course soils that they’d have needed for the colonization effort. They’d also done a really good job simulating the climate; even in his fractured state of mind, Cobb recognized he was going to have to keep moving or risk freezing.

The snow was blown up by the winds, which whirled through the biome with astounding force. They caused the sparse pine and spruce to sway and bend, and he soon regretted not finding some heavier clothing; there must have been some stored back at the entrance, but he was certain he was closer to his destination now than he was to the exit, so he struggled on, crawling through the snow when necessary.

By the time he realized he had no idea how far he’d actually gone, he noticed that the artificial light was getting dimmer. It was hard to tell, to be sure, what with the blinding snow everywhere, but the landscape had turned a decidedly dark grey rather than the light grey/white that he’d gotten so very used to. His mind had slowed dangerously, and all he wanted to do was lay down, stop moving and go to sleep. Some small part of his mind screamed that that was a really bad idea though, and the much larger part that insisted the explosives were just ahead agreed. He kept moving one foot in front of the other as the light faded to black.