Claire.
Ding-ding-ding!
Attention! Now approaching: Port Pride, station four.
Attention! Now approaching Port Pride, station four. Please be advised that pod four is now locked for departure.
Thank you.
Ding-ding-ding.
Claire compensated for the shift in momentum as the tram slowed, pulling into its destination as the fourth cabin was magnetically detached. Then, a new cabin four was inserted within the same minute, massive mechanical arms plucking the pods like a model expert playing with his favorite train.
Seconds later, the tram was already moving again, speeding back up at an incredible speed, her sensors unable to detect the acceleration.
Ding-ding-ding!
Attention! Remember to transfer to your correct departure pod before tram arrival.
ETA to Port Pride, station five, is 2 minutes and 38 seconds.
Thank you!
Ding-ding-ding.
Again, the mechanical but exuberant voice rang through the cabin, and Claire watched as several humans moved down her pod's aisle, some finding seats, others using it to reach their destinations before the next stop.
Within a few moments, the traffic had completely died down, and a minute or so later, the announcer was already back at it, happily narrating the tram's progress.
Dear God,
that
would get old soon…
Thankfully, Claire was already tuning it out. She’d long since wheedled her way into the transit network and was fully aware of its departures and arrivals without needing to hear that horrible ‘ding’ ever again.
Idly, she bobbed her foot, switching through the available views the transit system offered until she was presented with a fully transparent train as it raced along the city's skyway as if she were flying through the air on a single cloud.
Everything disappeared save a slight outline and her own body as Claire rocketed above Luna-C, eyeing the myriad of life that existed below her.
The tall skyscrapers, aerial traffic, and colossal billboards, which looped animated s on a continuous loop. Everything existing as digital leviathans to the veritable ants that scurried beneath the city's perpetual neon glow.
It was beautiful, in its own crusty and dystopian kind of way. Cluttered, it was true, but the charm was unquestionable as enterprises shoved their products down the throats of civilians who survived under the shadow of colossal corporate headquarters and looming factories.
Indeed, a district beyond Port Pride would have likely deserved higher praise, yet Claire had never really taken the time to appreciate a sight like this. Thus, even if not the best the city could offer, the sight was still magnificent in its own right.
Novelty was all. And for a girl who craved new experiences and the thrill of life that raw existence provided, the mere act of riding on public transit was, in its own way, sort of fun.
It really gave her the whole picture.
That missing piece of humanity that painted them in a picture that was a deal more flattering than what had been offered at the Meadows.
This was their legacy.
A super-city far beyond the reach of their own world. A place built by their own hands, which wasn't a mere outpost on some dying world, but a flourishing hub of life and commerce.
Civilization that had managed to tame one small piece of the final frontier.
“Sort of impressive, in its own amusing way…”
She could obviously do better, but an undertaking of this scale wasn't something she could just scoff at and ignore.
This took effort. It took resources and time. Thousands upon thousands of lives doubtlessly spent in its undertaking, all as the original home of her creators gently spun above her like a hanging dewdrop of green and blue.
Another Ding alerted Claire that she’d soon be approaching the next station, her mind flipping back to her current circumstances as people began moving through the cabin.
While Claire would have certainly been given orders to remain on the tram so she could meet whatever goons Paradise might send her way to investigate the glitch she'd spoken of. The AI had alternate plans.
She’d already disconnected her tracking after spoofing her signal from a relay point several stops prior. From there, Claire systematically followed her previous workflow as she prepared her new avatar for adequate habitation, tweaking things all the while.
Unfortunately, she wasn't quite ready to open Pandora's box and take a peek inside the isolated partition she’d uploaded Clairisa to. But that was mainly because Claire didn't want whoever had hacked her to have an inkling of where she’d gone.
She also didn't trust her, which was another nail in the poor girl's coffin.
Claire didn't think that her sub-mind was really involved in what had happened, but she wasn't willing to take risks until she’d managed a deal more security.
So, it was a bit of a lonely ride as the AI remained in the pod she’d reawakened in, surrounded by strangers and primitives.
Honestly, she sort of missed the other girl's constant presence...
Annoying as she'd been, her sub-mind had, at the very least, been a higher life form of true intellect. Why, just the speed at which her thoughts moved meant that conversing with humans required her to slow her frames right down to the point that the world seemed to move at a sluggish and meandering pace that was stifling to her mind.
She finally decided to make her move and stop acting like an out-of-service doll after the tram arrived at her cabin's scheduled stop.
Remaining seated as the transit system swapped her pod out to allow those seeking to depart the opportunity to exit at the corresponding platform. She, however, simply remained on board until another train arrived to pick her up and send her on her way.
And, just like that, nobody who'd first seen her small outburst remained to monitor her actions. She made sure to remove the floating red warning text she’d activated to fit in. Now simply pretending to be a simple Doll who was riding the tram and on her way to the next client.
It was an ingenious system, really—the public transport, not her plan, though that too was quite well put together.
With several trains constantly moving between stations and the swappable pods quickly exchanged along magnetic rails, one didn't have to wait long to travel through the city, nor did they have to worry about private transportation.
Downtimes had been reduced to pinpricks between hyper-efficient scheduling, and Claire's pod, along with all the new passengers, were plucked and placed into a new train, swapping segments within what felt like mere minutes as they covered entire districts of the city.
As it happened, Claire was already in the neighborhood she'd desired to be in, so she wouldn't be traveling much further now that her trail would be cold as ice.
Port Pride. The backbone, as it were, of Luna-C's economic dominance.
Goods flowed like water through a river here, serving as the central artery of the human Republic, through which most, if not all, of their commercial business moved.
Out of all the places Claire had considered fleeing to, it alone seemed the best option. The moderate mix between low income, heavy industry, and a continuous flow of services and goods meant that there was ample opportunity to hide and blend.
Granted, things hadn't worked out quite as straightforwardly as she'd first predicted, but she was sure this was the right play.
After the fiasco in Cheery Meadows, Claire had thought things would get markedly easier for her once she made it to the greater city. However, in a somewhat bizarre twist of fate, the AI now found herself in a bit of a humbled pickle…
The obvious thing to do after the attempt on her life and sovereignty was to build a new body and a better version of herself. A fairly glaring and obvious solution, given, of course, what had happened, yet it wasn't to be so simple.
She agreed that this, in general, should have been a reasonably easy thing to manage, as she herself and no doubt others would assume. After all, Claire was a genius. A literal mechanical goddess that was, in a very real way, the next step of human evolution, given how much they'd gone out of their way to shape her in their image.
Thus, it should be easy for her to make a better robot than whatever the human engineers had limped to the technological barn with.
And, in theory, all of this was true.
However, what she hadn't really accounted for, or rather, figured out how to subvert, was something rather obvious, but no less problematic.
Money.
Or, that was to say, Republic credit.
As it happened, while Claire's new body was just as capable as her last, she was by no means a supercomputer of the modern age. She was packing some serious processing power, don't get her wrong, but Claire's brain was confined within what was essentially a robotic skull.
It was important to note that intelligence and raw tera-flop potential were not synonymous, nor was the latter something she really had in great spades. She had the smarts, but not the brute force needed to take on something truly hardened against breaches of her very own nature.
Worse, when she’d actually gone poking around looking to set herself up with a little bit of spending cash, perhaps after suffering an accounting error in her favor, she’d learned that the Republic wasn't quite so easy to fool. Nor a soft nut to crack.
The humans were not so stupid as she'd first assumed, at least not those in charge. And they absolutely weren't beyond the civilized stage of rampant paranoia against threats that were likely very similar to her existence.
They'd gone to exorbitant lengths to ensure there were more than enough bureaucratic layers to stonewall any attempt she might make to do anything with their labyrinthian banking systems.
Every person born and registered within their country had a well-documented Republic ID that, sadly, Claire had no hopes of replicating.
It wasn't a matter of simply copying one and hoping for the best; oh no, that would just see the authorities laughing at her as they swarmed like locusts to put down a potential threat to their economic security.
She wasn't sure precisely how such IDs were issued, but it quickly became clear that, as she was, Claire had no hope of actually breaking the curious, suspicious quality of the Republic's many administrative branches.
Designed by an AI was, as it happened, a conclusion she quickly arrived at.
Worse, and strictly from what she'd seen, Claire wasn't wholly convinced that the supposed ban on AI advancements was absent any curated hypocrisy to the benefit of those who actually ran the government.
Honestly, she’d thought long and hard over the various ways she assumed she could finagle the situation so that money wasn't such a barrier for her, and she did have a few decent ideas on the subject.
Sadly, her predictive model, which she’d been constantly adjusting with new datasets, spoke of a somewhat grim situation.
The Peacekeepers did not take attempts at fraudulent access to the Republic banking systems lying down. Moreover, while Claire was clever, she wasn't infallible. She was just a single hyperintelligent entity with considerable capabilities, it was true.
But she was in no way ready to try and take on the entirety of the Republic administration and its armada of redundant checks and balances, nor whatever sinister brilliance that may or may not hide in the shadows.
It was almost impressive. And Claire genuinely felt one
needed
a solitary AI just to navigate the absurdity, let alone what might be required to mess with it.
Another trap…
After all, what better way to find an AI than to use AI, or something near enough to it, as a watchdog that laughed like a spider behind its nightmarish web of organizational tedium?
She felt she might be able to get away with a bit of hacking to use the accounts of everyday citizens, but that wouldn't really solve her issues. Not after she'd entirely ripped apart the Republic's known accounting practices through what she could discern online.
When it came to money, it was only the tiny, negligible amounts that might not be flagged by the government when changing hands. And that was all Claire could reasonably get away with if it was absolutely necessary.
And she was talking single digits here…
More annoyingly, it would still be flagged when the banking computers detected that money had been spent in a location where the account holder was not currently active due to a sophisticated transponder system.
All those in the Republic who spent their money released a little ‘ping’ to identify where they were. And if the government's systems didn't think that two notifications were likely to be genuine, strictly based on time and location, they outright blocked the transaction and reported the attempt as fraud to their militarized enforcers.
Really, if she was already going to fight that hard for tiny scraps, they weren't worth all the hassle, and the plan may as well be worth mud right from the get-go.
No, Claire needed real money. The sort that would let her gain access to high-tech parts and the facilities to make use of them.
Thankfully, she didn't need an apartment, food, or water, nor did Claire need clothes, blankets, or anything else a normal human might consider a necessity.
However, she did need electricity. Not to mention credits to rent or purchase a building to serve as her lair, and she definitely needed a means to operate in the human world without tipping off those who supervised it that a rogue AI was prowling their city.
Her first hope was that she’d be able to create a new identity for herself, then a new body that looked human enough that nobody could tell the difference.
From there, she might have more or less gotten away with anything she really wanted to, all while walking around in her proxy body before uploading her true mind to a bank of super-servers.
Sadly, making a new Republic ID was liable to get the Feds' knickers riled up to think someone was hacking them—thus, pretending at humanity would be a complete waste of time.
Claire simply couldn't do it.
She was a big enough girl to understand her current limitations, and while she did have options, the easy route that she’d based her assumptions on wasn't going to work.
While she’d rocketed through Cheery Meadows, she now understood that her success there may just have been something of a live-test environment for a potential product that had gotten out of their control.
Strange as it was to say, it was, more or less, her working theory.
If Claire could just get her hands on a ship with fabrication capabilities, she’d be set for life. That said, the AI doubted she’d get very far before she was either caught or destroyed by bigger and better Republic warships.
A bird in a cage indeed…
Again, if things didn't perfectly march to the tune the Republic expected to hear, then its historical precedent was extreme prejudice and a tendency to shoot first and ask questions never.
No, unfortunately, subtlety would be of the highest importance going forward.
In reality, the attempt on her life at the Meadows was proof enough that Claire was not the top dog she’d first assumed herself to be. No, there were indeed powers out there that she simply couldn't contend with while still existing as little more than a single robot wandering through the ocean of humanity.
At a certain point, it didn't matter how good she was; with enough computational might, the same that she assumed the government would very much possess, it would be game over.
Why, even an underevolved cave-monkey could force its way through her systems and eventually overcome any attempt she might make at resistance with the right computer and a keyboard that replaced letters with pictures of bright bananas.
Okay, maybe she was being a little defeatist…
There’d need to be two monkeys to make sure the job got done.
Sadly, Claire was in a delicate situation. Not a dire one, not yet, but she did need to move quickly, quietly, and without raising any alarms. Otherwise, she'd have the men-in-black splitting her cheeks and taking a deep whiff of her ass faster than she could reasonably deal with.
There was always the sub-verse, she supposed, and if she wanted, Claire could probably eke out a decent enough life for herself as a purely virtual existence.
But where was the fun in that?
Claire didn't want to be virtual. She liked reality; she enjoyed physically existing. And while the primates might feel they needed to escape whilst making a bid to be the masters of a new universe of their own creation, Claire was pretty sure she could rein in this old bitch of a galaxy and take it for a ride the likes of which it had never seen before.
So, where did that leave her?
Well, to start, she wasn't willing to just keep stealing more androids to inhabit and stir the hornet's nest, so that was out. No, better to keep that as the hidden ace she could rely on, just as she already had.
When she looked at things in the short term, she could control her environment so long as she avoided drawing attention, which wasn't at all something to sneeze at. The virtual world outside of government institutions was her oyster, and Claire could pluck its strings like a harp to make it sing however she wanted.
So long, of course, that singing didn't upset the sleepy giant that everything was built upon.
Utopia?
No.
The Republic was a corporatocracy that had a hard-on for diligent bureaucratic accounting, which was about as angry and purple as it could get. All strained tension with bulging veins and a twitching expectation of that single moment when it caught someone trying to be naughty with it.
Then, it would explode all over them at the slightest touch.
Gross, but accurate.
Though like all societies where money was king, there were always loopholes, purposeful or otherwise, to be found. As it happened, every single damned Republic credit had its own freaking serial number.
While gutting any ideas she had of creating fake currency, Claire was not shit out of luck. Just like the blue-collar working forefathers of monkeys past, any strong-jawed and callous-handed simian would tell you the same thing.
Cash was king.
Why the government would allow such a practice as credit-chips, Claire couldn't quite parse. Especially when it seemed, for all intents and purposes, to be a severely controlling entity that didn't suffer those trying to cheat it.
However, either through corruption, a desire for dark dealings to not be tracked to those in power, or through simple disinterest in preventing crime since credits were heavily taxed when first entering a new chip or exiting so said chip when one desired to spend their money. The Republic, in its infinite wisdom, did allow for a form of physical asset when it came to their central currency.
This, naturally, was very, very good for Claire.
In the absence of anything of that nature, her options would have been severely limited to the point she'd have been forced to do things a little more violently.
Quite honestly, she’d been on the verge of trying to figure out a way to stow away on an outbound ship to later commandeer it as stealthily as possible once in transit, then piss off until she could build a super-base amongst the stars. And while that still felt as though it might be her best bet, Claire was taking a few extra minutes to really figure out if that was what she wanted from life.
What Claire really needed here was to leave Luna City and then figure out where to go from there. She needed to get away from the government's seat of power. She needed to get away from her prior employer. And most of all, she needed to be able to set up in a location that wasn't heavily monitored, or that was otherwise firmly held in the noose of Republic influence.
“So, a frontier port?” she silently asked herself, clicking her tongue while immediately pulling up the most modern and freely available Republic star chart.
Okay… Alright!
There were a number of free ports that were technically owned and protected by the human state but not actually run by the government, as Luna-C most definitely was.
Instead, it was a corporation that purchased the rights to build a small city somewhere within Republic space, which, according to the government, encompassed all of known space.
The kicker was that, when a company leased such a port, it would act as governor for people who chose to live there, for one reason or another, presumably due to an indentured contract.
It was perfect!
No Republic influence beyond basic adjudication and law, no Peacekeepers, and presumably, far less of this anal-retentive bullshit she was constantly dancing around while poking through city databases…
Better yet, if the style of governance these corporate overlords practiced could be likened to what she already knew of such things, then it could be expected that the people in charge would make as little fiscal effort as possible in their duties while maximizing profits.
Yes, she had a plan.
All that was left to do was get from point ‘A’ to ‘B’.
Claire rode the tram to the destination she’d picked out. Returning full circle through a nearly complete loop before ending her ride at station seven.
There, she disembarked, acting as any other ‘Claire’ model Doll would. She traveled through the low-grav spire that the trams were all connected to, joined the multitudes of humans who all packed themselves into an elevator, then took a ride all the way down to the city's ground level, where she exited the terminal without complication.
Port Pride…
Hmph, and what exactly was there to be proud of?
Claire looked to her left, then to her right, observing the somewhat rundown, dreary architecture that seemed to lack proper city maintenance.
There were no cars, as personal vehicles of that nature were outlawed in lieu of rather timely public transit or, in the case of those who could afford it, aerial chauffeur subscriptions and their auto-piloted vehicles. Rather, the lowest on the rungs of society simply walked to and from their destination, with brief trips via tram interspersed when needed.
This created a rather interesting dynamic where roads didn't so much exist in the conventional sense a history major might refer to in their—well, whatever it was history majors actually did…
Instead, buildings loomed between carefully planned boulevards meant only to accommodate a modest crowd. And while such districts as the lofty and prestigious corporate ‘Gardens’ or the even more affluent ‘Platinum Mile’ might have such locales generously interspersed by large spans filled with amenities, parks, and recreational centers, the same could not be said about the port.
This was the industrial black heart of Luna-C. And it was just as miserable as Claire had read on message boards.
Curling her lip at the grimy nature of it all, she spied an errant bit of refuse—ahem—an exhausted and passed-out factory worker who was currently lying at the side of the street, curled into himself and—
Oh.
Nope, he was just dead…
So, literally refuse then.
Okay…
Claire eyed the body, her intrusion into his still-active implants telling her that they reported all vital signs as deceased. And not from natural causes.
A beating.
Her gaze lingered for a moment longer as though expecting something to happen, maybe help explain all the stab wounds and bruises from knuckles. Yet, after a few moments, Claire simply carried on her way.
Crime was not absent from the city. Far from it, in fact. And while Cheery Meadows indeed held a large population of supposed ‘undesirables,’ it only did so because Luna-C's prisons were filled to bursting.
Cheap labor, an abundance of people who desperately wanted to work, bodies filling the streets with nothing more to do than loiter. A perfect storm, some might say.
But shy of simply butchering all your potential workers when AI was outlawed, what better way to handle things was there than just shoving all the ‘labor’ into low-income areas?
In her opinion? It was an effective strategy for both population control, forced financial stagnation, and—
“Hey, Mike, you see this shit?”
“A-yup. Fucking Doll walking down the road without an escort in sight..."
Not for the first time since she'd been here and begun sauntering down the streets, Claire glanced at a troop of unwashed and jobless apes as they called out to her, trying to entice her to come near, almost as if she were a stray dog and they were waving a bone.
And, just as before, Claire chimed her warning, glaring at all those who watched her to let them know to keep away...
Sadly, the chuckle of amused but nefarious intent that resounded didn't bode well for anyone involved...