I was in luck. Brando didn’t seem to mind kicking off the conversation. “So how bad’s your workshop? Scuttlebutt is the last guy turned out to be a slob.”
“Not terrible," I took a seat across from Coro when he kicked it out for me. “There’s a lot of fine dust on every surface and some clutter, but nothing the cleaners can’t handle. The room’s dedicated filters are almost at capacity, though.”
“Are you kidding me?” Brando boomed and I barely kept from flinching. My ear drums almost vibrated from the sheer volume of his outrage. I’d been right. He really had been using his ‘indoor’ voice before. “I installed those at the beginning of the year. They’re rated for 10,000 hours! How did he already blow through that?”
“Not sure yet, but it looks like microshavings from one of the tools," I shrugged. “I’ll check everything in there before I use it.”
“I bet there’s an unseated screen in the finisher somewhere," Coro volunteered. He had a breathy, melodious voice that sounded like music. “I’ll take a look later if you like. I’ve got one with a similar issue in my shop and they’d have come from the same lot. I probably have a replacement part, it’s that’s the case. They came in a pack of ten.”
“That little shit," Brando grumbled and stabbed at the chunk of red protein in his tray. It was formed into a little patty and covered with anonymous brown sauce, although I thought Brando might be imagining J. Armsa’s face there instead. “That why you’ve got the bots out?”
The hatch behind us opened just then to admit two little bots with a bio-hazard bag suspended in between them. According to their supervisor, it was the cleaning accessories they’d used to contain and eliminate the mildew issue. They were headed for the bio-waste disposal unit in the galley so I left them to it.
“Yeah, among other things. I get twitchy around air hazards," I explained. “Plus it makes for good drills with a new crew. I get to see what level of autonomy they can handle outside of a crisis. I’ve got auxiliaries riding herd on them right now.”
That seemed to get Coro’s attention. He looked at me, really looked for the first time and I realized he had synthetic eyes. Sometimes you couldn’t tell, but Coro hadn’t even bothered to try and hide it. His eyes were pure, unrelieved black and small shifting pin-points of light blinked on and off just below their mirrored surface. That explained the medical feedstocks. Eyes needed constant lubrication. He probably had even more enhancements going on under the hood. “Not command macros?” he asked.
Ugh, macros; last refuge of the lazy. It was an effort to stay off the soapbox. He hadn’t asked for a lecture.
“I don’t like relying on blind direction. Bots are smart, but they don’t always take a holistic approach to problem solving. At the same time, they don’t respond to micromanagement any better than humans. Auxiliaries are my solution to the problem, but there’s difference schools of thought on the subject.”
“No, it’s efficient," Coro agreed and seemed to unfold from his cautious hunch. He was taller than I’d realized, almost taller than Brando while sitting down. “Are your auxiliaries fully independent?”
I waggled a hand in a ‘so-so’ gesture. “Semi-independent. They check in frequently with new tasks, but my cadre has a lot of experience at this point and they share what they learn with each other. They only need a light hand on the reins.”
Coro’s brows flew up and the activity behind his eyes peaked. I was pretty sure that wasn’t a social display. He was doing something back there. “You aren’t worried one will spontaneously evolve? Gained experience is how you nurture AI seed code.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“It’s happened," I shrugged as his jaw dropped. “I’ve had to recover three auxiliaries from seed code over the years. Two of them were viable. Romulus runs traffic control for Luna Central. We write sometimes. The older one, Lupa, freelances. I was a lot younger and less settled when she came online and they model themselves using their caretakers as a template so she likes to move around. She clocks a little closer to human processing speed so she’ll call me sometimes when we wind up in the same sector. Romulus has better hardware so it's harder for him to slow down comfortably, but we send letters.”
That reminded me. I needed to let the kids know that I was OK. They did not like that I was still on Mimir when we’d talked last time, but they hadn’t had any viable leads on a better, safer berth at the time.
“Two…” Coro’s voice failed him and he reached out without looking and pulled on Brando’s sleeve.
Brando’s laugh could have shaken the table, but his hands were gentle as he disengaged. “Yeah, buddy. I know," he looked at me and explained. “Synthetic life is a big deal where he comes from, but they’re way behind the Core when it comes to developing Intelligent Synthetics. He was the same way when he found out that Solar law recognizes AI as people.”
“Do you want Lupa’s beacon code? I think she’s a ship right now," I asked. “She likes talking with organic people.”
“Yes, very much so," Coro cleared his throat and the lights in his eyes winked out as one. “Thank you.”
Elaine came out of the galley balancing a tray in each hand. She slid one in front of me. It was another red protein tray, but mine was pretending to be stew.
“What did I miss?” she asked, sitting down next to me.
“The new girl grows AI," Brando replied.
Elaine blinked and then shrugged. “Not the weirdest hobby I’ve heard of.” She looked at me. “Keep them out of the mainframe or Amanda and Taj will have kittens.”
Coro noticed my confusion and explained, “Amanda is the first mate and Taj is the pilot," he said. “They tend to keep odd hours compared to the rest of us, but I’m sure they’ll both make time to introduce themselves.”
“Do you really grow AI?” Elaine asked, leaning over so the others wouldn’t overhead her. “I have no idea what’s involved so I don’t know if he’s lying.”
“I use auxiliary intelligences to help manage my bots. Sometimes they develop sentience.”
That wasn’t entirely true. Not all my auxiliaries were at risk. I had two sets of code that tended to spawn intelligent synthetics, but they were both on standby for now. I’d learned the hard way that the company you keep matters a lot when you’re nurturing a young mind.
My mood dipped at the thought of Remus, but I had to shake it off because I was absolutely not going to discuss him right now.
“It’s not quite the same thing and it’s not something that happens with any kind of frequency. So I wouldn’t worry.” I reassured her.
I took a bite of my lunch and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was just as good as the last meal I’d had on board. This one was a little spicy and had real vegetables in it, not just flavored soy chunks. “Thank you for this," I told Elaine who smiled and stabbed her spoon into the crust of her own meal. It was a white protein pie with a cream sauce inside. That smelled really good too.
“We fly on our stomachs," she explained. “Jack doesn’t get cheap with the food.”
“Thanks the stars for that," I sighed and dug into my food.
Behind me, the bots finished disposing of the biohazard bag and skittered back into the corridor. I queried their directives and they were heading back to the workshop to support the ones who were cleaning up plastic microshavings by assessing the fabbers in there. Their supervising auxiliary had overheard Coro and issued them an order to find that loose screen ASAP.
Once I was done with my meal and had excused myself to return to my workshop, I found myself in a very different environment. Every surface was gleaming clean. There were no more bits of miscellaneous discarded crap on the floor or shreds of wrapping film from the bot wrappers. I saw there were a few bots in the repair queue, being checked over by one of the more advanced models that had been commandeered by one of my auxiliaries as a body.
I sent it orders to form a consensus with its peers about whether that kind of body would do for their use or if they wanted me to request something better and, if so, to give me a short list of what kind of body they’d want at three different price points.
It was a relief to return to the warm confines of my pod. It wasn’t exactly cold in the rest of the ship. The temperatures were well within the comfortable norm for human occupation, but I still felt chilly until the pad under me finally heated up.
I made a note to myself to get a blanket for while I was in the pod when I could.