Ironheart Page 5

  And Madaku had his own secret project that he wanted to work on. It intrigued him, it almost galled him, that Anya’s code was not available in the Registry. During his off-hours he’d found himself poring over the samples of it they’d cloned and uploaded to the Registry and placed in the Canary AI for analysis. It was confirmed that the Registry had never heard of it or anything obviously related to it. Almost as if there had been a whole independent cybernetic culture out there, some race of computer-savvy sentients, that had gone extinct and left no trace of their mathematical techniques or programming strategies except the code on Ironheart. Undoubtedly the explanation was nothing so dramatic as that, but it remained an intriguing problem, and Madaku found himself fiddling with it more and more obsessively. He welcomed the prospect of being invited to deal with her code still more. Who knew, maybe he would figure out a way to hack into it—purely as an intellectual exercise, of course, with no invasive intentions.

  So Madaku and Anya boarded the box-like, utilitarian shuttle and headed back over toward Ironheart.

  It gave Madaku the willies, being alone with Anya. Exposure to Willa had mellowed her, but a lot of that softening disappeared along with her tutor. During the ride back to her ship, there wasn’t much small talk. When they were about halfway over, Madaku gave it a shot: “Will it be good to get back to your ship?”

  There was her habitual pause before answering. She was sitting behind Madaku, gazing out at the starfield. Though she leaned far back in her chair with her legs wide, not even a casual observer could have thought she was slumping, or accused her of lazy posture. By leaning back and spreading her legs out, she gave herself the illusion of more mass, more volume. Though her hands curled light and loose atop her thighs, energy thrummed through her body. Sometimes he imagined he could feel the maddened electrons popping off her and hitting him.

  Finally, she said, “One always returns. That is the way things are. But it is important that things be made new, as well. Or, at least, that one try to make them so.”

  That didn’t exactly make sense, but whatever. “Well, I’ll take a crack at it. Even if your engines are unfamiliar to me, the Registry will come up with similar models, and we’ll soon have you good as new.” Hesitantly, as if asking too many questions would be presuming too far upon the privilege of this audience, he said, “How long have you owned Ironheart?”

  Anya had looked away from Ironheart and seemed to be examining the stars to remind herself which ones she had visited and which she had yet to see. “Did I not tell you?” she said. “I do not remember.”

  “You told me. I guess I thought maybe it was a temporary lapse caused by the effects of suspended animation.” It seemed to him that at the mention of suspended animation a mysterious, cold amusement flickered briefly in her face.

  Ironheart’s slowly turning thruster-wings were near enough to make out their inscriptions with the naked eye. Madaku remarked how alien so many of them seemed, how old. He said, “May I ask how you got so many names, Anya?”

  Her vision pierced into some hidden, phantasmagorical place, and one could almost see her repeating to herself old tales of how she’d come by her many names. “I picked them up,” she said. “Here and there.”

  They didn’t say anything else till they arrived at her ship. Madaku could have asked Anya for an access code, but unless she offered it he decided to see if it was any easier to dock this time. Between what he and the AI had learned about Ironheart’s code when they’d docked four days ago, and the work he’d been secretly doing on the code in his spare time, they were able to dock. But the code had already mutated since their last visit, enough that again it took the shuttle’s AI a second to persuade the airlock to open.

  “How easily you broke my ship’s defenses,” observed Anya, while they waited for the airlock to pressurize. She didn’t sound particularly upset—perhaps only the mildest exasperation.

  “I hope you don’t mind my accessing without asking first.”

  Anya said, “It does not matter. It is the way. Ever one awakes and finds that certain of one’s tools are useless and must be replaced. Though that happens less and less. There was a time, I think, when one had to cycle through all one’s possessions even without a sleep, even in the span of a normal life.”

  “Your defenses system put up a good fight,” said Madaku. “The code’s evolutionary morphing capacities are really pretty extraordinary. And it’s so unusual that, even now that our AI has deciphered its core architecture and mutative principles, it takes the Registry almost a second to construct a key.”

  Anya gave him a sharp look. Madaku almost physically recoiled. She said, “One second? Dost thou speak to me of one second as if it might be an advantage in combat, in defense?”

  Madaku wondered if she’d reverted to Classical Galactic because she was pissed off and not thinking, or if it was because she wanted to signal her contempt by using the second-person-singular on him. But why the contempt? What had he done? Almost stammering, he said, “Well, I guess I didn’t mean it necessarily gave you a strong real-world advantage, or anything. But it’s still an interesting, impressive bit of programming. And there are really ingenious defenses against anyone being able to hijack your system without your knowledge.”

  Anya ignored the second part of his statement. Her narrowed eyes lingered on him, feeling him out. “‘Impressive.’ You mean, as in a game?”

  “Well. Um. Kind of, I guess.”

  Mercifully, after another moment, Anya took those eyes off him. As she turned to stride through the airlock and into the ship, Madaku hurrying after her, he heard her mutter, presumably to herself, “A world of low-stakes games—so be it, I’ve awoken in such as these before, as well.”

  They bypassed the room with the suspension coffin that Fehd was lusting after, and went straight to the bridge. Even so, Madaku saw enough to appreciate anew how bizarre Ironheart’s layout was. It was impossible to see what had motivated the engineers to place the corridor’s turns where they had, and everywhere there were those mysterious crates made from all different materials, held in racks along the walls. In places little nooks and niches had been carved into the bulkhead itself, and idols or trinkets or statuettes or trophies hid within their shadows—Anya maintained too brisk a pace for Madaku to pause and get a good look at any of them.

  When they arrived at the bridge, Madaku saw that it had a much more old-fashioned set-up than the bridge on the Canary, or any other ship Madaku had ever stepped foot on. Most bridges were just conference rooms, since cybernetic redundancies meant that any command, action, or reading could be made from any terminal aboard or connected to the ship.

  On Ironheart, though, important functions really were wired through the bridge. Madaku didn’t see why it had been designed like that; it struck him as inefficient and dangerous. And, while the circuitry was very old, and the original unmodified base probably the oldest cybernetic set-up he’d ever seen, it wasn’t so old that modern redundancies couldn’t have been built in. It was as if it dated from an age when the minds of humans hadn’t yet caught up with their technology, when they unthinkingly still designed their machines to be analogues with an animal, having this set of organs located in that specific place, having a brain centered in the bridge.

  Anyway, that was why they had to actually physically go to the bridge, because that was where the controls for the scramblers were. Anya entered a code into a keypad that was fixed onto a console, so that it couldn’t be moved around; then she underwent a retinal scan; then a tiny scraper popped out of the console, took an invisible sample of her skin cells, and ran a DNA test. Once the computer was satisfied Anya was herself, it allowed her to turn off the scramblers, so that Madaku could get a fuller look at the ship’s inner workings and what had gone wrong with them.

  The controls were marked in yet another script he’d never seen before, one made up entirely of squat triangles and rigid lines. The triangles and lines were arranged in all sorts of angles and clump
s, diagonal lines cross-hatching, stacks of triangles tilted to the left or right. Eyeballing the consoles and readouts, Madaku guessed that he saw about a hundred characters, which would probably take it out of the running for being an alphabet and might mean they were part of a complicated set of ideograms. That was a significantly less efficient manner of writing, and was especially unusual in a ship’s controls.

  But whatever. Another weird thing, big deal. Who was counting anymore?

  Madaku couldn’t read the controls, obviously, and it would have been tiresome to have Anya translate everything for him, so he hooked his adapter up to her system.

  Once the adapter’s AI and the Ironheart’s had chatted a few nanoseconds, the adapter was able to show Madaku the ship’s readings using the same format as aboard the Canary. He routed the data through a tablet, that he stretched out and propped up on his knees. Then he got to work.

  He was hoping Anya would step out after she’d turned off the scramblers attached to her engineering sections and gotten the adapter hooked up. For one thing, her presence made him nervous, and for another it would be easier for him to snoop through the system, without her there watching him. Hooked up as he was to the system itself, from Ironheart’s own console and with permission of its master, he would break no Registry taboos in looking around.

  But she didn’t leave, she just sat in her black captain’s chair and leaned it way back, and lounged there, gazing up at the tan perma-plastic ceiling. Madaku tried to ignore her, as he ran analysis protocols to figure out how the thrusters were supposed to work and diagnostics to figure out why they’d stopped working that way.

  Before long, he was so caught up in exploring the information design, and solving the mystery of the engine failure, that he actually did forget Anya was there. So he jumped when she spoke.

  “Tell me,” she said. “If it was so easy for you to break my code’s defenses and access my airlock, why could you not simply turn off my scramblers yourself?”

  He was shocked and uncomfortable at the question, but tried to hide it. “We could have, of course. But we would never do such a thing without permission. Except, of course, in a true emergency.”

  For the first time, Anya looked taken aback. After taking a moment to let his words sink in, Anya said, “You mean you could have done all this without me? My scramblers are as weak to you as my airlock? You could have come onto the bridge, turned off the scramblers, and hooked up the adapter yourself, all while leaving me aboard your own ship?”

  “Well ... yes, of course we could have.” How could she not have figured this all out on her own? Even if she was from a time so distant that these things hadn’t been true then—which, in truth, was a possibility that was only really hitting him now.... “We could have,” he said. “But we never would. Except ... well, when first boarding we do have our AI turn off the scramblers for a nanosecond, with instructions to check only for survivors in need of assistance or immediate danger sources such as radiation leaks. Once the AI decides there’s no such emergency, we switch off the view and re-enable scrambling before we can see anything else. Anyway, that all happens automatically, and only the AI gets to see that data—it’s never shared with us.” That had been moot in her ship’s case, since the AI decay had rendered its data on the interior pre-scrambled, so to speak—although he had to admit that everything sure did seem to be functioning now, which was weird. Had her central AI rebooted itself?... He refrained from mentioning that there were, however, things that one could normally do in theory that did indeed seem hardly possible with Ironheart’s AI. For instance, the mutative rate prevented him from being able to create an interface sufficiently antibodied that Ironheart’s system would not recognize it; such an interface would have theoretically allowed him to manipulate her ship’s systems without her or her AI realizing the commands came from an outside source. Naturally, such an action would be highly taboo and radically contra the Registry guidelines, and he would never consider actually doing it ... but it was still weird that he couldn’t do it.

  The truth was that, in his spare time, he’d been trying to figure out if there were some way that he could. Not that he would—it was purely as a diversion.

  She just kept staring at him. “Why do you switch off the view into the other ship?”

  The longer her confusion lasted, the more discombobulated he became. “Well,” he said. “To do otherwise would be incredibly impolite.” Then he added, “And contrary to Registry Guidelines.”

  “Ah.” Her expression showed the beginnings of comprehension, and amusement.

  Madaku continued: “Obviously, when it’s a question of boarding a ship that’s possibly derelict, or possibly has someone aboard that needs to be rescued, in that case we’re justified in boarding. But if we know it belongs to somebody, and especially if we’re in contact with that owner, then it would take some pretty extreme circumstances to justify us forcing our way in and messing around with its systems....”

  “Yes, yes, it all sounds very civilized.” Nobody could have missed the amusement in her voice now. “You mentioned guidelines. Who is it that enforces these?”

  Her question was so large and obvious that for a second he didn’t understand it. Once it had processed, he said, “The Registry. You could make a complaint to the Registry, if we did that.”

  “I see.” She reclined back in her chair again, and once more stared at the ceiling. Madaku hesitated, unsure whether they were finished. Then he returned his attention to the tablet on his knees, trying to regain his focus.

  He worked for a while, studying the principles of Anya’s thrusters, trying to look back in time and see why they had stopped working. There was no blaringly obvious reason. It looked almost like they’d been intentionally disabled. That was impossible, though, so he wondered if the problem hadn’t been with the hyperdrive. In that case, he feared the ship would have much bigger problems than its realspace thrusters. But they’d need Willa to come over if they were to check that out. He began checking the hyperdrive couplings.

  “Tell me,” said Anya in a conversational tone behind him, “what would happen, if I killed you all?”

  Madaku swiveled in his chair to face her. “Excuse me?”

  Still reclined, she turned to face him. He saw that she was playing with something in her right hand—something like a toy, sort of like a little gray metal die except with prongs sticking out. Almost smiling, almost mocking him, she said, “Say that I upgrade my code. That I download more powerful code from the Galactic Registry. It sounds like all of you can hack into each other’s systems whenever you like. Let us say I hacked into the Canary, lowered her energy shields from inside, and blasted her from the sky on a whim. What’s to stop me from doing that, if your code offers such paltry protection?”

  “Hopefully our first line of defense would be your total lack of desire to do anything remotely like that.”

  Again he could see her tightening with impatience. “Even if I’ve no reason to do it, dolt, there must still be those who would. There must be psychopaths, murderers, bandits. What happens if a shipful of nasty people came along and blew you up—what then?”

  “The Registry would prosecute the attackers. The Canary and all its occupants are listed in the Registry, and the ship and we four crew members all have chips implanted, linked to our subspace antenna and sending signals to the Registry. If we should suffer sudden death or destruction, the Registry would immediately know of it. It would run a sweep through its contacts to see which of all its trillions were in the same vicinity as us. Once it did that, it would only take a little data-sifting for them to find the guilty party.”

  “You mean to say there are peacekeepers ready to swoop in to the remotest corners of the galaxy, each time there’s a crime? That’s absurd.”

  “The guilty party would be apprehended the first time they made contact with any community or group strong enough to do so. Otherwise that community or group would face censure by the Registry, for its ina
ction.”

  “But what is to stop these violent ones from avoiding all contact with any group? From coming to someplace, like, say, here, and living out the rest of their days in the wilderness of space?”

  Now it was Madaku’s turn to get impatient. “Well, yes, that does happen, but it’s extremely rare! Too rare for us to go around constantly worrying about it. The fact is, most sentients like to at least sometimes be part of a community. There just aren’t that many desperate individuals, within any given species.... I mean, maybe things were different before the Hygienes, I don’t know.”

  Anya got that look again, like she was gazing into the distance of her inner self. “Ah, yes, the Hygiene,” she said. “I remember that.” Madaku thought that was a weird thing to say—anyone who’d ever been in school remembered hearing about the Hygienes. It was also odd that she said “the Hygiene,” as if there’d been only one.

  After she spent a while dwelling in wherever it was she went, Anya’s eyes lost their haze and she turned to him. “I thank you for helping me see more clearly how things lie in this new world.”

  “Well, you know ... no problem.” Madaku had to keep reminding himself how long she’d been out. His latest analyses of the radiation trace-burns inside her thrusters suggested the engines had been cold for around six thousand years. Fehd might be hungry to see her suspension coffin so he could upload the design to the Registry, in exchange for credits. But Madaku wanted to see it, just so he could try to figure out how it worked. He’d double-checked with the Registry, and the longest anyone was ever on record as having spent in suspended animation was six hundred fifty-seven standard years.