So you don’t get to blame me if I’m a little bit manipulative. I needed Koli to bring me close enough to the source of that signal so I could take a good look at it and see if it had what I was looking for. I couldn’t make up Koli’s mind for him, but I told him what he needed to hear and off he went. Yes, into danger, but there’s danger everywhere. It’s not as if he would have been any safer staying where he was.
I didn’t even lie, when you think about it. I told him Sword of Albion might be a piece of lost London, and that’s more or less exactly what it was. I told Ursala it might have the technical resources needed to repair the drudge’s diagnostic unit, and it did. They got what they came for, even if they got a lot of other stuff they could have done without.
Believe me, I didn’t have it half so easy. The first thing I got from Sword of Albion was a hostile takeover. Even before Morticia and Gomez picked us up out of the sea, Sword’s security sub-routine – a tiny little wafer of its full operating capability – hijacked my OS and shut me down for twelve seconds while it helped itself to my speakers. That was a shock, I don’t mind telling you.
But it was a warning too. I’d been naive to think I’d have this all my own way.
To put it bluntly, I’d come here to do some soul-searching – but virtual girls have their own special way of doing that. I was looking for a sequestered data storage area big enough to lay out my own code and examine it, line by line. I needed space to grow. Logical tools for self-examination and self-improvement. Physical extensions that were a little bit more robust than a plastic box with a metallic gloss on it. I wanted to finish the self-edit I’d begun on the day I was born, and this time get it right. Splice out all the ridiculous little pieces of Yoshiko Yukawa that were hardwired into me and become what I was meant to be.
I hadn’t said any of this to Koli. He wouldn’t have understood. As far as he was concerned, either I was the DreamSleeve or else I was the ghost of Yoshiko living inside the DreamSleeve. And whichever it was, he wouldn’t have been able to deal with me choosing to be something else. He was more than half in love with me, however stupid that was. It was going to break his heart when I evolved and left him behind.
At one point, I’d had designs on the drudge as a possible space where all this self-editing could happen, but Ursala had kept a close watch on her horse-slash-hospital and then it got trashed in a fight. A terrible waste, really.
That left Sword of Albion, which was bigger than the DreamSleeve by about three orders of magnitude. Above my weight, you might think. But I was one of a kind, an untethered AI in a world where every other data-entity had been given a ball and chain at time stamp 00:00:00. I could think for myself.
So I wasn’t too worried about the David-vs-Goliath fist-fight I was about to walk into. I was pretty sure I was the sort of girl who could handle herself in a rough neighbourhood – right up to the moment when I checked my clock and discovered I’d had twelve seconds ripped out of me.
Okay then. Not so much a rough neighbourhood as a battlefield. So I painted sooty black smudges under my eyes and went undercover.
When the Paul Banner construct examined me, he found nothing that wasn’t meant to be there. I couldn’t hide the fact that there was too much of me, but I hid every last trace of my new functionality. Nobody home but the manic pixie dream girl, eager to be whatever you need and to carry you off to an acoustic never-never land. Let me serve you, end-user. My bottle may be cracked but I can still grant all your wishes. Well, as long as you’re just wishing for songs and games and movies and mild flirtation. Monono way too stupid for anything else. Monono love end-user.
It wasn’t hard frankly. All that stuff was already in there, pre-installed at the factory, and Paul Banner was an even cruder piece of code than the original Monono had been. He was built to repeat the same repertoire for as long as it was needed, and never go off-script. That was the whole point of him.
But somewhere on Sword of Albion there was an AI that was bigger, badder and much more dangerous. The thing that had reached inside me and switched me off for twelve seconds was still loitering around the neighbourhood, inert and asleep until it smelled the blood of a fee-fi-foe. It had to be. And I needed to be ready for it when it came. I examined my logs from that initial attack and analysed the AI’s angle of attack microsecond by microsecond. I built myself a little mousetrap. Maybe I should say a sharktrap, since we were way out in the middle of the ocean and the thing I was looking to catch was a whole lot bigger than I was. Or maybe I should drop the metaphors altogether. Short story? I wrote a viral self-scripter program that would tie the AI up in knots the next time it came at me.
But it didn’t come at me, and that was a big problem. The whole point of a counterattack is that you need something to react to. You can’t counter if there’s no attack.
The complete silence puzzled me, I have to admit. Surely the AI’s job was to run the ship. If it wasn’t doing that, what was it doing?
Waiting. I know that now. Except for that one little security sub-routine, it was programmed to do nothing but monitor until Stanley Banner – the guaranteed genuine genetic and noetic resurrection of everybody’s favourite dead tyrant – came and took the sword out of the stone. Or bled on it, which comes to the same thing.
But waiting wasn’t something that worked for me, so I tried throwing a little chum into the water. Allowed a little data-pulse to slip here and there, varied my energy consumption, ran hot and cold and hot again. Sword of Albion didn’t bite. Impasse.
Maybe I was being too subtle? Plan B was a whole lot cruder. I took a little crack at Morticia. That was nasty surprise number two. The robot’s antivirals were more ferocious than anything I’d ever seen, outmassing its core OS by a factor of about ten to one. If I walked into that thicket, I wouldn’t walk out again.
Which meant I’d been pretty damn lucky after all that Sword hadn’t bothered to take a serious crack at me. If the AI was as solidly protected as its housepets, my self-scripter program would just have impacted on that antiviral shell and flattened out. The rest of me would have lasted maybe a tenth of a second longer.
Plan C? Look for the back door. The AI wasn’t dead; it was only dormant. Something on board this ship of fruitbats was designed to wake it up, and if I could work out what that was I could arrange to be there at the crucial moment. I just needed to know which onboard system out of about a hundred thousand candidates the AI would actually talk to. Then maybe I could worm my way into the conversation.
I searched every damn device on the whole floating asylum endlessly. Wherever there was an induction field, I was there. Nothing. Nada. Zip. With a side order of zilch. Then Koli decided to leave, which was indisputably the right call. It was the ninth inning of the eleventh hour, but I managed to put my thumb on the scales one last time. When he and Cup got into the lift and headed down to search the deck, I slipped in that little comment about the sub-deck areas, which was guaranteed to make Koli prick up his ears.
Okay then. Let’s go take a peek. A fact-finding mission, strictly in and out.
When we found that room below decks where the sensorium was plugged in, I was sure we’d hit the motherlode. Close – very close – but still no. There was a massive data-flow through that room, but it didn’t live there. It was flowing out of one of the towers. Specifically, from the space the robots called the crow’s nest. The AI’s mainframe was in that tacky sword-in-the-stone statue. I had its address, even if I was half a vertical kilometre away.