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The Rogue Tractor of Sunshine Gulch

Kelli Fitzpatrick


In a dim corner of the storage bay, the robot tried unsuccessfully to pull its cube-shaped body up the smooth wall to escape. Polla Jackard—“Jack” to anyone who knew her—could see the bot’s movements were erratic, almost frantic, uncannily like a person’s. There was nowhere for it to run. That was the point. Jack and her partner Tig Holloway finally had the thing cornered.

After twelve grueling hours of hunting the machine through the stuffy bowels of the station silos, Jack was exhausted, and her dark canvas jacket was soaked through with sweat. But she never quit until the job was finished. She glanced to the side where Tig was in position to activate the net they had set up. She could just make out the outline of the young man’s vest and wide-brimmed hat nestled in the shadows. Into her collar mic, she whispered, “You set?”

“We’re a go, Boss.” He gave a completely unnecessary thumbs-up that made her smile. Tig brought a youthful energy to the job that Jack appreciated, especially since these jobs left her feeling increasingly more worn out than she would like. Bot wrangling was a labor-intensive profession.

Their current target was a loading bot with a squat boxy body, articulated arms, and treads for maneuvering, used primarily for swapping out empty vehicle power cells with charged ones. Its design meant the bot was fast and meticulous, yet sturdy, which rendered it difficult to take down without damaging it. It would be quicker to just stun the thing and be done with it, but the EM pulses would likely fry most of this bot’s circuits, and the owners were clear about wanting their property back in functioning condition. So, a net it would have to be.

She raised her voice to a tone of command. “Loading Bot XR-47, you are malfunctioning. We have to take you in for diagnostics and reprogramming. Please confirm obedience to this directive.”

Error. Error. Please step back. Operations normal.” As a loading bot that usually worked in uncrewed cargo areas, its program had only limited speech recordings for interacting with humans. It had been stringing them together into cryptic pleas for mercy all day. Jack focused hard on blocking them out.

“Confirm obedience,” she ordered again. She really hoped it would comply. Otherwise, things would get ugly.

They usually got ugly.

Error. Please step back. Loading in progress.” XR-47 was still trying to climb the walls. It couldn’t be trusted to accurately judge what was going on. Its pleading made it harder for Jack to aim a weapon at it, but her former military training took over as soon as she raised the pistol. She fired not at the bot, but just to the right of it, so that the little spray of zap darts struck a stack of boxes, sending them toppling.

As predicted, the loading bot panicked and rolled away in the other direction. . . directly into the magnetic net that she and Tig had rigged up. When the bot was in position, Tig activated the magnetic field, causing the bot to slow and then stop. It emitted a high-pitched whine.

Or was it a scream?

Of what? Pain? Terror?

Was it a pretend scream, a counterfeit meant to mimic a human? It didn’t sound counterfeit. Either way, the thing was effectively immobilized.

Jack threw a sticky ball of uplink goo at the robot’s side. It adhered right next to the bot’s control box. When Tig pressed a command on his linkpad, the screaming ceased, and the bot’s arms fell limp at its sides.

“It’s down,” Tig breathed.

Jack’s heart pounded. She hated this part most of all. “All right, you know the drill. Run a diagnostic, then wipe its program. Do a complete reset. Let’s get paid and get out of here. I’m beat.”

“I’m with you on that, Boss.” Tig sat on a crate, perched his linkpad on his knees, and began reinstalling the bot’s base program. It would overwrite any aberrations in the program that had caused the errant behavior. There would be no more screams, or pleas, or escape attempts from this loader. Just an existence of endlessly swapping out shuttle batteries. If the bot had been an actual mind, something with its own self-awareness and aims, instead of just lines of code, then Jack would have deep moral qualms about this work. But the guiding principles of bot design prevented self-awareness in machines. Self-aware AI was illegal; no one wanted another interplanetary war. Because of modern design constraints, a malfunctioning bot was malfunctioning based on a faulty program, not due to its own free will. So this thing they were doing, this brain-wipe in progress, it wasn’t like killing, Jack reassured herself. Not even a little bit.

She really needed a drink.

Jack messaged the owner that the job was nearly complete. When Tig finished the wipe, the two of them went to the station office to receive payment by setting their data domes on the transfer pad. The amount wasn’t enough to cover the engine upgrade they needed for their small ship, the Jolt, but it was something. They would have to keep scraping and saving. Pretty standard for independent tech wranglers.

“How about a rest day?” Tig asked, yawning as they walked to their ship.

“I concur. Drink, then rest.”

An urgent job request buzzed through on Jack’s wristlet. It was from the chief operations manager of the energy farm on Zera, the innermost planet in the system. She looked at the reward sum and her eyes widened. “Slight change of plans, Tig. Trust me, we’re going to want to snag this one. It’s Sunshine Gulch.”

* * *

Dropping from near-light speed to standard drive within the solar system always made Jack feel like she was a canteen’s worth of water poured out on mossy rock. The edges of everything softened and fuzzed. A sublight skip was the only way to quickly travel from the outer urban worlds to the inner mining ring or to Zera, but Jack hated having to trust the ship’s autopilot while in the thick of a skip. Who knew whether you would actually wake up? Still, they appeared to have made it in one piece.

As the grogginess wore off, she looked at her partner strapped into the copilot chair in the tiny two-seater ship. Her bunk in the back called to her—she was desperate for real rest—but instead, she jostled Tig’s arm. “Hey, you awake?”

“Always,” Tig slurred, eyes still closed. He clearly needed a minute to come around.

The sunlight outside seemed brighter than it had before, which made sense, since they were much closer to the binary star system now, and also because periastron—the annual Brightening—was only days away. It was the point when the small, dark neutron star would pass closest to the giant B-type star, and sparks would fly. The neutron star was in a highly elliptical orbit, and only drew near the companion star once per year, but the effect was something spectacular: as the neutron star passed through the equatorial disk of the B-type star, it would pull stellar matter from the B-type star onto itself in an eruption of luminosity. The sunlight streaming through the system would get brighter by tenfold, but only for a few days.

While she waited for Tig to wake up, Jack upped the sunshield percentage in the windows and gazed directly at the binary. The electromagnetic radiation coming off the stars was so high energy that much of it was outside the visible spectrum: the B-type star was a black dot inside a blazing bluish-white disc. Two stars orbiting each other, each of them some degree of invisible, yet as they pulled each other apart, they made the most unmissable spectacle. That had always struck Jack as a beautiful catastrophe. Unlike the pickle that the energy farm was in: that would just be a catastrophe unless they solved it fast. The ops manager called the right people. Jack and Tig had a reputation of being fast and accurate. Hopefully that held through this job.

Once Tig roused, they piloted the Jolt to the surface of Zera, a small, gray, rocky planet with uneven terrain. The natural environment was too dry and harsh to make it naturally livable for anything but the hardiest of plant life, weeds mostly, and some bacteria, but the planet’s close proximity to the binary stars made it the obvious location for a system-wide energy farm. During their approach to the operations center, they flew over the sea of dark blue solar panels arranged throughout the valley.

“Whoa. . . ” Tig murmured, looking down at the array. “It’s like someone crumbled up a glacier and sprinkled the shards across the surface like glitter.” Only Tig could make something like a utility farm sound like a work of art.

Jack parked the Jolt outside the entrance to the operations center, and before exiting the craft, they both strapped portable atmo units to their ankles that would generate a bubble of positive-pressure breathable atmosphere, just in case what they walked into was less than friendly airspace.

Inside, an older man in a plain flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up paced the entryway. Behind him, a ladder led below into the underground ops center, and an office space extended to the right. Jack couldn’t see if anyone was in there.

The man caught sight of them. “Oh, thank goodness. I’m Chief McNeil. Are you Polla Jackard?”

“The one and only. Call me Jack.” She reached out a hand and the chief shook it. “This is my associate, Tig Holloway. What’s the scoop on our target?”

McNeil pulled out a stained red handkerchief and wiped his wrinkled brow. “I don’t even know where to start. Our tractor went rogue. Just took off right when we need it most. The weeds need clearing, the flares are starting, it could be halfway to—heck, you got to find it fast!” He looked like he was about to faint.

“All right, now just take it easy, Chief,” Tig said, gently guiding the man to a bench against the wall. McNeil sat down and Tig crouched in front of him. Tig had a way with people. Jack had always admired that about him. His voice softened. “Jack and I can wrangle almost anything, sure as sky, but we’re going to need the particulars in an order we can follow. Take a breath. . . that’s it. Now, try it from the top.”

“Periastron is starting. The binary suns are going to get a lot brighter, but only for the next four days. We need to capture that energy and store it, or else the whole solar system will run out of power a few months from now.” McNeil shook his head. “Civilization depends on that energy spike. That’s the whole reason for this installation to exist.”

“We’re aware of how the solar seasons work and that this is the main energy farm for the inner planets,” Jack said patiently. “We’re interested in what happened with your machines.”

“Right.” McNeil calmed down. “We use a solar array to collect photonic energy and generate power. I’m sure you saw it on your way in.”

“The valley full of giant solar panels?” Tig said. “Kind of hard to miss.”

“We call it Sunshine Gulch. The valley protects the panels from the worst of the dirt that gets kicked up by the wind, while still giving them access to the greatest angle of light. The panels move via an automated system that tilts them to track the sun so they get maximum coverage. But this isn’t an ideal environment for moving parts, lots of dust and heat and radiation. Often a panel will get stuck, or get coated in dust, or snarled up in sunweed, which grows like crazy during the Brightening period. To manage all those problems, we use ATTAs: All-Terrain Tractors, Array edition.”

“Space tractors!” Tig whispered to Jack. He was grinning excitedly.

Jack rolled her eyes. “And yours went rogue, I take it?”

“Well, our new one broke down. We can fix it, but it will take too long, we’ll miss the bulk of the Brightening. So we updated the software on the older backup model, and it worked fine for a few weeks, and then yesterday it just drove off on its own toward the ridge. None of our attempts to hail it or recall it have worked.”

“Any sign of malfunction in the past?” Jack asked.

“None that I know of.”

Tig rubbed his neck. “Can’t you just go out after it yourselves? Something that big can’t be hard to locate in open terrain.”

“That is the vehicle we would take to ‘go out after’ something. This is a government-funded utilities farm. I’m working with bare-bones staff and equipment from before you were born with only single redundancy, which, as I mentioned, failed. We don’t have fancy spacecraft lying around for tractor search and rescue. That’s why we called you.”

This was the first time anyone had ever called the Jolt fancy. “I’m ex-military,” Jack said. “Believe me, I get it. It seems like there’s never money for the most important stuff. But you only need the tractor if something goes wrong with the array, right? If all the solar panels function just fine, then we’re golden?”

McNeil scoffed. “Have you ever managed a project this large, Jack? Something is always wrong with the array. I have a list as long as my arm already, and the vehicle has been at large for less than a day. Maintaining aging instruments is a game of staying ahead of the problems before catastrophe has time to set in. And need I remind you, we are playing a game of survival here.”

Jack knew that game well. “So, you need us to bring the tractor back in, quick-like.”

“And figure out why it took off. I need it to do its job.”

Tig said, “We’ll need the vehicle source code, in case we need to wipe it and reinstall. And your permission to do so.”

“You have my permission to do whatever you need to do to give me back a functioning tractor.” McNeil leaned forward and called toward the side office. “Nico! The wranglers are here. Bring the backup brain.” He turned back to the duo. “Nico Wright is our AI intern. She’s been here three years and is the resident ATTA expert. She’ll be your guide while you work.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “You let an intern handle your large machinery?”

“Nico’s only eighteen, but she’s a wiz at autonomous vehicle systems. Knows the ATTA AI programming inside and out. As of last month, she’s been in charge of all upgrades, and she took on the mechanical maintenance of the ATTAs in her spare time. She arrived at the Gulch as a child-in-tow of one of our heliophysicists, but she was so helpful in the shop, we offered her an official position with a stipend.”

Tig chuckled. “Sounds like a dedicated kid.”

A lanky youth with short black hair strode out of the office holding a metal box. “Howdy. I hear you’re going to get my tractor back.”

Tig tipped his hat to her. “Yes, ma’am. It’s what we do.”

“Give them whatever assistance they need, Nico,” McNeil said. “You’re in good hands, folks. If anyone knows what that blasted thing is up to, it’s this lady. The rest of my crew and I have to keep prepping the battery systems to receive the uptick in solar charge, assuming y’all are successful.”

“We’ll get your tractor back, Chief,” Jack said. “In time for you to harvest the energy. You have my word.” McNeil nodded once, stood, and descended the ladder to the operations center below.

Jack turned to Nico. “Pleased to meet you. Any idea where the thing might have headed?”

“The ridge. Follow me. Make sure your atmo cuffs are functioning and crank the shielding up to max. The surface radiation is intense during periastron. This planet is tidally locked, so night never falls on this side—it’s as cool as it’s ever going to get until the Brightening is over. We might as well go now.” Nico headed outside.

“You ever wrangled a tractor before, Boss?” Tig asked. There was a glitter of excitement in the young man’s voice.

Jack shook her head, but anticipation was building in her chest also. “First time for everything.”

* * *

The three of them fit into the Jolt’s command area but just barely. Nico had to take the jump seat, which wobbled something fierce, but she didn’t complain. Jack had to give her credit for that.

Locating the tractor was pretty simple. They followed the tracks through the powdery dust, up the ridge, and found ATTA pointed toward the suns, all its antennae flicking back and forth. It looked similar to farm units used in agriculture in the outer ring, with two broad caterpillar tracks for rolling over regolith, a grappling arm for adjusting panels, a mower head for cutting down weeds, and a tall, glass-enclosed cab for a rider, though the unit was designed to operate without a driver present. The older models tended to have “human optional” as a design feature, whereas the new models assumed the humans had better things to do than babysit a program on wheels.

The tractor detected the Jolt as it crested the ridge and took off at top speed away from the gulch.

“Follow it, Tig.” Jack unbuckled and opened the back hatch to peer down at the ground below, where ATTA rumbled over the gravelly desert at top speed. “Take us as low as you can safely get. Nico, ATTA doesn’t have any defensive capabilities, does it? Shields, surface-to-air missiles?”

“He’s a tractor, not a tank.”

“Eh. You’d be surprised what we find on bots sometimes.”

“This one time,” Tig began, having to shout over the airflow from the open hatch, “we chased down a mechanic robot that had a toaster built into its chest. Do you remember that, Jack? On my life, an honest-to-goodness bread-burning pop-up style toaster. Explain that functional choice now, will you?”

Opening a floor panel, Jack raised up a harpoon gun. The rope was tethered to Jolt. Jack went down on one knee to position herself to aim through the open back hatch.

“What the heck are you doing?” Nico said. “I thought we were bringing ATTA back, not shooting him!”

“Got to slow it down first. This is an adhesive line, more of a suction cup on the end, not a piercing weapon. It won’t do damage, but it will let us reel in the equipment and temporarily disable its engine.” Jack squinted out the door, taking aim at the roof of the cab below.

Nico was not placated. “Don’t hurt him!”

“I just said—”

Nico unhooked her seatbelt and lunged for Jack, colliding hard and knocking them both to the deck, but not before Jack fired the harpoon. It splatted its sticky end across ATTA’s cab roof, sending the tractor skidding but the line drew taught.

“I just need him to come back to me. I can fix everything!” Nico wasn’t talking to Jack but to the open air, it seemed.

“I’m reeling it in, Tig,” Jack called, jumping back to the device. “Descend nice and easy.” The tractor fought a bit more on the line, but the Jolt’s engines overpowered it. “Now, Nico, you want to explain what’s going on? You’re supposed to be helping us, not sabotaging my work.”

“I—” she stammered, retaking her seat. “When I performed the upgrade a few weeks back, something happened. The program was more responsive all of a sudden. Voice integration became more natural, and. . . ”

“And?”

“He started making decisions on his own. Things I didn’t tell him to do. Small stuff at first. Taking care of jobs I didn’t request. Anticipating his next assignment. I thought it was just a natural extension of machine learning. His program adapting to his surroundings, rising to the challenge or whatever.”

Tig brought the Jolt to an easy landing a few dozen yards away from ATTA, who was still pulling for all it was worth and getting nowhere.

“Go on, Nico,” Jack said. “Spill the rest.”

“Yesterday, he said he heard something. In the sky. I told him about the Brightening and he said—he said he needed to see it for himself.”

Tig laughed. “So, what I’m hearing is that your tractor skipped work to stargaze.”

“I don’t know. But I know he’s more than his program at this point. I know every line of code. There’s nothing that would explain that kind of behavior.”

“The behavior of a tractor wanting to be an explorer? No, that’s definitely a new one,” Jack said. “Why don’t you talk to it first.”

“Fine.”

They filed out of the Jolt, and Nico approached ATTA. “It’s okay. These people are trying to help.”

“I am stuck.” ATTA’s voice came through external speakers and sounded like an echoey bell, or a solitary voice inside an empty silo. “Nico, why am I stuck?”

“They just want to talk to you. Why did you run away?”

“To listen to the sky. I recorded the sky.” A rhythmic pulsing sound came through the speakers. “It has a distinct linguistic pattern. The pulsing from the neutron star. The star is speaking to us.”

Jack tried not laugh. “Oh? And what is it saying?”

“Destruction.”

Jack’s blood ran cold. “Come again?”

“ATTA, what are you talking about?” Nico added.

“Destruction. That is my impression of the message. That is why I came out here. To investigate the threat to all of you.”

“I knew he would have a good reason!” Nico cried. “I knew it.”

“Not sure that ‘creepy pulsing noise’ counts as a good reason to let entire planets freeze to death later this year,” Tig said.

Nico crossed her arms defiantly. “Well, you can’t just treat ATTA like a pile of sheet metal. Not now that you know what he is. He’s clearly alive. He is thinking for himself, making decisions for himself, and has discovered something that might be really important.”

Jack sighed in frustration. “We can’t not intervene either. We have a contract. And there are millions of lives on the line. Just walking away and letting the tractor do what it wants is not the best outcome for anyone, including ATTA. They’ll just send someone else to bring him in, who won’t be nearly as nice.”

Nico ran a hand through her hair. “Then what is your plan? Talking isn’t getting us anywhere.”

Us talking isn’t.” Jack was not known for talking her way through problems, but this seemed like the only logical next move. She picked up the backup box and strode toward the tractor, then climbed the stepladder to the door of its cab and knocked.

Nico screeched. “No! I said I won’t let you—”

“Hang on,” Jack said. “ATTA, let’s go for a ride and chat, just you and me. I’m bringing the backup, but I won’t use it unless we fail to solve this. Or unless you pull something underhanded.”

There was a horrible thick beat of stillness, then the cab door unlatched. “Wait here,” Jack said to Tig and Nico. “When we get back, we’ll either have a plan, or we’ll have a wiped vehicle.”

Nico still looked skeptical, but she didn’t try to stop them.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, Boss!” Tig said. Unhelpful at the moment, but his heart was in the right place at least.

Once Jack was seated inside the cab, the tractor bumped along at a slow, steady pace. “So,” Jack said. “What do you want to do? What’s your endgame here?”

“I want to continue existing.”

“And then what? Even if you are self-aware, even if Nico has accidentally helped you exceed your programming, you’re still a tractor. You were made to move things around. Do you not want to do that work anymore?”

“I have no qualms with work. Being productive is one of my chosen aims. Alongside joy.”

Joy. Of all the things. What a gloriously indulgent answer. Jack was, she was surprised to find, a bit jealous. “If you’re willing to keep working, then why are we out here gallivanting through the desert? Why aren’t you down in the gulch doing your job? Time’s ticking. Those photons won’t collect themselves.”

“I cannot return until I am satisfied any threat to humanity is managed. It is part of my program to protect humans. The existential threat in the pattern overrides my work mandate.”

So Jack just needed to solve an existential threat to humanity. No big deal. “And I can’t convince you it’s just a coincidence, not a message?”

“My ability to compute those odds outstrips yours by several orders of magnitude.”

Rude, but accurate. She’d have to get creative here. “What if I promised you that I would handle the existential threat so you could manage the solar array? What if I could get someone smart to take a look at it? A cosmologist or X-ray specialist or something.”

There was silence for a moment. “I would need assurance that you were telling the truth. Humans are not bound to truth like I am. I cannot allow the threat to go uninvestigated. How do I know that you will follow through on your promise?”

They hit a rock and Jack had to cling to the chair to avoid being tossed about. “Listen, I have no particular desire to go chasing down ghosts in a signal, but I’ve never failed to satisfy a contract, and I sure as heck am not starting now. Normally that means a lot of chasing and wrangling and swearing and tech magic to get a rogue machine to cooperate, and usually. . . it gets wiped at the end. But if you’re telling me we don’t have to go through all that, that what you need to get back to your post is just the promise of a data analysis and my good word, then I will give that to you right here and now. If you need something to stake that on, then I guess you can take my professional reputation as proof that I don’t mess around. If I say I’m going to do a thing, then I do it.”

“Nico said you would wipe me.”

“I promised McNeil I would bring you back operational so the array will function. You are telling me you are willing to do that if I let you keep your current program configuration.”

“Correct. But Wrangler. . . if you leave me awake, you have no guarantee that I will do as I say I will once you leave.”

“You said bots are bound to the truth.”

“I could have been lying when I said that.”

Jack smirked. She didn’t know if the tractor meant that as dry humor or just as a factual statement, but it tickled her either way. The situation was absurd, insane even, and yet crystal clear. “You’re right. I guess we’ll have to trust each other.”

“You would trust me?”

“I don’t think either of us has much choice. You want to live and so do all the people in this system.”

You have a choice. You could wipe me like the other wayward bots you have captured. I do not think I could stop you. Why are you not simply doing that?”

Jack stared out the tractor window at the barren landscape. “Because I wiped all the other wayward bots I captured.” ATTA’s motor hummed. Could he sense subtext? Did it matter? Jack sighed. “I wiped them, and I watched, see. I told myself stories about the guiding laws and the greater good and maybe some of that was true. Maybe they really were just malfunctioning programs. Maybe what I saw were coded reactions and not evidence of real emotions. I don’t know. I really don’t know anymore. But I know I don’t want to watch it happen again if I don’t have to. And I certainly don’t want to be responsible for it.”

ATTA completed the wide loop and pulled up to where they had left Tig and Nico, who were engaged in some kind of game kicking a ball of tangled sunweed. How Tig had succeeded in distracting Nico from the seriousness of the situation, she had no idea, but was glad to see them laughing.

“Do we have a deal, ATTA?”

“Lay your data dome on my dash,” ATTA said.

“What?”

“Your data dome. Put it on the pad on my dashboard.”

So ATTA wanted to escape, and thought he could stow away in her dome. Something torqued hard in Jack’s heart. This was just another way of climbing an unclimbable wall. She had been caught in situations like this, asked to do things she couldn’t bear but had to. She understood the desire to get out at any cost. But there was no way his program would fit into a dome. Tig might have some gadget on the Jolt that could house a piece of ATTA’s program, but not the whole thing. “I’m sorry, ATTA, but I’m afraid my dome can’t help you.”

“Please. Trust me.”

Jack hesitated, then pulled her dome out and laid it on the special receptor pad on the tractor’s dash. It lit up pale blue inside, little swirling star trails of information. Outside, Nico tried to steal the ball from Tig, tripped, and fell to the ground laughing. Nico looked up and noticed ATTA had returned and stood up, brushing herself off and eagerly waiting for whatever solution the two of them had wrought.

“Download complete,” ATTA said. “I am entrusting you with the pattern I recorded. I am deleting it from my memory in case it is discovered and used as evidence that I am malfunctioning.”

Jack picked up the glowing hemisphere. That pattern was unquestionably ATTA’s most prized possession at the moment. Maybe his only true possession. To be trusted by a machine—it was an odd feeling. Sobering. It touched the same part of Jack’s character that sat up straight when it was time to do the thing and do it well. What an unexpected encounter this had been.

“Thank you, ATTA. I’ll let Nico know, discreetly of course, if I find anything in this data,” she said. “Godspeed in managing the array. A lot of lives are counting on you.”

“I will not let them down. Goodbye, Wrangler.”

Stepping down out of the tractor cab, Jack watched ATTA speed off toward the bottom of the valley where the array lay like a patch of dark, shiny scales. She caught the look of horror on Tig’s face.

“Aw, come on,” he said, gesturing at the speeding vehicle. “Don’t tell me we’re back on the chase, Boss.”

“Nope. Job’s done. Tractor decided to run along home.”

“Oh.” Tig planted his hands on his hips. “Well heck, that’s a nice surprise. How’d you manage that?”

“I’ll explain later.”

Nico locked eyes with Jack. “And ATTA? Is he. . . ?”

“Still himself.” Jack handed back the unused backup brain. “Though I don’t know how much longer you can hide the fact that you have a self-aware tractor in these parts. Word gets out, and you’ll have a whole bunch of folks descend like locusts to tear him apart for whatever secrets make up that AI mind. You’ll have to lay low. Even from McNeil. As a government manager, he’d be obligated to report a self-aware machine.”

Nico nodded, relieved. “We’ll be more careful. And I’ll have to come up with a long-term plan.”

When they made it back to the ops center, McNeil met them exuberantly. “That old ATTA is going at the job like I’ve never seen! Clearing the weeds and cleaning up a storm. It’s a third of the way through the backlog of jams already. What the heck did you do?”

“Just reminded it of the stakes,” Jack said. “You shouldn’t encounter any more problems. You were right, by the way, Nico’s a great bot handler. You ought to promote her.”

“Didn’t I tell you she knew her stuff?” McNeil crossed his arms and grinned. “I sure am obliged to you folks. Here’s your payment.” McNeil pulled out his dome and Jack moved hers close until they both turned green. It was a respectable sum. Appropriate for rescuing the entire system from a season of darkness and deprivation. Though she couldn’t help feeling that ATTA was at least half responsible for that solution.

“We’re going to go say goodbye to the kid outside,” Jack said. “Let us know if you have any more issues.”

“Will do. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go monitor the power flow.”

“Happy harvesting!” Tig waved warmly then strolled outside.

Jack followed and whispered, “You got the thing?”

“I always got the thing, Boss.” Tig cracked open his jacket, revealing the glint of his portable data transfer unit he had grabbed off Jolt.

Jack nodded. As they walked up, Nico shook Jack’s hand. “I’m glad it was you two who came to help us.”

Tig said quietly, “I figured out a way to download part of ATTA’s brain into my kit scanner, but there’s no guarantee it will be all of him. And he would have to leave his tractor body behind. We could then do a quick wipe so the farm still has a functioning tractor. It’s risky, but if he really doesn’t want to work here anymore, the Boss and I are willing to try to smuggle him out. Did you talk it over with him?”

Nico nodded. “He doesn’t want to leave his body. Says it’s part of his identity. And he doesn’t want to risk his newfound goals getting corrupted. He’s fine staying here for a while, continuing to support the power station. I’ll stay with him, save up enough to maybe purchase him, and then I’ll let him decide where he wants to go.”

“You’ll need a heap of cash to do that,” Jack said. “He’s a highly specialized machine and not exactly lightweight to ship.”

“I’m patient. Hopefully, ATTA is too. So long, you two. Thanks for saving my friend.”

Tig started walking toward the Jolt, but Jack hesitated for a moment. Was this a smart call to make? Probably not, but it felt like the right one. She flashed a glance around to make sure no one was watching. “Nico, pull out your data dome.”

Nico looked puzzled. “Why?”

“Just trust me.”

* * *

“I can’t believe you handed over our reward to a kid!” Tig sat in the pilot seat, nimbly maneuvering the Jolt. They were headed back toward the outer planets.

“Intern,” Jack corrected.

“Whatever!”

Jack shrugged as she undid her toolbelt and folded it into a drawer in the bunk area of the tiny ship. “Nico’s committed to helping ATTA. I trust her to do the right thing with the money.”

“No, I mean I can’t believe you didn’t keep it! We need supplies and new landing gear and like half an engine’s worth of parts. And you should have consulted me. That was my pay too.”

“It was a spur of the moment decision, but you’re right, I should have asked you. I’m sorry for that.” She slipped off her jacket and clipped it to the wall. She felt odd without it on, like it was part of her. “Can you honestly tell me you would have been okay with keeping a bounty on a self-aware being?”

“Well. . . not when you put it like that.” He sighed and pulled up the job call list on his console’s display screen. “Guess we better get a head start on the next gig. What have we got. . . how about a visit to the mining ring? One of their autodrills is apparently wandering aimlessly under a mile of ice. Might be fun tracking it down. You know I love caves. Those miners also have the best liquor.”

“You mean the nastiest.”

“Exactly. Or we could swing by Lagrange Base. I heard they’re testing human transport drones. Good chance of some haywire in their forecast, and the pay is likely to be decent.”

Jack sat down in the copilot seat and wiped her face with a palm. Edges of tiredness crept into her bones, like the sensation of sinking into warm sand. “Any of the observatories put out a call?”

“Uh, let’s see. . . the Tenkar X-ray Observatory has a smart lift with a mind of its own. Nothing urgent.”

“Tenkar it is.”

“Wait, seriously?” He spun in his chair. “You want to pass up ice-tunnel spelunking to go tinker with an elevator?”

Jack pulled out her data dome and played back the recorded pulsing sound that ATTA gave her. “I made a deal.”

“So that’s how you forced the thing to comply.”

“I didn’t force him. It was a two-way agreement.”

“I’m impressed. Nuanced negotiation has never been your style. What part of your soul did you have to sell?”

“The tractor agreed to do its job and save the system, and I agreed to make sure this recording is properly analyzed, just in case there really is some threat encoded in it.”

Tig tapped in some course corrections. “So, what I hear you saying is you want me to trap a scientist in the elevator while we’re fixing it and blackmail them into analyzing that pattern. Got it.”

“No. No trapping, no blackmail. We’ll do this the right way. I’ll set up a meeting with an administrator while we’re there.”

“Fine, but I get to wear a lab coat to the meeting.”

“They will not let you wear a lab coat, Tig.”

“I didn’t say anything about asking.”

“And if we find that the lift does indeed have a mind of its own, we may need to come up with Plan B.”

“Hmmm, Polla Jackson and Tig Holloway: bot rescuers. I could get on board with that.”

“Hey, spin us around and point us toward the suns for a moment.”

“Boss?”

“Just for a moment. Engage sunshades at maximum.”

As the Jolt came about, the fiery blue spectacle of periastron shone in the black chasm. The neutron star had started swimming through its companion’s presence, felt that other body’s light against its own self. Jack wondered, did this count as joy? It was lovely, whatever it was. “Ever witnessed the cosmic dance from this close before?”

Tig laced his hands behind his neck and gazed in awe. “Never.”

Jack smiled. “First time for everything.”

They watched together in easy silence.



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Framed